The SF Collection

Richard Morgan

Altered Carbon

Broken Angels

Woken Furies

Market Forces

Black Man

www.gollancz.co.uk

Altered Carbon

RICHARD MORGAN

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE: ARRIVAL - (Needlecast Download)

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

PART TWO: REACTION - (Intrusion Conflict)

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PART THREE: ALLIANCE - (Application Upgrade)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PART FOUR: PERSUASION - (Viral Corrupt)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

PART FIVE: NEMESIS - (Systems Crash)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

This book is for
my father and mother:

JOHN
for his iron endurance and
unflagging generosity of spirit
in the face of adversity
&
MARGARET
for the white hot rage
that dwells in compassion and
a refusal to turn away

PROLOGUE

Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah’s cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting. Millsport had long since put itself to bed, but out in the Reach currents were still snagging on the shoals, and the sound came ashore to prowl the empty streets. There was a fine mist drifting in from the whirlpool, falling on the city like sheets of muslin and fogging the kitchen windows.

Chemically alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden table for the fiftieth time that night. Sarah’s Heckler & Koch shard pistol glinted dully at me in the low light, the butt gaping open for its clip. It was an assassin’s weapon, compact and utterly silent. The magazines lay next to it. She had wrapped insulating tape around each one to distinguish the ammunition; green for sleep, black for the spider venom load. Most of the clips were black-wrapped. Sarah had used up a lot of green on the security guards at Gemini Biosys the previous night.

My own contributions were less subtle. The big silver Smith & Wesson, and the four remaining hallucinogen grenades. The thin crimson line around each canister seemed to sparkle slightly, as if it were about to detach itself from the metal casing and float up to join the curlicues of smoke ribboning off my cigarette. Shift and slide of altered significants, the side effect of the tetrameth I’d scored that afternoon down at the wharf. I don’t usually smoke when I’m straight, but for some reason the tet always triggers the urge.

Against the distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying strop of rotorblades on the fabric of the night.

I stubbed out the cigarette, mildly unimpressed with myself, and went through to the bedroom. Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath the single sheet. A raven sweep of hair covered her face and one long-fingered hand trailed over the side of the bed. As I stood looking at her the night outside split. One of Harlan’s World’s orbital guardians test-firing into the Reach. Thunder from the concussed sky rolled in to rattle the windows. The woman in the bed stirred and swept the hair out of her eyes. The liquid crystal gaze found me and locked on.

‘What’re you looking at?’ Voice husky with the residue of sleep.

I smiled a little.

‘Don’t give me that shit. Tell me what you’re looking at.’

‘Just looking. It’s time to go.’

She lifted her head and picked up the sound of the helicopter. The sleep slid away from her face and she sat up in bed.

‘Where’s the ’ware?’

It was a Corps joke. I smiled, the way you do when you see an old friend, and pointed to the case in the corner of the room.

‘Get my gun for me.’

‘Yes ma’am. Black or green?’

‘Black. I trust these scumbags about as far as a clingfilm condom.’

In the kitchen, I loaded up the shard pistol, cast a glance at my own weapon and left it lying there. Instead, I scooped up one of the H grenades and took it back in my other hand. I paused in the doorway to the bedroom and weighed the two pieces of hardware in each palm as if I was trying to decide which was the heavier.

‘A little something with your phallic substitute, ma’am?’

Sarah looked up from beneath the hanging sickle of black hair over her forehead. She was in the midst of pulling a pair of long woollen socks up over the sheen of her thighs.

‘Yours is the one with the long barrel, Tak.’

‘Size isn’t—’

We both heard it at the same time. A metallic double clack from the corridor outside. Our eyes met across the room and for a quarter second I saw my own shock mirrored there. Then I was tossing the loaded shard gun to her. She put up one hand and took it out of the air just as the whole of the bedroom wall caved in in thunder. The blast knocked me back into a corner and onto the floor.

They must have located us in the apartment with body-heat sensors, then mined the whole wall with limpets. Taking no chances this time. The commando that came through the ruined wall was stocky and insect-eyed in full gas attack rig, hefting a snub-barrelled Kalashnikov in gloved hands.

Ears ringing, still on the floor, I flung the H grenade up at him. It was unfused, useless in any case against the gas mask, but he didn’t have time to identify the device as it spun at him. He batted it off the breech of his Kalashnikov and stumbled back, eyes wide behind the glass panels of the mask.

‘Fire in the hole.’

Sarah was down on the floor beside the bed, arms wrapped around her head and sheltered from the blast. She heard the shout and in the seconds the bluff had bought us she popped up again, shard gun outflung. Beyond the wall I could see figures huddled against the expected grenade blast. I heard the mosquito whine of monomolecular splinters across the room as she put three shots into the lead commando. They shredded invisibly through the attack suit and into the flesh beneath. He made a noise like someone straining to lift something heavy as the spider venom sank its claws into his nervous system. I grinned and started to get up.

Sarah was turning her aim on the figures beyond the wall when the second commando of the night appeared braced in the kitchen doorway and hosed her away with his assault rifle.

Still on my knees, I watched her die with chemical clarity. It all went so slowly it was like a video playback on frame advance. The commando kept his aim low, holding the Kalashnikov down against the hyper-rapid-fire recoil it was famous for. The bed went first, erupting into gouts of white goosedown and ripped cloth, then Sarah, caught in the storm as she turned. I saw one leg turned to pulp below the knee, and then the body hits, bloody fistfuls of tissue torn out of her pale flanks as she fell through the curtain of fire.

I reeled to my feet as the assault rifle stammered to a halt. Sarah had rolled over on her face, as if to hide the damage the shells had done to her, but I saw it all through veils of red anyway. I came out of the corner without conscious thought, and the commando was too late to bring the Kalashnikov around. I slammed into him at waist height, blocked the gun and knocked him back into the kitchen. The barrel of the rifle caught on the door jamb and he lost his grip. I heard the weapon clatter to the ground behind me as we hit the kitchen floor. With the speed and strength of the tetrameth I scrambled astride him, batted aside one flailing arm and seized his head in both hands. Then I smashed it against the tiles like a coconut.

Under the mask, his eyes went suddenly unfocused. I lifted the head again and smashed it down again, feeling the skull give soggily with the impact. I ground down against the crunch, lifted and smashed again. There was a roaring in my ears like the maelstrom and somewhere I could hear my own voice screaming obscenities. I was going for a fourth or fifth blow when something kicked me between the shoulder blades and splinters jumped magically out of the table leg in front of me. I felt the sting as two of them found homes in my face.

For some reason the rage puddled abruptly out of me. I let go of the commando’s head almost gently and was lifting one puzzled hand to the pain of the splinters in my cheek when I realised I had been shot, and that the bullet must have torn all the way through my chest and into the table leg. I looked down, dumbfounded, and saw the dark red stain inking its way out over my shirt. No doubt about it. An exit hole big enough to take a golf ball.

With the realisation came the pain. It felt as if someone had run a steel-wool pipe-cleaner briskly through my chest cavity. Almost thoughtfully, I reached up, found the hole and plugged it with my two middle fingers. The finger tips scraped over the roughness of torn bone in the wound, and I felt something membranous throb against one of them. The bullet had missed my heart. I grunted and attempted to rise, but the grunt turned into a cough and I tasted blood on my tongue.

‘Don’t you move, motherfucker.’

The yell came out of a young throat, badly distorted with shock. I hunched forward over my wound and looked back over my shoulder. Behind me in the doorway, a young man in a police uniform had both hands clasped around the pistol he had just shot me with. He was trembling visibly. I coughed again and turned back to the table.

The Smith & Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where I had left it less than two minutes before. Perhaps it was that, the scant shavings of time that had been planed off since Sarah was alive and all was well, that drove me. Less than two minutes ago I could have picked up the gun, I’d even thought about it, so why not now. I gritted my teeth, pressed my fingers harder into the hole in my chest and staggered upright. Blood spattered warmly against the back of my throat. I braced myself on the edge of the table with my free hand and looked back at the cop. I could feel my lips peeling back from the clenched teeth in something that was more a grin than a grimace.

‘Don’t make me do it, Kovacs.’

I got myself a step closer to the table and leaned against it with my thighs, breath whistling through my teeth and bubbling in my throat. The Smith & Wesson gleamed like fool’s gold on the scarred wood. Out in the Reach power lashed down from an orbital and lit the kitchen in tones of blue. I could hear the maelstrom calling.

‘I said don’t—’

I closed my eyes and clawed the gun off the table.

PART ONE: ARRIVAL

(Needlecast Download)

CHAPTER ONE

Coming back from the dead can be rough.

In the Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it in neutral and float. It’s the first lesson and the trainers drill it into you from day one. Hard-eyed Virginia Vidaura, dancer’s body poised inside the shapeless Corps coveralls as she paced in front of us in the induction room. Don’t worry about anything, she said, and you’ll be ready for it. A decade later, I met her again, in a holding pen at the New Kanagawa justice facility. She was going down for eighty to a century; excessively armed robbery and organic damage. The last thing she said to me when they walked her out of the cell was: ‘Don’t worry kid, they’ll store it.’ Then she bent her head to light a cigarette, drew the smoke hard into lungs she no longer gave a damn about and set off down the corridor as if to a tedious briefing. From the narrow angle of vision afforded me by the cell gate, I watched the pride in that walk and I whispered the words to myself like a mantra.

Don’t worry, they’ll store it. It was a superbly double-edged piece of street wisdom. Bleak faith in the efficiency of the penal system, and a clue to the elusive state of mind required to steer you past the rocks of psychosis. Whatever you feel, whatever you’re thinking, whatever you are when they store you, that’s what you’ll be when you come out. With states of high anxiety, that can be a problem. So you let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.

If you have time.

I came thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a non-existent weapon. The weight hit me like a hammer and I collapsed back into the floatation gel. I flailed with my arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of gel poured into my mouth and down my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a hold on the hatch coaming, but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my nose and throat, and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip on the hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g manoeuvre, pressing me down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank. Floatation gel? I was drowning.

Abruptly, there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing into an upright position. At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my chest, someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head down, coughing out the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so much.

‘So much for training.’ It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. ‘What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?’

That was when I had it. On Harlan’s World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn’t. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard ‘k’ instead of the slavic ‘ch’.

And everything was too heavy.

The realisation came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through frosted plate glass.

Offworld.

Somewhere along the line, they’d taken Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.), and they’d freighted him. And since Harlan’s World was the only habitable biosphere in the Glimmer system, that meant a stellar range needlecast to—

Where?

I looked up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting in the opened hatch of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world like an ancient aviator who’d forgotten to dress before climbing aboard his biplane. The cylinder was one of a row of about twenty backed up against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door which was closed. The air was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their due, on Harlan’s World at least the re-sleeving rooms are decked out in pastel colours and the attendants are pretty. After all, you’re supposed to have paid your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny start to your new life.

Sunny wasn’t in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres tall, he looked as if he’d made his living wrestling swamp panthers before the present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature bulged on his chest and arms like body armour and the head above it was cropped close to the skull, revealing a long scar like a lightning strike down to the left ear. He was dressed in a loose black garment with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the breast. His eyes matched the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having helped me sit up, he had stepped back out of arm’s reach, as per the manual. He’d been doing this a long time.

I pressed one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.

‘Want to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?’

‘Kovacs, right now you don’t have any rights.’

I looked up and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his face. I shrugged and snorted the other nostril clean.

‘Want to tell me where I am?’

He hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before he passed it on, and then mirrored my shrug.

‘Sure. Why not? You’re in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth.’ The grimace of a smile came back. ‘Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay on this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH. ’

‘Don’t give up the day job,’ I told him soberly.

The doctor led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace and I was hard pressed to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain grey towel and still dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got through in a day.

‘You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,’ she recited. ‘There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve the problem. If you have any recurring comp—’

‘I know. I’ve done this before.’

I wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered Sarah.

We stopped at a side door with the word shower stencilled on frosted glass. The doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.

‘I’ve used showers before as well,’ I assured her.

She nodded. ‘When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to talk to you.’

The manual says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.

‘What do they want?’

‘They didn’t choose to share that with me.’ The words showed an edge of frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. ‘Perhaps your reputation precedes you.’

‘Perhaps it does.’ On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile. ‘Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?’

She looked at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and contempt of the failed human reformer.

‘With a man like you,’ she managed finally, ‘I would have thought they would be the worried ones.’

‘Yeah, right,’ I said quietly.

She hesitated, then gestured. ‘There is a mirror in the changing room,’ she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I was ready for the mirror yet.

In the shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself, once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with you later on and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’ve worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.

In the changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch, and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.

This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back. It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.

I stood there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines everywhere. The thick cropped hair was black shot through with grey. The eyes were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint jagged scar under the left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there, wondering if the two were connected.

The envelope beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy. Handwritten signature. Very quaint.

Well, you’re on Earth now. Most ancient of civilised worlds. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.

It was four-fifteen, local time.

The doctor was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her shoulder. There was no one else in the room.

I glanced around, then back at the suit.

‘You the police?’

‘Outside.’ He gestured at the door. ‘This isn’t their jurisdiction. They need a special brief to get in here. We have our own security.’

‘And you are?’

He looked at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs. ‘Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you are now leaving.’

‘You don’t sound delighted to be losing me.’

Sullivan pinned me with a stare. ‘You’re a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.’

I touched the letter in my breast pocket. ‘Lucky for me Mr Bancroft disagrees with you. He’s supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside as well?’

‘I haven’t looked.’

Somewhere on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialled it in a couple of places and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper, scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed the copy to me.

‘Takeshi Lev Kovacs,’ he said, mispronouncing my name with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. ‘By the powers vested in me by the UN Justice Accord, I discharge you on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft, for a period not to exceed six weeks, at the end of which time your parole status will be reconsidered. Please sign here.’

I took the pen and wrote my name in someone else’s handwriting next to the warden’s finger. Sullivan separated the top and bottom copies, and handed me the pink one. The doctor held up a second sheet and Sullivan took it.

‘This is a doctor’s statement certifying that Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.) was received intact from the Harlan’s World Justice Administration, and subsequently sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed circuit monitor. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign the declaration.’

I glanced up and searched in vain for any sign of the cameras. Not worth fighting about. I scribbled my new signature a second time.

‘This is a copy of the leasing agreement by which you are bound. Please read it carefully. Failure to comply with any of its articles may result in you being returned to storage immediately to complete the full term of your sentence either here, or at another facility of the Administration’s choice. Do you understand these terms and agree to be bound by them?’

I took the paperwork and scanned rapidly through it. It was standard stuff. A modified version of the parole agreement I’d signed half a dozen times before on Harlan’s World. The language was a bit stiffer, but the content was the same. Bullshit by any other name. I signed it without a blink.

‘Well then.’ Sullivan seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. ‘You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Don’t waste the opportunity.’

Don’t they ever get tired of saying it?

I folded up my bits of paper without speaking and stuffed them into my pocket next to the letter. I was turning to leave when the doctor stood up and held out a small white card to me.

‘Mr Kovacs.’

I paused.

‘There shouldn’t be any major problems with adjusting,’ she said. ‘This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there is anything major. Call this number.’

I put out an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that I hadn’t noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in. My hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the rest of the paperwork and I was gone, crossing the reception and pushing open the door without a word. Ungracious maybe, but I didn’t think anyone in that building had earnt my gratitude yet.

You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Sure. A hundred and eighty light years from home, wearing another man’s body on a six-week rental agreement. Freighted in to do a job that the local police wouldn’t touch with a riot prod. Fail and go back into storage. I felt so lucky I could have burst into song as I walked out the door.

CHAPTER TWO

The hall outside was huge, and all but deserted. It looked like nothing so much as the Millsport rail terminal back home. Beneath a tilted roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along in the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood, a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.

Download Central.

These people wouldn’t recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the homecomers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face and body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a couple of generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend. I knew one guy in the Corps, Murakami, who was waiting on the release of a great-grandfather put away over a century back. Was going up to Newpest with a litre of whisky and a pool cue for homecoming gifts. He’d been brought up on stories of his great-grandfather in the Kanagawa pool halls. The guy had been put away before Murakami was even born.

I spotted my reception committee as I went down the steps into the body of the hall. Three tall silhouettes were gathered around one of the benches, shifting restlessly in the slanting rays of sunlight and creating eddies in the dust motes that floated there. A fourth figure sat on the bench, arms folded and legs stretched out. All four of them were wearing reflective sunglasses that at a distance turned their faces into identical masks.

Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that had been fed recently. Bulky and tough-looking with neatly groomed crimson mohicans, they arrived in my path a couple of metres ahead, forcing me either to stop in turn or cut an abrupt circle around them. I stopped. Newly arrived and newly sleeved is the wrong state to be in if you plan to piss off the local militia. I tried on my second smile of the day.

‘Something I can do for you?’

The older of the two waved a badge negligently in my direction, then put it away as if it might tarnish in the open air.

‘Bay City police. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.’ The sentence sounded bitten off, as if he was resisting the urge to add some epithet to the end of it. I made an attempt to look as if I was seriously considering whether or not to go along with them, but they had me and they knew it. An hour out of the tank, you don’t know enough about your new body to be getting into brawls with it. I shut down my images of Sarah’s death and let myself be shepherded back to the seated cop.

The lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden discs of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face, stuck up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a clear hint of the lithe body within. She looked up at me with her arms folded on her chest for nearly a minute before anyone spoke.

‘It’s Kovacs, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Takeshi Kovacs?’ Her pronunciation was perfect. ‘Out of Harlan’s World? Millsport via the Kanagawa storage facility?’

‘Tell you what, I’ll just stop you when you get one wrong.’

There was a long, mirror-lensed pause. The lieutenant unfolded fractionally and examined the blade of one hand.

‘You got a licence for that sense of humour, Kovacs?’

‘Sorry. Left it at home.’

‘And what brings you to Earth?’

I gestured impatiently. ‘You know all this already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Have you got something to say to me, or did you just bring these kids along for educational purposes?’

I felt a hand fasten on my upper arm and tensed. The lieutenant made a barely perceptible motion with her head and the cop behind me let go again.

‘Cool down, Kovacs. I’m just making conversation here. Yeah, I know Laurens Bancroft sprung you. Matter of fact, I’m here to offer you a lift up to the Bancroft residence.’ She sat forward suddenly, and stood up. On her feet she was almost as tall as my new sleeve. ‘I’m Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.’

‘Was?’

She nodded. ‘Case is closed, Kovacs.’

‘Is that a warning?’

‘No, it’s just the facts. Open-and-shut suicide.’

‘Bancroft doesn’t seem to think so. He claims he was murdered.’

‘Yeah, so I hear.’ Ortega shrugged. ‘Well, that’s his prerogative. I guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he’d blow his own head clean off.’

‘A man like what?’

‘Oh come—’ She stopped herself and gave me a small smile. ‘Sorry, I keep forgetting.’

‘Forgetting what?’

Another pause, but this time Kristin Ortega seemed to be off balance for the first time in our brief acquaintance. There was hesitancy blurring her tone when she spoke again. ‘You’re not from here.’

‘So?’

‘So anyone from here would know what kind of man Laurens Bancroft is. That’s all.’

Fascinated at why someone would lie so ineptly to a total stranger, I tried to put her back at her ease. ‘A rich man,’ I hazarded. ‘A powerful man.’

She smiled thinly. ‘You’ll see. Now do you want this lift or not?’

The letter in my pocket said a chauffeur would be outside the terminal to pick me up. Bancroft had made no mention of the police. I shrugged.

‘I’ve never turned down a free ride yet.’

‘Good. Then shall we go?’

They flanked me to the door and stepped out ahead like body-guards, heads tilted back and lensed eyes scanning. Ortega and I stepped through the gap together and the warmth of the sunlight hit me in the face. I screwed up my new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly-kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, I could see sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly and I caught the faint odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the familiar hum of traffic, but everything else felt like a period drama set piece.

‘. . . and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you . . .’

The squawk of the poorly operated ampbox hit us as we went down the steps from the exit. I glanced across the landing area and saw a crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESOLUTION 653!! ONLY GOD CAN RESURRECT!! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speaker.

‘What’s this?’

‘Catholics,’ said Ortega, lip curling. ‘Old-time religious sect.’

‘Yeah? Never heard of them.’

‘No. You wouldn’t have. They don’t believe you can digitise a human being without losing the soul.’

‘Not a widespread faith then.’

‘Just on Earth,’ she said sourly. ‘I think the Vatican - that’s their central church - financed a couple of cryoships to Starfall and Latimer—’

‘I’ve been to Latimer, I never ran into anything like this.’

‘The ships only left at the turn of the century, Kovacs. They won’t get there for a couple more decades yet.’

We skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at me. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped my sleeve’s unsettled reflexes and I made a blocking motion before I got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and I took it with a placating smile.

‘They have no right,’ the woman said.

‘Oh, I agree . . .’

‘Only the Lord our God can save your soul.’

‘I—’ But by this time Kristin Ortega was steering me firmly away, one hand on my arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. I shook her off politely but equally firmly.

‘Are we in some kind of hurry?’

‘I think we both have better things to do, yes,’ she said, tight lipped, looking back to where her colleagues were engaged in fending off leaflets of their own.

‘I might have wanted to talk to her.’

‘Yeah? Looked to me like you wanted to throat-chop her.’

‘That’s just the sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and she tripped it. You know, most people lie down for a few hours after downloading. I’m a little on edge.’

I stared at the leaflet in my hands. CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? it demanded of me rhetorically. The word ‘machine’ had been printed in script designed to resemble an archaic computer display. ‘Soul’ was in flowing stereographic letters that danced all over the page. I turned over for the answer.

NO!!!!!

‘So cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn’t. Interesting.’ I looked back at the glowing placards, musing. ‘What’s Resolution 653?’

‘It’s a test case going through the UN Court,’ said Ortega shortly. ‘Bay City public prosecutor’s office want to subpoena a Catholic who’s in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican say she’s already dead and in the hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy.’

‘I see. So your loyalties are pretty undivided here.’

She stopped and turned to face me.

‘Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organisation in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practise birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favour is that this d.h.f. thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity.’

My lift turned out to be a battered but undeniably rakish-looking Lockheed-Mitoma transport decked out in what were presumably police colours. I’d flown Lock-Mits on Sharya, but they’d been a dull radar-reflective black all over. The red and white stripes on this one looked garish by comparison. A pilot in sunglasses to match the rest of Ortega’s little gang sat motionless in the cockpit. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was already hinged up. Ortega banged on the hatch coaming as we climbed aboard and the turbines awoke with a whispery sound.

I helped one of the mohicans manhandle the hatch down, steadied myself against the lift of the cruiser and found my way to a window seat. As we spiralled up, I craned my neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about a hundred metres up and dropped its nose slightly. I sank back into the arms of the automould and found Ortega watching me.

‘Still curious huh?’ she said.

‘I feel like a tourist. Answer me a question?’

‘If I can.’

‘Well, if these guys don’t practise birth control, there’s got to be an awful lot of them, right. And Earth isn’t exactly a hive of activity these days, so . . . Why aren’t they running things?’

Ortega and her men swapped a set of unpleasant smiles. ‘Storage, ’ said the mohican on my left.

I slapped myself on the back of the neck, and then wondered if the gesture was in use here. It’s the standard site for a cortical stack, after all, but then cultural quirks don’t always work like that.

‘Storage. Of course.’ I looked around at their faces. ‘There’s no special exemption for them?’

‘Nope.’ For some reason, this little exchange seemed to have made us all buddies. They were relaxing. The same mohican went on to elaborate. ‘Ten years or three months, it’s all the same to them. A death sentence every time. They never come off stack. It’s cute, huh?’

I nodded. ‘Very tidy. What happens to the bodies?’

The man opposite me made a throwaway gesture. ‘Sold off, broken down for transplants. Depends on the family.’

I turned away and stared out of the window.

‘Something the matter, Kovacs?’

I faced Ortega with a fresh smile gripping my face. It felt as if I was getting quite good at them.

‘No, no. I was just thinking. It’s like a different planet.’

That cracked them up.

Suntouch House
October 2nd

Takeshi-san,

When you receive this letter, you will doubtless be somewhat disoriented. I offer my sincere apologies for this, but I have been assured that the training you underwent with the Envoy Corps should enable you to deal with the situation. Similarly, I assure you that I would not have subjected you to any of this had my own situation not been desperate.

My name is Laurens Bancroft. Coming as you do from the colonies, this may not mean anything to you. Suffice it to say that I am a rich and powerful man here on Earth, and have made many enemies as a result. Six weeks ago I was murdered, an act which the police, for reasons of their own, have chosen to regard as suicide. Since the murderers ultimately failed I can only assume that they will try again and, in view of the police attitude, they may well succeed.

Clearly you will wonder what all this has to do with you and why you have been dragged a hundred and eighty-six light years out of storage to deal with such a local matter. I have been advised by my lawyers to retain a private investigator, but owing to my prominence in the global community, I am unable to trust anyone I could engage locally. I was given your name by Reileen Kawahara, for whom I understand you did some work on New Beijing eight years ago. The Envoy Corps were able to locate you in Kanagawa within two days of my requesting your whereabouts, though in view of your discharge and subsequent activities they were unable to offer any kind of operational guarantees or pledges. It is my understanding that you are your own man.

The terms under which you have been released are as follows: You are contracted to work for me for a period of six weeks with an option for me to renew at the end of that time should further work be necessary. During this time I shall be responsible for all reasonable expenses incurred by your investigation. In addition, I shall cover the cost of sleeve rental for this period. In the event that you conclude the investigation successfully, the remainder of your storage sentence at Kanagawa - one hundred and seventeen years and four months - will be annulled and you will be refreighted to Harlan’s World for immediate release in a sleeve of your own choosing. Alternatively, I undertake to pay off the balance of the mortgage on your current sleeve here on Earth and you may become a naturalised UN citizen. In either case the sum of one hundred thousand UN dollars, or equivalent, will be credited to you.

I believe these terms to be generous but I should add that I am not a man to be trifled with. In the event that your investigation fails and I am killed, or that you attempt to in any way escape or evade the terms of your contract, the sleeve lease will be terminated immediately and you will be returned to storage to complete your sentence here on Earth. Any further legal penalties that you incur may be added to that sentence. Should you choose not to accept my contract from the outset, you will also be returned to storage immediately, though I cannot undertake to refreight you to Harlan’s World in this case.

I am hopeful that you will see this arrangement as an opportunity, and agree to work for me. In anticipation of this, I am sending a driver to collect you from the storage facility. His name is Curtis and he is one of my most trusted employees. He will be waiting for you in the release hall.

I look forward to meeting you at Suntouch House.

Yours sincerely,
Laurens J. Bancroft.

CHAPTER THREE

Suntouch House was aptly named. From Bay City we flew south down the coast for about half an hour before the change in engine pitch warned me that we were approaching our destination. By that time the light through the right side windows was turning warm gold with the sun’s decline towards the sea. I peered out as we started to descend and saw how the waves below were molten copper and the air above pure amber. It was like landing in a jar of honey.

The transport sideslipped and banked, giving me a view of the Bancroft estate. It edged in from the sea in neatly manicured tones of green and gravel around a sprawling tile-roofed mansion big enough to house a small army. The walls were white, the roofing coral and the army, if it existed, was out of sight. Any security systems Bancroft had installed were very low-key. As we came lower I made out the discreet haze of a power fence along one border of the grounds. Barely enough to distort the view from the house. Nice.

Less than a dozen metres up over one of the immaculate lawns the pilot kicked in the landing brake with what seemed like unnecessary violence. The transport shuddered from end to end and we came down hard amidst flying clods of turf.

I shot Ortega a reproachful look which she ignored. She threw open the hatch and climbed out. After a moment I joined her on the damaged lawn. Prodding at the torn grass with the toe of one shoe, I shouted over the sound of the turbines. ‘What was that all about? You guys pissed off with Bancroft just because he doesn’t buy his own suicide?’

‘No.’ Ortega surveyed the house in front of us as if she was thinking of moving in. ‘No, that’s not why we’re pissed off with Mr Bancroft.’

‘Care to tell me why?’

‘You’re the detective.’

A young woman appeared from the side of the house, tennis racket in hand, and came across the lawn towards us. When she was about twenty metres away, she stopped, tucked the racket under her arm and cupped her hands to her mouth.

‘Are you Kovacs?’

She was beautiful in a sun, sea and sand sort of way and the sports shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal effect. Golden hair brushed her shoulders as she moved and the shout gave away a glimpse of milk white teeth. She wore sweat bands at forehead and wrists and from the dew on her brow they were not for show. There was finely toned muscle in her legs and a substantial bicep stood out when she lifted her arms. Exuberant breasts strained the fabric of the leotard. I wondered if the body was hers.

‘Yes,’ I called back. ‘Takeshi Kovacs. I was discharged this afternoon.’

‘You were supposed to be met at the storage facility.’ It was like an accusation. I spread my hands.

‘Well. I was.’

‘Not by the police.’ She stalked forward, eyes mostly on Ortega. ‘You. I know you.’

‘Lieutenant Ortega,’ said Ortega, as if she was at a garden party. ‘Bay City, Organic Damage Division.’

‘Yes. I remember now.’ The tone was distinctly hostile. ‘I assume it was you who arranged for our chauffeur to be pulled over on some trumped-up emissions charge.’

‘No, that would be Traffic Control, ma’am,’ said the detective politely. ‘I have no jurisdiction in that division.’

The woman in front of us sneered.

‘Oh, I’m sure you haven’t, lieutenant. And I’m sure none of your friends work there either.’ The voice turned patronising. ‘We’ll have him released before the sun goes down, you know.’

I glanced sideways to see Ortega’s reaction, but there was none. The hawk profile remained impassive. Most of me was preoccupied with the other woman’s sneer. It was an ugly expression, and one that belonged on an altogether older face.

Back up by the house there were two large men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They had been standing under the eaves watching since we arrived, but now they ambled out of the shade and began to make their way in our direction. From the slight widening of the young woman’s eyes I guessed that she had summoned them on an internal mike. Slick. On Harlan’s World people are still a bit averse to sticking racks of hardware into themselves, but it looked as if Earth was going to be a different proposition.

‘You are not welcome here, lieutenant,’ said the young woman in a freezing voice.

‘Just leaving, ma’am,’ said Ortega heavily. She clapped me unexpectedly on the shoulder and headed back to the transport at an easy pace. Halfway there she suddenly stopped and turned back.

‘Here, Kovacs. Almost forgot. You’ll need these.’

She dug in her breast pocket and tossed me a small packet. I caught it reflexively and looked down. Cigarettes.

‘Be seeing you.’

She swung herself aboard the transport and slammed the hatch. Through the glass I saw her looking at me. The transport lifted on full repulse, pulverising the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west towards the ocean. We watched it out of sight.

‘Charming,’ said the woman beside me, largely to herself.

‘Mrs Bancroft?’

She swung around. From the look on her face, I wasn’t much more welcome here than Ortega had been. She had seen the lieutenant’s gesture of camaraderie and her lips twitched with disapproval.

‘My husband sent a car for you, Mr Kovacs. Why didn’t you wait for it?’

I took out Bancroft’s letter. ‘It says here the car would be waiting for me. It wasn’t.’

She tried to take the letter from me and I lifted it out of her reach. She stood facing me, flushed, breasts rising and falling distractingly. When they stick a body in the tank, it goes on producing hormones pretty much the way it would if you were asleep. I became abruptly aware that I was swinging a hard-on like a filled fire hose.

‘You should have waited.’

Harlan’s World, I remembered from somewhere, has gravity at about 0.8g. I suddenly felt unreasonably heavy again. I pushed out a compressed breath.

‘Mrs Bancroft, if I’d waited, I’d still be there now. Can we go inside?’

Her eyes widened a little, and I suddenly saw in them how old she really was. Then she lowered her gaze and summoned composure. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Kovacs. I’ve forgotten my manners. The police, as you see, have not been sympathetic. It’s been very upsetting, and we all still feel a little on edge. If you can imagine—’

‘There’s no need to explain.’

‘But I am very sorry. I’m not usually like this. None of us are.’ She gestured around as if to say that the two armed guards behind her would ordinarily have been bearing garlands of flowers. ‘Please accept my apologies.’

‘Of course.’

‘My husband’s waiting for you in the seaward lounge. I’ll take you to him immediately.’

The inside of the house was light and airy. A maid met us at the veranda door and took Mrs Bancroft’s tennis racket for her without a word. We went down a marbled hallway hung with art that, to my untutored eye, looked old. Sketches of Gagarin and Armstrong, Empathist renderings of Konrad Harlan and Angin Chandra. At the end of this gallery, set on a plinth, was something like a narrow tree made out of crumbling red stone. I paused in front of it and Mrs Bancroft had to backtrack from the left turn she was making.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

‘Very much. This is from Mars, isn’t it.’

Her face underwent a change that I caught out of the corner of my eye. She was reassessing. I turned for a closer look at her face.

‘I’m impressed,’ she said.

‘People often are. Sometimes I do handsprings too.’

She looked at me narrowly. ‘Do you really know what this is?’

‘Frankly, no. I used to be interested in structural art. I recognise the stone from pictures, but . . .’

‘It’s a Songspire.’ She reached past me and let her fingers trail down one of the upright branches. A faint sighing awoke from the thing and a perfume like cherries and mustard wafted into the air.

‘Is it alive?’

‘No one knows.’ There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that I liked her better for. ‘On Mars they grow to be a hundred metres tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think that most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might only have been around since the founding of the Roman empire.’

‘Must have been expensive. To bring it back to Earth, I mean.’

‘Money wasn’t an object, Mr Kovacs.’ The mask was back in place. Time to move on.

We made double time down the left-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for our unscheduled stop. With each step Mrs Bancroft’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and I took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work, Angin Chandra with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket. Not much help.

The seaward lounge was built on the end of the house’s west wing. Mrs Bancroft took me into it through an unobtrusive wooden door and the sun hit us in the eyes as soon as we entered.

‘Laurens. This is Mr Kovacs.’

I lifted a hand to shade my eyes and saw that the seaward lounge had an upper level with sliding glass doors that accessed a balcony. Leaning on the balcony was a man. He must have heard us come in; come to that, he must have heard the police cruiser arrive and known what it signified, but still he stayed where he was, staring out to sea. Coming back from the dead sometimes makes you feel that way. Or maybe it was just arrogance. Mrs Bancroft nodded me forward and we went up a set of stairs made from the same wood as the door. For the first time I noticed that the walls of the room were shelved from top to bottom with books. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.

As we came out onto the balcony, Bancroft turned to face us. There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.

‘Mr Kovacs.’ He transferred the book so that he could shake my hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. How do you find the new sleeve?’

‘It’s fine. Comfortable.’

‘Yes, I didn’t involve myself too much in the details, but I instructed my lawyers to find something . . . suitable.’ He glanced back, as if looking for Ortega’s cruiser on the horizon. ‘I hope the police weren’t too officious.’

‘Not so far.’

Bancroft looked like a Man Who Read. There’s a favourite experia star on Harlan’s World called Alain Marriott, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cuts a swathe through the brutal tyranny of the early Settlement years. It’s questionable how accurate this portrayal of the Quellists is, but it’s a good flic. I’ve seen it twice. Bancroft looked a lot like an older version of Marriott in that role. He was slim and elegant with a full head of iron grey hair which he wore back in a ponytail, and hard black eyes. The book in his hand and the shelves around him were like an utterly natural extension of the powerhouse of a mind that looked out from those eyes.

Bancroft touched his wife on the shoulder with a dismissive casualness that in my present state made me want to weep.

‘It was that woman, again,’ said Mrs Bancroft. ‘The lieutenant.’

Bancroft nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it, Miriam. They’re just sniffing around. I warned them I was going to do this, and they ignored me. Well, now Mr Kovacs is here, and they’re finally taking me seriously.’

He turned to me. ‘The police have not been very helpful to me over this matter.’

‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here, apparently.’

We looked at each other while I tried to decide if I was angry with this man or not. He’d dragged me halfway across the settled universe, dumped me into a new body and offered me a deal that was weighted so I couldn’t refuse. Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please.

On the other hand, no one at Suntouch House had mispronounced my name yet, and I didn’t really have a choice. And then there was the money. A hundred thousand UN was about six or seven times what Sarah and I had expected to make on the Millsport wetware haul. UN dollars, the hardest currency there was, negotiable on any world in the Protectorate.

That had to be worth keeping your temper for.

Bancroft gave his wife another casual touch, this time on her waist, pushing her away.

‘Miriam, could you leave us alone for a while. I’m sure Mr Kovacs has endless questions, and it’s likely to be boring for you.’

‘Actually, I’m likely to have some questions for Mrs Bancroft as well.’

She was already on her way back inside, and my comment stopped her in mid-stride. She cocked her head at an angle, and looked from me to Bancroft and back. Beside me, her husband stirred. This wasn’t what he wanted.

‘Maybe I could speak to you later,’ I amended. ‘Separately.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Her eyes met mine, then danced aside. ‘I’ll be in the chart room, Laurens. Send Mr Kovacs along when you’ve finished.’

We both watched her leave, and when the door closed behind her Bancroft gestured me to one of the lounge chairs on the balcony. Behind them, an antique astronomical telescope stood levelled at the horizon, gathering dust. Looking down at the boards under my feet, I saw they were worn with use. The impression of age settled over me like a cloak, and I lowered myself into my chair with a tiny frisson of unease.

‘Please don’t think of me as a chauvinist, Mr Kovacs. After nearly two hundred and fifty years of marriage, my relationship with Miriam is more politeness than anything. It really would be better if you spoke to her alone.’

‘I understand.’ That was shaving the truth a bit, but it would do.

‘Would you care for a drink? Something alcoholic?’

‘No thank you. Just some fruit juice, if you have it.’ The shakiness associated with downloading was beginning to assert itself, and in addition there was an unwelcome scratchiness in my feet and fingers which I assumed was nicotine dependency. Apart from the odd cigarette bummed from Sarah, I’d been quit for the last two sleeves and I didn’t want to have to break the habit all over again. Alcohol on top of everything would finish me.

Bancroft folded his hands in his lap. ‘Of course. I’ll have some brought up. Now, where would you like to begin?’

‘Maybe we should start with your expectations. I don’t know what Reileen Kawahara told you, or what kind of profile the Envoy Corps has here on Earth, but don’t expect miracles from me. I’m not a sorcerer.’

‘I’m aware of that. I have read the Corps literature carefully. And all Reileen Kawahara told me was that you were reliable, if a trifle fastidious.’

I remembered Kawahara’s methods, and my reactions to them. Fastidious. Right.

I gave him the standard spiel anyway. It felt funny, pitching for a client who was already in. Felt funny to play down what I could do, as well. The criminal community isn’t long on modesty, and what you do to get serious backing is inflate whatever reputation you may already have. This was more like being back in the Corps. Long polished conference tables and Virginia Vidaura ticking off the capabilities of her team.

‘Envoy training was developed for the UN colonial commando units. That doesn’t mean . . .’

Doesn’t mean every Envoy is a commando. No, not exactly, but then what is a soldier anyway? How much of special forces training is engraved on the physical body and how much in the mind? And what happens when the two are separated?

Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty light years out from Earth. The most far-flung four times that distance, and some of the Colony transports are still going. If some maniac starts rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toys, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information, via hyperspatial needlecast, so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment the shit hit the fan, the marines would be arriving just in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won.

That’s no way to run a Protectorate.

OK, you can digitise and freight the minds of a crack combat team. It’s been a long time since weight of numbers counted for much in a war, and most of the military victories of the last half millennium have been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. You can even decant your crack d.h.f. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems and steroid built bodies. Then what do you do?

They’re in bodies they don’t know, on a world they don’t know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they’ve probably never even heard of and certainly don’t understand. The climate is different, the language and culture is different, the wildlife and vegetation is different, the atmosphere is different. Shit, even the gravity is different. They know nothing, and even if you download them with implanted local knowledge, it’s a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they’re likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving.

That’s where you get the Envoy Corps.

Neurachem conditioning, cyborg interfaces, augmentation - all this stuff is physical. Most of it doesn’t even touch the pure mind, and it’s the pure mind that gets freighted. That’s where the Corps started. They took psychospiritual techniques that oriental cultures on Earth had known about for millennia and distilled them into a training system so complete that on most worlds graduates of it were instantly forbidden by law to hold any political or military office.

Not soldiers, no. Not exactly.

‘I work by absorption,’ I finished. ‘Whatever I come into contact with, I soak up, and I use that to get by.’

Bancroft shifted in his seat. He wasn’t used to being lectured. It was time to start.

‘Who found your body?’

‘My daughter, Naomi.’

He broke off as someone opened the door in the room below. A moment later, the maid who had attended Miriam Bancroft earlier came up the steps to the balcony bearing a tray with a visibly chilled decanter and tall glasses. Bancroft was wired with internal tannoy, like everyone else at Suntouch House it seemed.

The maid set down her tray, poured in machine-like silence and then withdrew on a short nod from Bancroft. He stared after her blankly for a while.

Back from the dead. It’s no joke.

‘Naomi,’ I prompted him gently.

He blinked. ‘Oh. Yes. She barged in here, wanting something. Probably the keys to one of the limos. I’m an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is my youngest.’

‘How young?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘Do you have many children?’

‘Yes, I do. Very many.’ Bancroft smiled faintly. ‘When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters.’

‘Do they live with you?’

‘Naomi does, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now.’

‘How is Naomi?’ I stepped my tone down a little. Finding your father without his head isn’t the best way to start the day.

‘She’s in psychosurgery,’ said Bancroft shortly. ‘But she’ll pull through. Do you need to talk to her?’

‘Not at the moment.’ I got up from the chair and went to the balcony door. ‘You say she barged in here. This is where it happened?’

‘Yes.’ Bancroft joined me at the door. ‘Someone got in here and took my head off with a particle blaster. You can see the blast mark on the wall down there. Over by the desk.’

I went inside and down the stairs. The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item - they must have freighted the gene code from Harlan’s World and cultured the tree here. That struck me as almost as extravagant as the Songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. On the World mirrorwood grows in forests on three continents, and practically every canal dive in Millsport has a bar top carved out of the stuff. I moved past it to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downwards.

Bancroft had remained on the balcony. I looked up at his silhouetted face. ‘This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing else was damaged, broken or disturbed in any way?’

‘No. Nothing.’ It was clear that he wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet until I’d finished.

‘And the police found the weapon beside you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you own a weapon that would do this?’

‘Yes. It was mine. I keep it in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?’

‘Not at the moment, thank you.’ I knew from experience how difficult mirrorwood furniture is to shift. I turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. ‘Whose prints will open this?’

‘Miriam’s and my own.’

There was a significant pause. Bancroft sighed, loud enough to carry across the room. ‘Go on, Kovacs. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or my wife murdered me. There’s just no other reasonable explanation. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank at Alcatraz.’

I looked elaborately round the room before I met his eyes.

‘Well, you’ll admit it makes for easier police work,’ I said. ‘It’s nice and neat.’

He snorted, but there was a laugh in it. I found myself beginning to like this man despite myself. I went back up, stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail. Outside a black-clad figure prowled back and forth across the lawn below, weapon slung at port. In the distance the power fence shimmered. I stared in that direction for a while.

‘It’s asking a lot to believe that someone got in here, past all the security, broke into a safe only you and your wife had access to and murdered you, without causing any disturbance. You’re an intelligent man, you must have some reason for believing it.’

‘Oh, I do. Several.’

‘Reasons the police chose to ignore.’

‘Yes.’

I turned to face him. ‘All right. Let’s hear it.’

‘You’re looking at it, Mr Kovacs.’ He stood there in front of me. ‘I’m here. I’m back. You can’t kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.’

‘You’ve got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. How regular is the update?’

Bancroft smiled. ‘Every forty-eight hours.’ He tapped the back of his neck. ‘Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz. I don’t even have to think about it.’

‘And they keep your clones on ice there as well.’

‘Yes. Multiple units.’

Guaranteed immortality. I sat there thinking about that for a while, wondering how I’d like it. Wondering if I’d like it.

‘Must be expensive,’ I said at last.

‘Not really. I own PsychaSec.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you see, Kovacs, neither I nor my wife could have pulled that trigger. We both knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the remote.’

I nodded. ‘All right, who else did know about it? Let’s narrow the field.’

‘Apart from my family?’ Bancroft shrugged. ‘My lawyer, Oumou Prescott. A couple of her legal aides. The director at PsychaSec. That’s about it.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘suicide is rarely a rational act.’

‘Yes, that’s what the police said. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory as well.’

‘Which were?’

This was what Bancroft had wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. ‘Which were that I should choose to walk the last two kilometres home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself.’

I blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The police found traces of a cruiser landing in a field two kilometres from the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is just outside the pick-up range of the house security surveillance. Equally conveniently, there was apparently no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.’

‘Did they check taxi datastacks?’

Bancroft nodded. ‘For what it’s worth, they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep records of their fleets’ whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing.’ A momentary hunted look crossed Bancroft’s face. ‘For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage.’

‘Have you used these firms in the past?’

‘On occasion, yes.’

The logical next question hung in the air between us. I left it unasked, and waited. If Bancroft wasn’t going to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, I wasn’t going to press him until I had a few other landmarks locked down.

Bancroft cleared his throat. ‘There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution, the police say. A pattern more in keeping with a larger vehicle.’

‘That depends on how hard it landed.’

‘I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes was in keeping with a two-kilometre trek across country. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing.’

‘And the police know this too?’

‘Of course they do.’

‘How did they explain it?’

Bancroft smiled thinly. ‘They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As you say, suicide is not a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important at the moment of the act. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights, that. Is it the same system on Harlan’s World?’

I shrugged. ‘More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offence.’

‘I suppose that’s a wise precaution.’

‘Yes. It stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.’ Bancroft leaned forward on the rail and locked gazes with me. ‘Mr Kovacs, I am three hundred and fifty-seven years old. I have lived through a corporate war, the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?’

I looked back at him, back at those hard dark eyes. ‘Yes. Very clear.’

‘That’s good.’ He unpinned his stare. ‘Shall we continue?’

‘Yes. The police. They don’t like you very much, do they?’

Bancroft smiled without much humour. ‘The police and I have a perspective problem.’

‘Perspective?’

‘That’s right.’ He moved along the balcony. ‘Come here, I’ll show you what I mean.’

I followed him along the rail, catching the telescope with my arm as I did and knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. I paused to watch the thing realign itself. The fingermarks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.

Bancroft had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.

‘Yours?’ I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.

‘Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.’ It was said without conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. ‘Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the Colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.’

He was losing me. I brought him back to reality. ‘Perspective?’ I reminded him gently.

‘Perspective.’ He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. ‘You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.’

I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.

‘That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked him.’

Bancroft turned to make sure his point was getting across.

‘You see, Mr Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to bother him. He had no respect.’

‘So you’re the tree.’

‘Just so,’ said Bancroft equably. ‘I am the tree. The police would like to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they have no respect.’

I went back to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’ve seen this kind of thing from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you.

And then you make up some of your own.

Bancroft stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve this line of inquiry for a while.

‘What’s the last thing you remember?’

‘Tuesday 14th August,’ he said promptly. ‘Going to bed at about midnight.’

‘That was the last remote update.’

‘Yes, the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.’

‘So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Optimally bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again, wondering absently how it had got there.

‘And there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you.’

Bancroft was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.

‘Did I say something amusing?’

He had the grace to come back to his seat.

‘No, Mr Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.’

This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.

‘Had any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them. Ms Prescott handles that for me.’

‘You don’t consider death threats worth your attention?’

‘Mr Kovacs, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.’

‘Very convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe neither you nor the police have consulted Ms Prescott’s files.’

Bancroft waved a hand. ‘Of course, the police conducted their own cursory inquiry. Oumou Prescott told them exactly what she had already told me. That nothing out of the ordinary had been received in the last six months. I have enough faith in her not to need to check beyond that. You’ll probably want to look at the files yourself, though.’

The thought of scrolling through hundreds of metres of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me. I mastered it with an effort worthy of Virginia Vidaura’s approval.

‘Well, I’ll certainly need to talk to Oumou Prescott, anyway.’

‘I’ll make the appointment immediately.’ Bancroft’s eyes took on the inward glaze of someone consulting internal hardware. What time would suit you?’

I held up a hand. ‘Probably better if I do that myself. Just let her know I’ll be in touch. And I’ll need to see the re-sleeving facility at PsychaSec.’

‘Certainly. In fact, I’ll get Prescott to take you there. She knows the director. Anything else?’

‘A line of credit.’

‘Of course. My bank have already allocated a DNA-coded account to you. I understand they have the same system on Harlan’s World.’

I licked my thumb and held it up queryingly. Bancroft nodded. ‘Just the same here. You will find there are areas of Bay City where cash is still the only negotiable currency. Hopefully you won’t have to spend much time in those parts, but if you do you can draw actual currency against your account at any bank outlet. Will you require a weapon?’

‘Not at the moment, no.’ One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot ’em up carnival.

‘Well.’ Bancroft seemed almost perplexed by my response. He had been on the point of reaching into his shirt pocket, and now he completed the action, awkwardly. He held out an inscribed card to me. ‘This is my gunmaker. I’ve told them to expect you.’

I took the card and looked at it. The ornate script read Larkin & Green - Armourers since 2203. Quaint. Below was a single string of numbers. I pocketed the card.

‘This might be useful later on,’ I admitted. ‘But for the moment I want to make a soft landing. Sit back and wait for the dust to settle. I think you can appreciate the need for that.’

‘Yes, of course. Whatever you think best. I trust your judgement.’ Bancroft caught my gaze and held it. ‘You’ll bear in mind the terms of our agreement, though. I am paying for a service. I don’t react well to abuse of trust, Mr Kovacs.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you do,’ I said tiredly. I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies any more, punishment can only come through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory. ‘For what it’s worth, the line the Corps fed you about me is so much shit on a prick. My word’s as good as it ever was.’

I stood up.

‘Can you recommend a place to stay back in the city. Somewhere quiet, mid range.’

‘Yes, there are places like that on Mission Street. I’ll have someone ferry you back there. Curtis, if he’s out of arrest by then.’ Bancroft climbed to his feet as well. ‘I take it you intend to interview Miriam now. She really knows more about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you’ll want to speak to her quite closely.’

I thought about those ancient eyes in that pneumatic teenager’s body and the idea of carrying on a conversation with Miriam Bancroft was suddenly repellent. At the same time a cold hand strummed taut chords in the pit of my stomach and the head of my penis swelled abruptly with blood. Classy.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said unenthusiastically. ‘I’d like to do that.’

CHAPTER FOUR

‘You seem ill at ease, Mr Kovacs. Are you?’

I looked over my shoulder at the maid who had shown me in, then back at Miriam Bancroft. Their bodies were about the same age.

‘No,’ I said, more coarsely than I’d intended.

She briefly curved her mouth down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she’d been studying when I arrived. Behind me the maid pulled the chart room door closed with a heavy click. Bancroft hadn’t seen fit to accompany me into the presence of his wife. Perhaps one encounter a day was as much as they allowed themselves. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as we came down from the balcony in the seaward lounge. Bancroft paid her about as much attention as he had last time.

When I left, he was standing by the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.

Mrs Bancroft deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.

‘Well,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Ask me your questions, then.’

‘Where were you when it happened?’

‘I was in bed.’ She looked up at me this time. ‘Please don’t ask me to corroborate that; I was alone.’

The chart room was long and airy under an arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. I moved out of the centre aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs Bancroft and myself. It felt a little like taking cover.

‘Mrs Bancroft, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I’m not the police. I’m interested in information, not guilt.’

She slid the wrapped map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She had left her fresh young sweat and tennis clothes in some elegant bathroom while I was talking to her husband. Now she was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to the elbow, her wrists unadorned with jewellery.

‘Do I sound guilty, Mr Kovacs?’ she asked me.

‘You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger.’

She laughed. It was a pleasant, throaty sound and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out. A laugh I could get to like.

‘How very indirect you are.’

I looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of me. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before I was born. The names marked on it were in a script I couldn’t read

‘Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs Bancroft.’

‘No? Then what is?’

I shrugged. ‘Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties.’

‘Sounds boring. I think you’re going to have a few shocks here, Mr Kovacs.’

‘I didn’t say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs Bancroft.’

‘Oh.’ She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards me. ‘Yes, Laurens told me a little about you. It seems you’re thought of as a dangerous man on Harlan’s World.’

I shrugged again.

‘It’s Russian.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The script.’ She came round the rack and stood beside me, looking down at the map. ‘This is a Russian computer-generated chart of moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at auction. Do you like it?’

‘It’s very nice. What time did you go to sleep the night your husband was shot?’

She stared at me. ‘Early. I told you, I was alone.’ She forced the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. ‘Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Mr Kovacs, it’s not. It’s resignation. With a twist of bitterness.’

‘You feel bitter about your husband?’

She smiled. ‘I thought I said resigned.’

‘You said both.’

‘Are you saying you think I killed my husband?’

‘I don’t think anything yet. But it is a possibility.’

‘Is it?’

‘You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives.’

Still smiling, she said, ‘Building a case, are we, Mr Kovacs?’

I looked back at her. ‘If the heart pumps. Yeah.’

‘The police had a similar theory for a while. They decided the heart didn’t pump. I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.’

I looked down at my hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out Kristin Ortega’s cigarettes. I was in the middle of tapping one out of the pack. Nerves. Feeling oddly betrayed by my new sleeve, I put the packet away.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s a question of climate control. A lot of the maps in here are very sensitive to pollution. You couldn’t know.’

She somehow managed to make it sound as if only a complete moron wouldn’t have realised. I could feel my grip on the interview sliding out of sight.

‘What made the police—’

‘Ask them.’ She turned her back and walked away from me as if making a decision. ‘How old are you, Mr Kovacs?’

‘Subjectively? Forty-one. The years on Harlan’s World are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.’

‘And objectively?’ she asked, mocking my tone.

‘I’ve had about a century in the tank. You tend to lose track.’ That was a lie. I knew to the day how long each of my terms in storage had been. I’d worked it out one night and now the number wouldn’t go away. Every time I went down again, I added on.

‘How alone you must be by now.’

I sighed and turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. Syrtis Minor; 3rd excavation, east quarter. Bradbury; aboriginal ruins. I started to tug one of the rolls free.

‘Mrs Bancroft, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?’

She whirled on me almost before I had finished speaking and her face was tight with anger.

‘My husband did not kill himself,’ she said freezingly.

‘You seem very sure of that.’ I looked up from the map and gave her a smile. ‘For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.’

‘Put that back,’ she cried, starting towards me. ‘You have no idea how valuable—’

She stopped, brought up short as I slid the map back into the rack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.

‘Are you trying to make me angry, Mr Kovacs?’

‘I’m just trying to get some attention.’

We looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs Bancroft lowered her gaze.

‘I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?’

‘Where had your husband gone that night?’

She bit her lip. ‘I’m not sure. He went to Osaka that day, for a meeting.’

‘Osaka is where?’

She looked at me in surprise

‘I’m not from here,’ I said patiently.

‘Osaka’s in Japan. I thought—’

‘Yeah, Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labour. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.’

I stopped. Mrs Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.

‘I am over three centuries old, Mr Kovacs.’ There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. ‘Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.’

The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.

‘It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please? He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.’

‘No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—’

‘Yes?’

She shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. ‘Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.’

‘And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?’

The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. ‘He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr Kovacs.’

‘This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?’

‘Oh . . . no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to source.’

I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.

‘Routine stuff, huh?’

‘I would think so, yes.’ She gave me a weary smile. ‘Mr Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.’

‘I’m sure they do as well, Mrs Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.’

‘You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.’ There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. ‘Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.’

This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.

‘Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.’ I looked around the chart room. ‘All these maps. How long have you been collecting?’

Mrs Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.

‘Most of my life,’ she said. ‘While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.’

For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.

Old.

With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to run, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.

‘Are you all right, Mr Kovacs?’

Download dues.

I focused with an effort. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes. ‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Bancroft. Thank you for your time.’

She moved towards me. ‘Would you like—’

‘No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.’

The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.

I badly needed a cigarette.

CHAPTER FIVE

The sky was the texture of old silver and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s chauffeur got me back to town. We spiralled in from the sea over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d only been out of arrest a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting their duties.

I didn’t complain. My own mood wasn’t far off matching the chauffeur’s. Images of Sarah’s death kept creeping into my mind. It had only happened last night. Subjectively.

We braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up difference from the details.

The Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different cast and colour - I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a girl who looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy.

The impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd. I frowned and caught at it.

On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until it’s not there any more.

I wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get round tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant

‘Curtis.’ I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. ‘You want to cut the broadcast block for a minute?’

He looked across at me with a slight curl of the lip. ‘Sure.’

I settled back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. ‘I’m not a tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.’

The street sellers’ catalogues came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial: coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ’casts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make sense.

‘What does from the Houses mean?’ I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase from the ’casts for the third time.

Curtis sneered. ‘The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.’ He nodded at the street. ‘Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the Houses.’

‘And Stiff ?’

He shrugged. ‘Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it for near death experiences. Cheaper than suicide.’

‘I guess.’

‘You don’t get ’thanatine on Harlan’s World?’

‘No.’ I’d used it offworld with the Corps a couple of times, but there was a ban in fashion back home. ‘We got suicide, though. You want to put the screen back up.’

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

‘This is Mission Street,’ said Curtis. ‘The next couple of blocks are all hotels. You want me to drop you here?’

‘You recommend anywhere?’

‘Depends what you want.’

I gave him one of his own shrugs back. ‘Light. Space. Room service.’

He squinted thoughtfully. ‘Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean.’ The limousine picked up speed fractionally and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit facade in a style I didn’t recognise. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment I lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me and they parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

If the lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a cleaning robot round them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling the gloom into the centre of the room. The street I’d just come in off was the strongest source of light in the place.

The lobby was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. I picked my way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

I looked around and back at the screen.

No one.

I cleared my throat.

The characters blurred and shifted: ELECT LANGUAGE.

‘I’m looking for a room,’ I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling, multi-coloured fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.

‘Good day, sir. Welcome to the Hotel Hendrix, established 2087 and still here today. How may we serve you?’

I repeated my request, following the move into Amanglic.

‘Thank you, sir. We have a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city’s information and entertainment stack. Please indicate your preference for floor and size.’

‘I’d like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you’ve got.’ The face recoiled into a corner inset and a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel’s room structure etched itself into place. A selector pulsed efficiently through the rooms and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine print data shuttered down on one side of the screen.

‘The Watchtower suite, three rooms, dormitory thirteen point eight seven metres by—’

‘That’s fine, I’ll take it.’

The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjuror’s trick and the woman leapt back to full screen.

‘How many nights will you be with us, sir?’

‘Indefinite.’

‘A deposit is required,’ said the hotel diffidently, ‘for stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars UN should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded.’

‘Fine.’

‘Thank you sir.’ From the tone of voice, I began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Hendrix. ‘How will you be paying?’

‘DNA trace. First Colony Bank of California.’

The payment details were scrolling out when I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull.

‘That’s exactly what you think it is,’ said a calm voice. ‘You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks. I’m talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body.’

I complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up my spine to the point the gun muzzle was touching. It was a while since I’d been threatened with real death.

‘That’s good,’ said the same calm voice. ‘Now, my associate here is going to pat you down. You let her do that, and no sudden moves.’

‘Please key your DNA signature onto the pad beside this screen.’ The hotel had accessed First Colony’s database. I waited impassively while a slim, black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring grey scanner over me from head to foot. The gun at my neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. My flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

‘He’s clean.’ Another crisp, professional voice. ‘Basic neurachem, but it’s inoperative. No hardware.’

‘Really? Travelling kind of light, aren’t you, Kovacs?’

My heart dropped out of my chest and landed soggily in my guts. I’d hoped this was just local crime.

‘I don’t know you,’ I said cautiously, turning my head a couple of millimetres. The gun jabbed and I stopped.

‘That’s right, you don’t. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk outside—’

‘Credit access will cease in thirty seconds,’ said the hotel patiently. ‘Please key in your DNA signature now.’

‘Mr Kovacs won’t be needing his reservation,’ said the man behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, Kovacs, we’re going for a ride.’

‘I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment,’ said the woman on the screen.

Something in the tone of that phrase stopped me as I was turning, and on impulse I forced out a sudden, racking cough.

‘What—’

Bending forward with the force of the cough, I raised a hand to my mouth and licked my thumb.

‘The fuck are you playing at, Kovacs?’

I straightened again and snapped my hand out to the keypad beside the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the matt black receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of my skull and I collapsed to my hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into my face and I went the rest of the way down.

‘Thank you sir.’ I heard the voice of the hotel through a roaring in my head. ‘Your account is being processed.’

I tried to get up and got a second boot in the ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from my nose onto the carpet. The barrel of the gun ground into my neck.

‘That wasn’t smart, Kovacs.’ The voice was marginally less calm. ‘If you think the cops are going to trace us where you’re going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up! ’

He was pulling me to my feet when the thunder cut loose.

Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix’s security systems with twenty-millimetre automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed the twin-mounted autoturret come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channelled a three-second burst of fire through my primary assailant. Enough fire-power to bring down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.

The masked woman ran for the doors, and with the echoes of fire still hammering in my ears I saw the turret swivel to follow. She made about a dozen paces through the gloom before a prism of ruby laser light dappled across her back and a fresh fusillade exploded in the confines of the lobby. I clapped both hands over my ears, still on my knees, and the shells punched through her. She went over in a graceless tangle of limbs.

The firing stopped.

In the cordite reeking quiet that followed, nothing moved. The autoturret had gone dormant, barrels slanting at a downward angle, smoke coiling from the breeches. I unclasped my hands from my ears and climbed to my feet, pressing gingerly on my nose and face to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down and though there were cuts in my mouth I couldn’t find any loosened teeth. My ribs hurt where the second kick had hit me, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. I glanced over at the nearest corpse, and wished I hadn’t. Someone was going to have to get a mop.

To my left an elevator door opened with a faint chime.

‘Your room is ready, sir,’ said the hotel.

CHAPTER SIX

Kristin Ortega was remarkably restrained.

She came through the hotel doors with a loping stride that bounced one heavily weighted jacket pocket against her thigh, came to a halt in the centre of the lobby and surveyed the carnage with her tongue thrust into one cheek.

‘You do this sort of thing a lot, Kovacs?’

‘I’ve been waiting a while,’ I told her mildly. ‘I’m not in a great mood.’

The hotel had placed a call to the Bay City police about the time the autoturret had cut loose, but it was a good half hour before the first cruisers came spiralling down out of the sky traffic. I hadn’t bothered to go to my room, since I knew they were going to drag me out of bed anyway, and once they arrived there was no question of me going anywhere until Ortega got there. A police medic gave me a cursory check, ascertained that I wasn’t suffering from concussion and left me with a retardant spray to stop the nose bleed, after which I sat in the lobby and let my new sleeve smoke some of the lieutenant’s cigarettes. I was still sitting there an hour later when she arrived.

Ortega gestured. ‘Yeah, well. Busy city at night.’

I offered her the packet. She looked at it as if I’d just posed a major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the packet, she searched her pockets, produced a heavy petrol lighter and snapped it open. She seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around us, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.

‘So.’ She plumed smoke into the air above her head. ‘You know these guys?’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break!’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, I’ve been out of storage six hours, if that.’ I could hear my voice starting to rise. ‘Meaning, I’ve talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I’ve never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions or am I going to bed?’

‘All right, keep your skull on.’ Ortega looked suddenly tired. She sank into the lounger opposite mine. ‘You told my sergeant they were professionals.’

‘They were.’ I’d decided it was the one piece of information I might as well share with the police, since they’d probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the two corpses through their files.

‘Did they call you by name?’

I furrowed my brow with great care. ‘By name?’

‘Yeah.’ She made an impatient gesture. ‘Did they call you Kovacs?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Any other names?’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Such as?’

The weariness that had clouded her face retreated abruptly, and she gave me a hard look. ‘Forget it. We’ll run the hotel’s memory, and see.’

Oops.

‘On Harlan’s World you’d have to get a warrant for that.’ I made it come out lazily.

‘We do here.’ Ortega knocked ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. ‘But it won’t be a problem. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Hendrix has been up on an organic damage charge. While ago, but the archives go back.’

‘So how come it wasn’t decommissioned?’

‘I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self defence. Course,’ she nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep, ‘we’re talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this.’

‘Yeah, I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?’

‘What do you think I am, a search construct?’ Ortega had started watching me with a speculative hostility I didn’t much like. Then, abruptly, she shrugged. ‘Archive précis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple of centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under shortly afterwards with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Hendrix graded to artificial intelligence status instead and bought itself out.’

‘Smart.’

‘Yeah, from what I hear the AIs were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are AI.’ She grinned at me through the smoke. ‘That’s why no one stays in them. Shame, really. I read somewhere they’re hardwired to want customers the way people want sex. That’s got to be frustrating, right?’

‘Right.’

One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.

‘We got a make on the DNA samples,’ the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.

‘Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Kovacs.’ She waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse. ‘Sleeve last registered to Dimitri Kadmin, otherwise known as Dimi the Twin. Professional assassin out of Vladivostock.’

‘And the woman?’

Ortega and the mohican exchanged glances. ‘Ulan Bator registry?’

‘Got it in one, chief.’

‘Got the motherfucker.’ Ortega bounced to her feet with renewed energy. ‘Let’s get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Dimi downloaded into Holding before midnight.’ She looked back at me. ‘Kovacs, you may just have proved useful.’

The mohican reached under his double-breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together, they went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet, cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, I got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to me.

It was not what you’d call refined biotech surgery. The mohican had chopped out a section of the corpse’s spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and now he was digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Kristin Ortega was holding the head steady in both hands.

‘They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to,’ she was saying. ‘See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out, that’s where it’ll be.’

‘I’m trying,’ grunted the mohican. ‘Some augmentation in here, I reckon. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over ... Shit!! Thought I had it there.’

‘No, look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.’ Ortega took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

‘Shit, I nearly had it, chief.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in there.’ She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief acknowledgement and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up at the mohican with a grin.

‘Hear that?’

She reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

‘Gotcha, Dimi.’ Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing. ‘Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.’

As we watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my head close enough to Ortega to mutter.

‘So you know who this one is as well?’

She jerked round to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I couldn’t be sure. ‘Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin too. Ha, pun! The sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the black market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.’

‘Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?’

Ortega grimaced. ‘Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.’ She shrugged. ‘Price of progress.’

‘About the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a stellar range ’cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it.’

The mohican slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.

‘It’s easier here,’ she said shortly.

‘Yeah? How’s it work?’

‘It—’ She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. ‘Why do you want to know?’

I grinned at her. ‘Just naturally nosy, I guess.’

‘OK, Kovacs.’ She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. ‘Works like this. One day Mr Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyd’s or Cartwright Solar, maybe.’

‘Is that here?’ I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of my room. ‘In Bay City?’

The mohican had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded rapido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers leave.

‘Bay City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.’ Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing at the overload of whisky she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it. ‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr Kadmin wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con, with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than money.’

I leaned back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean metre of space between us.

‘OK, so that’s one copy. Then what?’

Ortega shrugged. ‘Fatal accident.’

‘In Ulan Bator?’

‘Right. Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyd’s with their retrieval writ, freight Dimi (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you.’

‘Meanwhile ...’

‘Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who’s not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Bay City.’

‘You don’t catch these guys too often.’

‘Almost never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like this or held on a UN indictable offence. Without the UN rap, you’ve got no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.’

‘That’s pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?’

‘Erasure.’

‘Erasure? You do that here?’

Ortega nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never quite on it. ‘Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?’

I thought about it. Some crimes in the Corps carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen it applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.

‘It’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?’

‘You feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?’

I ran the tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. ‘No. But does it stop with people like him?’

‘There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage.’ The look on Ortega’s face said she didn’t think that was such a great idea.

I put my coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own cigarette to the packet’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.

‘How old are you, Ortega?’

She looked back at me narrowly. ‘Thirty-four. Why?’

‘Never been d.h.’d, hmm?’

‘Yeah, I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.’

I let out the first breath of smoke. ‘Kind of touchy about it, aren’t you?’

‘Like I said, I’m not a criminal.’

‘No.’ I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. ‘If you were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy rap.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to.’ I didn’t know what had led me to forget that Ortega was the law, but something had. Something had been building in the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room. I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.

‘Kadmin’s expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to cost.’

‘About twenty grand a hit.’

‘Then Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.’

Ortega raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s fast work, for someone who just got here.’

‘Oh, come on.’ I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. ‘If it was suicide, who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?’

‘You’re well liked, are you?’

I leaned forward. ‘No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m working for Bancroft.’

Ortega grinned. ‘Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?’

Tired, Takeshi. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura wagging her finger at me. The Envoy Corps don’t get taken apart by local law.

I stumbled on as best I could.

‘They knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip off the tourists. Ortega, come on.’

She let my exasperation sink into the silence before she answered me. ‘So Bancroft was hit as well? Maybe. So what?’

‘So you’ve got to reopen the inquiry.’

‘You don’t listen, Kovacs.’ She bent me a smile meant for stopping armed men in their tracks. ‘The case is closed.’

I sagged back against the wall and watched her through the smoke for a while. Finally, I said, ‘You know, when your clean-up squad arrived tonight one of them showed me his badge for long enough to actually see it. Quite fancy, close up. That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it.’

She made a get-on-with-it gesture, and I took another pull on my cigarette before I sank the barb in.

‘To protect and serve? I guess by the time you make lieutenant, you don’t really believe that stuff any more.’

Contact. A muscle jumped under one eye and her cheeks pulled in as if she was sucking on something bitter. She stared at me, and for that moment I thought I might have pushed too far. Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed.

‘Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not people like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.’

‘A Meth?’

‘Yeah. A Meth. You know, and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years. He’s old. I mean, really old.’

‘Is that a crime, lieutenant?’

‘It should be,’ said Ortega grimly. ‘You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well they don’t really matter any more. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.’

I looked seriously at her. ‘You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?’

‘I’m not talking about Bancroft,’ she waved the objection aside impatiently, ‘I’m talking about his kind. They’re like the AIs. They’re a breed apart. They’re not human, they deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes back up on you.’

I thought briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses, and wondered how far off the mark Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

‘So Bancroft gets short-changed because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens, you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police has got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing.’

But Ortega wasn’t rising to the bait any more. She sipped her coffee and made a dismissive gesture. ‘Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don’t have the resources to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.’

‘And if they’re not phantoms?’

Ortega sighed. ‘Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defences and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraphic test there is and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband, no one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut case.’

‘And the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send Kadmin out here?’

‘I’m not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real death victims who weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away.’ There was a hooded tiredness building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers. ‘Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get re-sleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have the sympathy to spare for Mr Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under.’

‘That happen often, does it?’

‘Often enough, but don’t look surprised.’ She gave me a bleak smile. ‘He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.’

It was a side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have and a view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were screaming for sleep.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

‘I think you’d better go, lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a headache.’

Something flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug and swung her legs over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the door, she stopped and I saw her turn her head.

‘Hey, Kovacs.’

I looked over at her. ‘Forget something?’

She nodded her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game we’d been playing.

‘You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I guess I owe you that.’

‘You don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.’

‘Leila Begin,’ she said. ‘Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see where it gets you.’

The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it down to its filter.

Bancroft had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less than a day and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back. First, Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the Vladivostock hitman and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam Bancroft’s off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Bancroft case to remain closed.

That wasn’t an option I had.

‘Your guest has left the building,’ said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.

‘Thanks,’ I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. ‘Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?’

‘Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?’

‘No.’ I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. ‘Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.’

Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

I made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.

And sleep dragged me under.

CHAPTER SEVEN

There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.

Innenininennininennin . . .

I know this place.

I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.

Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.

‘Leila Begin,’ he says, and nods back to where I have come from. ‘Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.’

‘I will,’ I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.

‘Going to turn and fight?’ he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.

‘With what?’ I say, opening my empty hands.

‘Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.’

‘Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.’

Jimmy de Soto snorts derisively. ‘Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.’

‘You can’t know that,’ I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. ‘You died years before that happened.’

‘Oh, come on, who really dies these days?’

‘Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.’

‘What’s a Catholic?’

‘Tell you later. You got any cigarettes.’

‘Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?’

I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course . . .

I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.

‘Lucky one,’ says Jimmy de Soto judicially. ‘They missed the socket.’

He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.

‘I’ve got to do something about this,’ I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.

‘Smell that?’ Jimmy asks, lifting his own face to the chilly air around us. ‘They’re changing it.’

‘What?’ But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only . . .

‘Got to go,’ says Jimmy, and I’m about to ask him where when I realise he means me and I’m

Awake.

My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waif-like figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realisation, I came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.

‘You have a visitor,’ said the voice of the Hendrix briskly.

‘What time is it?’ I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.

‘Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.’

‘And my visitor?’

‘Oumou Prescott,’ said the hotel. ‘Do you require breakfast?’

I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. ‘Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.’

By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.

Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favourite colours and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.

‘Mr Kovacs.’

‘Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?’ I laid the tray on the unmade bed.

‘No, thank you. Mr Kovacs, I am Laurens Bancroft’s principal legal representative via the firm of Prescott, Forbes and Hernandez. Mr Bancroft informed me—’

‘Yes, I know.’ I picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.

‘The point is, Mr Kovacs, we have an appointment with Dennis Nyman at PsychaSec in ...’ Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. ‘Thirty minutes.’

‘I see,’ I said, chewing slowly. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I’ve been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn’t realise you would sleep so late.’

I grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. ‘Faulty research, then. I was only sleeved yesterday.’

She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.

‘We’ll be late, then,’ she said. ‘I guess you need breakfast.’

It was cold in the middle of the Bay.

I climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of grey cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. I turned up the collar of my summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to mid thigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff your hands in.

Beside me, Prescott was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb and we both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over my hands and face. I blinked my eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Prescott raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Prescott turned to the building behind us and gestured with one laconic thumb.

‘This way.’

I pushed my hands into the inadequate pockets of my suit and followed her lead. Bent slightly into the wind, we picked our way up the long, winding steps to PsychaSec Alcatraz.

I’d expected a high-security installation, and I wasn’t disappointed. PsychaSec was laid out in a series of long, low double-storey modules with deeply recessed windows reminiscent of a military command bunker. The only break in this pattern was a single dome at the western end which I guessed had to house the satellite uplink gear. The whole complex was a pale granite grey and the windows a smoky reflectant orange. There was no holodisplay, or broadcast publicity, in fact nothing to announce we’d got the right place except a sober plaque laser-engraved into the sloping stone wall of the entrance block:

PsychaSec S.A.

D.H.F. Retrieval and Secure Holding Clonic Re-sleeving

Above the plaque was a small black sentry eye flanked by heavily grilled speakers. Oumou Prescott raised her arm and waved at it.

‘Welcome to PsychaSec Alcatraz,’ said a construct voice briskly. ‘Please identify yourself within the fifteen-second security time limit.’

‘Oumou Prescott and Takeshi Kovacs to see Director Nyman. We have an appointment.’

A thin, green scanning laser flickered over us both from head to foot and then a section of the wall hinged smoothly back and down forming a passage inside. Glad to get out of the wind, I stepped nimbly into the niche and followed orange runway lights down a short corridor into a reception area, leaving Prescott to bring up the rear. As soon as we stepped off the walkway and into reception, the massive door slab rumbled upright and closed again. Solid security.

Reception was a circular, warmly lit area with banks of seats and low tables set at the cardinal compass points. There were small groups of people seated north and east, conversing in low tones. In the centre was a circular desk where a receptionist sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment. No artificial constructs here; this was a real human being, a slim young man barely out of his teens who looked up with intelligent eyes as we approached.

‘You can go right through, Ms Prescott. The Director’s office is up the stairs and third door on your right.’

‘Thank you.’ Prescott took the lead again, turning back briefly to mutter as soon as we were out of earshot of the receptionist, ‘Nyman’s a bit impressed with himself since this place was built, but he’s basically a good person. Try not to let him irritate you.’

‘Sure.’

We followed the receptionist’s instructions until, outside the aforementioned door I had to stop and suppress a snigger. Nyman’s door, no doubt in the best possible Earth taste, was pure mirrorwood from top to bottom. After the high-profile security system and flesh and blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the vaginal spittoons at Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. My amusement must have been evident because Prescott gave me a frown as she knocked on the door.

‘Come.’

Sleep had done wonders for the interface between my mind and my new sleeve. Composing my rented features, I followed Prescott into the room.

Nyman was at his desk, ostensibly working at a grey and green coloured holodisplay. He was a thin, serious-looking man who affected steel-rimmed external eyelenses to go with his expensively cut black suit and short, tidy hair. His expression, behind the lenses, was slightly resentful. He’d not been happy when Prescott phoned him from the cab to say we would be delayed, but Bancroft had obviously been in touch with him because he accepted the later appointment time with the stiff acquiescence of a disciplined child.

‘Since you have requested a viewing of our facilities here, Mr Kovacs, shall we start? I have cleared my agenda for the next couple of hours, but I do have clients waiting.’

Something about Nyman’s manner brought Warden Sullivan to mind, but it was an altogether smoother, less embittered Sullivan. I glanced over Nyman’s suit and face. Perhaps if the Warden had made his career in storage for the super rich instead of the criminal element he might have turned out like this.

‘Fine.’

It got pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most d.h.f. depots, wasn’t much more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the 7 to 11 degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of the big thirty-centimetre expanded format discs and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. ‘It’s a duplex system,’ said Nyman proudly. ‘Every client is stored on two separate discs in different parts of the building. Random code distribution, only the central processor can find them both and there’s a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access to both copies. To do any real damage, you’d have to break in and get past all the security systems twice.’

I made polite noises.

‘Our satellite uplink operates through a network of no less than eighteen secure clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence. ’ Nyman was getting carried away with his own sales pitch. He seemed to have forgotten that neither Prescott nor myself were in the market for PsychaSec’s services. ‘No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission route.’

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Given an artificial intelligence of sufficient size and inclination, you’d get it right sooner or later, but this was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used AIs to get at you didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was looking in the wrong place.

‘Can I get access to Bancroft’s clones?’ I asked Prescott abruptly.

‘From a legal point of view?’ Prescott shrugged. ‘Mr Bancroft’s instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.’

Carte blanche? Prescott had been springing these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of the heavy parchment. It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement years flic.

Well, you’re on Earth now. I turned to Nyman, who nodded grudgingly.

‘There are some procedures,’ he said.

We went back up to ground level, along corridors that forcibly reminded me of the re-sleeving facility at Bay City Central by their very dissimilarity. No rubber gurney wheel tracks here - the sleeve transporters would be air cushion vehicles - and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in Gaudí-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.

Nyman caught the look. ‘There are some jobs that robot labour just never gets quite right,’ he said.

‘I’m sure.’

The clone banks appeared on our left, heavy, sealed doors in bevelled and sculpted steel counterpointing the ornate windows. We stopped at one and Nyman peered into the retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outwards, fully a metre thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four-metre-long chamber with a similar door at the far end. We stepped inside, and the outer door swung shut with a soft thud that pushed the air into my ears.

‘This is an airtight chamber,’ said Nyman redundantly. ‘We will receive a sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No reason to be alarmed.’

A light in the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust-off was in progress and then the second door opened with no more sound than the first. We walked out into the Bancroft family vault.

I’d seen this sort of thing before. Reileen Kawahara had maintained a small one for her transit clones on New Beijing, and of course the Corps had them in abundance. Still, I’d never seen anything quite like this.

The space was oval, dome-ceilinged, and must have extended through both storeys of the installation. It was huge, the size of a temple back home. Lighting was low, a drowsy orange, and the temperature was blood-warm. The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods of the same orange as the light, suspended from the ceiling by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, foetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; towards the top of the dome I could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cultured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analogue of womb lining, and they would grow with the foetus within to become like the metre and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault. The whole crop hung there like an insane mobile, just waiting for some huge sickly breeze to stir it into motion.

Nyman cleared his throat, and both Prescott and I shook off the paralysed wonder that had gripped us on the threshold.

‘This may look haphazard,’ he said, ‘but the spacing is computer generated.’

‘I know.’ I nodded and went closer to one of the lower sacs. ‘It’s fractal-derived, right?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Nyman seemed almost to resent my knowledge.

I peered in at the clone. Centimetres away from my face Miriam Bancroft’s features dreamed in amniotic fluid beneath the membrane. Her arms were folded protectively across her breasts and her hands were folded lightly into fists under her chin. Her hair had been gathered into a thick, coiled snake on the top of her head and covered in some kind of web.

‘The whole family’s here,’ murmured Prescott at my shoulder. ‘Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most only have one or two clones, but Bancroft and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ Despite myself, I had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Miriam Bancroft’s face. It was warm, and gave slightly under my hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed through to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give in to such penetrations and heal afterwards.

I turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Nyman.

‘This is all very nice, but presumably you don’t shell one of these whenever Bancroft comes in here. You must have tanks as well.’

‘This way.’ Nyman gestured us to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of our passage, and I had to duck to avoid brushing against one. Nyman’s fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door and we went though into a long, low room whose clinical illumination was almost blinding after the womb light of the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I’d woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.

‘Full life support suspension chambers,’ said Nyman. ‘Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.’

I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.

‘Who has access to this chamber?’

‘Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.’

I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at seven and eight.

‘You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?’

‘Yes.’ Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. ‘Have you not been informed of her current condition?’

‘Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,’ I growled. ‘That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.’

‘Well.’ Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.

‘PsychaSec have instructions from Mr Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.’

‘The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,’ said Nyman knowledgeably. ‘Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. ‘Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?’

There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.

‘I consider that remark in very poor taste,’ the director said finally. ‘Do you have any more important questions, Mr Kovacs?’

I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.

‘Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?’

Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. ‘I am directly authorised by Mr Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.’

There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.

‘This place is entry-monitored, right?’

‘Naturally.’ Nyman’s tone was still chilly.

‘Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?’

‘No more than usual. Mr Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—’

‘Indulge me,’ I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.

The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.’

Prescott yawned. ‘Total Absorb, huh?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ I looked at her more closely. ‘You know much about the Corps?’

‘Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?’

‘Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?’

‘Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.’

‘Impressions?’

‘Of Ortega?’ Prescott looked surprised. ‘Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—’

‘Not for Bancroft’s liking.’

Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. ‘I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—’

‘But she doesn’t like Meths, right?’

Another pause. ‘You have quite an ear for the street, Mr Kovacs.’ ‘You pick up the terminology,’ I said modestly. ‘Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?’

Prescott thought about it for a while. ‘It’s a common enough prejudice,’ she said slowly, ‘But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr Bancroft was alive, so . . .’

‘Better things to do, huh?’

‘Yes. Something like that.’

I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah . . . A loser’s catalogue, any way you looked at it.

I locked it down.

The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.

‘Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?’

‘Sorry?’ She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. ‘What did you say?’

‘This sleeve. You chose it, right?’

She frowned. ‘No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.’

‘No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.’

‘Oh.’ The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. ‘Mr Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?’

I grunted. ‘Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.’

Prescott’s smile gained ground. ‘Are you going to give up?’

‘If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.’

‘Do you think you can?’

‘Give up smoking?’

‘No. Crack this case.’

I looked at her, deadpan. ‘I don’t really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment?’

‘Yes. I drew them up.’ Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.

‘Well, well,’ I said, and went back to looking out of the window.

AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN’T

I slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk, Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.

‘Is it all like this?’ I asked.

‘Well, it gets less coherent.’ She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representations of the files I was accessing tumbled in cool shades of blue and green. ‘This is what we call the R&R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.’

‘Ortega bring any of them in?’

‘It’s not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage. It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft says we can delete it.’

‘And nothing new in the last six months?’

Prescott shrugged. ‘The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House.’

I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment-formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently, her grey metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.

‘Prescott, what can you tell me about Leila Begin?’

The silence that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was staring off into a corner of the field.

‘I suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,’ she said slowly.

‘Yeah.’ I sat up. ‘She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact, she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.’

Prescott swivelled to face me. ‘I don’t see how this can have any bearing on the case at hand.’

‘Try me.’

‘Very well.’ There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look on her face. ‘Leila Begin was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Fifty years ago, Bancroft was one of her clients. Through a number of indiscretions, this became known to Miriam Bancroft. The two women met at some function down in San Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Miriam Bancroft beat the shit out of Leila Begin.’

I studied Prescott’s face across the table, puzzled. ‘And that’s it?’ ‘No, that’s not it, Kovacs,’ she said tiredly. ‘Begin was six months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You physically can’t fit a spinal stack into a foetus, so that made it real death. Potential three- to five-decade sentence.’

‘Was it Bancroft’s baby?’

Prescott shrugged. ‘Debatable. Begin refused to let them do a gene match on the foetus. Said it was irrelevant who the father was. She probably figured the uncertainty was more valuable from a press point of view than a definite no.’

‘Or she was too distraught?’

‘Come on, Kovacs.’ Prescott jerked a hand irritably at me. ‘This is an Oakland whore we’re talking about.’

‘Did Miriam Bancroft go into storage?’

‘No, and that’s where Ortega gets to stick her knife in. Bancroft bought off everybody. The witnesses, the press, even Begin took a pay-off in the end. Settled out of court. Enough to get her a Lloyd’s cloning policy and take her out of the game. Last I heard, she was wearing out her second sleeve somewhere down in Brazil. But this is half a century ago, Kovacs.’

‘Were you around?’

‘No.’ Prescott leaned across the desk. ‘And neither was Kristin Ortega, which makes it kind of sickening to hear her whining on about it. Oh, I had an earful of it too, when they pulled out of the investigation last month. She never even met Begin.’

‘I think it might be a matter of principle,’ I said gently. ‘Is Bancroft still going to prostitutes on a regular basis?’

‘That is none of my concern.’

I stuck my finger through the holographic display and watched the coloured files distort around the intrusion. ‘You might have to make it your concern, counsellor. Sexual jealousy’s a pretty sturdy motive for murder, after all.’

‘May I remind you that Miriam Bancroft tested negative on a polygraph when asked that question,’ said Prescott sharply.

‘I’m not talking about Mrs Bancroft.’ I stopped playing with the display and stared across the desk at the lawyer before me. ‘I’m talking about the other million available orifices out there and the even larger number of partners or blood relatives who might not relish seeing some Meth fucking them. That’s going to have to include some experts on covert penetration, no pun intended, and maybe the odd psychopath or two. In short, someone capable of getting into Bancroft’s house and torching him.’

Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.

‘What about it, Prescott.’ I waved my hand through the holograph. ‘Anything in here that begins FOR WHAT YOU DID TO MY GIRL, DAUGHTER, SISTER, MOTHER, DELETE AS APPLICABLE?’

I didn’t need her to answer me. I could see it in her face.

With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the trees across the meadow, Oumou Prescott bent to the database keyboard and called up a new purple oblong of holographic light on the display. I watched as it bloomed and opened like some Cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind me, another cow voiced its resigned disgruntlement.

I slipped the headset back on.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The town was called Ember. I found it on the map, about two hundred kilometres north of Bay City, on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.

‘Free Trade Enforcer,’ said Prescott, peering over my shoulder. ‘Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built. Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the town grew up around the site to cater for the tourists.’

‘Tourists?’

She looked at me. ‘It’s a big ship.’

I hired an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-coloured suspension bridge. I needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but almost deserted so I stuck to the yellow line in the centre of the road and barrelled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above my head, but I finally found a Neo-Maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of me, and for a while I forgot about the Corps and Innenin and everything that had happened since.

By the time I hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted angles of the Free Trade Enforcer’s launch deck, and the last of its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either side of the wreck’s shadow. Prescott was right. It was a big ship.

I slowed my speed in deference to the rise of buildings around me, wondering idly how anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to shore. Maybe Bancroft knew. He’d probably been around then.

Ember’s main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian railing in wrought iron. There were holograph ’casters fixed to the trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman’s face wreathed with the words SLIP-SLIDE - ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATRE. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.

I rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the facades, and finally found what I was looking for about two thirds of the way along the front. I coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty metres up, sat still for a few minutes to see if anything happened and then, when it didn’t, I got out of the car and walked back along the street.

Elliott’s Data Linkage broking was a narrow facade sandwiched between an industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where gulls screeched and fought over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Elliott’s was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the operations room. I stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harboured behind a long moulded plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass-walled office. The far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the brackets had resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.

‘Help you?’

A thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head round the corner of one of the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.

‘Yeah, I’m looking for Victor Elliott.’

‘Out front.’ He gestured back the way I had come. ‘See the old guy on the rail? Watching the wreck? That’s him.’

I looked out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the rail.

‘He owns this place, right?’

‘Yeah. For his sins.’ The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. ‘Not much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is.’

I thanked him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade now, and Anchana Salomao’s holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, I came up next to the man on the rail and leaned my own arms on the black iron. He looked round as I joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgement, then went back to staring at the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.

‘That’s a pretty grim piece of parking,’ I said, gesturing out at the wreck.

It earned me a speculative look before he answered me. ‘They say it was terrorists.’ His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he’d once put too much effort into using it and something had broken. ‘Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both.’

‘Maybe they did it for the insurance,’ I said.

Elliott looked at me again, more sharply. ‘You’re not from here?’ he asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone this time.

‘No. Passing through.’

‘From Rio?’ He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. ‘You an artist?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ He seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill he’d forgotten. ‘You move like an artist.’

‘Near miss. It’s military neurachem.’

He got it then, but the shock didn’t seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes. He looked me up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.

‘You come looking for me? You from Bancroft?’

‘You might say that.’

He moistened his lips. ‘Come to kill me?’

I took the hardcopy out of my pocket and handed it across to him. ‘Come to ask you some questions. Did you transmit this?’

He read it, lips moving wordlessly. Inside my head, I could hear the words he was tasting again: . . . for taking my daughter from me . . . will burn the flesh from your head . . . will never know the hour or the day . . . nowhere safe in this life . . . It wasn’t highly original, but it was heartfelt and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Prescott had shown me on the Rabid & Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the death Bancroft had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the outside of Bancroft’s skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated contents across the room.

‘Yes, that’s mine,’ Elliott said quietly.

‘You’re aware that someone assassinated Laurens Bancroft last month.’

He handed me back the paper. ‘That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his own head off.’

‘Well, that is a possibility,’ I conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it into a refuse-filled skip below us on the beach. ‘But it’s not one I’m being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ said Elliott flatly.

‘I figured you’d say that. I might even believe you, except that whoever did kill Bancroft got through some very heavy-duty security systems, and you used to be a sergeant in the tactical marines. Now, I knew some tacs back on Harlan’s World, and a few of them were wired for covert wet work.’

Elliott looked at me curiously. ‘You a grasshopper?’

‘A what?’

‘Grasshopper. Offworlder.’

‘Yeah.’ If Elliott had ever been afraid of me, it was wearing off fast. I considered playing the Envoy card, but it didn’t seem worth it. The man was still talking.

‘Bancroft don’t need to bring in muscle from offworld. What’s your angle on this?’

‘Private contractor,’ I said. ‘Find the killer.’

Elliott snorted. ‘And you thought it was me.’

I hadn’t thought that, but I let it go, because the misconception was giving him a feeling of superiority that kept the conversation rolling. Something approaching a spark appeared in his eyes.

‘You think I could have got into Bancroft’s house? I know I couldn’t, because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the lawn.’

‘Because of your daughter?’

‘Yes, because of my daughter.’ The anger was fuelling his animation. ‘My daughter and all the others like her. She was only a kid.’

He broke off and stared out to sea again. After a moment, he gestured at the Free Trade Enforcer, where I could now see small lights glimmering around what must be a stage set up on the sloping launch deck. ‘That was what she wanted. All she wanted. Total Body Theatre. Be like Anchana Salomao and Rhian Li. She went to Bay City because she heard there was a connection there, someone who could—’

He jarred to a halt, and looked at me. The datarat had called him old, and now for the first time I saw why. In spite of his solid sergeant’s bulk and barely swelling waistline, the face was old, carved in the harsh lines of long-term pain. He was on the edge of tears.

‘She could have made it too. She was beautiful.’

He was fumbling for something in his pocket. I produced my cigarettes and offered him one. He took it automatically, lit it from the proffered ignition patch on the packet, but he went on fumbling in his pockets until he’d dug out a small Kodakristal. I really didn’t want to see this, but he activated it before I could say anything and a tiny cubed image sprang up in the air between us.

He was right. Elizabeth Elliott was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a few years younger than Miriam Bancroft. Whether she had the driving determination and horselike stamina that you needed in Total Body Theatre, the picture didn’t show, but she probably could have given it a shot.

The holoshot showed her sandwiched between Elliott and another woman who was an almost perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older woman’s face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiselling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.

‘Gone,’ said Elliott, as if he had guessed who my attention was focused on. ‘Four years ago. You know what Dipping is?’

I shook my head. Local colour, Virginia Vidaura said in my ear. Soak it up.

Elliott looked up, for a moment I thought at the holo of Anchana Salomao, but then I saw that his head was tilted at the sky beyond. ‘Up there,’ he said, and jarred to a halt the way he had when he mentioned his daughter’s youth.

I waited.

‘Up there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps, it looks like someone’s knitting the world a scarf.’ He looked down at me again, eyes shiny. ‘Irene said that. Knitting the world a scarf. Some of that scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by numbers.’

Now I thought I knew what was coming, but I kept quiet.

‘If you’re good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites. Moments in the head of a fashion-house princess, the ideas of a particle theorist, memories from a king’s childhood. There’s a market for this stuff. Oh, the society magazines run edited skullwalks of these sorts of people, but it’s all authorised, sanitised. Cut for public consumption. No unguarded moments, nothing that could embarrass anybody or damage popularity, just great big plastic smiles on everything. That ain’t what people really want.’

I had my doubts about that. The skullwalk magazines were big on Harlan’s World as well, and the only time their consumers protested was when one of the notables they portrayed was caught in some moment of human weakness. Infidelity and abusive language were usually the biggest generators of public outcry. It made sense. Anyone pitiful enough to want to spend so much time outside their own head wasn’t going to want to see the same basic human realities reflected in the gilded skulls of those they admired.

‘With mindbites, you get everything,’ said Elliott with a peculiar enthusiasm I suspected was a graft from his wife’s opinions. ‘The doubt, the muck, the humanity. People will pay a fortune for it.’

‘But it’s illegal?’

Elliott gestured at the shopfront that bore his name. ‘The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving policy to pay on both of us, plus Elizabeth. My tac pension wasn’t going to be enough. What could we do?’

‘How long did she get?’ I asked him softly.

Elliott stared out to sea. ‘Thirty years.’

After a while, stare still fixed on the horizon, he said, ‘I was OK for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Irene’s body.’ He half-turned towards me and coughed out something that might have been a laugh. ‘Corporation bought it direct from the Bay City storage facility. Paid five times what I could have afforded. They say the bitch only wears it alternate months.’

‘Elizabeth know that?’

He nodded once, like an axe coming down. ‘She got it out of me, one night. I was jack-happy. Been cruising the stacks all day, looking for business. No handle on where I was or what was going on. You want to know what she said?’

‘No,’ I muttered.

He didn’t hear me. His knuckles had whitened on the iron railing. ‘She said, Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back.’

This was getting out of hand.

‘Look, Elliott, I’m sorry about your daughter, but from what I hear she wasn’t working the kind of places Bancroft goes. Jerry’s Closed Quarters isn’t exactly the Houses, is it?’

The ex-tac spun on me without warning, and there was blind murder in his eyes and his crooked hands. I couldn’t blame him. All he could see in front of him was Bancroft’s man.

But you can’t jump an Envoy - the conditioning won’t let it happen. I saw the attack coming almost before he knew he was going to do it himself, and I had the neurachem of my borrowed sleeve online fragments of a second later. He hit low, driving under the guard he thought I’d put up, looking for the body blows that would break up my ribs. The guard wasn’t there, and neither was I. Instead, I stepped inside the hooks of his punches, took him off balance with my weight and tangled one leg amidst his. He stumbled back against the railing and I drove a cruel elbow uppercut into his solar plexus. His face went grey with the shock. Leaning over, I pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork of my thumb and fingers into his throat.

‘That’s enough,’ I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

I looked down at Elliott.

His eyes were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.

I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.

‘Listen, I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Bancroft?’

‘Because she told me, motherfucker.’ The sentence hissed out of him. ‘She told me what he’d done.’

‘And what was that?’

He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. ‘Dirty things,’ he said. ‘She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.’

Meal ticket. Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.

‘You think that’s why she died?’

He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.

‘She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.’

‘Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.’

‘How would they know?’ he said dully. ‘They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.’

‘They find him yet?’

‘Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?’

‘That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?’ I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t read that way to me.’

Elliott turned away.

‘Flesh,’ he said. ‘What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?’

It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.

‘Elizabeth’s still on stack,’ I said quietly.

‘Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.’ He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. ‘I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?’

There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look round.

PART TWO: REACTION

(Intrusion Conflict)

CHAPTER NINE

I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.

‘Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,’ I said cheerfully. ‘You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?’

She pulled a face. ‘Oh, please.’

‘All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?’

‘I really have no idea, Kovacs.’

‘Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.’ My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside, the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

‘Here we are.’ Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. ‘Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.’

Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.

‘You got an image there?’

‘Of Begin?’ Prescott shrugged. ‘Only a two-d. You want me to send it.’

‘Please.’

The ancient carphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

‘Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.’

‘Mariposa and San Bruno,’ Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. ‘Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.’

‘Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge.’

‘You’re going there? Tonight?’

‘Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,’ I said patiently. ‘Of course I’m going there tonight.’

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

‘It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.’

This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.

‘I’m sending the map,’ she said stiffly.

Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

Miriam Bancroft.

There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ’caster and the image kept fizzling out.

I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests - you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.

I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.

‘Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.’

I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.

‘Stiff?’

Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.

‘Do you want cabins or bar?’

I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. ‘What’s the deal in the bar?’

‘Ha ha ha.’ Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. ‘The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.’

‘Cabins,’ I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

‘Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.’

I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.

I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.

‘Do you want to see me see me see me . . . ?’

Cheap echo box on the vocoder.

I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.

‘Do you want to touch me touch me touch me . . . ?’

Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.

‘Tell me what you want, honey,’ she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

I cleared my own. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?’

Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.

‘You remember a girl used to work here?’ I asked.

She was working on my belt now. ‘Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—’

‘She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.’

Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.

‘What the fuck is this? You the Sia?’

‘The what?’

‘Sia. The heat.’ Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. ‘We had this, man—’

‘No.’ I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. ‘No, I’m her mother.’

Taut silence. She glared at me.

‘Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.’

‘No.’ I pulled her hand back to my groin. ‘Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t ...’

She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly. ‘That looks like prime tank flesh to me,’ she said untrustingly. ‘You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?’

‘It’s not parole.’ The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. ‘You know what I went down for?’

‘Lizzie said mindbites, something—’

‘Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?’

‘No. Lizzie never talked much about—’

‘Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.’

The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. ‘So who—’

I skinned her a smile. ‘Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.’

‘Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.’ Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairy-tale mother come looking for her lost daughter. ‘How come you’re cross-sleeved?’

‘There’s a deal,’ I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. ‘This ... person ... gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.’

‘That so? So why you here?’ There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.

‘There’s a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?’

She shook her head, face turned down.

‘A lot of the girls get hurt,’ she said quietly. ‘But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.’

‘Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?’

She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. ‘Mrs Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.’

I made myself wince. ‘Anyone. Important?’

‘I don’t know. Look, Mrs Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and . . .’ She paused, and added hurriedly, ‘Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.’

‘Can I talk to them?’

Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.

‘It’s better if you. Don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us . . .’

I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. ‘Well, maybe you could ask for me . . .’

The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

‘Sure. I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.’

I took her hand in both of mine. ‘Thank you, Anenome.’

‘My name’s not Anenome,’ she said abruptly. ‘I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.’

‘Thank you, Louise.’ I held on to her hand. ‘Thank you for doing this—’

‘Look, I’m not promising anything,’ she said with an attempt at roughness. ‘Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.’

She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.

Lit in red.

Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.

I stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.

‘You waiting for me?’ I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.

Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. ‘Look, man,’ he began weakly.

I sliced him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.

‘I said—’

That was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.

The Mongol took off, running.

I vaulted the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I threw out my chest and sprinted.

Ahead of me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my chest. Rain slapped at my face.

Fucking cigarettes.

We came out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me. Cross now. Cross now. Cross now. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly up the street.

Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me upright.

The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us by another ten metres.

A wayward speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.

I spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could panic him into tripping.

That wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and followed. Finally, I had the advantage.

Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.

In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.

I hit hard, skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been. The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover that wasn’t there.

‘LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!’

A cluster of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street and flooded us with white fire. From where I lay, I screwed up my eyes and could just make out the police transport, a regulation crowd-control five metres off the street, lights flashing. The soft storm of its turbines swept flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings and pinned them there like dying moths.

‘STAND WHERE YOU ARE!’ the tannoy thundered again. ‘LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!’

The Mongol brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the transport bucked as its pilot tried to avoid the beam. Sparks showered off one turbine where the weapon found its mark and the transport sideslipped badly. Machine-rifle fire answered from a mounting somewhere below the vessel’s nose, but by that time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone through the smoking gap.

Screams from somewhere within.

I picked myself slowly up off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilot’s window, a hatch whined up and Kristin Ortega stood framed in the opening.

CHAPTER TEN

The transport was a stripped-down version of the one that had given me the ride out to Suntouch House, and it was noisy in the cabin. Ortega had to shout to make herself heard above the engines.

‘We’ll put in a sniffer squad, but if he’s connected he can get stuff that’ll change his body’s chemical signature before dawn. After that, we’re down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part of town ...’

The transport banked and she gestured down at the warren of streets below. ‘Look at it. Licktown, they call it. Used to be called Potrero way back. They say it was a nice area.’

‘So what happened?’

Ortega shrugged in her steel lattice seat. ‘Economic crisis. You know how it is. One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan.’

‘That’s tough.’

‘Yeah, isn’t it,’ said the detective dismissively. ‘Kovacs, what the fuck were you doing at Jerry’s?’

‘Getting an itch scratched,’ I growled. ‘Any laws against it?’

She looked at me. ‘You weren’t getting greased in Jerry’s. You were barely in there ten minutes.’

I lifted my own shoulders and made an apologetic face. ‘You ever been downloaded into a male body straight out of the tank, you’ll know what it’s like. Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Jerry’s, performance isn’t an issue.’

Ortega’s lips curved in something approximating a smile. She leaned forward across the space between us.

‘Bullshit, Kovacs. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they’ve got on you at Millsport. Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so steep you’d need pitons and rope to get up it. Everything you do, performance is going to be an issue.’

‘Well.’ I fed myself a cigarette and ignited it as I spoke. ‘You know there’s a lot you can do for some women in ten minutes.’

Ortega rolled her eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around her face.

‘Right. And you’re telling me with the credit you have from Bancroft, Jerry’s is the best you can afford?’

‘It’s not about cost,’ I said, and wondered if that was the truth of what brought people like Bancroft down to Licktown.

Ortega leaned her head against the window and looked out at the rain. She didn’t look at me. ‘You’re chasing leads, Kovacs. You went down to Jerry’s to follow up something Bancroft did there. Given time I can find out what that was, but it’d be easier if you just told me.’

‘Why? You told me the Bancroft case was closed. What’s your interest?’

That brought her eyes back round to mine, and there was a light in them. ‘My interest is keeping the peace. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but every time we meet it’s to the sound of heavy-calibre gunfire.’

I spread my hands. ‘I’m unarmed. All I’m doing is asking questions. And speaking of questions . . . How come you were sitting on my shoulder when the fun started?’

‘Just lucky, I guess.’

I let that one go. Ortega was tailing me, that much was certain. And that in turn meant there had to be more to the Bancroft case than she was admitting.

‘What’s going to happen to my car?’ I asked.

‘We’ll have it picked up. Notify the hire company. Someone can come and get it from the impound. Unless you want it.’

I shook my head.

‘Tell me something, Kovacs. Why’d you hire a ground car? On what Bancroft’s paying you, you could have had one of these.’ She slapped the bulkhead by her side.

‘I like to go places on the ground,’ I said. ‘You get a better sense of distance that way. And on Harlan’s World, we don’t go up in the air much.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Listen, the guy who nearly torched you out of the sky back there—’

‘Excuse me?’ She cranked up one eyebrow in what by now I was beginning to think of as her trademark expression. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we saved your sleeve back there. You were the one looking down the wrong end of the hardware.’

I gestured. ‘Whatever. He was waiting for me.’

‘Waiting for you?’ Whatever she really thought, Ortega’s face was disbelieving. ‘According to those Stiff dealers we loaded into the wagon, he was buying product. An old customer, they say.’

I shook my head. ‘He was waiting for me. I went to talk to him, he took off.’

‘Maybe he didn’t like your face. One of the dealers, I think it was the one whose skull you cracked, said you were looking jacked up to kill someone.’ She shrugged again. ‘They say you started it, and it certainly looks that way.’

‘In that case, why aren’t you charging me?’

‘Oh, with what?’ She exhaled an imaginary plume of smoke. ‘Organic damage (surgery reparable) to a pair of Stiff peddlers? Endangering police property? Breach of the peace in Licktown. Give me a break, Kovacs. This sort of thing goes down every night outside Jerry’s. I’m too tired for the paperwork.’

The transport tipped and through the window I could see the dim form of the Hendrix’s tower. I’d accepted Ortega’s offer of a ride home in much the same spirit as I had the police lift out to Suntouch House - to see where it would take me. Envoy wisdom. Go with the flow, and see what it shows you. I’d no reason to suppose Ortega was lying to me about our destination, but still part of me was surprised to see that tower. Envoys aren’t big on trust.

After an initial wrangle with the Hendrix about landing permission, the pilot set us down on a grimy-looking drop pad atop the tower. I could feel the wind tugging at the transport’s lightweight body as we landed, and as the hatch unfolded upwards, the cold came battering aboard. I got up to go. Ortega stayed where she was, watching me go with a lopsided look that I still couldn’t work out. The charge I’d felt last night was back. I could feel the need to say something pressing on me like an impending sneeze.

‘Hey, how’d the bust go down on Kadmin?’

She shifted in the seat and stuck out one long leg to rest her boot on the chair I had just vacated. A thin smile.

‘Grinding through the machine,’ she said. ‘We’ll get there.’

‘Good.’ I climbed out into the wind and rain, raising my voice. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

She nodded gravely, then tipped her head back to say something to the pilot behind her. The whine of the turbines built and I ducked hurriedly out from under the hatch as it began to close. As I stepped back, the transport unglued itself and lifted away, lights flashing. I caught a final glimpse of Ortega’s face through the rain-streaked cabin window, then the wind seemed to carry the little craft away like an autumn leaf, wheeling away and down towards the streets below. In seconds it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other flyers speckling the night sky. I turned and walked against the wind to the drop pad’s access staircase. My suit was sodden from the rain. What had possessed Bancroft to outfit me for summer with the scrambled weather systems that Bay City had so far exhibited was beyond me. On Harlan’s World, when it’s winter, it stays that way long enough for you to make decisions about your wardrobe.

The upper levels of the Hendrix were in darkness relieved only by the occasional glow of dying illuminum tiles, but the hotel obligingly lit my way with neon tubes that flickered on in my path and died out again behind me. It was a weird effect, making me feel as if I was carrying a candle or torch.

‘You have a visitor,’ the hotel said chattily as I got into the elevator and the doors whirred closed.

I slammed my hand against the emergency stop button, raw flesh stinging where I’d skinned my palm. ‘What?’

‘You have a visi—’

‘Yeah, I heard.’ It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if the AI could take offence at my tone. ‘Who is it, and where are they?’

‘She identifies herself as Miriam Bancroft. Subsequent search of the city archives has confirmed sleeve identity. I have allowed her to wait in your room, since she is unarmed and you left nothing of consequence there this morning. Aside from refreshment, she has touched nothing.’

Feeling my temper rising, I found focus on a small dent in the metal of the elevator door and made an attempt at calm.

‘This is interesting. Do you make arbitrary decisions like this for all your guests?’

‘Miriam Bancroft is the wife of Laurens Bancroft,’ said the hotel reproachfully. ‘Who in turn is paying for your room. Under the circumstances, I thought it wise not to create unnecessary tensions.’

I looked up at the ceiling of the elevator.

‘You been checking up on me?’

‘A background check is part of the contract I operate under. Any information retained is wholly confidential, unless subpoenaed under UN directive 231.4.’

‘Yeah? So what else you know?’

‘Lieutenant Takeshi Lev Kovacs,’ said the hotel. ‘Also known as Mamba Lev, One Hand Rending, the Icepick, born Newpest, Harlan’s World 35th May 187, colonial reckoning. Recruited to UN Protectorate forces 11th September 204, selected for Envoy Corps enhancement 31st June 211 during routine screening—’

‘All right.’ Inwardly I was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got. Most people’s records dry up as soon as the trace goes offworld. Interstellar needlecasts are expensive. Unless the Hendrix had just broken into Warden Sullivan’s records, which was illegal. Ortega’s comment about the hotel’s previous charge sheet drifted back to me. What kind of crimes did an AI commit anyway?

‘It also occurred to me that Mrs Bancroft is probably here in connection with the matter of her husband’s death, which you are investigating. I thought you would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting in the lobby.’

I sighed, and unpinned my hand from the elevator’s stop button.

‘No, I bet she wasn’t.’

She was seated in the window, nursing a tall, ice-filled glass and watching the lights of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard. She didn’t turn her head when I let myself in, so I advanced across the room into her field of vision.

‘The hotel told me you were here,’ I said. ‘In case you were wondering why I didn’t unsleeve myself in shock.’

She looked up at me and shook hair back from her face

‘Very dry, Mr Kovacs. Should I applaud?’

I shrugged. ‘You might say thank you for the drink.’

She examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes up again.

‘Thank you for the drink.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ I went to the cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there. A bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt suggested itself. I uncorked it, sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping my eyes on my hands as they poured, I said, ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘About an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?’

I held onto the first mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.

‘Now why would you think that, Mrs Bancroft?’

She made an elegant gesture with one hand. ‘No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?’

‘Not particularly.’ I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.

‘Well.’ She cleared her throat. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

I waved my glass at her. ‘Let’s start with why you’re here.’

‘I want to know what progress you’ve made.’

‘You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.’

For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.

‘I want you to stop,’ she said.

I let the words sink into the darkened room.

‘Why?’

I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘Well.’ I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. ‘To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.’

‘A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,’ she said carefully. ‘And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.’

‘Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.’

She sat forward over her drink. ‘Let’s not pretend, Mr Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.’

‘I’m still curious.’

‘Maybe I could satisfy that,’ she said softly.

I swallowed more whisky. ‘Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs Bancroft?’

She made an impatient gesture. ‘I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are . . . curious about other things, are you not?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I looked at her over the rim of my glass.

Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.

‘Do you know what Merge Nine is?’ she asked, a little unsteadily.

‘Empathin?’ I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.

‘Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve . . .’ She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. ‘This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when . . . aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr Kovacs.’

And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.

Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.

I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.

Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.

Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.

For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed against the glass of the biocabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.

And then the motion.

The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep raga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.

Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, ‘What do you think of me?’

I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.

‘Is that a trick question?’

She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.

‘No. I want to know.’

‘Do you care?’ It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.

‘You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?’ The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. ‘You think we don’t care about anything young?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. ‘Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?’

I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.

‘Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.’

She staved off a chuckle. ‘I’m serious. Do you like me?’

‘What kind of a question—’

‘I’m serious.’ The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.

‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘I like you.’

Her voice lowered into her throat. ‘Do you like what we did?’

‘Yes, I like what we did.’

‘Do you want more?’

‘Yes, I want more.’

She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. ‘Say it again.’

‘I want more. Of you.’

She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.

‘Out west,’ she murmured, ‘about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility.’ Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. ‘I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?’

I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.

‘What was that?’ She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.

‘How long?’ I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. ‘Is this fun park invitation good for?’

She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery.

‘Unlimited rides,’ she said.

‘But for a limited period only, right?’

She shook her head. ‘No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.’

‘That might take a long time.’

‘No.’ There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time and her gaze fell a little. ‘No it won’t.’

The pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak I could hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.

As the orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine and as I started to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.

Whiteout.

And when I came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was gone like a fever dream.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs (Newpest chapter). Later on, I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military; brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was - the only thing the marine corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.

These days I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.

Bay City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.

A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop, back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it and come out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this approach, and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.

‘Look,’ she told me one day in a Millsport coffee house. ‘Shopping - actual, physical shopping - could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.’

‘They who?’

‘People. Society.’ She waved a hand impatiently. ‘Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?’

At twenty-two years old, a marine corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.

‘It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?’

I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.

‘Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically fucking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.’

Enjoyment wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.

The boots were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far. Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a defiant red silk bandanna across my forehead, Newpest gang style. It wasn’t exactly assimilative, but it went with the vaguely mutinous irritation that had been rising in me since yesterday. I dumped Bancroft’s summer suit in a skip on the street outside and left the shoes beside it.

Before I left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards: the doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armourer.

Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitors blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner facade, extending less than a half dozen metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been annexed. I pushed through well-cared-for wooden doors into the cool, oil-smelling interior.

Inside, the place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space under the gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was carpeted.

A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. ‘May I be of assistance, sir?’

‘I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,’ I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. ‘I’m looking for some hardware.’

‘Of course, sir.’ The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. ‘Mr Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.’

The head disappeared and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, I realised I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than me.

The next case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These too were dated back into the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.

‘Has sir found anything to his liking?’

I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick back-combed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend Mars Expo 2076.

‘Just looking.’ I said and gestured back at the guns. ‘Are these made of wood?’

The green photo-receptor gaze regarded me gravely. ‘That is correct, sir. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested in?’

I looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.

‘They’re a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.’

‘Certainly, sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?’

I grinned at the machine. ‘We can assume that.’

‘Then perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have been.’

‘Smith & Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn’t in this sleeve.’

The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light conversation with Envoys.

‘And what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?’

I shrugged. ‘Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.’

The mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

The photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing’s posture unlocked. ‘If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right combination.’

I followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the decor of the back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibreglass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practised hands. The mandroid led me to a small grey-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt-thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.

‘Chip?’ He nodded at the machine and ignored me.

‘Clive, this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr Bancroft, looking for equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.’

Clive nodded again and set aside the electromag.

‘This way,’ he said.

The mandroid touched my arm lightly. ‘Should sir require anything further, I shall be in the showroom.’

It bowed fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.

‘Second series Nemesis X,’ he said, holding out the gun. ‘The Nemex. Manufactured under licence for Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Fires a jacketed slug with a customised propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a firefight. Feel the weight.’

I took the weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight. Clive waited beside me patiently ‘All right.’ I handed it back. ‘And something subtle?’

‘Philips squeeze gun.’ Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. ‘A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty metres. No recoil, and you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.’

‘Batteries?’

‘Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.’

‘Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?’

‘Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it.’

‘All right, fine.’ Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through your skull. No telling when you might get re-sleeved, if at all. But by now the ache in my head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Maybe target practice wasn’t the thing right at that moment. I didn’t bother asking the price either. It wasn’t my money I was spending. ‘Ammunition?’

‘Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?’

‘Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.’

‘Ten clips, each?’ There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. ‘And you wanted a blade, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Sheila!’ Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matt grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked round when she heard her name, remembered the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Clive waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.

‘Sheila, this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?’

‘Sure.’ The woman reached out a lanky arm. ‘Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What kind of steel you looking for?’

I matched her grip. ‘Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.’

‘All right,’ she said amiably. ‘Want to come with me? You finished here?’

Clive nodded at me. ‘I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?’

‘Carry out.’

‘Thought so.’

Sheila’s end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.

‘Tebbit knife,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘Very nasty.’

And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette’s head. ‘Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them with the sharp end.’

I stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code I didn’t recognise. Light glinted dully off the grey metal.

‘What’s this?’

‘What?’ Sheila moved to stand beside me. ‘Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with haemoglobin. Well away from the edges, so if you cut yourself there’s no problem, but if you sink it in anything with blood . . .’

‘Charming.’

‘Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.’ There was pride in her voice.

‘I’ll take it.’

Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was beginning to recede.

I was three blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.

It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.

The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.

The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Hendrix.

On my way down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller. Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more than they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view; heavy, rounded pendants nestling glans-like in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.

A tide of cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.

Betathanatine. The Reaper.

Final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.

It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.

The last time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.

‘Got Stiff, man,’ said a hoarse voice redundantly. I blinked away the broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against a shop front.

‘Hey ...’

‘Don’t piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.’

I saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Retargetting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers . . .

And was face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres tall. Tentacles writhed at me and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.

‘You want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,’ I said tightly.

The mound of flesh vanished and I was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.

‘All right, man, all right.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘You don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a living here.’

I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.

‘Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,’ I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was obscene.

‘I give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my face.’

I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.

I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.

Mid afternoon. My first of the day.

CHAPTER TWELVE

As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.

Psychoentirety rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve-changer, but this was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments I was literally terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practised snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice discs had lived up to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.

I shifted behind his eyes.

Reluctantly, he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.

The weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.

A weapon - any weapon - is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.

In the ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for most of us. Ninety per cent of Envoy intake came up through the Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough.

Virginia Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.

‘Mr de Soto. You do not agree.’

Jimmy shifted, a little abashed at how he easily he had been picked out. ‘Well, ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.’

There was a faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it subsided.

‘Indeed,’ she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. ‘This . . . device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.’

Jimmy hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon. Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was centre stage before the assembled trainees and stripped off her Corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.

‘You will see,’ she said loudly, ‘that the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Mr de Soto, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.’

Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.

‘On your call,’ she repeated.

‘Now,’ he snapped.

It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.

The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.

‘A weapon is a tool,’ she repeated, a little breathlessly. ‘A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension - you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.’

Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.

Got the frags, Virginia.

Breathe, she said. Move. Control.

And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.

He was beginning to annoy me.

The cab curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitors’ blurb panel.

‘Welcome to Urbline services,’ said a smooth female voice. ‘You are linked to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you require.’

‘Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?’

‘The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,’ said the datastack blandly. ‘However, Urbline services guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—’

‘Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?’

There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

‘Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—’

‘That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?’

‘Straight line distance is approximately one kilometre.’

‘Got a map?’

The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.

‘All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.’

‘As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.’

I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.

‘Thanks.’

The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.

Where the streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green; canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.

The second cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.

‘You looking for something, tourist?’

There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.

‘Come slumming, maybe,’ the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.

The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.

Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.

‘I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.’

There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.

‘Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.’

The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimetre from his eyes.

‘Don’t,’ I said quietly

The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.

I backed away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.

The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.

Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.

I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth voice said, ‘Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?’

‘What’s the deal in the bar?’

‘Ha ha ha,’ went the laugh protocol. ‘The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.’

‘Cabins.’

‘Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.’

Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.

‘Louise?’

The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.

‘Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.’

A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.

‘Right there, fucker,’ said a tight voice. ‘This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.’

I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.

‘That’s it.’ The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. ‘Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.’

I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His mouth was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.

‘Now who the fuck are you?’ he hissed at me.

I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. ‘Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.’

The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.

‘You’re lying to me,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City justice facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.’

He kicked at the inert body on the floor and I peered down out of the corner of my nearest eye. In the harsh white light the marks of torture were livid on the girl’s flesh.

‘Now I want you to think real carefully about your next answer, whoever you are. Why are you asking after Lizzie Elliott?’

I slid my eyes back over the barrel of the blaster to the clenched face beyond. It wasn’t the expression of someone who’d been dealt in. Too scared.

‘Lizzie Elliott’s my daughter, you piece of shit, and if your friend up at the city store had any real access, you’d know why the record still says I’m on stack.’

The gun in my back shoved forward more sharply, but unexpectedly the blond seemed to relax. His mouth flexed in a rictus of resignation. He lowered the blaster.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Deek, go and get Oktai.’

Someone at my back slipped out of the cabin. The blond waved his gun at me. ‘You. Sit down in the corner.’ His tone was distracted, almost casual.

I felt the gun taken out of my back and moved to obey. As I settled onto the satin floor, I weighed the odds. With Deek gone, there were still three of them. The blond, a woman in what looked to me like a synthetic Asian-skinned sleeve, toting the second particle blaster whose imprint I could still feel in my spine, and a large black man whose only weapon appeared to be an iron pipe. Not a chance. These were not the street sharks I’d faced down on Nineteenth Street. There was a cold embodied purpose about them, a kind of cheap version of what Kadmin had had back at the Hendrix.

For a moment I looked at the synthetic woman and wondered, but it couldn’t be. Even if he’d somehow managed to slip the charges Kristin Ortega had talked about and got himself re-sleeved, Kadmin was on the inside. He knew who had hired him, and who I was. The faces peering at me from around the biocabin, on their own admission, knew nothing.

Let’s keep it that way.

My gaze crept across to Louise’s battered sleeve. It looked as if they had cut slits in the skin of her thighs and then forced the wounds apart until they tore. Simple, crude and very effective. They would have made her watch while they did it, compounding the pain with terror. It’s a gut-swooping experience seeing that happen to your body. On Sharya, the religious police used it a lot. She’d probably need psychosurgery to get over the trauma.

The blond saw where my eyes had gone and offered me a grim nod, as if I’d been an accomplice to the act.

‘Want to know why her head’s still on, huh?’

I looked bleakly across the room at him. ‘No. You look like a busy man but I guess you’ll get round to it.’

‘No need,’ he said casually, enjoying his moment. ‘Old Anenome’s Catholic. Third or fourth generation, the girls tell me. Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican. We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.’

‘You talk too much, Jerry,’ said the woman.

The blond’s eyes flared whitely at her, but whatever retort he was mustering behind the curl of his lip quietened as two men, presumably Deek and Oktai, pushed into the tiny room on another wave of junk rhythm from the corridor. My eyes measured Deek and placed him in the same category - muscle - as the pipe-wielder, then switched to his companion, who was staring steadily at me. My heart twitched. Oktai was the Mongol.

Jerry jerked his head in my direction.

‘This him?’ he asked.

Oktai nodded slowly, a savage grin of triumph etched across his broad face. His massive hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was working through an extreme of hate so deep it was choking him. I could see the bump where someone had inexpertly repaired his broken nose with tissue weld, but that didn’t seem like enough to warrant the fury I was watching.

‘All right, Ryker.’ The blond leaned forward a little. ‘You want to change your story? You want to tell me why you’re breaking my balls down here?’

He was talking to me.

Deek spat into a corner of the room.

‘I don’t know,’ I said clearly, ‘what the fuck you are talking about. You turned my daughter into a prostitute, and then you killed her. And for that, I’m going to kill you.’

‘I doubt you’ll get the chance for that,’ said Jerry, crouching opposite me and looking at the floor. ‘Your daughter was a stupid, starstruck little cunt who thought she could put a lock on me and—’

He stopped and shook his head disbelievingly.

‘The fuck am I talking to? I see you standing there, and still I’m buying this shit. You’re good, Ryker, I’ll give you that.’ He sniffed. ‘Now, I’m going to ask you one more time, nicely. Maybe see if we can cut a deal. After that I’m going to send you to see some very sophisticated friends of mine. You understand what I’m saying?’

I nodded once, slowly.

‘Good. So here it comes, Ryker. What are you doing in Licktown?’

I looked into his face. Small-time punk with delusions of connection. I wasn’t going to learn anything here.

‘Who’s Ryker?’

The blond lowered his head again and looked at the floor between my feet. He seemed unhappy about what was going to happen next. Finally he licked his lips, nodded slightly to himself and made a brushing gesture across his knees as he stood up.

‘All right, tough guy. But I want you to remember you had the choice.’ He turned to the synthetic woman. ‘Get him out of here. I want no traces. And tell them, he’s n-wired to the eyes, they’ll get nothing out of him in this sleeve.’

The woman nodded and gestured me to my feet with her blaster. She prodded Louise’s corpse with the toe of one boot. ‘And this?’

‘Get rid of it. Milo, Deek, go with her.’

The pipe-wielder shoved his weapon into his waistband and stooped to shoulder the corpse as if it were a bundle of kindling. Deek, close behind, slapped it affectionately on one bruised buttock.

The Mongol made a noise in his throat. Jerry glanced across at him with faint distaste. ‘No, not you. They’re going places I don’t want you to see. Don’t worry, there’ll be a disc.’

‘Sure, man,’ said Deek over his shoulder. ‘We’ll bring it right back across.’

‘All right, that’s enough,’ said the woman roughly, moving to face me. ‘Let’s have an understanding here, Ryker. You got neurachem, so do I. And this is a high-impact chassis. Lockheed-Mitoma test pilot specs. You can’t damage me worth a jack. And I’ll be happy to burn your guts out if you even look at me wrong. They don’t care what state you’re in where we’re going. That clear, Ryker?’

‘My name’s not Ryker,’ I said irritably.

‘Right.’

We went through the frosted glass door, into a tiny space that held a make-up table and shower stall, and out onto a corridor parallel to the one at the front of the booths. Here the lighting was unambiguous, there was no music, and the corridor gave onto larger, partially curtained dressing rooms where young men and women slumped smoking or just staring into space like untenanted synthetics. If any of them saw the little procession go past, they gave no indication. Milo went ahead with the corpse. Deek took up position at my back and the synthetic woman brought up the rear, blaster held casually at her side. My last glimpse of Jerry was a proprietorial figure standing with hands on hips in the corridor behind us. Then Deek cuffed me across the side of the head and I turned to face the front again. Louise’s dangling, mutilated legs preceded me out into a gloomy covered parking area, where a pure black lozenge of aircar awaited us.

The synthetic cracked the vehicle’s boot open and waved the blaster at me.

‘Plenty of room. Make yourself comfortable.’

I climbed into the boot space and discovered she was right. Then Milo tipped Louise’s corpse in with me and slammed the lid down, leaving the two of us in darkness together. I heard the dull clunk of other doors opening and closing elsewhere, and then the whispering of the car’s engines and the faint bump as we lifted from the ground.

The journey was quick, and smoother than a corresponding surface trip would have been. Jerry’s friends were driving carefully - you don’t want to be pulled down by a bored patrolman for un-signalled lane change when you’ve got passengers in the boot. It might almost have been pleasantly womb-like there in the dark, but for the faint stench of faeces from the corpse. Louise had voided her bowels during the torture.

I spent most of the journey feeling sorry for the girl, and worrying at the Catholic madness like a dog with a bone. This woman’s stack was utterly undamaged. Financial considerations aside, she could be brought back to life on the spin of a disc. On Harlan’s World she’d be temporarily re-sleeved for the court hearing, albeit probably in a synthetic, and once the verdict came down there’d be a Victim Support supplement from the state added to whatever policy her family already held. Nine cases out of ten that was enough money to ensure re-sleeving of some sort. Death, where is thy sting?

I didn’t know if they had VS supplements on earth. Kristin Ortega’s angry monologue two nights ago seemed to suggest not, but at least there was the potential to bring this girl back to life. Somewhere on this fucked-up planet, some guru had ordained otherwise, and Louise, alias Anenome, had queued up with how many others to ratify the insanity.

Human beings. Never figure them out.

The car tilted and the corpse rolled unpleasantly against me as we spiralled down. Something wet seeped through the leg of my trousers. I could feel myself starting to sweat with the fear. They were going to decant me into some flesh with none of the resistance to pain that my current sleeve had. And while I was imprisoned there, they could do whatever they liked to that sleeve, up to and including physically killing it.

And then they would start again, in a fresh body.

Or, if they were really sophisticated, they could jack my consciousness into a virtual matrix similar to the ones used in psychosurgery, and do the whole thing electronically. Subjectively, there’d be no difference, but there what might take days in the real world could be done in as many minutes.

I swallowed hard, using the neurachem while I still had it to stifle the fear. As gently as I could, I pushed Louise’s cold embrace away from my face and tried not to think about the reason she had died.

The car touched down and rolled along the ground for a few moments before it stopped. When the boot cracked open again, all I could see was the roof of another covered car park strung with illuminum bars.

They took me out with professional caution, the woman standing well back, Deek and Milo to the sides giving her a clear field of fire. I clambered awkwardly over Louise and out onto a floor of black concrete. Scanning the gloom covertly, I saw about a dozen other vehicles, nondescript, registration bar codes illegible at this distance. A short ramp at the far end led up to what must be the landing pad. Indistinguishable from a million other similar installations. I sighed and as I straightened up I felt the damp on my leg again. I glanced down at my clothes. There was a dark stain of something on my thigh.

‘So where are we?’ I asked.

‘End of the line’s where you are,’ grunted Milo, lifting Louise out. He looked at the woman. ‘This going to the usual place?’

She nodded, and he set off across the car park towards a set of double doors. I was moving to follow when a jerk of the woman’s blaster brought me up short.

‘Not you. That’s the chute - the easy way out. We got people want to talk to you before you get to go down the chute. You go this way.’

Deek grinned and produced a small weapon from his back pocket. ‘That’s right, Mr Badass Cop. You go this way.’

They marched me through another set of doors into a commercial capacity elevator which, according to the flashing LED display on the wall, sank two dozen levels before we stopped. Throughout the ride, Deek and the woman stood in opposite corners of the car, guns levelled. I ignored them and watched the digit counter.

When the doors opened there was a medical team waiting for us with a strap-equipped gurney. My instincts screamed at me to try and jump them, but I held myself immobile while the two pale-blue-clad men came forward to hold my arms and the female medic shot me in the neck with a hypodermic spray. There was an icy sting, a brief rush of cold and then the corners of my vision disappeared in webbings of grey. The last thing I saw clearly was the incurious face of the medic as she watched me lose consciousness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I awoke to the sound of the ezan being called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multiple throats of a mosque’s loudspeakers. It was a sound I’d last heard in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.

I sat up on the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They’d sleeved me in a woman’s body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.

I got up and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and humid.

My arms were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.

The ezan stopped.

Virtuality. They’d tapped into my memories and come up with this. I’d seen some of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya, they’d sleeved me in a woman.

Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.

That had its disadvantages.

In general, and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.

No neurachem. I checked.

No combat conditioning, no reflex of aggression.

Nothing.

Not even calluses on the young flesh.

The door banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.

The one with the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me, and tried to focus on him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘We begin.’

I lunged for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.

‘Bitch cunt,’ he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood on his fingers.

‘Oh, please,’ I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. ‘Do we have to have the script too? Just because I’m wearing this—’

I jammed to a halt. He looked pleased. ‘Not Irene Elliott, then,’ he said. ‘We progress.’

This time he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creaking sound. I twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that wasn’t mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your strength.

The floor was hard and uncomfortable against the soft skin of my elbows. I heard a grating sound and turned my head. The second man was drawing up a pair of stools from the side of the room. While the one who had beaten me taped my legs apart, the spectator sat down on one of the stools, produced a packet of cigarettes and shook one out. Grinning broadly at me, he put it in his mouth and reached down for the blowtorch. When his companion stepped back to admire his handiwork, he offered him the packet. It was declined. The smoker shrugged, ignited the blowtorch and tilted his head to light up from it.

‘You will tell us,’ he said, gesturing with the cigarette and pluming smoke into the air above me, ‘everything you know about Jerry’s Closed Quarters and Elizabeth Elliott.’

The blowtorch hissed and chuckled softly to itself in the quiet room. Sunlight poured in through the high window and brought with it, infinitely faintly, the sounds of a city full of people.

They started with my feet.

The screaming runs on and on, higher and louder than I ever believed a human throat could render, shredding my hearing. Traceries of red streak across my vision.

Innenininennininennin . . .

Jimmy de Soto staggers into view, Sunjet gone, gory hands plastered to his face. The shrieks peel out from his stumbling figure, and for a moment I can almost believe it’s his contamination alarm that’s making the noise. I check my own shoulder meter reflexively, then the half-submerged edge of an intelligible word rises through the agony and I know it’s him.

He is standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what’s happened to his face, he’s still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can still see fragments of the eye’s mucous casing on his fingers.

‘Jimmy, JIMMY, what the fuck . . .’

The screaming sandpapers on and on. It’s taking all my strength to prevent him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My spine goes cold as I realise what’s happening.

Viral strike.

I stop yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line.

‘Medic! Medic! Stack down! Viral strike!’

And the world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and down the Innenin beachhead.

After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.

When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.

Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.

But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.

Digital Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.

What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.

There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.

Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.

A heated iron inserted into your vagina.

The pain. The humiliation.

The damage.

Psychodynamics/Integrity training.

Introduction.

The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.

The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—

‘Some fucking game, eh pal?’

Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality—

His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.

‘You keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?’

I wince. ‘Her feet. She can’t walk.’

‘Motherfuckers,’ he says matter of factly. ‘Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?’

‘We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.’

‘Ryker, who the fuck’s he?’

‘I don’t know.’

He shrugs. ‘So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?’

‘I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.’

‘You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.’

‘That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.’

‘Yeah.’ Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. ‘See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?’

During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations.

Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—

You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—

As I was saying . . .

Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!

The explosion brought the entire building down.

That’s fucking enough!

I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.

Back to start.

Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.

‘Aha, the dreamer.’ The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.

I looked over the side at the blue water.

‘What is it this time?’ I said with forced lightness. ‘Feed me to the sharks?’

She laughed, showing perfect teeth. ‘No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.’

I stood loose limbed, staring at her. ‘So talk.’

‘Very well.’ The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. ‘You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.’

‘My interest is in seeing you die.’

A small smile. ‘Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.’

She extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.

‘Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.’ She pointed out over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.

‘I don’t want to go back there,’ I said truthfully.

‘Good. Then tell us who you are.’

I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. ‘I thought I had.’

‘What you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.’

‘I bet it isn’t,’ I muttered.

‘We do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.’

‘You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.’

It was a colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.

‘It was my understanding,’ said the woman quietly, ‘that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?’

Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.

‘Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN Court,’ I suggested, folding my arms.

The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally, she said, ‘You are aware we could erase your stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.’

‘They’d find you,’ I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. ‘You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.’

‘What deal?’ she asked woodenly.

In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.

‘There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,’ I said carefully. ‘They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.’

‘And they called the Envoys?’ The woman’s tone was scornful. ‘For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?’

‘I’m not Ryker,’ I snapped. ‘This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out of ten, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it - and I mean at UN Praesidium level - so they call us in.’

The woman frowned. ‘And the deal?’

‘Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.’

‘As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—’

I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. ‘Don’t fuck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?’

Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.

‘We will consider this,’ said the woman.

Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat. I was.

Not.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.

They’d put me back.

Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.

I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.

‘Clothes.’ She flung them at me with a scowl. ‘Get dressed.’

One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. ‘Procedure calls for—’

‘Yeah,’ the woman sneered. ‘Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving our business through someone else.’

‘He’s not talking about the re-sleeve,’ I observed, pulling on my trousers. ‘He wants to check for interrogation trauma.’

‘Who asked you?’

I shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Where are we going?’

‘To talk to someone,’ she said shortly and turned back to the medics. ‘If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.’

I continued dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover tunic and jacket were intact but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either. Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.

‘So who are we going to see?’

The woman gave me a sour look. ‘Someone who knows enough to check out your shit. And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly dispersal.’

‘When this is over,’ I said evenly, ‘maybe I can persuade one of our squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to thank you for your support.’

The blaster came out of its sheath with a soft strop, and was under my chin. I barely saw it happen. My recently re-sleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, aeons too late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.

‘Don’t you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,’ she said softly. ‘You got these clowns scared, they’re anchored in place and they think you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me. Got it?’

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up by the gun.

‘Got it,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she breathed, and removed the blaster. ‘You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologise with everybody else. But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.’

At a rapid pace, we went down corridors that I tried to memorise and into a lift identical to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again, and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during the torture were hazy - the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining off the experience to avert the trauma - but even if it had gone on a couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.

‘Get in the car,’ said the woman laconically.

This time my ride was a larger, more elegant machine, reminiscent of Bancroft’s limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and shaven-headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear. I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the military would be seen dead with authorisation stripes. It was too close to the serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.

A second man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling negligently from his hand. He too had the shaven skull and the bar code. I looked hard at it as I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur and I cranked up the neurachem to eavesdrop.

‘... head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.’

‘No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—’

One of the medics slammed the door shut on me and the solid clunk at max amplification nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the machine pistoleer opened the doors on the other side and climbed in next to me.

‘Close your eyes,’ the woman said, producing my bandanna. ‘I’m going blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t going to want you knowing where to find them.’

I looked around at the windows. ‘These look polarised to me anyway.’

‘Yeah, but no telling how good that neurachem is, huh? Now hold still.’

She knotted the red cloth with practised efficiency and spread it a little to cover my whole field of vision. I settled back in the seat.

‘Couple of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when.’

The car boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat the odour of faeces on the inbound journey, and the seat I was in moulded itself supportively to my form. I seemed to have moved up in the order of things.

Strictly temporary, man. I smiled faintly as Jimmy’s voice echoed in the back of my skull. He was right. A couple of things were clear about whoever we were going to see. This was someone who didn’t want to come to the clinic, who didn’t even want to be seen near it. That bespoke respectability, and with it power, the power to access offworld data. Pretty soon they were going to know that the Envoy Corps was an empty threat, and very shortly after that I was going to be dead. Really dead.

That kind of dictates the action, pal.

Thanks, Jimmy.

After a few minutes the woman told me to take off the blindfold. I pushed it up onto my forehead and retied it there in its customary position. At my side, the muscle with the machine pistol smirked. I gave him a curious look.

‘Something funny?’

‘Yeah.’ The woman spoke without turning her gaze from the city lights beyond the window. ‘You look like a fucking idiot.’

‘Not where I come from.’

She turned to look at me pityingly. ‘You aren’t where you come from. You’re on Earth. Try behaving like it.’

I looked from one to the other of them, the pistoleer still smirking, the synthetic with the expression of polite contempt, then shrugged and reached up with both hands to untie the bandanna. The woman went back to watching the lights of the city sink below us. The rain seemed to have stopped.

I chopped down savagely from head height, left and right. My left fist jarred into the pistoleer’s temple with enough force to break the bone and he slumped sideways with a single grunt. He never even saw the blow coming. My right arm was still in motion.

The synthetic whipped around, probably faster than I could have struck, but she misread me. Her arm was raised to block and cover her head, and I was under the guard, reaching. My hand closed on the blaster at her belt, knocked out the safety and triggered it. The beam seethed into life, cutting downwards, and a large quantity of the woman’s right leg burst open in wet ropes of flesh before the blowback circuits cut the blast. She howled, a cry more of rage than of pain, and then I dragged the muzzle of the weapon up, triggering another blast diagonally across her body. The blaster carved a channel a handsbreadth wide right through her and into the seat behind. Blood exploded across the cabin.

The blaster cut out again and the cabin went suddenly dim as the flaring of the beam weapon stopped. Beside me, the synthetic woman bubbled and sighed, and then the section of her torso that the head was attached to sagged away from the left side of the body. Her forehead came to rest against the window she had been looking out of. It looked oddly as if she was cooling her brow on the rain-streaked glass. The rest of the body sat stiffly upright, the massive sloping wound cauterised clean by the beam. The mingled stink of cooked meat and fried synthetic components was everywhere.

‘Trepp? Trepp?’ It was the chauffeur’s intercom squawking. I wiped blood out of my eyes and looked at the screen set in the forward bulkhead.

‘She’s dead,’ I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster. ‘They’re both dead. And you’re next, if you don’t get us on the ground right now.’

The chauffeur rallied. ‘We’re five hundred metres above the Bay, friend, and I’m flying this car. What do you propose doing about that?’

I selected a mid-point on the wall between the two cabins, knocked out the blowback cutout on the blaster and shielded my face with one hand.

‘Hey, what are you—’

I fired through into the driver’s compartment on tight focus. The beam punched a molten hole about a centimetre wide and for a moment it rained sparks backwards into the cabin as the armouring beneath the plastic resisted. Then the sparks died as the beam broke through and I heard something electrical short out in the forward compartment. I stopped firing.

‘The next one goes right through your seat,’ I promised. ‘I’ve got friends who’ll re-sleeve me when they fish us out of the Bay. You I’ll carve into steaks right through this fucking wall, and even if I miss your stack, they’ll have a hard time finding which part of you it’s inside, now fucking get me on the ground.’

The limousine banked abruptly to one side, losing altitude. I sat back a little amidst the carnage and cleaned more blood off my face with one sleeve.

‘That’s good,’ I said more calmly. ‘Now set me down near Mission Street. And if you’re thinking about signalling for help, think about this. If there’s a firefight, you die first. Got it? You die first. I’m talking about real death. I’ll make sure I burn out your stack if it’s the last thing I do before they take me down.’

His face looked back at me on the screen, pale. Scared, but not scared enough. Or maybe scared of someone else. Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of longheld obedience through hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s how you fight wars, after all - with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

I used to be like that myself.

‘How about this?’ I offered rapidly. ‘You violate traffic protocol putting us down. The Sia turn up, bust you and hold you. You say nothing. I’m gone and they’ve got nothing on you outside of a traffic misdemeanour. Your story is you’re just the driver, your passengers had a little disagreement in the back seat and then I hijacked you to the ground. Meanwhile, whoever you work for bails you out rapido and you pick up a bonus for not cracking in virtual holding.’

I watched the screen. His expression wavered, and he swallowed hard. Enough carrot, time for the stick. I locked the blowback circuit on again, lifted the blaster so he could see it and fitted it to the nape of Trepp’s neck.

‘I’d say you’re getting a bargain.’

At point-blank range, the blaster beam vaporised spine, stack and everything around it. I turned back to the screen.

‘Your call.’

The driver’s face convulsed, and the limo started to lose height raggedly. I watched the flow of traffic through the window, then leaned forward and tapped on the screen.

‘Don’t forget that violation, will you?’

He gulped and nodded. The limo dropped vertically through stacked lanes of traffic and bumped hard along the ground, to a chorus of furious collision alert screeches from the vehicles around us. Through the window I recognised the street I’d cruised with Curtis the night before. Our pace slowed somewhat.

‘Crack the nearside door,’ I said, tucking the blaster under my jacket. Another jerky nod and the door in question clunked open, then hung ajar. I swivelled, kicked it wide and heard police sirens wailing somewhere above us. My eyes met the driver’s on the screen for a moment and I grinned.

‘Wise man,’ I said, and threw myself out of the coasting vehicle.

The pavement hit me in the shoulder and back as I rolled amidst startled cries from passing pedestrians. I rolled twice, hit hard against a stone frontage and climbed cautiously to my feet. A passing couple stared at me and I skinned my teeth in a smile that made them hurry on, finding interest in other shop fronts.

A stale blast of displaced air washed over me as a traffic cop’s cruiser dropped in the wake of the offending limo. I stayed where I was, giving back the diminishing handful of curious looks from passers-by who had seen my unorthodox arrival. Interest in me was waning, in any case. One by one the stares slipped away, drawn by the flashing lights of the police cruiser, now hovering menacingly above and behind the stationary limo.

‘Turn off your engines and remain where you are,’ crackled the airborne speaker system.

A crowd started to knot up as people hurried past me, jostling and trying to see what was going on. I leaned back on the frontage, checking myself for damage from the jump. By the feel of the fading numbness in my shoulder and across my back, I’d done it right this time.

‘Raise your hands above your head and step away from your vehicle,’ came the metallic voice of the traffic cop.

Over the bobbing heads of the spectators, I made out the driver, easing himself out of the limo in the recommended posture. He looked relieved to be alive. For a moment I caught myself wondering why that kind of stand-off wasn’t more popular in the circles I moved in.

Just too many death wishes all round, I guess.

I backstepped a few metres in the mix of the crowd, then turned and slipped away into the brightly lit anonymity of the Bay City night.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here - it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.’

QUELLCRIST FALCONER Things I Should Have Learnt by Now Volume II

There was a cold blue dawn over the city by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen of recent rain. I stood in the shadow of the expressway pillars and watched the gutted street for any hint of movement. There was a feeling I needed, but it wasn’t easy to come by in the cold light of the rising day. My head was buzzing with rapid data assimilation and Jimmy de Soto floated around in the back of my mind like a restless demon familiar.

Where are you going, Tak?

To do some damage.

The Hendrix hadn’t been able to give me anything on the clinic I’d been taken to. From Deek’s promise to the Mongolian to bring a disc of my torture right back across, I supposed that the place had to be on the other side of the Bay, probably in Oakland, but that in itself wasn’t much help, even for an AI. The whole Bay area appeared to be suffused with illegal biotech activity. I was going to have to retrace my steps the hard way.

Jerry’s Closed Quarters.

Here the Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife, and went out to do some interrogating of my own.

I’d seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.

Jerry’s Closed Quarters by dawn light.

What little cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her religion would not let her come back from.

Make it personal.

The Nemex was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.

The door robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.

‘We’re closed, friend,’ the synth voice said.

I levelled the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled from the shattered lintel housing.

Cautiously, I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as he saw me.

‘You. What—’

I shot him through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me, took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his fingers touched the weapon.

At the bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spiderweb holo with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security presence for the cabins - three at most, more likely down to two at this time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.

Jerry the cheapskate.

I listened, cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the floor.

The doors to the bar remained closed.

I eased my head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her forehead.

‘You work security for Jerry?’

She nodded, eyes flaring white around her irises.

‘One chance. Where is he?’

‘Bar,’ she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. ‘Table. Back corner.’

I nodded, stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.

‘Wait, you—’

The Philips gun sighed.

Damage.

I was in the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him in, still firing.

It was a wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deek, reeling backwards with his hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a speed that was truly semi-divine.

I heard the dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim, bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward, clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar - no time to turn and aim - and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun, half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched him back onto the dance platform.

The Nemex echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.

By now I had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.

‘Wise man.’ The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. ‘Leave your hands right there, and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at the wrist.’

He sank back into his seat, face working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing. Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.

At this, Jerry erupted.

‘Are you fucking crazy, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—’

I jerked the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up. Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then straddled it, facing him.

‘You, Jerry,’ I said evenly, ‘need to listen to people occasionally. I’ve told you, my name is not Ryker.’

‘Whoever the fuck you are, I’m connected.’ There was so much venom on the face before me it was a wonder Jerry didn’t choke on it. ‘I’m jacked into the fucking machine, you get me? This. All this. You’re going to fucking pay. You’re going to wish—’

‘I’d never met you,’ I finished for him. I stowed the empty Philips gun back in its Fibregrip holster. ‘Jerry, I already wish I’d never met you. Your sophisticated friends were sophisticated enough for that. But I notice they didn’t tell you I was back on the street. Not so tight with Ray these days, is that it?’

I was watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried again.

‘Trepp’s dead,’ I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. ‘Trepp, and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?’

His mouth tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel of the Nemex up against his left eye.

‘I asked you a question.’

‘Fuck you.’

I nodded and settled back onto my seat. ‘Hard man, huh? So I’ll tell you. I need some answers, Jerry. You can start by telling me what happened to Elizabeth Elliott. That should be easy, I figure you carved her up yourself. Then I want to know who Elias Ryker is, who Trepp works for, and where the clinic is that you sent me to.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘You don’t think I’m serious? Or are you just hoping the cops are going to show up and save your stack?’ I fished the commandeered blaster out of my pocket left-handed and drew a careful bead on the dead security guard on the runway. The range was short and the beam torched his head off in a single explosion. The stench of charred flesh rolled across the room to us. Keeping one eye on Jerry, I played the beam around a little until I was sure I’d destroyed everything from the shoulders up, then snapped the weapon off and lowered it. Jerry stared at me over the table.

‘You piece of shit, he only worked security for me!’

‘That’s just become a proscribed profession, as far as I’m concerned. Deek and the rest are going the same way. And so are you, unless you tell me what I want to know.’ I lifted the beam weapon. ‘One chance.’

‘All right.’ The crack was audible in his voice. ‘All right, all right. Elliott tried to put a lock on a customer, she got some big name Meth come slumming down here, reckoned she’d got enough shit to twist him. Stupid cunt tried to make me a partnership deal, she figured I could lean on this Meth guy. No fucking clue what she was dealing with.’

‘No.’ I looked stonily at him across the table. ‘I guess not.’

He caught the look. ‘Hey, man, I know what you’re thinking, but it ain’t like that. I tried to warn her off, so she went direct. Direct to a fucking Meth. You think I wanted this place ripped down and me buried under it. I had to deal with her, man. Had to.’

‘You iced her?’

He shook his head. ‘I made a call,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘That’s how it works around here.’

‘Who’s Ryker?’

‘Ryker’s a -’ He swallowed. ‘A cop. Used to work Sleeve Theft, then they upped him to the Organic Damage Division. He was fucking that Sia cunt, the one came out here the night you crocked Oktai.’

‘Ortega?’

‘Yeah, Ortega. Everybody knew it, they say that’s how he got the transfer. That’s why we figured you were - he was - back on the street. When Deek saw you talking to Ortega we figured she’d accessed someone, done a deal.’

‘Back on the street? Back from where?’

‘Ryker was dirty, man.’ Now the flow had started, it was coming in full flood. ‘He RD’d a couple of sleevedealers, up in Seattle—’

‘RD?’

‘Yeah, RD’d.’ Jerry looked momentarily nonplussed, as if I’d just queried the colour of the sky.

‘I’m not from here,’ I said patiently.

‘RD. Real Death. He pulped them, man. Couple of other guys went down stack intact so Ryker paid off some Dipper to register the lot of them Catholic. Either the input didn’t take, or someone at OrgDam found out. He got the double barrel. Two hundred years, no remission. Word is, Ortega headed up the squad that took him down.’

Well, well. I waved the Nemex encouragingly.

‘That’s it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I never even met the guy.’

‘And Oktai?’

Jerry nodded vigorously. ‘That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare part deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back.’

‘So Oktai comes running to you—’

‘That’s it. He’s like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here. So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—’

Jerry dried up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.

‘That’s fucking it.’ There was an edge of desperation in his voice.

‘All right.’ I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes, remembered I had none. ‘You smoke?’

‘Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?’

I sighed. ‘Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your cred. Who’d you borrow her from?’

‘Trepp’s an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favours sometimes.’

‘Not any more. You ever see her real sleeve?’

‘No. Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.’

‘That far from here?’

‘’Bout an hour, suborbital.’

By my reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe InterPlanetary too. The Senior Fleet.

‘So who’s the wire say she’s working for now?’

‘I don’t know.’

I studied the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. ‘Yeah, you do.’ I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. ‘Trepp’s gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her out. You need to worry about me.’

He stared defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.

‘I heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.’

‘Good. Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.’ The Envoy training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.

‘Listen, those are dangerous people. You got away, you’d better just leave it at that. You got no idea what they—’

‘I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.’ I pointed the blaster into his face. ‘The clinic.’

‘Christ, they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use the spare parts, sometimes, and I—’ He changed tack abruptly as he saw my face. ‘They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.’

I thought of Louise, alias Anenome, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a machine than the door robot had.

‘We’re going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates. And don’t fuck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over the other side of the Bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?’

From his face I judged that he did.

But just to make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of rage.

There’s a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about half a kilometre from shore, spit into the ocean beyond and return. Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It always sounded like macho bullshit to me.

Now, marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water. I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the lift for the second time, Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could happen.

Again and again.

They were rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.

‘We thought—’

‘Never mind that,’ snapped Jerry. ‘Open the fucking door. We’ve got to get this piece of shit off the street.’

The clinic was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in neo-industrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons, facades draped in scaffolding and balconies hung with fake cabling and hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry thrust me inside.

The entrance hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls and patches of exposed brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.

‘I don’t need any fucking help. You’re the wipeouts that let this motherfucker go in the first place.’

The two guards exchanged a glance and the extended grasp turned into a placatory gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the car park on the roof last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team were waiting, sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again. He had it down to perfection.

‘Never fucking mind that.’ He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck. ‘He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.’

‘He’s in surgery.’

‘Surgery?’ Jerry barked a laugh. ‘You mean he’s watching the machine make pick and mix. All right, Chung, then.’

The team hesitated.

‘What? Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this morning.’

‘No, it’s . . .’ The man nearest me gestured. ‘It’s not procedure, taking him in awake.’

‘Don’t fucking tell me about procedure.’ Jerry did a good impression of a man about to explode with fury. ‘Was it procedure to let this piece of shit get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that fucking procedure? Was it? ’

There was silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with a kind of gritted calm.

‘He ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are going to see Chung. Now, move.’

They bought it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the operating theatre I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the corridor behind us.

‘Just a moment.’ The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask which he now unpinned with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly handsome, blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.

‘Miller,’ said Jerry.

‘What exactly is going on here? Courault,’ the tall man turned to the female medic, ‘you know better than to bring subjects through here unsedated.’

‘Yes, sir. Mr Sedaka insisted that there was no risk involved. He said he was in a hurry. To see director Chung.’

‘I don’t care how much of a hurry he’s in.’ Miller swung on Jerry, eyes narrowing with suspicion. ‘Are you insane, Sedaka? What do you think this is, the visitors’ gallery? I’ve got clients in there. Recognisable faces. Courault, sedate this man immediately.’

Oh, well. No one’s lucky for ever.

I was already moving. Before Courault could lift the hypospray from her hip sack, I yanked both the Nemex and the blaster from Jerry’s waistband and spun, firing. Courault and her two colleagues went down, multiply injured. Blood splattered on antiseptic white behind them. Miller had time for one outraged yell and then I shot him in the mouth with the Nemex. Jerry was just backing away from me, the unloaded Philips gun still dangling from his hand. I threw up the blaster.

‘Look, I did my fucking best, I—’

The beam cut loose and his head exploded.

In the sudden quiet that followed, I retraced my steps to the doors of the surgery and pushed through them. The little knot of figures, immaculately suited to a man and woman, had left the table on which a young female sleeve was laid out, and were gaping at me behind forgotten surgical masks. Only the autosurgeon continued working unperturbed, making smooth incisions and cauterising wounds with abrupt little sizzlings. Indistinct lumps of raw red poked out of an array of small metal dishes collected at the subject’s head. It looked unnervingly like the start of some arcane banquet.

The woman on the table was Louise.

There were five men and women in the theatre, and I killed them all while they stared at me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster, and raked the beam over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went round and inflicted Real Death on everyone there.

Outside, there were more alarms and two of the medical crew were still alive. Courault had succeeded in crawling a dozen metres down the corridor in a broad trail of her own blood, and one of her male colleagues, too weak to escape, was trying to prop himself up against the wall. The floor was slippery under him and he kept sliding back down. I ignored him and went after the woman. She stopped when she heard my footsteps, twisted her head to look round and then began to crawl again, frantically. I stamped a foot down between her shoulders to make her stop and then kicked her onto her back.

We looked at each other for a long moment while I remembered her impassive face as she had put me under the night before. I lifted the blaster for her to see.

‘Real Death,’ I said, and pulled the trigger.

I walked back to the remaining medic who had seen and was now scrabbling desperately backwards away from me. I crouched down in front of him. The screaming of the alarms rose and fell over our heads like lost souls.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he moaned as I pointed the blaster at his face. ‘Jesus Christ, I only work here.’

‘Good enough,’ I told him.

The blaster was almost inaudible against the alarms.

Working rapidly, I took care of the third medic in similar fashion, dealt with Miller a little more at length, stripped Jerry’s headless corpse of its jacket and tucked the garment under my arm. Then I scooped up the Philips gun, tucked it into my waistband and left. On my way out along the screaming corridors of the clinic, I killed every person that I met, and melted their stacks to slag.

Personal.

The police were landing on the roof as I let myself out of the front door and walked unhurriedly down the street. Under my arm, Miller’s severed head was beginning to seep blood through the lining of Jerry’s jacket.

PART THREE: ALLIANCE

(Application Upgrade)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was quiet and sunny in the gardens at Suntouch House, and the air smelled of mown grass. From the tennis courts came the faint popping of a game in progress and once I heard Miriam Bancroft’s voice raised in excitement. Flash of tanned legs beneath a flaring white skirt and a puff of shell-pink dust where the driven ball buried itself in the back of her opponent’s court. There was a polite ripple of applause from the seated figures watching. I made my way down towards the courts, flanked by heavily armed security men with blank faces.

The players were taking a game break when I arrived, feet planted wide in front of their seats, heads down. As my feet crunched on the gravel surround, Miriam Bancroft looked up through tangled blonde hair and met my eye. She said nothing, but her hands worked at the handle of her racket and a smile split her lips. Her opponent, who also glanced up, was a slim young man with something about him that suggested he might genuinely be as young as his body. He looked vaguely familiar.

Bancroft was seated at the middle of a row of deck chairs, Oumou Prescott on his right and a man and woman I’d never met on his left. He didn’t get up when I reached him; in fact he barely looked at me. One hand gestured to the seat next to Prescott.

‘Sit down, Kovacs. It’s the last game.’

I twitched a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded myself into the deck chair. Oumou Prescott leaned across to me and murmured behind her hand.

‘Mr Bancroft has had some unwanted attention from the police today. You are being less subtle than we had hoped.’

‘Just warming up,’ I muttered back.

By some prior agreed time limit, Miriam Bancroft and her opponent shrugged off their towels and took up position. I settled back and watched the play, eyes mostly on the woman’s taut body as it surged and swung within the white cotton, remembering how it looked unclothed, how it had writhed against me. Once, just before a service, she caught me looking at her and her mouth bent in fractional amusement. She was still waiting for an answer from me, and now she thought she had it. When the match finished, in a flurry of hard-fought but visibly inevitable points, she came off court glowing.

She was talking to the man and woman I didn’t know when I approached to offer my congratulations. She saw me coming and turned to include me in the little group.

‘Mr Kovacs.’ Her eyes widened the slightest bit. ‘Did you enjoy watching?’

‘Very much,’ I said truthfully. ‘You’re quite merciless.’

She tipped her head on one side and began to towel her sweat-soaked hair with one hand. ‘Only when required,’ she said. ‘You won’t know Nalan or Joseph, of course. Nalan, Joseph, this is Takeshi Kovacs, the Envoy Laurens hired to look into his murder. Mr Kovacs is from offworld. Mr Kovacs, this is Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court, and Joseph Phiri from the Commission of Human Rights.’

‘Delighted.’ I made a brief formal bow to both of them. ‘You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.’

The two officials exchanged a glance, then Phiri nodded. ‘You’re very well informed,’ he said gravely. ‘I’ve heard a lot about the Envoy Corps, but still I’m impressed. How long have you been on Earth, exactly?’

‘About a week.’ I exaggerated, hoping to play down the usual paranoia elected officials exhibit around Envoys.

‘A week, yes. Impressive indeed.’ Phiri was a heavy-set black man, apparently in his fifties, with hair that was greying a little and careful brown eyes. Like Dennis Nyman, he affected external eye-wear, but where Nyman’s steely lenses had been designed to enhance the planes of his face, this man wore the glasses to deflect attention. They were heavy-framed and gave him the appearance of a forgetful cleric, but behind the lenses, the eyes missed nothing.

‘And are you making progress with your investigation?’ This was Ertekin, a handsome Arab woman a couple of decades younger than Phiri, and therefore likely to be on at least her second sleeve. I smiled at her.

‘Progress is difficult to define, your honour. As Quell would have it, They come to me with progress reports, but all I see is change, and bodies burnt.’

‘Ah, you are from Harlan’s World, then,’ Ertekin said politely. ‘And do you consider yourself a Quellist, Mr Kovacs?’

I let the smile become a grin. ‘Sporadically. I’d say she had a point.’

‘Mr Kovacs has been quite busy, in fact,’ said Miriam Bancroft hurriedly. ‘I imagine he and Laurens have a lot to discuss. Perhaps it might be better if we left them to these matters.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Ertekin inclined her head. ‘Perhaps we’ll talk again later.’

The three of them drifted over to commiserate with Miriam’s opponent, who was ruefully stowing his racket and towels in a bag; but for all Miriam’s diplomatic steerage, Nalan Ertekin did not seem unduly concerned to make her escape. I felt a momentary glimmer of admiration for her. Telling a UN executive, in effect an officer of the Protectorate, that you’re a Quellist is a bit like confessing to ritual slaughter at a vegetarian dinner; it’s not really the done thing.

I turned to find Oumou Prescott at my shoulder.

‘Shall we?’ she said grimly, and pointed up towards the house. Bancroft was already striding ahead. We went after him at what I thought was an excessive pace.

‘One question,’ I managed, between breathing. ‘Who’s the kid? The one Mrs Bancroft crucified.’

Prescott flicked me an impatient glance.

‘Big secret, huh?’

‘No, Mr Kovacs, it is not a secret, large or otherwise. I merely think you might do better occupying your mind with other matters than the Bancrofts’ house guests. If you must know, the other player was Marco Kawahara.’

‘Was it, indeed?’ Accidentally, I’d slipped into Phiri’s speech patterns. Chalk up a double strike for personality. ‘So that’s where I’ve seen his face before. Takes after his mother, doesn’t he?’

‘I really wouldn’t know,’ said Prescott dismissively. ‘I have never met Ms Kawahara.’

‘Lucky you.’

Bancroft was waiting for us in an exotic conservatory pinned to the seaward wing of the house. The glass walls were a riot of alien colours and forms, among which I picked out a young mirrorwood tree and numerous stands of martyrweed. Bancroft was standing next to one of the latter, spraying it carefully with a white metallic dust. I don’t know much about martyrweed beyond its obvious uses as a security device, so I had no idea what the powder was.

Bancroft turned as we came in. ‘Please keep your voices reasonably low.’ His own voice was curiously flat in the sound absorbent environment. ‘Martyrweed is highly sensitive at this stage of development. Mr Kovacs, I assume you are familiar with it.’

‘Yeah.’ I glanced at the vaguely hand-shaped cups of the leaves, with the central crimson stains that had given the plant its name. ‘You sure these are mature?’

‘Fully. On Adoracion, you’ll have seen them larger, but I had Nakamura tailor these for indoor use. This is as secure as a Nilvibe cabin and,’ he gestured to a trio of steel frame chairs beside the martyrweed, ‘a great deal more comfortable.’

‘You wanted to see me,’ I said impatiently. ‘What about?’

For just a moment that black iron stare bent on me with the full force of Bancroft’s three and a half centuries, and it was like locking gazes with a demon. For that second, the Meth soul was looking out and I saw reflected in those eyes all the myriad ordinary single lives that they had watched die, like the pale flickerings of moths at a flame. It was an experience I’d only had once before, and that was when I’d taken issue with Reileen Kawahara. I could feel the heat on my wings.

Then it was gone, and there was only Bancroft, moving to seat himself and setting the powder spray aside on an adjacent table. He looked up and waited to see if I would sit down as well. When I did not, he steepled his fingers and frowned. Oumou Prescott hovered between us.

‘Mr Kovacs, I am aware that by the terms of our contract I agreed to meet all reasonable expenses in this investigation, but when I said that, I did not expect to be paying for a trail of wilful organic damage from one side of Bay City to another. I have spent most of this morning buying off both the West Coast triads and the Bay City police, neither of whom were very well disposed towards me even before you started this carnage. I wonder if you realise how much it is costing me just to keep you alive and out of storage.’

I looked around at the conservatory and shrugged.

‘I imagine you can afford it.’

Prescott flinched. Bancroft allowed himself the splinter of a smile.

‘Perhaps, Mr Kovacs, I no longer wish to afford it.’

‘Then pull the fucking plug.’ The martyrweed trembled visibly at the sudden change in tone. I didn’t care. Abruptly, I was no longer in the mood for playing the Bancrofts’ elegant games. I was tired. Discounting the brief period of unconsciousness at the clinic, I had been awake for over thirty hours and my nerves were raw from the continual use of the neurachem system. I had been in a firefight. I had escaped from a moving aircar. I had been subjected to interrogation routines that would have traumatised most human beings for a lifetime. I had committed multiple combat murders. And I had been in the act of crawling into bed when the Hendrix let Bancroft’s curt summons through the call block I’d requested, quote, ‘in the interests of maintaining good client relations and so assuring continued guest status’. Someday, someone was going to have to overhaul the hotel’s antique service industry idiolect; I had weighed the idea of doing it myself with the Nemex when I got off the phone, but my irritation at the hotel’s enslaved responses to guest-holding was overridden by the anger I felt towards Bancroft himself. It was that anger that had stopped me ignoring the call and going to bed anyway, and propelled me out to Suntouch House dressed in the same rumpled clothes I had been wearing since the previous day.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Kovacs?’ Oumou Prescott was staring at me. ‘Are you suggesting—’

‘No, I’m not, Prescott. I’m threatening.’ I switched my gaze back to Bancroft. ‘I didn’t ask to join this fucking No dance. You dragged me here, Bancroft. You pulled me out of the store on Harlan’s World and you jacked me into Elias Ryker’s sleeve just to piss Ortega off. You sent me out there with a few vague hints and watched me stumble around in the dark, cracking my shins on your past misdemeanours. Well, if you don’t want to play any more, now the current’s running a little hard, that’s fine with me. I’m through risking my stack for a piece of shit like you. You can just put me back in the box, and I’ll take my chances a hundred and seventeen years from now. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and whoever wants you toasted will have wiped you off the face of the planet by then.’

I’d had to check my weapons at the main gate, but I could feel the dangerous looseness of the Envoy combat mode stealing over me as I spoke. If the Meth demon came back and got out of hand, I was going to choke the life out of Bancroft there and then just for the satisfaction.

Curiously, what I said only seemed to make him thoughtful. He heard me out, inclined his head as if in agreement, then turned to Prescott.

‘Ou, can you drop out for a while. There are some things that Mr Kovacs and I need to discuss in private.’

Prescott looked dubious. ‘Shall I post someone outside?’ she queried, with a hard glance at me. Bancroft shook his head.

‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’

Prescott left, looking dubious, while I struggled not to admire Bancroft’s cool. He’d just heard me say I was happy to go back into storage, he’d been reading my body count all morning, and still he thought he had my specs down tight enough to know whether I was dangerous or not.

I took a seat. Maybe he was right.

‘You’ve got some explaining to do,’ I said evenly. ‘You can start with Ryker’s sleeve, and go on from there. Why’d you do it, and why conceal it from me?’

‘Conceal it?’ Bancroft’s brows arched. ‘We barely discussed it.’

‘You told me you’d left the sleeve selection to your lawyers. You were at pains to stress that. But Prescott insists you made the selection yourself. You should have briefed her a bit better on the lies you were going to tell.’

‘Well.’ Bancroft made a gesture of acceptance. ‘A reflexive caution, then. One tells the truth to so few people in the end, it becomes a habit. But I had no idea it would matter to you so much. After your career in the Corps, and your time in storage, I mean. Do you usually exhibit this much interest in the past history of the sleeves you wear?’

‘No, I don’t. But ever since I arrived, Ortega’s been all over me like anticontaminant plastic. I thought it was because she had something to hide. Turns out, she’s just trying to protect her boyfriend’s sleeve while he’s in the store. Incidentally, did you bother to find out why Ryker was on stack?’

This time Bancroft’s open-handed motion was dismissive. ‘A corruption charge. Unjustified organic damage, and attempted falsification of personality detail. I understand it wasn’t his first offence.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. In fact he was well known for it. Well known and very unpopular, especially around places like Licktown, which is where I’ve been the last couple of days, following the trail of your dripping dick. But we’ll come back to that. I want to know why you did it. Why am I wearing Ryker’s sleeve?’

Bancroft’s eyes flared momentarily at the insult, but he really was too good a player to rise to it. Instead, he shot his right cuff in a displacement gesture I recognised from Diplomatic Basic, and smiled faintly.

‘Really, I had no idea it would prove inconvenient. I was looking to provide you with suitable armour, and the sleeve carries—’

‘Why Ryker?’

There was a beat of silence. Meths were not people you interrupted lightly, and Bancroft was having a hard time dealing with the lack of respect. I thought about the tree beyond the tennis courts. No doubt Ortega, had she been there, would have cheered.

‘A move, Mr Kovacs. Merely a move.’

‘A move? Against Ortega?’

‘Just so.’ Bancroft settled back into his seat. ‘Lieutenant Ortega made her prejudices quite clear the moment she stepped into this house. She was unhelpful in the extreme. She lacked respect. It was something that I remembered, an account to be adjusted. When the shortlist Oumou provided me with included Elias Ryker’s sleeve, and listed Ortega as paying the tank mortgage, I saw the move as almost karmic. It dictated itself.’

‘A little childish for someone your age, don’t you think?’

Bancroft inclined his head. ‘Perhaps. But then, do you recall a General MacIntyre of Envoy Command, resident of Harlan’s World, who was found gutted and decapitated in his private jet a year after the Innenin massacre?’

‘Vaguely.’ I sat, cold, remembering. But if Bancroft could play the control game, so could I.

‘Vaguely?’ Bancroft raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d have thought a veteran of Innenin could scarcely fail to recall the death of the commander who presided over the whole debacle, the man many claim was actually guilty by negligence of all those Real Deaths.’

‘MacIntyre was exonerated of all blame by the Protectorate Court of Inquiry,’ I said quietly. ‘Do you have a point to make?’

Bancroft shrugged. ‘Only that it seems his death was a revenge killing, despite the verdict handed down by the court, a pointless act, in fact, since it could not bring back those who died. Childishness is a common enough sin amongst humans. Perhaps we should not be so quick to judge.’

‘Perhaps not.’ I stood up and went to stand at the door of the conservatory, looking out. ‘Well, then don’t feel that I’m sitting in judgement, but why exactly didn’t you tell me you spent so much time in whorehouses?’

‘Ah, the Elliott girl. Yes, Oumou has told me about this. Do you seriously think her father had something to do with my death?’

I turned back. ‘Not now, no. I seriously believe he had nothing to do with your death, in fact. But I’ve wasted a lot of time finding that out.’

Bancroft met my eye calmly. ‘I’m sorry if my briefing was inadequate, Mr Kovacs. It is true, I spend some of my leisure time in purchased sexual release, both real and virtual. Or, as you so elegantly put it, whorehouses. I’d not considered it especially important. Equally, I spend part of my time in small-scale gambling. And occasionally null-gravity knife fighting. All of these things could make me enemies, as indeed could most of my business interests. I didn’t feel that your first day in a new sleeve on a new world was the time for a line-by-line explanation of my life. Where would I expect to begin? Instead, I told you the background of the crime and suggested that you talk to Oumou. I didn’t expect you to take off after the first clue like a heatseeker. Nor did I expect you to lay waste everything that got in your way. I was told the Envoy Corps had a reputation for subtlety.’

Put like that, he had a point. Virginia Vidaura would have been furious, she probably would have been right behind Bancroft, waiting to deck me for gross lack of finesse. But then, neither she nor Bancroft had been looking into Victor Elliott’s face the night he told me about his family. I swallowed a sharp retort and marshalled what I knew, trying to decide how much to let go of.

‘Laurens?’

Miriam Bancroft was standing just outside the conservatory, a towel draped around her neck and her racket under one arm.

‘Miriam.’ There was a genuine deference in Bancroft’s tone, but little else that I could determine.

‘I’m taking Nalan and Joseph out to Hudson’s Raft for a scuba lunch. Joseph’s never done it before, and we’ve talked him into it.’ She glanced from Bancroft to myself and back. ‘Will you be coming with us?’

‘Maybe later,’ said Bancroft. ‘Where will you be?’

Miriam shrugged. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it. Somewhere on the starboard decks. Benton’s, maybe?’

‘Fine. I’ll catch you up. Spear me a kingfish if you see one.’

‘Aye aye.’ She touched the blade of one hand to the side of her head in a ludicrous salute that made both of us smile unexpectedly. Miriam’s gaze quivered and settled on me. ‘Do you like seafood, Mr Kovacs?’

‘Probably. I’ve had very little time to exercise my tastes on Earth, Mrs Bancroft. So far I’ve only eaten what my hotel has to offer.’

‘Well. Once you’ve developed a taste for it,’ she said significantly, ‘maybe we’ll see you as well?’

‘Thank you, but I doubt it.’

‘Well,’ she repeated brightly. ‘Try not to be too much longer, Laurens. I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.’

Bancroft grunted. ‘The way he played today, I’m not surprised. I thought for a while he was doing it deliberately.’

‘Not the last game,’ I said, to no one in particular.

The Bancrofts focused on me, he unreadably, she with her head tipped to one side and a sudden wide smile that made her look unexpectedly child-like. For a moment I met her gaze, and one hand rose to touch her hair with what seemed like fractional uncertainty.

‘Curtis will be bringing the limousine round,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go. It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr Kovacs.’

We both watched her stride away across the lawn, her tennis skirt tilting back and forth. Even allowing for Bancroft’s apparent indifference to his wife as a sexual being, Miriam’s wordplay was steering fractionally too close to the wind for my liking. I had to plug the silence with something.

‘Tell me something, Bancroft,’ I said with my eyes still on the receding figure. ‘No disrespect intended, but why does someone who’s married to her, who’s chosen to stay married, spend his time in quote purchased sexual release?’

I turned casually back and found him watching me without expression. He said nothing for several seconds, and when he spoke his voice was carefully bland.

‘Have you ever come in a woman’s face, Kovacs?’

Culture shock is something they teach you to lock down very early on in the Corps, but just occasionally a blast gets through the armour and the reality around you feels like a jigsaw that won’t quite fit together. I barely chopped off my stare before it got started. This man, older than the entire human history of my planet, was asking me this question. It was as if he’d asked me had I ever played with water pistols.

‘Uh. Yes. It, uh, it happens if—’

‘A woman you paid?’

‘Well, sometimes. Not especially. I—’ I remembered his wife’s abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. ‘I don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine, and—’

‘Nor of mine,’ snapped the man in front of me, with rather too much emphasis. ‘I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of us that are better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a civilised context.’

‘I’d hardly counterpose civilisation with spilling semen.’

‘You come from another place,’ said Bancroft broodingly. ‘A brash, young colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The UN declarations fossilised into global conformity, there was a -’ he gestured ‘- a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.’

‘You talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t fight your way free?’

Bancroft smiled thinly. ‘Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her flesh with other men and women. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, Mr Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear. While all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?’

I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a centuries-old soul and Bancroft was in full flow.

‘No,’ he answered his own question. ‘How could you? Just as your culture is too shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience cannot possibly encompass what it is to love the same person for two hundred and fifty years. In the end, if you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration with the sordid desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time? I tell you, you cannot.’

‘So instead you vent yourself on prostitutes?’

The thin smile returned. ‘I am not proud of myself, Mr Kovacs. But you do not live this long without accepting yourself in every facet, however distasteful. The women are there. They satisfy a market need, and are recompensed accordingly. And in this way I purge myself.’

‘Does your wife know this?’

‘Of course. And has done for a very considerable time. Oumou informs me that you are already aware of the facts regarding Leila Begin. Miriam has calmed down a lot since then. I’m sure she has adventures of her own.’

‘How sure?’

Bancroft made an irritated gesture. ‘Is this relevant? I don’t have my wife monitored, if that’s what you mean, but I know her. She has her appetites to contend with just as I do.’

‘And this doesn’t bother you?’

‘Mr Kovacs, I am many things, but I am not a hypocrite. It is the flesh, nothing more. Miriam and I understand this. And now, since this line of questioning doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, can we please get back on track. In the absence of any guilt on the part of Elliott, what else do you have?’

I made a decision then that came up from levels of instinct way below conscious thought. I shook my head. ‘There’s nothing yet.’

‘But there will be?’

‘Yes. You can write Ortega off to this sleeve, but there’s still Kadmin. He wasn’t after Ryker. He knew me. Something’s going on.’

Bancroft nodded in satisfaction. ‘Are you going to speak to Kadmin?’

‘If Ortega lets me.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning the police will have run whatever satellite footage they’ve got over Oakland this morning, which means they can probably identify me leaving the clinic. There must have been something overhead at the time. I don’t suppose they’ll be at their most co-operative.’

Bancroft permitted himself another of his splintered smiles. ‘Very astute, Mr Kovacs. But you need have nothing to fear on that count. The Wei Clinic - what little you left of it - is reluctant to either release internal video footage or press charges against anyone. They have more to fear in any investigation than do you. Of course, whether they choose to seek more private reprisals is, shall we say, a more protracted question.’

‘And Jerry’s?’

A shrug. ‘The same. With the proprietor dead, a managing interest has stepped in.’

‘Very tidy.’

‘I’m glad you appreciate it.’ Bancroft got to his feet. ‘As I said, it has been a busy morning, and negotiations are by no means at an end. I would be grateful if you could limit your depredations somewhat in future. It has been costly.’

Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports ... for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying ... Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.

Someone else was paying.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained-glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.

Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch of coloured light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding centre, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me - the subsonics were obviously getting to him as well.

‘Lieutenant Ortega,’ I told him. ‘Organic Damage.’

‘Who shall I say it is?’

‘Tell her it’s Elias Ryker.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened then turned back to me.

‘She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?’

I nodded and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.

‘Please surrender the weapon carefully,’ he added with a gentle smile. ‘Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.’

I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.

‘Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.’

The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.

‘I wouldn’t,’ I told them.

‘Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,’ said the desk sergeant pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.

It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.

Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.

The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.

‘Sit down, Kovacs.’

I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.

‘You work the night shift?’

Her eyes flared. ‘What kind of crack is that?’

‘Hey, nothing.’ I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. ‘I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.’

‘Oh, that.’ Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. ‘It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.’

‘That’s tough.’

‘Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—’ She looked up abruptly. ‘What the fuck am I—Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?’

I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.

‘About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.’

‘We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.’

I shrugged.

‘And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.’

‘Impound his vehicle did you?’ I asked casually. ‘Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?’

Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.

I nodded. ‘Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.’

‘Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.’

‘Admirable tenacity,’ I said. ‘Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.’

‘There is no fucking Bancroft case.’

Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.

‘Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?’

‘Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?’

‘We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.’

She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.

‘You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,’ I said coldly. ‘I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was fighting the Protectorate’s battles for them.’

‘That was war.’

‘Oh, please.’

She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.

‘And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.’ I gestured at my own face. ‘This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.’

She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my head with clenched determination.

‘I quit.’

‘Did you?’ There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. ‘Good for you. I’m impressed.’

‘Yeah, Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.’

She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.

‘What do you want?’ she asked flatly.

The holding racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.

‘I don’t see that this is going to change anything,’ said Ortega as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. ‘What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?’

‘Look.’ I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.

‘I—’ she said.

‘3089b,’ called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot. ‘This the one you wanted, lieutenant?’

Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. ‘That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual.’

‘Sure.’ Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. ‘You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take about five minutes.’

‘The point is,’ I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps, ‘you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you, he’s been dealing with you all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an unknown. If he’s never been extra-system, the chances are he’s never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the Corps most places I’ve been.’

Ortega gave me a sceptical look over her shoulder. ‘You’re going to frighten him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.’

‘He’ll be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away. Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead. Someone who is scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may rub off on Kadmin.’

‘And this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?’

‘Ortega, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank asap, out of harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get written off in another firefight, do you?’

‘Another firefight?’ It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.

‘Yeah, after the Hendrix,’ I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face chemical interlock that had put me off balance. ‘I picked up some bad bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.’

She shot me another, longer glance over her shoulder.

The virtual interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automould couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they blinked on.

‘Traffic,’ he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust. ‘Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.’ He glanced back at Ortega. ‘Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?’

‘Yeah.’ Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of our new co-operation. ‘Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack. Set it to spin and guess what?’

‘Catholic?’

‘In one. That Total Absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a case like that, but El—’ She stopped. Restarted. ‘The detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his neighbourhood, he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but -’ she shrugged ‘- he wouldn’t let it go.’

‘Very tenacious. Elias Ryker?’

She nodded.

‘He pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the Vow. The girl’s family are borderliners, nominally Christian, but mostly not Catholic. Quite rich as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they spin out for family births and marriages. The Department’s been in virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.’

‘Roll on Resolution 653, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

We both went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom of the line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfibre like chicle in a child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and reattached with epoxy hinges afterwards. The curved grey ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.

‘Tell me something, Ortega,’ I said after a while. ‘That tail you had on me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than the others? A blind man could have spotted him.’

There was a pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly. ‘All we had. It was a snap thing, we had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.’

‘The clothes.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That simple?’

‘Yep.’

I threw my mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward. I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing . . .

‘Got it!’ I snapped my fingers. ‘You hammered me on the shoulder when you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.’

‘Enzyme bond bleeper,’ said Ortega matter of factly. ‘Not much bigger than a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in you wouldn’t be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you offloaded it into that skip we thought you’d tipped us.’

‘No. Nothing so bright.’

‘That’s it,’ announced Micky suddenly. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your spinal spiral, we are in the pipe.’

It was a rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation, but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull grey ceiling grew abruptly fascinating with fishtail swirls of light and meaning drained out of the universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was

Elsewhere.

It spread out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down from the gantry. Steel grey, stippled every few metres with a nipple-like swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same grey with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race memory of what an actual lock looked like.

In front of me softly shaped grey furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side, one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an existence separate to the floor.

Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.

‘Smoke?’

‘No thanks, I—’ Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.

I looked up at the geometric sky. ‘Is this standard?’

‘Pretty much.’ Ortega squinted into the distance. ‘Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.’

Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.

‘Again, lieutenant?’ he said when the programme had rendered him complete. ‘There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.’

‘That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,’ said Ortega. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.’

‘No thank you.’

‘I said sit, motherfucker.’ There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.

‘You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?’

We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.

He was the Patchwork Man.

Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.

The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, but the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

He would have made a fine Envoy.

‘I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,’ I said quietly.

Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. ‘If you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality edited.’

‘Do you know this man, Kadmin?’ asked Ortega.

‘Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?’ Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. ‘Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.’

‘You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.’ Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. ‘Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.’

‘I’m not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.’

‘Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.’ Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. ‘We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.’

Kadmin smiled. ‘Then what are you here for?’

‘Who sent you?’ I asked him softly.

‘The Dog speaks!

Is it a wolf I hear,
Howling his lonely communion
With the unpiloted stars,
Or merely the self importance and servitude
In the bark of a dog?

How many millennia did it take,
Twisting and torturing
The pride from the one
To make a tool,
The other?’

I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.

I finished it for him.

‘And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit?
And who do we find to blame?’

‘Have you come seeking blame, Mr Kovacs?’

‘Among other things.’

‘How disappointing.’

‘You expected something else?’

‘No,’ said Kadmin with another smile. ‘Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.’

‘Maybe.’

He shook his great piebald head. ‘Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.’

‘That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.’

‘Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.’ Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. ‘Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?’

‘No. I’m just putting things into perspective.’ I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. ‘Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.’

Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.

‘I was not asked to kill you,’ he said tonelessly, ‘unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.’

Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.

Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.

‘I hear you right?’ she hissed. ‘You making threats, fuckhead?’

Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.

‘Police brutal—’

‘That’s right, motherfucker.’ Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. ‘Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they? But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular tape.’

‘Leave him alone, Ortega.’

She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back. Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.

‘You too,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah, sure.’ There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. ‘Like I said, going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I’ll wait for you.’

‘Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?’ I wondered softly. ‘You going down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?’

For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.

‘You through, Kovacs?’ asked Ortega.

I tried to meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. ‘Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.’

Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

I shrugged. ‘I’m through.’

‘Good,’ said Ortega grimly. ‘Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.’ She waggled her fingers in front of his eyes. ‘Be seeing you, fuckhead.’

At that, Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.

We left.

Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.

‘So what did you learn from that?’

I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. ‘Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.’

‘Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.’

I shook my head. ‘About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any sense.’

‘The Corps? Unfinished business?’ Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. ‘Maybe a grudge match?’

‘No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there’s nothing I know about the Corps that isn’t in a low-wall datastack somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a fucking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.’

‘Whoever had him killed?’

I tipped my head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. ‘You believe me, then.’

‘Not entirely.’

‘Oh, come on.’

But Ortega wasn’t listening. ‘What I want to know,’ she brooded, ‘is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.’

‘Even to his lawyers?’

‘We don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.’

I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.

‘Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?’

‘Physically, you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.’ Ortega’s lip curled. ‘Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.’

‘What’s this suit’s name?’

There was a brief pause while she hung onto the name. ‘Kadmin’s a spinning item right now. I’m not sure we go this far.’

‘Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking Elias’s fine features with some more maximal push investigation.’

She was silent for a while.

‘Rutherford,’ she said finally. ‘You want to talk to Rutherford?’

‘Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier. I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.’

‘Keith Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions. He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.’

She had a point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.

‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘All I need is a couple of minutes’ conversation. How about you tell him I’m Elias Ryker, your partner from Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.’

Ortega took off her lenses and stared at me.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘No. I’m trying to be practical. Rutherford’s sleeving in from Ulan Bator, right?’

‘New York,’ she said tightly.

‘New York. Right. So he probably doesn’t know anything about you or Ryker.’

‘Probably not.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The problem is, Kovacs, that I don’t like it.’

There was more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her. It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.

‘Ortega,’ I said gently. ‘I’m not him. I’m not trying to be hi—’

‘You couldn’t even come close,’ she snapped.

‘All we’re talking about is a couple of hours’ make-believe.’

‘Is that all?’

She said it in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque efficiency that I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in the eyes behind the mirror lenses.

‘All right,’ she said finally, clearing her throat. ‘I’ll get you in. I don’t see the point, but I’ll do it. Then what?’

‘That’s a little difficult to say. I’ll have to improvise.’

‘Like you did at the Wei Clinic?’

I shrugged noncommittally. ‘Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can’t react to something until it happens.’

‘I don’t want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city stats.’

‘If there’s violence, it won’t be me that starts it.’

‘That’s not much of a guarantee. Haven’t you got any idea what you’re going to do?’

‘I’m going to talk.’

‘Just talk?’ She looked at me disbelievingly. ‘That’s all?’

I jammed my ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face.

‘Sometimes that’s all it takes.’ I said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I met my first lawyer when I was fifteen. He was a harried-looking juvenile affray expert who defended me, not unhandily, in a minor organic damage suit involving a Newpest police officer. He bargained them down with a kind of myopic patience to Conditional Release and eleven minutes of virtual psychiatric counselling. In the hall outside the juvenile court, he looked into my probably infuriatingly smug face and nodded as if his worst fears about the meaning of his life were being confirmed. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. I forget his name.

My entry into the Newpest gang scene shortly afterwards precluded any more such legal encounters. The gangs were web-smart, wired up and already writing their own intrusion programmes or buying them from kids half their age in return for low-grade virtual porn ripped off the networks. They didn’t get caught easily, and in return for this favour the Newpest heat tended to leave them alone. Inter-gang violence was largely ritualised and excluded other players most of the time. On the odd occasion that it spilled over and affected civilians, there would be a rapid and brutal series of punitive raids that left a couple of lead gang heroes in the store and the rest of us with extensive bruising. Fortunately I never worked my way up the chain of command far enough to get put away, so the next time I saw the inside of a courtroom was the Innenin inquiry.

The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I’d been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

After that, straightforward criminality came as something of a relief.

‘Something bothering you?’ Ortega glanced sideways at me as she brought the unmarked cruiser down on a shelving pebble beach below the split-level, glass-fronted offices of Prendergast Sanchez, attorneys-at-law.

‘Just thinking.’

‘Try cold showers and alcohol. Works for me.’

I nodded and held up the minuscule bead of metal I had been rolling between my finger and thumb. ‘Is this legal?’

Ortega reached up and killed the primaries. ‘More or less. No one’s going to complain.’

‘Good. Now, I’m going to need verbal cover to start with. You do the talking, I’ll just shut up and listen. Take it from there.’

‘Fine. Ryker was like that, anyway. Never used two words if one would do it. Most of the time with the scumbags, he’d just look at them.’

‘Sort of Micky Nozawa type, huh?’

‘Who?’

‘Never mind.’ The rattle of upthrown pebbles on the hull died away as Ortega cut the engines to idle. I stretched in my seat and threw open my side of the hatch. Climbing out, I saw an over-burly figure coming down the meandering set of wooden steps from the split level. Looked like grafting. A blunt-looking gun was slung over his shoulder and he wore gloves. Probably not a lawyer.

‘Go easy,’ said Ortega, suddenly at my shoulder. ‘We have jurisdiction here. He isn’t going to start anything.’

She flashed her badge as the muscle jumped the last step to the beach and landed on flexed legs. You could see the disappointment on his face as he saw it.

‘Bay City police. We’re here to see Rutherford.’

‘You can’t park that here.’

‘I already have,’ Ortega told him evenly. ‘Are we going to keep Mr Rutherford waiting?’

There was a prickly silence, but she’d gauged him correctly. Contenting himself with a grunt, the muscle gestured us up the staircase and followed at prudent shepherding distance. It took a while to get to the top, and I was pleased to see when we arrived that Ortega was considerably more out of breath than I was. We went across a modest sundeck made from the same wood as the stairs and through two sets of automatic plate glass doors into a reception area styled to look like someone’s lounge. There were rugs on the floor, knitted in the same patterns as my jacket, and Empathist prints on the walls. Five single armchairs provided parking.

‘Can I help you?’

This was a lawyer, no question about it. A smoothly groomed blonde woman in a loose skirt and jacket tailored to fit the room, hands resting comfortably in her pockets.

‘Bay City police. Where’s Rutherford?’

The woman flickered a glance sideways at our escort and having received the nod did not bother to demand identification.

‘I’m afraid Keith is occupied at the moment. He’s in virtual with New York.’

‘Well get him out of virtual then,’ said Ortega with dangerous mildness. ‘And tell him the officer who arrested his client is here to see him. I’m sure he’ll be interested.’

‘That may take some time, officer.’

‘No, it won’t.’

The two women locked gazes for a moment, and then the lawyer looked away. She nodded to the muscle, who went back outside, still looking disappointed.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said glacially. ‘Please wait here.’

We waited, Ortega at the floor-to-ceiling window, staring down at the beach with her back to the room and myself prowling the artwork. Some of it was quite good. With the separately ingrained habits of working in monitored environments, neither of us said anything for the ten minutes it took to produce Rutherford from the inner sanctum.

‘Lieutenant Ortega.’ The modulated voice reminded me of Miller’s at the clinic, and when I looked up from a print over the fireplace, I saw much the same kind of sleeve. Maybe a little older, with slightly craggier patriarchal features designed to inspire instant respect in jurors and judges alike, but the same athletic frame and off-the-rack good looks. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected visit? Not more harassment, I hope.’

Ortega ignored the allegation. ‘Detective Sergeant Elias Ryker,’ she said, nodding at me. ‘Your client just admitted to one count of abduction, and made a first degree organic damage threat under monitor. Care to see the footage?’

‘Not particularly. Care to tell me why you’re here?’

Rutherford was good. He’d barely reacted; barely, but enough to catch it out of the corner of my eye. My mind went into overdrive.

Ortega leaned on the back of an armchair. ‘For a man defending a mandatory erasure case, you’re showing a real lack of imagination.’

Rutherford sighed theatrically. ‘You have called me away from an important link. I assume you do have something to say.’

‘Do you know what third party retro-associative complicity is?’ I asked the question without turning from the print, and when I did look up, I had Rutherford’s complete attention.

‘I do not,’ he said stiffly.

‘That’s a pity, because you and the other partners of Prendergast Sanchez are right in the firing line if Kadmin rolls over. But of course, if that happens -’ I spread my hands and shrugged ‘- it’ll be open season. In fact, it may already be.’

‘All right, that’s enough.’ Rutherford’s hand rose decisively to a remote summons emitter pinned to his lapel. Our escort was on his way. ‘I don’t have time to play games with you. There is no statute by that name, and this is getting perilously close to harassment.’

I raised my voice. ‘Just wanted to know which side you want to be on when the program crashes, Rutherford. There is a statute. UN indictable offence, last handed down 4th May 2207. Look it up. I had to go back a long way to dig this one up, but it’ll take all of you down in the end. Kadmin knows it, that’s why he’s cracking.’

Rutherford smiled. ‘I don’t think so, detective.’

I repeated my shrug. ‘Shame. Like I said, look it up. Then decide which side you want to play for. We’re going to need inside corroboration, and we’re prepared to pay for it. If it isn’t you, Ulan Bator’s stuffed with lawyers who’ll give blow jobs for the chance.’

The smile wavered fractionally.

‘That’s right, think about it.’ I nodded at Ortega. ‘You can get me at Fell Street, same as the lieutenant here. Elias Ryker, offworld liaison. I’m promising you, this is going to go down, whatever happens, and when it does, I’ll be a good person to know.’

Ortega took the cue like she’d been doing it all her life. Like Sarah would have done. She unleaned herself from the chairback and made for the door.

‘Be seeing you, Rutherford,’ she said laconically, as we stepped back out onto the deck. The muscle was there, grinning widely and flexing his hands at his sides. ‘And you, don’t even think about it.’

I contented myself with the silent look that I had been told Ryker used to such great effect and followed my partner down the stairs.

Back in the cruiser, Ortega snapped on a screen and watched identity data from the bug scroll down.

‘Where’d you put it?’

‘Print over the fireplace. Corner of the frame.’

She grunted. ‘They’ll sweep it out of there in nothing flat, you know. And none of it’s admissible as evidence, anyway.’

‘I know. You’ve told me that twice already. That’s not the point. If Rutherford’s rattled, he’ll jump first.’

‘You think he’s rattled?’

‘A little.’

‘Yeah.’ She glanced curiously at me. ‘So what the fuck is third party retro-associative complicity?’

‘No idea. I made it up.’

Her eyebrow went up. ‘No shit?’

‘Convinced you, huh? Know what, you could have given me a polygraph test while I was spinning it, and I would have convinced that too. Basic Envoy tricks. Course, Rutherford will know that as soon as he looks it up, but it’s already served its purpose.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Provide the arena. Tell lies, you keep your opponent off balance. It’s like fighting on unfamiliar ground. Rutherford was rattled, but he smiled when I told him this stuff was why Kadmin was acting up.’ I looked up through the windscreen at the house above, formulating the scrapings of intuition into understanding. ‘He was fucking relieved when I said that. I don’t suppose normally he would have given that much away, but the bluff had him running scared, and him knowing better than me about something was that little ray of stability he needed. And that means he knows another reason why Kadmin changed behaviour. He knows the real reason.’

Ortega grunted approvingly. ‘Pretty good, Kovacs. You should have been a cop. You notice his reaction when I told him the good news about what Kadmin had done? He wasn’t surprised at all.’

‘No. He was expecting it. Or something like it.’

‘Yeah.’ She paused. ‘This really what you used to do for a living?’

‘Sometimes. Diplomatic missions, or deep-cover stuff. It wasn’t—’

I fell silent as she elbowed me in the ribs. On the screen, a series of coded sequences were unwinding like snakes of blue fire.

‘Here we go. Simultaneous calls, he must be doing this in virtual to save time. One, two, three - that one’s New York, must be to update the senior partners, and oops.’

The screen flared and went abruptly dark.

‘They found it,’ I said.

‘They did. The New York line probably has a sweeper attached, flushes out the call vicinity on connection.’

‘Or one of the others does.’

‘Yeah.’ Ortega punched up the screen’s memory and stared at the call codes. ‘They’re all three routed through discreet clearing. Take us a while to locate them. You want to eat?’

Homesickness isn’t something a veteran Envoy should confess to. If the conditioning hasn’t already ironed it out of you, the years of sleeving back and forth across the Protectorate should have done. Envoys are citizens of that elusive state, Here-and-Now, a state that jealously admits of no dual nationalities. The past is relevant only as data.

Homesickness was what I felt as we stepped past the kitchen area of the Flying Fish and the aroma of sauces I had last tasted in Millsport hit me like a friendly tentacle. Teriyaki, frying tempura and the undercurrent of miso. I stood wrapped in it for a moment, remembering that time. A ramen bar Sarah and I had skulked in while the heat from the Gemini Biosys gig died down, eyes hooked to newsnet broadcasts and a corner videophone with a smashed screen that was supposed to ring, any time now. Steam on the windows and the company of taciturn Millsport skippers.

And back beyond that, I remembered the moth-battered paper lanterns outside Watanabe’s on a Newpest Friday night. My teenage skin slick with sweat from the jungle wind blowing out of the south and my eyes glittering with tetrameth in one of the big windchime mirrors. Talk, cheaper than the big bowls of ramen, about big scores and yakuza connections, tickets north and beyond, new sleeves and new worlds. Old Watanabe had sat out on the deck with us, listening to it all but never commenting, just smoking his pipes and glancing from time to time in the mirror at his own Caucasian features - always with mild surprise, it seemed to me.

He never told us how he’d got that sleeve, just as he never denied or confirmed the rumours about his escapades with the marine corps, the Quell Memorial Brigade, the Envoys, whatever. An older gang member once told us he’d seen Watanabe face down a roomful of Seven Per Cent Angels with nothing but his pipe in his hands, and some kid from the swamp towns once came up with a fuzzy slice of newsreel footage he claimed was from the Settlement wars. It was only two-d, hurriedly shot just before an assault team went over the top, but the sergeant being interviewed was subtitled Watanabe, Y and there was something about the way he tilted his head when questioned that had us all crowing recognition at the screen. But then Watanabe was a common enough name, and come to that, the guy who said he’d seen the Angels facedown was also fond of telling us how he’d slept with a Harlan family heiress when she came slumming, and none of us believed that.

Once, on a rare evening when I was both straight and alone at Watanabe’s, I swallowed enough of my adolescent pride to ask the old man for his advice. I’d been reading UN armed forces promotional literature for weeks, and I needed someone to push me one way or the other.

Watanabe just grinned at me around the stem of his pipe. ‘I should advise you?’ he asked. ‘Share with you the wisdom that brought me to this?’

We both looked around the little bar and the fields beyond the deck.

‘Well, uh, yes.’

‘Well, uh, no,’ he said firmly, and resumed his pipe.

‘Kovacs?’

I blinked and found Ortega in front of me, looking curiously into my eyes.

‘Something I need to know about?’

I smiled faintly and glanced around at the kitchen’s shining steel counters. ‘Not really.’

‘It’s good food,’ she said, misinterpreting the look.

‘Well, let’s get some, then.’

She led me out of the steam and onto one of the restaurant’s gantries. The Flying Fish was, according to Ortega, a decommissioned aerial minesweeper that some oceanographic institute had bought up. The institute was now either defunct or had moved on and the bayward-facing facility had been gutted, but someone had stripped the Flying Fish, rerigged her as a restaurant and cabled her five hundred metres above the decaying facility buildings. Periodically the whole vessel was reeled gently back down to earth to disgorge its sated customers and take on fresh. There was a queue around two sides of the docking hangar when we arrived but Ortega jumped it with her badge, and when the airship came floating down through the open roof of the hangar, we were the first aboard.

I settled cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry itself was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the cushions to the sea a kilometre below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never been my strong point.

‘Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff,’ said Ortega, gesturing sideways at the hull. ‘Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.’

She paused. ‘I was born on Understanding Day,’ she added inconsequentially.

‘Really?’

‘Yep. January 9th. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.’

‘Nice.’

Who she was really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive. ‘When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be called Maria.’

‘You come here often?’

‘Not often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.’

‘Good guess.’

A waiter arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something vegetarian.

‘Good choice,’ said Ortega. She nodded at the waiter. ‘I’ll have the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?’

‘Water.’

Our selections flared briefly in pink and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked around her, seeking neutral conversation.

‘So, uh - you got places like this in Millsport?’

‘On the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.’

‘No?’ She raised her customary eyebrow. ‘Millsport’s an archipelago, isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—’

‘An obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I think you’re forgetting something.’ I flicked my eyes skywards. ‘We Are Not Alone.’

It clicked. ‘The orbitals? They’re hostile?’

‘Mmm. Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get close enough to decommission one of them, or even get aboard, come to that, we have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.’

‘Must make IP traffic tough.’

I nodded. ‘Well, yeah. Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and maintenance shuttles to the Platforms. Bit of exotic element mining, that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the equator towards evening and one crack of dawn slot up on the pole. It looks like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left holes in the net.’ I paused. ‘Or maybe someone shot them down.’

‘Someone? You mean someone, not the Martians?’

I spread my hands. ‘Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we even realised it was there. It’s the same on most of the Settled worlds. All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.’

‘But the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.’

‘Yeah, right.’ I folded my arms and sat back. ‘The archaeologues say what the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilisation.’

Ortega looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.

‘Do you mind if we talk about something else?’ Ortega asked uncomfortably.

‘Sure. Tell me about Ryker.’

The discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said eventually.

‘Fair enough.’ I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. ‘But I think you want to, really.’

‘How very male of you.’

The food arrived and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced auto-chef breakfast, I discovered I was ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway through hers.

‘Food OK?’ she asked ironically as I sat back.

I nodded, trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning online and spoil the sated feeling in my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.

Ortega’s phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.

‘Yeah? Uhuh. Uhuh, good. No, we’ll go.’ Her eyes flickered briefly to mine. ‘That so? No, leave that one too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks Zak. Owe you one.’

She stowed the phone again and resumed eating.

‘Good news?’

‘Depends on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.’

‘And the other call?’

Ortega looked up at me from her bowl, chewed and swallowed. ‘The other number was a residential discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of that?’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the Bay, alongside acres of abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometre long with six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange that I assumed was rust.

‘Don’t let it fool you,’ Ortega grunted as we circled. ‘They’ve polymered the hull a quarter-metre thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink it now.’

‘Expensive.’

She shrugged. ‘They’ve got the backing.’

We landed on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomfited in equal parts by the pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realise what she was doing and pulled herself abruptly upright again.

‘No one home,’ she said awkwardly.

‘So it seems. Shall we go and have a look?’

We got out into the customary blanket-snap of wind off the Bay and made for a tubular aluminium gangway that led onto the vessel near the stern. It was uncomfortably open ground, and I crossed it with an eye constantly sweeping the railed and craned lines of the ship’s deck and bridge tower. Nothing stirred. I squeezed my left arm lightly against my side to check the Fibregrip holster hadn’t slipped down, as the cheaper varieties often did after a couple of days’ wear. With the Nemex I was tolerably sure I could air out anyone shooting at us from the rail.

In the event it wasn’t necessary. We reached the end of the gangway without incident. A slim chain was fixed across the open entrance with a hand-lettered sign hung on it.

PANAMA ROSE
FIGHT TONITE - 22.00
GATE PRICE DOUBLE

I lifted the rectangle of thin metal and looked at the crude lettering dubiously.

‘Are you sure Rutherford called here?’

‘Like I said before, don’t let it fool you.’ Ortega was unhooking the chain. ‘Fighter chic. Crude’s the in thing. Last season it was neon signs, but even that’s not cool enough now. Place is fucking globally hyped. Only about three or four like it on the planet. There’s no coverage allowed in the arenas. No holos, not even televisuals. You coming, or what?’

‘Weird.’ I followed her down the tubular corridor, thinking of the freak fights I’d gone to when I was younger. On Harlan’s World, all fights were broadcast. They got the highest viewing figures of any transmitted entertainment online. ‘Don’t people like watching this sort of stuff?’

‘Yeah, of course they do.’ Even with the distortion of the echoing corridor, I could hear Ortega’s lip curling in the tone of her voice. ‘Never get enough of it. That’s how this scam works. See, first they set up the Creed—’

‘Creed?’

‘Yeah, Creed of Purity or some such shit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to interrupt? Creed goes, you want to see the fight, you go see it in the flesh. That’s better than watching it on the web. More classy. So, limited audience seating, sky-high demand. That makes the tickets very sexy, which makes them very expensive, which makes them even more sexy and whoever thought of it just rides that spiral up through the roof.’

‘Smart.’

‘Yeah, smart.’

We came to the end of the gangway, and stepped out again onto a wind-whipped deck. On either side of us the roofing of two of the cargo cells swelled smoothly to waist height like two enormous steel blisters on the ship’s skin. Beyond the rear swelling, the bridge towered blankly into the sky, seeming entirely unconnected with the hull we were standing on. The only motion came from the chains of a loading crane ahead of us that the wind had set swinging fractionally.

‘The last time I was out here,’ said Ortega, raising her voice to compete with the wind, ‘was because some dipshit newsprick from WorldWeb One got caught trying to walk recording implants into a title fight. They threw him into the Bay. After they’d removed the implants with a pair of pliers.’

‘Nice.’

‘Like I said, it’s a classy place.’

‘Such flattery, lieutenant. I hardly know how to respond.’

The voice coughed from rusty-looking tannoy horns set on two-metre-high stalks along the rail. My hand flew to the Nemex butt, and my vision cycled out to peripheral scan with a rapidity that hurt. Ortega gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked up at the bridge. The two of us swept the superstructure for movement in opposite directions, coordinating unconsciously. Under the immediacy of the tension, I felt a warm shiver of pleasure at that unlooked-for symmetry.

‘No, no. Over here,’ said the metallic voice, this time relegated to the horns at the stern. As I watched, the chains on one of the rear loading cranes grated into motion and began to run, presumably hauling something up from the open cell in front of the bridge. I left my hand on the Nemex. Overhead, the sun was breaking through the cloud cover.

The chain ended in a massive iron hook, in the crook of which stood the speaker, one hand still holding a prehistoric tannoy microphone, the other gripped lightly around the rising chain. He was dressed in an inappropriate-looking grey suit that flapped in the wind, leaning out from the chain at a fastidious angle, hair glinting in a wandering shaft of sunlight. I narrowed my eyes to confirm. Synthetic. Cheap synthetic.

The crane swung out over the curved cover of the cargo cell and the synth alighted elegantly on the top, looking down on us.

‘Elias Ryker,’ he said, and his voice was not much smoother than the tannoy had been. Someone had done a real cut-rate job on the vocal cords. He shook his head. ‘We thought we’d seen the last of you. How short the legislature’s memory.’

‘Carnage?’ Ortega lifted a hand to shade against the sudden sunlight. ‘That you?’

The synthetic bowed faintly and stowed the tannoy mike inside his jacket. He began to pick his way down the sloping cell cover.

‘Emcee Carnage, at your service, officers. And pray what have we done to offend today?’

I said nothing. From the sound of it, I was supposed to know this Carnage, and I didn’t have enough to work with at the moment. Remembering what Ortega had told me, I fixed the approaching synth with a blank stare, and hoped I was being sufficiently Ryker-like.

The synthetic reached the edge of the cell cover and jumped down. Up close, I saw that it wasn’t only the vocal cords that were crude. This body was so far from the one Trepp had been using when I torched her, it was barely deserving of the same name. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of antique. The black hair was coarse and enamelled-looking, the face slack silicoflesh, the pale blue eyes clearly logo’d across the white. The body looked solid, but a little too solid, and the arms were slightly wrong, reminiscent of snakes rather than limbs. The hands at the ends of the cuffs were smooth and lineless. The synth offered one featureless palm, as if for inspection.

‘Well?’ he asked gently.

‘Routine check, Carnage,’ said Ortega, helping me out. ‘Been some bomb threats on tonight’s fight. We’re here to have a look.’

Carnage laughed, jarringly. ‘As if you cared.’

‘Well, like I said,’ Ortega answered evenly, ‘it’s routine.’

‘Oh well, you’d better come along then.’ The synthetic sighed and nodded at me. ‘What’s the matter with him? Did they lose his speech functions in the stack?’

We followed him towards the back of the ship and found ourselves skirting the pit formed by the rolled-back cover of the rearmost cargo cell. I glanced down inside and saw a circular white fighting ring, walled on four sides by slopes of steel and plastic seating. Banks of lighting equipment were strung above but there were none of the spiky spherical units I associated with telemetry. In the centre of the ring, someone was knelt, painting a design on the mat by hand. He looked up as we passed.

‘Thematic,’ said Carnage, seeing where I was looking. ‘Means something in Arabic. This season’s fights are all themed around Protectorate police actions. Tonight it’s Sharya. Right Hand of God Martyrs versus Protec Marines. Hand to hand, no blades over ten centimetres.’

‘Bloodbath, in other words,’ said Ortega.

The synth shrugged. ‘What the public wants, the public pays for. I understand it is possible to inflict an outright mortal wound with a ten-centimetre blade. Just very difficult. A real test of skill, they say. This way.’

We went down a narrow companionway into the body of the ship, our own footsteps clanging around us in the tight confines.

‘Arenas first, I presume,’ Carnage shouted above the echoes.

‘No, let’s see the tanks first,’ suggested Ortega.

‘Really?’ It was hard to tell with the low-grade synthetic voice, but Carnage seemed to be amused. ‘Are you quite sure it’s a bomb you’re looking for, lieutenant? It seems to me the arena would be the obvious place to—’

‘Got something to hide, Carnage?’

The synthetic turned back to look at me for a moment, quizzically. ‘No, not at all, detective Ryker. The tanks it is, then. Welcome to the conversation, by the way. Was it cold on stack? Of course, you probably never expected to be there yourself.’

‘That’s enough.’ Ortega interposed herself. ‘Just take us to the tanks and save the small talk for tonight.’

‘But of course. We aim to co-operate with law enforcement. As a legally incorporated—’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Ortega waved the verbiage away with weary patience. ‘Just take us to the fucking tanks.’

I reverted to my dangerous stare.

We rode to the tank area in a dinky little electromag train that ran along one side of the hull, through two more converted cargo cells equipped with the same fighting rings and banks of seats but this time covered over with plastic sheeting. At the far end, we disembarked and stepped through the customary sonic cleansing lock. A great deal dirtier than PsychaSec’s facilities, ostensibly made of black iron, the heavy door swung outward to reveal a spotlessly white interior.

‘At this point we dispense with image,’ said Carnage carelessly. ‘Bare bones low-tech is all very well for the audience, but behind the scenes, well,’ he gestured around at the gleaming facilities, ‘you can’t make an omelette without a little oil in the pan.’

The forward cargo section was huge and chilly, the lighting gloomy, the technology aggressively massive. Where Bancroft’s low-lit womb mausoleum at PsychaSec had spoken in soft, cultured tones of the trappings of wealth, where the re-sleeving room at the Bay City storage facility had groaned minimal funding for minimal deservers, the Panama Rose’s body bank was a brutal growl of power. The storage tubes were racked on heavy chains like torpedoes on either side of us, jacked into a central monitor system at one end of the hold via thick black cables that twisted across the floor like pythons. The monitor unit itself squatted heavily ahead of us like an altar to some unpleasant spider god. We approached it on a metal jetty raised a quarter-metre above the frozen writhings of the data cables. Behind it to left and right, set into the far wall, were the square glass sides of two spacious decanting tanks. The right-hand tank already held a sleeve, floating backlit and tethered cruciform by monitor lines.

It was like walking into the Andric cathedral in Newpest.

Carnage walked to the central monitor, turned and spread his arms rather like the sleeve above and behind him.

‘Where would you like to start? I assume you’ve brought sophisticated bomb detection equipment with you.’

Ortega ignored him. She took a couple of steps closer to the decanting tank and looked up into the wash of cool green light it cast down into the gloom. ‘This one of tonight’s whores?’ she asked.

Carnage sniffed. ‘In not so many words, it is. I do wish you’d understand the difference between what they peddle in those greasy little shops down the coast, and this.’

‘So do I,’ Ortega told him, eyes still upward on the body. ‘Where’d you get this one from, then?’

‘How should I know?’ Carnage made a show of studying the plastic nails on his right hand. ‘Oh, we have the bill of sale somewhere, if you must look. By the look of him, I’d say this one’s out of Nippon Organics, or one of the Pacific Rim combines. Does it really matter?’

I went to the wall and stared up at the floating sleeve. Slim, hard-looking and brown, with the delicately lifted Japanese eyes on the shelf of unscaleably high cheekbones, a thick, straight drift of impenetrably black hair like seaweed in the tank fluid. Gracefully flexible with the long hands of an artist, but muscled for speed combat. It was the body of a tech ninja, the body I’d dreamed about having at fifteen, on dreary rain-filled days in Newpest. It wasn’t far off the sleeve they’d given me to fight the Sharya war in. It was a variation on the sleeve I’d bought with my first big pay-off in Millsport, the sleeve I’d met Sarah in.

It was like looking at myself under glass. The self I’d built somewhere in the coils of memory that trail all the way back to childhood. Suddenly I stood, exiled into Caucasian flesh, on the wrong side of the mirror.

Carnage came up to me and slapped the glass. ‘You approve, detective Ryker?’ When I said nothing, he went on. ‘I’m sure you do, someone with your appetite for, well, brawling. The specs are quite remarkable. Reinforced chassis, the bones are all culture-grown marrow alloy jointed with polybond ligamenting, carbon-reinforced tendons, Khumalo neurachem—’

‘Got neurachem,’ I said, for something to say.

‘I know all about your neurachem, detective Ryker.’ Even through the poor-quality voice, I thought I could hear a soft, sticky delight. ‘The fightdrome scanned your specs when you were on stack. There was some talk of buying you up, you know. Physically I mean. It was thought your sleeve could be used in a humiliation bout. Faked, of course, we would never dream of the actual thing here. That would be, well, criminal.’ Carnage paused dramatically. ‘But then it was decided that humiliation fights were not the, uh, the spirit of the establishment. A lowering of tone, you understand. Not a real contest. Shame really, with all the friends you’ve made, it would have been a big crowd-puller.’

I wasn’t really listening to him, but it dawned on me that Ryker was being insulted and I pivoted away from the glass to fix Carnage with what seemed like an appropriate glare.

‘But I digress,’ the synthetic went on smoothly. ‘What I meant to say is that your neurachem is to this system as my voice is to that of Anchana Salomao. This,’ he gestured once more at the tank, ‘is Khumalo neurachem, patented by Cape Neuronics only last year. A development of almost spiritual proportions. There are no synaptic chemical amplifiers, no servo chips or implanted wiring. The system is grown in, and it responds directly to thought. Consider that, detective. No one offworld has it yet, the UN are thought to be considering a ten-year colonial embargo, though myself I doubt the efficacy of such—’

‘Carnage.’ Ortega drifted in behind him, impatiently. ‘Why haven’t you decanted the other fighter yet?’

‘But we are doing, lieutenant.’ Carnage waved one hand at the rack of body tubes on the left. From behind them came the sound of prowling heavy machinery. I peered into the gloom and made out a big automated forklift unit rolling down the rows of containers. As we watched, it locked to a stop and bright, directed lighting sprang up on its frame. The forks reached and clamped on a tube, extracting it from the chained cradle while smaller servos disconnected the cabling from it. Separation complete, the machine withdrew slightly, swivelled about and trundled back along the rows towards the empty decanting tank.

‘The system is entirely automated,’ said Carnage superfluously.

Below the tank, I now noticed a line of three circular openings, like the forward discharge ports of an IP dreadnought. The forklift rose up a little on hydraulic pistons and loaded the tube it was carrying smoothly into the centre port. The tube fitted snugly, the visible end rotating through about ninety degrees before a steel baffle slammed down over it. Its task completed, the forklift sank back down on its hydraulics and its engines died.

I watched the tank.

It seemed like a while, but in fact probably took less than a minute. A hatch broke open in the floor of the tank and a silvery shoal of bubbles erupted upwards. Drifting after them came the body. It bobbed foetally for a moment, turning this way and that in the eddies caused by the air, then its arms and legs began to unfold, aided by the gently tugging monitor wires secured at wrist and ankle. It was bigger boned than the Khumalo sleeve, blocky and more heavily muscled but similar in colour. A strong-boned, hawk-nosed visage tipped lazily towards us as the thin wires pulled it upright.

‘Sharyan Right Hand of God martyr,’ said Carnage beamingly. ‘Not really, of course, but the race type’s accurate and it’s got an authentic Will of God enhanced response system.’ He nodded at the other tank. ‘The marines on Sharya were multi-racial, but there were enough Jap-types there to make it believable.’

‘Not much of a contest, is it?’ I said. ‘State-of-the-art neurachem against century-old Sharyan biomech.’

Carnage grinned with his slack silicoflesh face. ‘Well, that will depend on the fighters. I’m told the Khumalo system takes a bit of getting used to, and to be honest it isn’t always the best sleeve that wins. It’s more about psychology. Endurance, pain tolerance . . .’

‘Savagery,’ added Ortega. ‘Lack of empathy.’

‘Things like that,’ agreed the synthetic. ‘That’s what makes it exciting, of course. If you’d care to come tonight, lieutenant, detective, I’m sure I can find you a couple of remaindered seats near the back.’

‘You’ll be commentating,’ I surmised, already hearing the specs-rich vocabulary that Carnage used come tumbling out over the tannoy, the killing ring drenched in focused white light, the roaring, surging crowd in the darkened seating, the smell of sweat and bloodlust.

‘Of course I will.’ Carnage’s logo’d eyes narrowed. ‘You haven’t been away so long, you know.’

‘Are we going to look for these bombs?’ said Ortega loudly.

It took us over an hour to go over the hold, looking for imaginary bombs, while Carnage looked on with poorly veiled amusement. Up above, the two sleeves destined for slaughter in the arena looked down on us from their green-lit glass-sided wombs, their presences weighing no less heavily for their closed eyes and dreaming visages.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ortega dropped me on Mission Street as evening was falling over the city. She’d been withdrawn and monosyllabic on the flight back from the fightdrome, and I guessed the strain of reminding herself I was not Ryker was beginning to take a toll. But when I made a production of brushing off my shoulders as I got out of the cruiser, she laughed impulsively.

‘Stick around the Hendrix tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There’s someone I want you to talk to, but it’ll take a while to set up.’

‘Fair enough.’ I turned to go.

‘Kovacs.’

I turned back. She was leaning across to look up and out of the open door at me. I put an arm on the uplifted door wing of the cruiser and looked down. There was a longish pause during which I could feel my blood beginning to adrenalise gently.

‘Yes?’

She hesitated a moment longer, then said, ‘Carnage was hiding something back there, right?’

‘From the amount he talked, I’d say yes.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ She prodded hurriedly at the control console and the door began to slide back down. ‘See you tomorrow.’

I watched the cruiser into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn’t expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attraction between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists interviewed appeared to really understand the process, but there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting the effect had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.

Chemicals. I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft and I didn’t need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms, I didn’t need this.

Up ahead, over the heads of the evening’s scattered pedestrians, I saw the holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed again and started walking.

Halfway up the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the kerb. It looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport, so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in the machine’s image cast.

... from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses . . .

The voices groaned and murmured, male, female, overlaid. It was like a choir in the throes of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impressions.

Genuine . . .

Uncut . . .

Full sense repro . . .

Tailored . . .

As if to prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high-tech.

The flow ended with a phone number in glowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel her fingers.

Head in the Clouds, she breathed. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here, but you can certainly afford this.

Her head dipped, her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its cast radius.

I found I could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.

The sweat cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long, low limousine parked outside the Hendrix’s front doors.

Jangling nerves sent my hand leaping towards the holstered Nemex before I recognised the vehicle as Bancroft’s. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine and ascertained that the driver’s compartment was empty. I was still wondering what to do when the rear compartment hatch cracked open and Curtis unfolded himself from the seating inside.

‘We need to talk, Kovacs,’ he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. ‘Decision time.’

I looked him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanour that he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humour him.

‘Sure. In the limo?’

‘’S cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?’

My eyes narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur’s voice, and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I remembered distinctly that Bancroft’s limo had shielding against the street ’casts. This was something else.

I nodded at the hotel entrance.

‘OK, let’s go.’

The doors parted to let us in and the Hendrix came to life.

‘Good evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening -’

Curtis snorted. ‘Disappointed, hah, Kovacs?’

‘- nor any calls since you left.’ The hotel continued smoothly. ‘Do you wish this person admitted as a guest.’

‘Yeah, sure. You got a bar we can go to?’

‘I said your room,’ growled Curtis, behind me, then yelped as he barked his shin on one of the lobby’s low metal-edged tables.

‘The Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,’ said the hotel doubtfully, ‘but has not been used for a considerable time.’

‘I said—’

‘Shut up, Curtis. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.’

Across the lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid grudgingly aside and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis making sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.

‘This’ll do fine. Come on.’

Someone overliteral in imagination had done the interior decoration of the Midnight Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces showing either the declared hour or a few minutes to, interwoven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters. There was indented bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables and in the centre of the room a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial’s twelve mark.

It was all the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made our way towards the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis’s earlier mood quieten a little.

‘What will it be, gentlemen?’ said the machine unexpectedly, from no apparent vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analogue clock with spider-thin baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.

‘Vodka,’ he said shortly. ‘Subzero.’

‘And a whisky. Whatever it is I’ve been drinking out of the cabinet in my room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.’

The clock face inclined slightly and one multi-jointed arm swung up to select glasses from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.

Curtis picked up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at my own glass a little more circumspectly, wondering how long it had been since liquid last flowed through the bar’s tubes and spigots. My fears proved unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whisky melt its way down into my stomach.

Curtis banged down his glass.

‘Now you ready to talk?’

‘All right, Curtis,’ I said slowly, looking into my drink. ‘I imagine you have a message for me.’

‘Sure have.’ His voice was cranked to snapping point. ‘The lady says, you going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I’m supposed to give you time to make up your mind, so I’ll finish my drink.’

I fixed my gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis’s mood was beginning to make some sense.

‘Muscling in on your territory, am I?’

‘Don’t push your luck, Kovacs.’ There was a desperate edge to the words. ‘You say the wrong thing here, and I’ll—’

‘You’ll what?’ I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than half my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was maddening. I wanted to shake him. ‘You’ll what?’

Curtis gulped. ‘I was in the provincial marines.’

‘What as, a pin-up?’ I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand, then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. ‘Listen, Curtis. Don’t do this to us both.’

‘You think you’re pretty fucking tough, don’t you?’

‘This isn’t about tough, C—urtis.’ I’d almost called him kid. It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. ‘This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis. It’s not the same.’

He came for me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while the following roundhouse kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly overdramatic. Maybe it was the chemicals he’d dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind throws kicks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick in the same movement and grabbed his foot. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped, staggered and landed spreadeagled on the bar top. I smashed his face against the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.

‘See what I mean?’

He made muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar’s surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing stopped.

‘Good. Now you keep still or I’ll break it. I’m not in the mood for this.’ As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. ‘Aha. So what little delights have we got tubing round your system tonight? Hormone enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.’ I held the tube up to the dim light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. ‘Military format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the marines, was it?’ I recommenced my search and came up with the delivery system: a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a magnetic coil. Tip the crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from Sarah’s shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy, and consequently very popular, alternative to hyposprays.

I hauled Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet, clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.

‘You want to tip your head back to stop that,’ I told him. ‘Go ahead, I’m not going to hurt you again.’

‘Botherfucker!’

I held up the crystals and the little gun. ‘Where did you get these?’

‘Suck by prick, Kovacs.’ Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself, trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse’s. ‘I’b dot tellig you a fuckig thig.’

‘Fair enough.’ I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for a couple of seconds. ‘Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.’

He stared back at me in silence.

‘Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.’

The silence stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of power come true.

I shrugged. ‘In case you hadn’t guessed already, the answer to the lady’s question is no. I’m not interested. There, that should make you happy, and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn’t dosed yourself to the eyes it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you very much, the offer is appreciated, but there’s too much going on here to walk away from. Tell her I’m starting to enjoy it.’

There was a slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited, crimson-haired figure on the stairs.

‘Am I interrupting something?’ the mohican enquired. The voice was slow and relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.

I picked up my drink from the bar. ‘Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the party. What’ll you have?’

‘Overproof rum,’ said the cop, drifting over to us. ‘If they’ve got it. Small glass.’

I raised a finger at the clock face. The bartender produced a square-cut glass from somewhere and filled it with a deep red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis, sparing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long arm.

‘Appreciated.’ He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. ‘Not bad. I’d like a word with you, Kovacs. In private.’

We both glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.

‘You do that?’ he asked casually.

I nodded. ‘Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting someone.’

‘Well, I’m glad he ain’t protecting me.’

‘Like I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.’

‘Hell, you don’t need to explain yourself to me.’ The cop leaned on the bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay City storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. ‘He feels aggrieved enough, he can press charges and we’ll play back some more of this place’s memory.’

‘Got your warrant, then?’ I put the question with a lightness I didn’t feel.

‘Almost. Always takes a while with the legal department. Fucking AIs. Look, I wanted to apologise for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they’re fundamentally OK.’

I waved my glass laterally. ‘Forget it.’

‘Good. I’m Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Ortega’s partner most of the time.’ He drained his glass and grinned at me. ‘Loosely attached, I should point out.’

‘Noted.’ I signalled the bartender for refills. ‘Tell me something. You guys all go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?’

‘Same hairdresser.’ Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. ‘Old guy up on Fulton. Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store. It’s the only goddamn style he knows, but he’s a nice old guy and he’s cheap. One of us started going there a few years back, he gave us discounts. You know how it is.’

‘But not Ortega?’

‘Ortega cuts her own hair.’ Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. ‘Got a little holocast scanner, says it improves her spatial coordination or some such shit.’

‘Different.’

‘Yeah, she is.’ Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. ‘It’s her I’m here about.’

‘Oh-oh. Is this going to be a friendly warning?’

Bautista pulled a face. ‘Well, it’s going to be friendly, whatever you call it. I ain’t looking for a broken nose.’

I laughed despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.

‘Thing is, it’s tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and Ryker were real close. She’s been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now, and on a lieutenant’s pay that ain’t an easy thing to do. Never figured on an overbid like that fucker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker ain’t exactly young and he never was a beauty.’

‘Got neurachem,’ I pointed out.

‘Oh, sure. Got neurachem.’ Bautista waved an arm with largesse. ‘You tried it yet?’

‘Couple of times.’

‘Like dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?’

‘It’s a little rough,’ I admitted.

This time we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His face grew serious.

‘I ain’t trying to lean on you. All I’m saying is, go easy. This ain’t exactly what she needs right now.’

‘Me neither,’ I said feelingly. ‘This isn’t even my fucking planet.’

Bautista looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. ‘Harlan’s World’s a lot different to this, I guess.’

‘You guess right. Look, I don’t mean to be unsubtle, but hasn’t anyone pointed out to Ortega that Ryker’s as gone for good as it gets without real death? She’s not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is she?’

The cop looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You heard about Ryker, huh?’

‘I know he’s down for the double barrel. I know what he went down for.’

Bautista got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It can’t be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I regretted what I’d said.

Local colour. Soak it up.

‘You want to sit down?’ said the cop unhappily, casting around for bar stools that had evidently been removed at some stage. ‘Over in the booths, maybe? This’ll take a while to tell.’

We settled at one of the clock face tables and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like Ortega, he looked surprised.

‘I quit.’

‘In that sleeve?’ Bautista’s eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil of fragrant blue smoke. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. You were going to tell me about Ryker.’

‘Ryker,’ the cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back, ‘was working with the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They’re quite a sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain’t so easy to steal a whole sleeve intact and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There’s some crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.’

‘Oh?’ I said neutrally.

Bautista nodded. ‘Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare parts sale. But I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.’

‘Must have happened as I was walking out the door.’

‘Yeah, well anyway. Back in the winter of ’09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High level corruption. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.’

‘Nice.’

‘In the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.’

‘And did he? Make a difference, I mean?’

Bautista puffed out his cheeks. ‘He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgement went all to pieces.’

‘You don’t approve?’

‘Hey, what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.’

‘Did she?’ I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. ‘I thought she brought him in.’

‘Where’d you hear that?’

‘Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?’

‘Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.’

‘Ohhh.’

‘Yeah, ain’t that a laser up the ass.’ Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. ‘She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the IAD charges.’

‘From what I heard, they had him cold.’

‘Yeah, your source got that bit right.’ The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. ‘Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up by some high ranking asshole who took a fall back in ’09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.’

‘But you don’t buy it?’

‘I’d like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.’ Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. ‘I think Ryker got carried away.’

‘Blam, blam, blam?’

‘Something like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before, he’s right on the line most of the time. One slip.’ There was an old terror in Bautista’s eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. ‘With some of these turds, it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what happened.’

‘My source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty fucking careless.’

Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. ‘What Ortega says. But it won’t wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.

‘Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle PD wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.’

‘Or in a real hurry.’

Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was definitely a little drunk now. ‘There you go. The way IAD read it, Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a ‘‘do not disturb’’ sign on their stacks. Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with a plasma gun.’

‘Was it true?’

‘About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?’

‘What did Ryker say?’

‘He said he didn’t do it.’

‘Just that?’

‘Nah, it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.’ Bautista shrugged blearily. ‘They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn’t do it face to face. Virtual link.’

‘Which can be faked. Easily.’

‘Yeah.’ Bautista looked pleased. ‘But then, this guy says he’s done work for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too. Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle PD didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said.’

‘A hundred and twenty-four holes,’ I muttered.

‘Yep. That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.’

‘It could have been a set-up.’

‘Yeah, it could have been.’ Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got angry. ‘Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you, shit, sorry, the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke there was no one there to catch him.’

‘So Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down, and when they lose . . .’ I nodded to myself. ‘When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?’

‘Got it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc spinning.’ Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. ‘Like I said, it’s tearing her up.’

We sat quietly for a while.

‘You know,’ said Bautista finally. ‘I think I’m going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.’

‘Just part of living in the modern age,’ I told him, knocking back my drink.

‘Yeah, I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention the scumbags.’

‘So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?’

Bautista frowned. ‘That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.’

‘Sure. Sorry.’ I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren’t supposed to slip like that. ‘I’m a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.’

‘No thanks.’ Bautista drained what was left in his glass. ‘Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.’

‘Sounds like I should have been an old cop.’ I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol. ‘You can see yourself out OK, I guess.’

‘Sure.’ Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back. He frowned with concentration. ‘Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.’

I gestured him away. ‘You were never here,’ I assured him.

He grinned bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. ‘Right. Good. See you round, probably.’

‘See you.’

I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘You know anything about synamorphesterone?’

‘Heard of it.’ Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was still damp from the tide’s retreat, and our footprints welled soggily behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

‘Well, since we’re waiting, you want to fill me in?’

‘Harem drug.’ When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She was acting like someone who hadn’t slept well.

‘I’m not from here.’

‘You were on Sharya, you told me.’

‘Yeah. In a military capacity. There wasn’t all that much time for cultural awareness. We were too busy killing people.’

This last wasn’t quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate. Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infiltrated and then crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process we’d learnt quite a lot about local culture.

I’d asked for an early transfer out.

Ortega shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She sighed. ‘It’s a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it Stallion, in the south it’s Toro. We don’t get much of it here, street mood’s more ambient. Which I’m glad about. From what I hear it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?’

‘Sort of.’ This was pretty much what I’d learnt from the Hendrix database last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis’s behaviour ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model. ‘Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick it up. Easily, I mean.’

Ortega gave me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand. ‘Like I said, we don’t get much of it here,’ she said in time with her laboured, sinking footsteps. ‘You’d have to ask around. Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesised locally. But I don’t know. With designer hormones that’s likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south.’

She paused at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

‘Where the hell is she?’

‘Maybe she’s not coming,’ I suggested morosely. I hadn’t slept all that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista’s departure had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega’s call. It was still obscenely early in the morning.

‘She’ll come,’ said Ortega. ‘The link’s booked through to her personal pick-up. Call’s probably delayed at incoming security. We’ve only been in here about ten seconds, real time.’

I shivered in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

‘Got any cigarettes?’

I was seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega’s arm. The motion resolved itself into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface vehicle that was tearing round the curve of the beach towards us.

‘Told you she’d come.’

‘Or someone would,’ I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in their constructs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my time here.

The vehicle was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approaching craft impassively at my side.

‘Bit excessive for a phone call, isn’t it?’ I said nastily.

Ortega shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. ‘Money doesn’t automatically mean taste,’ she said.

The speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent pink. It was ploughing along through the shallow surf at the water’s edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred metres away the pilot must have seen us because the little craft veered out across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height towards us.

‘Pink? ’

Ortega shrugged again.

The ground jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.

The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a generously sculpted mouth.

The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.

‘Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,’ said Ortega formally. ‘Ms Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.’

The large eyes appraised me frankly.

‘You’re from offworld?’ she asked me.

‘That’s correct. Harlan’s World.’

‘Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.’ There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. ‘I can only hope that means you have an open mind.’

‘Open to what?’

‘The truth.’ Begin gave me a surprised look. ‘Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?’

Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

‘What’s all this about the truth?’ I asked, catching her up.

‘You have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft, ’ she said intensely, without looking round. ‘You wish to know the truth of what transpired the night he died. Is this not so?’

‘You don’t think it was suicide, then?’

‘Do you?’

‘I asked first.’

I saw a faint smile cross her lips. ‘No. I don’t.’

‘Let me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.’

Leila Begin stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. ‘Are you mocking me, Mr Kovacs?’

There was something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the spot. I shook my head.

‘No, I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Have you met Miriam Bancroft?’

‘Briefly, yes.’

‘You found her charming, no doubt.’

I shrugged evasively. ‘A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would do it.’

Begin looked me in the eyes. ‘She is a psychopath,’ she said seriously.

She resumed walking. After a moment I followed her.

‘Psychopath’s not a narrow term any more,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ve heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.’

‘Mr Kovacs.’ There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. ‘Miriam Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant and murdered my unborn child. She was aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven months pregnant?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.’

‘Kind of hard to legislate.’

Begin looked at me sidelong. ‘In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr Kovacs? Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are you acquainted with that?’

‘I think so,’ I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.

‘Then you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical stacks are fitted after birth.’

‘Where I come from too.’

‘I lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.’

I couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.

‘That doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.’

‘Of course it does.’ Begin favoured me with the sidelong glance again, and there was another bitter smile on her face. ‘I was not an isolated incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?’

‘In Oakland, I heard.’

The smile blossomed into a hard laugh. ‘Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me in Oakland. He met me at what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr Kovacs. That’s what made him hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why he would have stopped afterwards.’

‘So Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?’

‘She’s capable of it.’

‘I’m sure she is.’ Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I knew to this woman. ‘You harbour no feelings about Bancroft himself, I suppose? Good or bad.’

The smile again. ‘I was a whore, Mr Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the client wants them to feel. There’s no room for anything else.’

‘You telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?’

‘You telling me you can’t?’ she retorted.

‘All right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?’

She stopped and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her face had gone mask-like with remembrance.

‘Animal abandonment,’ she said finally. ‘And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.’

‘And what do you feel now?’

‘Now?’ Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. ‘Now I feel nothing, Mr Kovacs.’

‘You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.’

Begin made a dismissive gesture. ‘The lieutenant asked me to.’

‘Very public-spirited of you.’

The woman’s gaze came back to me. ‘You know what happened after my miscarriage?’

‘I heard you were paid off.’

‘Yes. Unpleasant-sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favours.’

‘And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?’

‘What revenge?’ Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. ‘I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.’

‘No one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.’

Begin looked at me sadly.

‘You are not from here,’ she said. ‘And it shows.’

Begin’s call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time rented out of a Chinatown forum provider. Cheap, Ortega told me on the way in, and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one’s listening.

It was also cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the pagoda’s middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square metres of fused sand flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a waiting area, natural light and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of the service cubicles. The trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp upright angle to economise on floor space and surrounded on all sides by blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, troded up and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

Returning from the wide open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momentary flashback to Harlan’s World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two pneumatically-breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a night-time cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the ratio and resolution went up, and the scenarios got more imaginative, but the thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the trodes on your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

‘Kovacs?’

I blinked and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

‘So what do you think?’

‘I think she’s full of shit.’ I raised my hands to forestall Ortega’s outburst. ‘No, listen, I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary. I’ve got no argument with that. But there are about half a hundred reasons why she doesn’t fit the bill. Ortega, you polygraphed her for fuck’s sake.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Ortega followed me down the corridor. ‘But that’s what I’ve been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that test. I mean, it’s witness-mandatory anyway, but she was demanding it practically as soon as I got to the scene. No weeping partner shit, not even a tear, she just slammed into the incident cruiser and asked for the wires.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m thinking about that stuff you pulled with Rutherford. You said if they polygraphed you while you were doing that, you wouldn’t register, now—’

‘Ortega, that’s Envoy conditioning. Pure mind discipline. It’s not physical. You can’t buy stuff like that off the rack at SleeveMart.’

‘Miriam Bancroft wears state-of-the-art Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff—’

‘Do Nakamura do something that’ll beat a police polygraph?’

‘Not officially.’

‘Well there you—’

‘Don’t be so fucking obtuse. You never heard of custom biochem?’

I paused at the foot of the stairs up to reception and shook my head. ‘I don’t buy it. Torch her husband with a weapon only she and he have access to. No one’s that stupid.’

We went upstairs, Ortega at my heels.

‘Think about it, Kovacs. I’m not saying it was premeditated -’

‘And what about the remote storage? It was a pointless crime -’

‘- not saying it was even rational, but you’ve got to—’

‘- got to be someone who didn’t know—’

‘Fuck! Kovacs!’

Ortega’s voice, up a full octave.

We were into the reception zone by now. Still two clients waiting on the left, a man and a woman deep in discussion of a large paper-wrapped package. On the right a peripheral flicker of crimson where there should have been none. I was looking at blood.

The ancient Asian receptionist was dead, throat cut with something that glinted metallic deep within the wound around her neck. Her head rested in a shiny pool of her own blood on the desk in front of her.

My hand leapt for the Nemex. Beside me, I heard the snap as Ortega chambered the first slug in her Smith & Wesson. I swung towards the two waiting clients and their paper-wrapped package.

Time turned dreamlike. The neurachem made everything impossibly slow, separate images drifting to the floor of my vision like autumn leaves.

The package had fallen apart. The woman was holding a compact Sunjet, the man a machine pistol. I cleared the Nemex and started firing from the hip.

The door to the gantry burst open and another figure stood in the opening, brandishing a pistol in each fist.

Beside me, Ortega’s Smith & Wesson boomed and blew the new arrival back through the door like a reversed film sequence of his entrance.

My first shot ruptured the headrest of the woman’s seat, showering her with white padding. The Sunjet sizzled, the beam went wide. The second slug exploded her head and turned the drifting white flecks red.

Ortega yelled in fury. She was still firing, upward my peripheral sense told me. Somewhere above us, her shots splintered glass.

The machine gunner had struggled to his feet. I registered the bland features of a synth and put a pair of slugs into him. He staggered back against the wall, still raising the gun. I dived for the floor.

The dome above our heads smashed inward. Ortega yelled something and I rolled sideways. A body tumbled bonelessly head over feet onto the ground next to me.

The machine pistol cut loose, aimless. Ortega yelled again and flattened herself on the floor. I rolled upright on the lap of the dead woman and shot the synthetic again, three times in rapid succession. The gunfire choked off.

Silence.

I swung the Nemex left and right, covering the corners of the room and the front door. The jagged edges of the smashed dome above. Nothing.

‘Ortega?’

‘Yeah, fine.’ She was sprawled on the other side of the room, propping herself up on one elbow. There was a tightness in her voice that belied her words. I swayed to my feet and made my way across to her, footsteps crunching on broken glass.

‘Where’s it hurt?’ I demanded, crouching to help her sit up.

‘Shoulder. Fucking bitch got me with the Sunjet.’

I stowed the Nemex and looked at the wound. The beam had carved a long diagonal furrow across the back of Ortega’s jacket and clipped through the left shoulder pad at the top. The meat beneath the pad was cooked, seared down to the bone in a narrow line at the centre.

‘Lucky,’ I said with forced lightness. ‘You hadn’t ducked, it would have been your head.’

‘I wasn’t ducking, I was fucking falling over.’

‘Good enough. You want to stand up?’

‘What do you think?’ Ortega levered herself to her knees on her uninjured arm and then stood. She grimaced at the movement of her jacket against the wound. ‘Fuck, that stings.’

‘I think that’s what the guy in the doorway said.’

Leaning on me, she turned to stare, eyes centimetres away. I deadpanned it, and the laughter broke across her face like a sunrise. She shook her head.

‘Jesus, Kovacs, you are one sick motherfucker. They teach you to tell post-firefight jokes in the Corps or is it just you?’

I guided her towards the exit. ‘Just me. Come on, let’s get you some fresh air.’

Behind us, there was a sudden flailing sound. I jerked around and saw the synthetic sleeve staggering upright. Its head was smashed and disfigured where my last shot had torn the side of the skull off, and the gun hand was spasmed open at the end of a stiff, blood-streaked right arm, but the other arm was flexing, hand curling into a fist. The synth stumbled against the chair, righted itself and came towards us, dragging its right leg.

I drew the Nemex and pointed it.

‘Fight’s over,’ I advised.

The slack face grinned at me. Another halting step. I frowned.

‘For Christ’s sake, Kovacs,’ Ortega was fumbling for her own weapon. ‘Get it over with.’

I snapped off a shot and the shell punched the synth backwards onto the glass-strewn floor. It twisted a couple of times, then lay still but breathing sluggishly. As I watched it, fascinated, a gurgling laugh arose from its mouth.

‘That’s fucking enough,’ it coughed, and laughed again. ‘Eh, Kovacs? That’s fucking enough.’

The words held me in shock for the space of a heartbeat, then I wheeled and made for the door, dragging Ortega with me.

‘Wha—’

‘Out. Get the fuck out.’ I thrust her through the door ahead of me and grabbed the railing outside. The dead pistoleer lay twisted on the walkway ahead. I shoved Ortega again and she vaulted the body awkwardly. Slamming the door after me, I followed her at a run.

We were almost to the end of the gantry when the dome behind us detonated in a geyser of glass and steel. I distinctly heard the door come off its hinges behind us, and then the blast picked us both up like discarded coats and threw us down the stairs into the street.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The police are more impressive by night.

First of all you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic colour into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. Then there’s the sound of the sirens on the night, like an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of dimly lit bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely nothing to see beyond this and people will still watch for hours.

Nine o’clock on a workday morning it’s a different matter. A couple of cruisers turned up in response to Ortega’s call in but their lights and sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The uniformed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and shepherded customers out of the neighbouring businesses, while Ortega persuaded the bank’s private security not to arrest me as a possible accessory to the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.

I sat the whole thing out on the kerb opposite, checking over the superficial injuries I’d acquired on my short flight down from the gantry to the street. Mostly, it was bruising and abrasions. The shape of the forum provider’s reception area had channelled most of the blast directly upwards through the roof and that was the route the bulk of the shrapnel had taken as well. We’d been very lucky.

Ortega left the clutch of uniformed officers gathered outside the bank and strode across to the street towards me. She had removed her jacket and there was a long white smear of tissue weld congealing over her shoulder wound. She held her discarded shoulder holster dangling in one hand and her breasts moved beneath the thin cotton of a white T-shirt that bore the legend You Have The Right To Remain Silent - Why Don’t You Try It For A While? She seated herself next to me on the kerb.

‘Forensic wagon’s on the way,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘You reckon we’ll get anything useful out of the wreckage?’

I looked at the smouldering ruin of the dome and shook my head.

‘There’ll be bodies, maybe even stacks intact, but those guys were just local street muscle. All they’ll tell you is that the synth hired them, probably for half a dozen ampoules of tetrameth each.’

‘Yeah, they were kind of sloppy, weren’t they?’

I felt a smile ghost across my lips. ‘Kind of. But then I don’t think they were even supposed to get us.’

‘Just keep us busy till your pal blew up, huh?’

‘Something like that.’

‘The way I figure it, the detonator was wired into his vital signs, right? You snuff him and boom, he takes you with him. Me too. And the cheap hired help.’

‘And wipes out his own stack and sleeve.’ I nodded. ‘Tidy, isn’t it?’

‘So what went wrong?’

I rubbed absently at the scar under my eye. ‘He overestimated me. I was supposed to kill him outright, but I missed. Probably would have killed himself at that stage, but I messed up his arm trying to stop the machine pistol.’ In my mind’s eye the gun drops from splayed fingers and skitters across the floor. ‘Blew it way out of his reach as well. He must have been lying there, willing himself to die when he heard us leaving. Wonder what make of synth he was using.’

‘Whoever it was, they can have an endorsement from me any day of the week,’ said Ortega cheerfully. ‘Maybe there’ll be something left for forensics after all.’

‘You know who it was, don’t you?’

‘He called you Kov—’

‘It was Kadmin.’

There was a short silence. I watched the smoke curling up from the ruined dome. Ortega breathed in, out.

‘Kadmin’s in the store.’

‘Not any more he isn’t.’ I glanced sideways at her. ‘You got a cigarette?’

She passed me the packet wordlessly. I shook one out, fitted it into the corner of my mouth, touched the ignition patch to the end and drew deeply. The movements happened as one, reflex conditioned over years like a macro of need. I didn’t have to consciously do anything. The smoke curling into my lungs was like a breath of the perfume you remember an old lover wearing.

‘He knew me.’ I exhaled. ‘And he knew his Quellist history too. ‘‘That’s fucking enough’’ is what a Quellist guerrilla called Iffy Deme said when she died under interrogation during the Unsettlement on Harlan’s World. She was wired with internal explosives and she brought the house down. Sound familiar? Now who do we know who can swap Quell quotes like a Millsport native?’

‘He’s in the fucking store, Kovacs. You can’t get someone out of the store without—’

‘Without an AI. With an AI, you can do it. I’ve seen it done. Core command on Adoracion did it with our prisoners of war, like that.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Like hooking elephant rays off a spawning reef.’

‘As easy as that?’ Ortega said ironically.

I sucked down some more smoke and ignored her. ‘You remember when we were in virtual with Kadmin, we got that lightning effect across the sky?’

‘Didn’t see it. No, wait, yeah. I thought it was a glitch.’

‘It wasn’t. It touched him. Reflected in the table. That’s when he promised to kill me.’ I turned towards her and grinned queasily. The memory of Kadmin’s virtual entity was clear and monstrous. ‘You want to hear a genuine first generation Harlan’s World myth? An offworld fairy story?’

‘Kovacs, even with an AI, they’d need—’

‘Want to hear the story?’

Ortega shrugged, winced and nodded. ‘Sure. Can I have my cigarettes back?’

I tossed her the pack and waited while she kindled the cigarette. She plumed smoke out across the street. ‘Go on, then.’

‘Right. Where I come from originally, Newpest, used to be a textile town. There’s a plant on Harlan’s World called belaweed, grows in the sea and on most shorelines too. Dry it out, treat it with chemicals and you can make something like cotton from it. During the Settlement Newpest was the belacotton capital of the World. Conditions in the mills were pretty bad even back then, and when the Quellists turned everything upside down it got worse. The belacotton industry went into decline and there was massive unemployment, unrelieved poverty and fuck all the Unsettlers could do about it. They were revolutionaries, not economists.’

‘Same old song, huh?’

‘Well, familiar tune anyway. Some pretty horrible stories came out of the textile slums around that time. Stuff like the Threshing Sprites, the Cannibal of Kitano Street.’

Ortega drew on her cigarette and widened her eyes. ‘Charming.’

‘Yeah, well, bad times. So you get the story of Mad Ludmila the seamstress. This is one they used to tell to kids to make them do their chores and come home before dark. Mad Ludmila had a failing belacotton mill and three children who never helped her out. They used to stay out late, playing the arcades across town and sleep all day. So one day, the story goes, Ludmila flips out.’

‘She wasn’t already mad, then?’

‘No, just a bit stressed.’

‘You called her Mad Ludmila.’

‘That’s what the story’s called.’

‘But if she wasn’t mad at the beginning—’

‘Do you want to hear this story or not?’

Ortega’s mouth quirked at the corner. She waved me on with her cigarette.

‘The story goes, one evening as her children were getting ready to go out, she spiked their coffee with something and when they were semi-conscious, but still aware, mind you, she drove them out to Mitcham’s Point and threw them into the threshing tanks one by one. They say you could hear the screams right across the swamp.’

‘Mh-mmmm.’

‘Of course, the police were suspicious -’

‘Really?’

‘- but they couldn’t prove anything. Couple of the kids had been into some nasty chemicals, they were jerking around with the local yakuza, no one was really surprised when they disappeared.’

‘Is there a point to this story?’

‘Yeah. See, Ludmila got rid of her fucking useless children, but it didn’t really help. She still needed someone to man the curing vats, to haul the belaweed up and down the mill stairs, and she was still broke. So what did she do?’

‘Something gory, I imagine.’

I nodded. ‘What she did, she picked the bits of her mangled kids out of the thresher and stitched them into a huge three-metre-tall carcass. And then, on a night sacred to the dark powers, she invoked a Tengu to—’

‘A what?’

‘A Tengu. It’s a sort of mischief-maker, a demon I guess you’d call it. She invoked the Tengu to animate the carcass, and then she stitched it in.’

‘What, when it wasn’t looking?’

‘Ortega, it’s a fairy story. She stitched the soul of the Tengu inside, but she promised to release it if it served her will nine years. Nine’s a sacred number in the Harlanite pantheons, so she was as bound to the agreement as the Tengu. Unfortunately -’

‘Ah.’

‘- Tengu are not known for their patience, and I don’t suppose old Ludmila was the easiest person to work for either. One night, not a third of the way through the contract, the Tengu turned on her and tore her apart. Some say it was Kishimo-jin’s doing, that she whispered terrible incitements into the Tengu’s ear at—’

‘Kishimo Gin?’

‘Kishimo-jin, the divine protectress of children. It was her revenge on Ludmila for the death of the children. That’s one version, there’s another that—’ I picked up Ortega’s mutinous expression out of the corner of my eye and hurried on. ‘Well, anyway, the Tengu tore her apart, but in so doing it locked itself into the spell and was condemned to remain imprisoned in the carcass. And now, with the original invoker of the spell dead, and worse still, betrayed, the carcass began to rot. A piece here, a piece there, but irreversibly. And so the Tengu was driven to prowling the streets and mills of the textile quarter, looking for fresh meat to replace the rotting portions of its body. It always killed children, because the parts it needed to replace were child-sized, but however many times it sewed new flesh to the carcass—’

‘It’d learnt to sew, then?’

‘Tengu are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.’

I fell silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.

‘Your mother tell you that story?’

‘Father. When I was five.’

She looked at the end of her cigarette. ‘Nice.’

‘No. He wasn’t. But that’s another story.’ I stood up and looked down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers. ‘Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was working for, he’s working for himself now.’

‘How?’ Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. ‘OK, an AI could tunnel into the Bay City PD stack. I’ll buy that. But we’re talking about microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to Sacramento.’

‘Microsecond’s all it needed.’

‘But Kadmin isn’t on stack. They’d need to know when he was being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need . . .’

She stopped as she saw it coming.

‘Me.’ I finished for her. ‘They’d need me.’

‘But you—’

‘I’m going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.’ I spun my cigarette into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth. ‘Today, maybe tomorrow too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.’

Ortega pulled a sour face. ‘You telling me to go undercover in my own city?’

‘Not telling you to do anything.’ I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the half-spent magazine with actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been. The clip went into my jacket pocket. ‘I’m giving you the state of play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you can be traced to either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.’ I nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. ‘Anybody down there with decent implants could have this conversation focused and amped.’

‘Jesus.’ She blew out her cheeks. ‘That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.’

‘Don’t tell me that. I used to do this for a living.’

She thought about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the cigarette packet. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into the Nemex, eyes still scanning the crowd.

‘There you go.’ Ortega tossed me the packet. ‘That’s a discreet destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay area and it’ll take you there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back to business as usual.’

I caught the packet left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers and put it away in my jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and stuffed the pistol back into its holster.

‘Tell me that when you’ve checked the stack,’ I said, and started walking.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I walked south.

Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The weather above the traffic flow was on the change, grey cloud cover racing in from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I left the cabs alone. Go primitive, Virginia Vidaura would have said. With an AI gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic plane. Of course, on a battlefield that’s a lot more easily done. Plenty of mud and chaos to hide in. A modern city - unbombed - is a logistical nightmare for this kind of evasion. Every building, every vehicle, every street is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the datahounds.

I found a battered-looking currency dispenser and replenished my thinning sheaf of plastified notes from it. Then I backed up two blocks and went east until I found a public callbox. I searched through my pockets, came up with a card, settled the call trodes on my head and dialled.

There was no image. No sound of connection. This was an internal chip. The voice spoke brusquely out of a blank screen.

‘Who is this?’

‘You gave me your card,’ I said, ‘in case of anything major. Well, now it seems there’s something pretty fucking major we need to talk about, doctor.’

There was an audible click as she swallowed, just once, and then her voice was there again, level and cool. ‘We should meet. I assume you don’t want to come to the facility.’

‘You assume right. You know the red bridge?’

‘The Golden Gate, it’s called,’ she said dryly. ‘Yes, I’m familiar with it.’

‘Be there at eleven. Northbound carriageway. Come alone.’

I cut the connection. Dialled again.

‘Bancroft residence, with whom do you wish to speak?’ A severely-suited woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of Angin Chandra’s pilot cuts arrived on the screen a fraction after she started speaking.

‘Laurens Bancroft, please.’

‘Mr Bancroft is in conference at present.’

That made it even easier. ‘Fine. When he’s available, can you tell him Takeshi Kovacs called.’

‘Would you like to speak to Mrs Bancroft? She has left instructions that—’

‘No,’ I said rapidly. ‘That won’t be necessary. Please tell Mr Bancroft that I shall be out of contact for a few days, but that I will call him from Seattle. That’s all.’

I cut the connection, and checked my watch. There was about an hour and forty minutes left of the time I’d given myself to be on the bridge. I went looking for a bar.

I’m stacked, backed up and I’m fifth dan
And I’m not afraid of the Patchwork Man

The small coin of urchin rhyme gleamed up at me from the silted bed of my childhood.

But I was afraid.

The rain still hadn’t set in when we got onto the approach road to the bridge, but the clouds were massing sullenly above and the windscreen was splattered with heavy droplets too few to trigger the truck’s wipers. I watched the rust-coloured structure looming up ahead through the distortion of the exploded raindrops and knew I was going to get soaked.

There was no traffic on the bridge. The suspension towers rose like the bones of some incalculably huge dinosaur above deserted asphalt lanes and side gantries lined with unidentifiable detritus.

‘Slow down,’ I told my companion as we passed under the first tower, and the heavy vehicle braked with uncalled for force. I glanced sideways. ‘Take it easy. I told you, this is a no-risk gig. I’m just meeting someone.’

Graft Nicholson gave me a bleary look from the driver’s seat, and a breath of stale alcohol came with it.

‘Yeah, sure. You hand out this much plastique on drivers every week, right? Just pick them out of Licktown bars for charity?’

I shrugged. ‘Believe what you want. Just keep your speed down. You can drive as fast as you like after you let me out.’

Nicholson shook his tangled head. ‘This is fucked, man—’

‘There. Standing on the walkway. Drop me there.’ There was a solitary figure leaning on the rail up ahead, apparently contemplating the view of the bay. Nicholson frowned with concentration and hunched the vastly outsized shoulders for which, presumably, he was named. The battered truck drifted sedately but not quite smoothly across two lanes and came to a bumpy halt beside the right-hand barrier.

I jumped down, glanced around for bystanders, saw none and pulled myself back up on the open door.

‘All right now, listen. It’s going to be at least two days till I get to Seattle, maybe three, so you just hole up in the first hotel the city limits datastack has to offer, and you wait for me there. Pay cash, but book in under my name. I’ll contact you between ten and eleven in the morning, so be in the hotel at those times. The rest of the time, you can do what you like. I figure I gave you enough cash not to get bored.’

Graft Nicholson bared his teeth in a knowing leer that made me feel slightly sorry for anyone working in the Seattle leisure industry that week. ‘Don’t worry ’bout me, man. Old Graft knows how to grab a good time by the titties.’

‘I’m glad. Just don’t get too comfortable. We may need to move it in a hurry.’

‘Yeah, yeah. What about the rest of the plastique, man?’

‘I told you. You’ll get paid when we’re done.’

‘And what about if you don’t show up in three days?’

‘In that case,’ I said pleasantly, ‘I’ll be dead. That happens, it’d be better to drop out of sight for a few weeks. They’re not going to waste time looking for you. They find me, they’ll be happy.’

‘Man, I don’t think I’m—’

‘You’ll be fine. See you in three days.’ I dropped back to the ground, slammed the truck door and banged on it twice. The engine rumbled into drive and Nicholson pulled the truck back out into the middle of the carriageway.

Watching him go, I wondered briefly if he’d actually go to Seattle at all. I’d given him a sizable chunk of credit, after all, and even with the promise of a second down payment if he followed instructions, the temptation would still be to double back somewhere up the coast and head straight back to the bar I’d picked him out of. Or he might get jumpy, sitting in the hotel waiting for a knock on the door, and skip before the three days were up. I couldn’t really blame him for these potential betrayals, since I had no intention of turning up myself. Whatever he did was fine by me.

In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, said Virginia in my ear. Run as much interference as you can without breaking pace.

‘A friend of yours, Mr Kovacs?’ The doctor had come to the barrier and was watching the car recede.

‘Met him in a bar,’ I said truthfully, climbing over to her side, and making for the rail. It was the same view I’d seen when Curtis brought me back from Suntouch House the day of my arrival. In the gloomy, pre-rain light the aerial traffic glimmered above the buildings across the Bay like a swarm of fireflies. Narrowing my eyes, I could make out detail on the island of Alcatraz, the grey-walled and orange-windowed bunker of PsychaSec SA. Beyond lay Oakland. At my back, the open sea and to north and south a solid kilometre of empty bridge. Reasonably sure that nothing short of tactical artillery could surprise me here, I turned back to look at the doctor.

She seemed to flinch as my gaze fell on her.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked softly. ‘Medical ethics pinching a little?’

‘It was not my idea—’

‘I know that. You just signed the releases, turned a blind eye, that kind of thing. So who was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said not quite steadily. ‘Someone came to see Sullivan. An artificial sleeve. Asian, I think.’

I nodded. Trepp.

‘What were Sullivan’s instructions?’

‘Virtual net locater, fitted between the cortical stack and neural interface.’ The clinical details seemed to give her strength. Her voice firmed up. ‘We did the surgery two days before you were freighted. Microscalpelled into the vertebrae along the line of the original stack incision, and plugged it with graft tissue. No show under any kind of sweep outside virtual. You’d have to run a full neuro-electrical to find it. How did you guess?’

‘I didn’t have to guess. Someone used it to locate and lever a contract killer out of the Bay City police holding stack. That’s Aiding and Abetting. You and Sullivan are both going down for a couple of decades minimum.’

She looked pointedly up and down the empty bridge. ‘In that case, why aren’t the police here, Mr Kovacs?’

I thought about the rap sheet and military records that must have come to earth with me, and what it must feel like standing here alone with someone who had done all those things. What it must have taken to come out here alone. Slowly, a reluctant smile crept out of one corner of my mouth.

‘All right, I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘Now tell me how to neutralise the damn thing.’

She looked at me seriously, and the rain began to fall. Heavy drops, dampening the shoulders of her coat. I felt it in my hair. We both glanced up and I cursed. A moment later she stepped closer to me and touched a heavy brooch on one wing of her coat. The air above us shimmered and the rain stopped falling on me. Looking up again, I saw it exploding off the dome of the repulsion field over our heads. Around our feet, the paving darkened in splotches and then uniformly, but a magic circle around our feet stayed dry.

‘To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement. It can be done, but not without a full micro-op theatre. Anything less, and you run the risk of damaging the neural interface, or even the spinal nerve canals.’

I shifted a little, uncomfortable at our proximity. ‘Yeah, I figured.’

‘Well, then you’ve probably also figured,’ she said, burlesquing my accent, ‘that you can enter either a scrambling signal or a mirror code into the stack receiver to neutralise the broadcast signature.’

‘If you’ve got the original signature.’

‘If, as you say, you have the original signature.’ She reached into her pocket and produced a small, plastic-sheathed disc, weighed it in her palm for a moment and then held it out to me. ‘Well, now you have.’

I took the disc and looked at it speculatively.

‘It’s genuine. Any neuro-electrical clinic will confirm that for you. If you have doubts, I can recommend—’

‘Why are you doing this for me?’

She met my eye, without flinching this time. ‘I’m not doing it for you, Mr Kovacs. I am doing this for myself.’

I waited. She looked away for a moment, across the Bay. ‘I am not a stranger to corruption, Mr Kovacs. No one can work for long in a justice facility and fail to recognise a gangster. The synthetic was one of a type. Warden Sullivan has had dealings with these people as long as I have had tenure at Bay City. Police jurisdiction ends outside our doors, and Administration salaries are not high.’

She looked back at me. ‘I have never taken payment from these people, nor, until now, had I acted on their behalf. But equally, I have never stood against them. It has been very easy to bury myself in my work and pretend not to see what goes on.’

‘ ‘‘The human eye is a wonderful device,’’ ’ I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. ‘ ‘‘With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.’’ ’

‘Very aptly put.’

‘It’s not mine. So how come you did the surgery?’

She nodded. ‘As I said, until now I had managed to avoid actual contact with these people. Sullivan had me assigned to Offworld Sleeving because there wasn’t much of it, and the favours he did were all local. It made it easier for both of us. He’s a good manager in that respect.’

‘Shame I came along then.’

‘Yes, it presented a problem. He knew it’d look odd if I was taken off the procedure for one of his more compliant medics, and he didn’t want any waves. Apparently this was something big.’ She placed the same derisive stress on the words as she had on my figured earlier. ‘These people were jacked in at high level, and everything had to be smooth. But he wasn’t stupid, he had a rationale all ready for me.’

‘Which was?’

She gave me another candid look. ‘That you were a dangerous psychopath. A killing machine turned rabid. And that, whatever the reasons, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have you swimming the dataflows untagged. No telling where you could needlecast to once you’re out of the real world. And I bought it. He showed me the files they have on you. Oh, he wasn’t stupid. No. I was.’

I thought of Leila Begin and our talk of psychopaths on the virtual beach. Of my own flippant responses.

‘Sullivan wouldn’t be the first person to call me a psychopath. And you wouldn’t be the first person to buy it either. The Envoys, well, it’s . . .’ I shrugged and looked away. ‘It’s a label. Simplification for public consumption.’

‘They say a lot of you turned. That twenty per cent of the serious crime in the Protectorate is caused by renegade Envoys. Is it true?’

‘The percentage?’ I stared away through the rain. ‘I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of us out there, yes. There’s not much else to do once you’ve been discharged from the Corps. They won’t let you into anything that might lead to a position of power or influence. On most worlds you’re barred from holding public office. Nobody trusts Envoys, and that means no promotion. No prospects. No loans, no credit.’

I turned back to her. ‘And the stuff we’ve been trained to do is so close to crime, there’s almost no difference. Except that crime is easier. Most criminals are stupid, you probably know that. Even the organised syndicates are like kid gangs compared to the Corps. It’s easy to get respect. And when you’ve spent the last decade of your life jacking in and out of sleeves, cooling out on stack and living virtual, the threats that law enforcement has to offer are pretty bland.’

We stood together in silence for a while.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally.

‘Don’t be. Anyone reading those files on me would have—’

‘That isn’t what I meant.’

‘Oh.’ I looked down at the disc in my hands. ‘Well, if you were looking to atone for something, I’d say you just have. And take it from me, no one stays totally clean. The only place you get to do that is on stack.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Yeah, well. There is just one more thing I’d like to know.’

‘Yes?’

‘Is Sullivan at Bay City Central right now?’

‘He was when I went out.’

‘And what time is he likely to leave this evening?’

‘It’s usually around seven.’ She compressed her lips. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to ask him some questions,’ I said truthfully.

‘And if he won’t answer them?’

‘Like you said, he’s not stupid.’ I put the disc into my jacket pocket. ‘Thank you for your help, doctor. I’d suggest you try not to be around the facility at seven tonight. And thank you.’

‘As I said Mr Kovacs, I am doing this for myself.’

‘That’s not what I meant, doctor.’

‘Oh.’

I placed one hand lightly on her arm, then stepped away from her and so back out into the rain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The wood of the bench had been worn by decades of occupants into a series of comfortable, buttock-shaped depressions, and the arms were similarly sculpted. I moulded myself lengthwise into the curves, cocked my boots on the bench end nearest the doors I was watching, and settled down to read the graffiti etched into the wood. I was soaked from the long walk back across town, but the hall was pleasantly heated and the rain rattled impotently on the long transparent panels of the tilted roof high above my head. After a while, one of the dog-sized cleaning robots came to wipe away my muddy footprints from the fused glass paving. I watched it idly until the job was done and the record of my arrival on the bench was totally erased.

It would have been nice to think my electronic traces could be wiped in the same way, but that kind of escape belonged to the legendary heroes of another age.

The cleaning robot trundled off and I went back to the graffiti. Most of it was Amanglic or Spanish, old jokes that I’d seen before in a hundred similar places; Cabron Modificado! and Absent without Sleeve!, the old crack The Altered Native Was Here!, but high on the bench’s backrest and chiselled upside down, like a tiny pool of inverted calm in all the rage and desperate pride, I found a curious haiku in Kanji:

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves
And burn your fingers once again.

The author must have been leaning over the back of the bench when he cut it into the wood, but still each character was executed with elegant care. I gazed at the calligraphy for what was probably a long time, while memories of Harlan’s World sang in my head like high-tension cables.

A sudden burst of crying over to my right jolted me out of the reverie. A young black woman and her two children, also black, were staring at the stooped, middle-aged white man standing before them in tattered UN surplus fatigues. Family reunion. The young woman’s face was a mask of shock, it hadn’t hit her properly yet, and the smaller child, probably no more than four, just didn’t get it at all. She was looking right through the white man, mouth forming the repeated question Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy? The man’s features were glistening in the rainy light from the roof - he looked like he’d been crying since they dragged him out of the tank.

I rolled my head to an empty quadrant of the hall. My own father had walked right past his waiting family and out of our lives when he was re-sleeved. We never even knew which one he was, although I sometimes wonder if my mother didn’t catch some splinter of recognition in an averted gaze, some echo of stance or gait as he passed. I don’t know if he was too ashamed to confront us, or more likely too set up with the luck of drawing a sleeve sounder than his own alcohol-wrecked body had been, and already plotting a new course for other cities and younger women. I was ten at the time. The first I knew about it was when the attendants ushered us out of the facility just short of locking up for the night. We’d been there since noon.

The chief attendant was an old man, conciliatory and very good with kids. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke kindly to me before leading us out. To my mother, he made a short bow and murmured something formal that allowed her to keep the dam of her self-control intact.

He probably saw a few like us every week.

I memorised Ortega’s discreet destination code, for something to do with my mind, then shredded that panel of the cigarette packet and ate it.

My clothes were almost dried through by the time Sullivan came through the doors leading out of the facility and started down the steps. His thin frame was cloaked in a long grey raincoat, and he wore a brimmed hat, something I hadn’t seen so far in Bay City. Framed in the V between my propped feet and reeled into close-up with the neurachem, his face looked pale and tired. I shifted a little on the bench and brushed the holstered Philips gun with the tips of my fingers. Sullivan was coming straight towards me, but when he saw my form sprawled on the bench he pursed his mouth with disapproval and altered course to avoid what he presumably took for a derelict cluttering up the facility. He passed without giving me another glance.

I gave him a few metres start and then swung silently to my feet and went after him, slipping the Philips gun out of its holster under my coat. I caught up just as he reached the exit. As the doors parted for him, I shoved him rudely in the small of the back and stepped quickly outside in his wake. He was swinging back to face me, features contorted with anger, as the doors started to close.

‘What do you think you’re—’ The rest of it died on his lips as he saw who I was.

‘Warden Sullivan,’ I said affably, and showed him the Philips gun under my jacket. ‘This is a silent weapon, and I’m not in a good mood. Please do exactly as I tell you.’

He swallowed. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to talk about Trepp, among others. And I don’t want to do it in the rain. Let’s go.’

‘My car is—’

‘A really bad idea.’ I nodded. ‘So let’s walk. And Warden Sullivan, if you so much as blink at the wrong person, I’ll shoot you in half. You won’t see the gun, no one will. But it’ll be there just the same.’

‘You’re making a mistake, Kovacs.’

‘I don’t think so.’ I tipped my head towards the diminished ranks of parked vehicles in the lot. ‘Straight through, and left into the street. Keep going till I tell you to stop.’

Sullivan started to say something else, but I jerked the barrel of the Philips gun at him and he shut up. Sideways at first, he made his way down the steps to the parking lot and then, with occasional backward glances, across the uneven ground towards the sagging double gate that had rusted open on its runners what looked like centuries ago.

‘Eyes front,’ I called across the widening gap between us. ‘I’m still back here, you don’t need to worry about that.’

Out on the street, I let the gap grow to about a dozen metres and pretended complete dissociation from the figure ahead of me. It wasn’t a great neighbourhood and there weren’t many people out walking in the rain. Sullivan was an easy target for the Philips gun at double the distance.

Five blocks on, I spotted the steamed-up windows of the noodle house I was looking for. I quickened my pace and came up on Sullivan’s streetside shoulder.

‘In here. Go to the booths at the back and sit down.’

I made a single sweep of the street, saw no one obvious, and followed Sullivan inside.

The place was almost empty, the daytime diners long departed and the evening not yet cranked up. Two ancient Chinese women sat in a corner with the withered elegance of dried bouquets, heads nodding together. On the other side of the restaurant four young men in pale silk suits lounged dangerously and toyed with expensive-looking chunks of hardware. At a table near one of the windows, a fat Caucasian was working his way through an enormous bowl of chow mein and simultaneously flicking over the pages of a holoporn comic. A video screen set high on one wall gave out coverage of some incomprehensible local sport.

‘Tea,’ I said to the young waiter who came to meet us, and seated myself opposite Sullivan in the booth.

‘You aren’t going to get away with this,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Even if you kill me, really kill me, they’ll check the most recent re-sleevings and backtrack to you sooner or later.’

‘Yeah, maybe they’ll even find out about the unofficial surgery this sleeve had before I arrived.’

‘That bitch. She’s going to—’

‘You’re in no position to be making threats,’ I said mildly. ‘In fact you’re in no position to do anything except answer my questions and hope I believe you. Who told you to tag me?’

Silence, apart from the game coverage from the set on the wall. Sullivan stared sullenly at me.

‘All right, I’ll make it easy for you. Simple yes or no. An artificial called Trepp came to see you. Was this the first time you’d had dealings with her?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

With measured anger, I backhanded him hard across the mouth. He collapsed sideways against the wall of the booth, losing his hat. The conversation of the young men in silk stopped abruptly, then resumed with great animation as I cut them a sideways glance. The two old women got stiffly to their feet and filed out through a back entrance. The Caucasian didn’t even look up from his holoporn. I leaned across the table.

‘Warden Sullivan, you’re not taking this in the spirit it’s intended. I am very concerned to know who you sold me to. I’m not going to go away just because you have some residual scruples about client confidentiality. Believe me, they didn’t pay you enough to hold out on me.’

Sullivan sat back up, wiping at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. To his credit, he managed a bitter smile with the undamaged portion of his lips.

‘You think I haven’t been threatened before, Kovacs?’

I examined the hand I’d hit him with. ‘I think you’ve had very little experience of personal violence, and that’s going to be a disadvantage. I’m going to give you the chance to tell me what I want to know here and now. After that we go somewhere with soundproofing. Now, who sent Trepp?’

‘You’re a thug, Kovacs. Nothing but—’

I snapped folded knuckles across the table and into his left eye. It made less noise than the slap. Sullivan grunted in shock and reeled away from the blow, cowering into the seat. I watched impassively until he recovered. Something cold was rising in me, something born on the benches of the Newpest justice facility and tempered with the years of pointless unpleasantness I had been witness to. I hoped Sullivan wasn’t as tough as he was trying to appear, for both our sakes. I leaned close again.

‘You said it, Sullivan. I’m a thug. Not a respectable criminal like you. I’m not a Meth, not a businessman. I have no vested interests, no social connections, no purchased respectability. It’s just me, and you’re in my way. So let’s start again. Who sent Trepp?’

‘He doesn’t know, Kovacs. You’re wasting your time.’

The woman’s voice was light and cheerful, pitched a little loud to carry from the door where she stood, hands in the pockets of a long black coat. She was slim and pale with close-cropped dark hair and a poise to the way she stood that bespoke combat skills. Beneath the coat she wore a grey quilted tunic that looked impact resistant and matching work trousers tucked into ankle boots. A single silver earring in the shape of a discarded trode cable dangled from her left ear. She appeared to be alone.

I lowered the Philips gun slowly, and without acknowledging that it had ever been trained on her she took the cue to advance casually into the restaurant. The young men in silk watched her every step of the way, but if she was aware of their gazes, she gave no sign. When she was about five paces from our booth, she gave me a look of enquiry and began to lift her hands slowly out of her pockets. I nodded, and she completed the movement, revealing open palms and fingers set with rings of black glass.

‘Trepp?’

‘Good guess. You going to let me sit down?’

I waved the Philips gun at the seat opposite, where Sullivan was cupping both hands to his eye. ‘If you can persuade your associate here to move over. Just keep your hands above the table.’

The woman smiled and inclined her head. She glanced at Sullivan, who was already squeezing up to the wall to make space for her, and then, keeping her hands poised at her sides, she swung herself elegantly in beside him. The economy of motion was so tight that her pendant earring barely shifted. Once seated, she pressed both hands palm down on the table in front of her.

‘That make you feel safer?’

‘It’ll do,’ I said, noticing that the black glass rings, like the earring, were a body joke. Each ring showed, X-ray like, a ghostly blue section of the bones in the fingers beneath. Trepp’s style, at least, I could get to like.

‘I didn’t tell him anything,’ Sullivan blurted.

‘You didn’t know anything worth a jack,’ said Trepp disinterestedly. She hadn’t even turned to look at him. ‘Lucky for you I turned up, I’d say. Mr Kovacs doesn’t look like someone ready to take ‘‘don’t know’’ for an answer. Am I right?’

‘What do you want, Trepp?’

‘Come to help out.’ Trepp glanced up as something rattled in the restaurant. The waiter had arrived bearing a tray with a large teapot and two handleless cups. ‘You order this?’

‘Yeah. Help yourself.’

‘Thanks, I love this stuff.’ Trepp waited while the waiter deposited everything, then busied herself with the teapot. ‘Sullivan, you want a cup too? Hey, bring him another cup, would you. Thanks. Now, where was I?’

‘You’d come to help out,’ I said pointedly.

‘Yeah.’ Trepp sipped at the green tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. ‘That’s right. I’m here to clarify things. See, you’re trying to hammer the information out of Sullivan here. And he doesn’t know fuck all. His contact was me, so here I am. Talk to me.’

I looked at her levelly. ‘I killed you last week, Trepp.’

‘Yeah, so they tell me.’ Trepp set down the tea cup and looked critically at her own fingerbones. ‘Course, I don’t remember that. In fact, I don’t even know you, Kovacs. Last thing I remember was putting myself into the tank about a month back. Everything after that’s gone. The me you torched in that cruiser, she’s dead. That wasn’t me. So, no hard feelings, huh?’

‘No remote storage, Trepp?’

She snorted. ‘Are you kidding? I make a living doing this, same as you, but not that much. Anyway, who needs that remote shit? The way I figure it, you fuck up, you’ve got to pay some kind of tab for it. I fucked up with you, right?’

I sipped my own tea and played back the fight in the aircar, considering the angles. ‘You were a little slow,’ I conceded. ‘A little careless.’

‘Yeah, careless. I got to watch that. Wearing artificials makes you that way. Very anti-Zen. I got a sensei in New York, it drives him up the fucking wall.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said patiently. ‘You want to tell me who sent you now?’

‘Hey, better than that. You’re invited to meet the Man.’ She nodded at my expression. ‘Yeah, Ray wants to talk to you. Same as last time, except this is a voluntary ride. Seems coercion doesn’t work too well with you.’

‘And Kadmin? He in on this as well?’

Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. ‘Kadmin’s, well, Kadmin’s a bit of a side issue right now. Bit of an embarrassment really. But I think we can deal on that as well. I really can’t tell you too much more now.’ She shuttled her glance sideways at Sullivan, who was beginning to sit up and pay attention. ‘It’s better if we go someplace else.’

‘All right.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll follow you out. But let’s have a couple of ground rules before we go. One, no virtuals.’

‘Way ahead of you there.’ Trepp finished her tea and started to get up from the table. ‘My instructions are to convey you directly to Ray. In the flesh.’

I put a hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.

‘Two. No surprises. You tell me exactly what’s going to happen well before it does. Anything unexpected, and you’re likely to be disappointing your sensei all over again.’

‘Fine. No surprises.’ Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she wasn’t accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. ‘We’re going to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?’

‘Just so long as it’s empty.’ I released her arm and she resumed motion, coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. ‘You stay here. If I see your face come through the door before we’re gone, I’ll put a hole in it. Tea’s on me.’

As I followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan’s tea cup and a big white handkerchief, presumably for the warden’s smashed lip. Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.

The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.

Outside, it was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. ‘Be a minute,’ she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. ‘You know who that place belongs to?’

‘I guessed.’

She shook her head. ‘Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living dangerously?’

I shrugged. ‘Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights. They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.’

‘Not around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get involved in a brawl on some stranger’s behalf. The way they figure it, that’s what the police are for. You’re from Harlan’s World, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Maybe it’s that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?’

‘Maybe.’

An autocab came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty compartment within. I smiled thinly.

‘After you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was looking, she grinned and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the seat. The hatch hinged down, shedding rain in sliding sheets.

‘Welcome to Urbline services,’ said the cab smoothly. ‘Please state your destination.’

‘Airport,’ said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction. ‘Private carriers’ terminal.’

The cab lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. ‘Not a local trip, then,’ I said tonelessly.

She brought her arms in again, hands held palm upward. ‘Well, we figured you wouldn’t go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital. Take about three hours.’

‘Sub-orbital?’ I drew a deep breath and touched the holstered Philips gun lightly. ‘You know, I’m going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this hardware before we fly.’

‘Yeah, we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you like. OK?’

‘Where are we going, Trepp?’

She smiled.

‘Europe,’ she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Wherever it was in Europe that we landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot’s time-check, it was still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.

‘Should be a limo waiting for us,’ Trepp said over her shoulder.

We passed, without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle generations were gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than I’d seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and schedule that govern most terminal buildings.

I adjusted the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and followed Trepp into the trees. It wasn’t quick enough to beat the gaze of two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn’t so easily bought - she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol out of my fingers and shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me in the back all the way along the aisle.

Outside again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale grey automould seating.

‘Ten minutes,’ she promised, as we rose into the air. ‘What did you think of the micro-climate?’

‘Very nice.’

‘Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?’

I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.

Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of those things.

Alone was fine with me.

The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.

Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first - strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.

It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather stained with age. As the cruiser spiralled down towards its base and then beyond, I realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artefact.

Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.

The limo settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.

‘This belong to the Catholics?’ I hazarded.

‘Used to.’ Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. ‘Back when it was new. It’s private property now.’

‘How come?’

‘Ask Ray.’ Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.

As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two metres between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.

Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man’s body emerged from the gloom as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the calibre as about the same as the Hendrix’s lobby defence system, and relinquished my weapons. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the automated killing units drew back and spidered up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.

‘Come on.’ Trepp’s voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. ‘You think if we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?’

I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted over the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.

I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high yield explosives.

At the end of the basilica, grey things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the grey things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.

‘Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?’

The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was addressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn towards the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.

‘Ray,’ I said, in Amanglic. ‘I should have fucking seen this one on the launch pad.’

Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flawlessly.

‘Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,’ she mused. ‘But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?’

‘Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.’

The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.

‘Yes, well, I believe we’ve been over this ground before.’

My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara’s interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.

I stepped closer to one of the grey envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.

‘Bullet-proof, right?’

‘Mmm.’ Kawahara tipped her head to one side. ‘Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.’

I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. ‘Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.’

She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer, a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petalled skirts cupping her lower body to mid-calf and a soft silk blouse settling over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modelled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.

‘Power is habitually buried,’ she said. ‘Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan’s World. Or the caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?’

‘Judging by the way I’ve been led around the last week, I’d say yes. Now do you want to get on with this pitch?’

‘Very well.’ Kawahara glanced aside at Trepp, who wandered away into the gloom, neck craned up at the ceiling like a tourist. I looked around for a seat and found none. ‘You are aware, no doubt, that I recommended you to Laurens Bancroft.’

‘He mentioned it.’

‘Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. We could have had this conversation a week ago, and saved everyone a lot of unnecessary pain. It was not my intention for Kadmin to harm you. His instructions were to bring you here alive.’

‘There’s been a change of programme,’ I said, walking along the curve of the end chamber. ‘Kadmin’s not following his instructions. He tried to kill me this morning.’

Kawahara made a gesture of irritation. ‘I know that. That’s why you’ve been brought here.’

‘Did you spring him?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘He was going to roll over on you?’

‘He told Keith Rutherford that he felt he was not deployed to his best advantage in holding. That it would be hard to honour his contract with me in such a position.’

‘Subtle.’

‘Wasn’t it. I never can resist sophisticated negotiation. I feel he earnt the re-investment.’

‘So you beaconed in on me, hooked him out and beamed him over to Carnage for re-sleeving, right?’ I felt in my pockets and found Ortega’s cigarettes. In the grim twilight of the basilica, the familiar packet was like a postcard from another place. ‘No wonder the Panama Rose didn’t have his second fighter decanted when we got there. He’d probably only just finished sleeving Kadmin. That motherfucker walked out of there in a Right Hand of God martyr.’

‘About the same time you were coming aboard,’ agreed Kawahara. ‘In fact, I understand he was posing as a menial and you walked right past him. I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.’

‘Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal haemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.’ I touched my cigarette to the ignition patch and drew it to life, remembering. The man knelt in the ring. I played it back slowly. On the deck of the fightdrome ship, peering down at the design being painted onto the killing floor. The upturned face as we passed. Yes, he’d even smiled. I grimaced at the memory.

‘You’re being a lot less courteous than befits a man in your situation.’ I thought that, underneath the cool, I could detect a ragged edge in her voice. Despite her much vaunted self-control, Reileen Kawahara wasn’t much better at coping with disrespect than Bancroft, General MacIntyre or any other creature of power I’d had dealings with. ‘Your life is in danger and I am in a position to safeguard it.’

‘My life’s been in danger before,’ I told her. ‘Usually as a result of some piece of shit like you making large-scale decisions about how reality ought to be run. You’ve already let Kadmin get too close for my comfort. In fact, he probably used your fucking virtual locater to do it.’

‘I sent him,’ Kawahara gritted, ‘to collect you. Again he disobeyed me.’

‘Didn’t he just.’ I rubbed reflexively at the bruise on my shoulder. ‘So why should I believe you can do any better next time?’

‘Because you know I can.’ Kawahara came across the centre of the chamber, ducking her head to avoid the leathery grey clone sacs, and intercepting my path around the perimeter. Her face was taut with anger. ‘I am one of the seven most powerful human beings in this solar system. I have access to powers that the UN Field Commander General would kill for.’

‘This architecture’s going to your head, Reileen. You wouldn’t even have found me if you hadn’t been keeping tabs on Sullivan. How the fuck are you going to find Kadmin?’

‘Kovacs, Kovacs.’ There was a definite trembling in her laugh, as if she was fighting an urge to put her thumbs through my eye sockets. ‘Do you have any idea what happens on the streets of any given city on Earth, if I put out a search on someone? Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snuff you out here and now?’

I drew deliberately on the cigarette and plumed the smoke out at her. ‘As your faithful retainer Trepp said, not ten minutes ago, why bring me here just to snuff me out? You want something from me. Now what is it?’

She breathed in through her nose, hard. A measure of calm seeped onto her face and she stepped back a couple of paces, turned away from the confrontation.

‘You’re right, Kovacs. I want you alive. If you disappear now, Bancroft’s going to get the wrong message.’

‘Or the right message.’ I scuffed absently at engraved lettering on the stone beneath my feet. ‘Did you torch him?’

‘No.’ Kawahara looked almost amused. ‘He killed himself.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to me, Kovacs. What I want from you is an end to the investigation. A tidy end.’

‘And how do you suggest I achieve that?’

‘I don’t care. Make something up. You’re an Envoy, after all. Convince him. Tell him you think the police verdict was correct. Produce a culprit, if you must.’ A thin smile. ‘I do not include myself in that category.’

‘If you didn’t kill him, if he torched his own head off, why should you care what happens? What’s your interest in this?’

‘That isn’t under discussion here.’

I nodded slowly. ‘And what do I get in return for this tidy ending?’

‘Apart from the hundred thousand dollars?’ Kawahara tilted her head quizzically. ‘Well, I understand you’ve been made a very generous recreational offer by other parties. And for my part, I will keep Kadmin off your back by whatever means necessary.’

I looked down at the lettering beneath my feet, and thought it through, link by link.

‘Francisco Franco,’ said Kawahara, mistaking the direction of my gaze for focused interest. ‘Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.’

‘Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.’

Kawahara shrugged. ‘Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.’

I glanced around, ostensibly casual, scanning for robot security systems. ‘Yeah, looks like it. So let me get this straight. You want me to sell Bancroft a parabolic full of shit, in return for which you’ll call off Kadmin, who you set on me in the first place. That’s the deal?’

‘That, as you put it, is the deal.’

I took one last lungful of smoke, savoured it and exhaled.

‘You can go fuck yourself, Kawahara.’ I dropped my cigarette on the engraved stonework and ground it out with my heel. ‘I’ll take my chances with Kadmin, and let Bancroft know you probably had him killed. So. Change your mind about letting me live now?’

My hands hung open at my sides, twitching to be filled with the rough woven bulk of handgun butts. I was going to put three Nemex shells through Kawahara’s throat, at stack height, then put the gun in my mouth and blow my own stack apart. Kawahara almost certainly had remote storage anyway, but fuck it, you’ve got to make a stand somewhere. And a man can only stave off his own death wish for so long.

It could have been worse. It could have been Innenin. Kawahara shook her head regretfully. She was smiling. ‘Always the same Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learnt anything since New Beijing?’

‘There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.’

‘Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?’ She was still smiling, poised like a total body theatre gymnast about to launch into her aria. For a moment I suffered the almost hallucinatory conviction that she was going to break into a little dance, choreographed to a junk rhythm beat from speakers hidden in the dome above us.

‘Takeshi, where did you get this belief that everything can be resolved with such brute simplicity? Surely not from the Envoys? Was it the Newpest gangs? The thrashings your father gave you as a child? Did you really think I would allow you to force my hand? Did you really think I would have come to the table this empty-handed? Think about it. You know me. Did you really believe it would be this easy?’

The neurachem seethed within me. I bit it back, hung from the moment like a parachutist braced in the jump hatch.

‘All right,’ I said evenly. ‘Impress me.’

‘Gladly.’ Kawahara reached into the breast pocket of her liquid black blouse. She produced a tiny holofile and flicked it into active with a thumbnail. As the images evolved in the air above the unit, she passed it to me. ‘A lot of the detail is legalistic, but you will of course recognise the salient points.’

I took the little sphere of light as if it were a poisonous flower. The name hit me at once, leaping out of the print -

- Sarah Sachilowska -

- and then the contract terminology, like a building coming down on me in slow motion.

- released into private storage -

- provision for virtual custody -

- unlimited period -

- subject to review at UN discretion -

- under vested authority of the Bay City justice facility -

The knowledge coursed sickly through me. I should have killed Sullivan when I had the chance.

‘Ten days.’ Kawahara was watching my reactions closely. ‘That’s how long you have to convince Bancroft the investigation is over, and to walk away. After that, Sachilowska goes into virtual at one of my clinics. There’s a whole new generation of virtual interrogation software out there, and I will personally see to it that she pioneers the lot.’

The holofile hit the marble floor with a brittle crack. I lurched at Kawahara, lips peeling back from my teeth. There was a low growling coming up through my throat that had nothing to do with any combat training I had ever undergone and my hands crooked into talons. I knew what her blood was going to taste like.

The cold barrel of a gun touched down on my neck before I got halfway.

‘I’d advise against that,’ said Trepp in my ear.

Kawahara came and stood closer to me. ‘Bancroft isn’t the only one that can buy troublesome criminals off colonial stacks. The Kanagawa justice facility were overjoyed when I came to them two days later with a bid for Sachilowska. The way they see it, if you’re freighted offworld, the chances of you ever having enough money to buy a needlecast back again are pretty slim. And of course they get paid for the privilege of waving you goodbye. It must seem too good to be true. I imagine they’re hoping it’s the start of a trend.’ She fingered the lapel of my jacket thoughtfully. ‘And in fact the way the virtuals market is at the moment, it might be a trend worth starting.’

The muscle under my eye jumped violently.

‘I’ll kill you,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll rip your fucking heart out and eat it. I’ll bring this place down around you—’

Kawahara leaned in until our faces were almost touching. Her breath smelt faintly of mint and oregano. ‘No, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll do exactly as I say, and you’ll do it within ten days. Because if you don’t, your friend Sachilowska will be starting her own private tour of hell without redemption.’

She stepped back and lifted her hands. ‘Kovacs, you should be thanking whatever deities they’ve got on Harlan’s World that I’m not some kind of sadist. I mean, I’ve given you an either/or. We could just as easily be negotiating exactly how much agony I put Sachilowska through. I mean, I could start now. That would give you an incentive to wrap things up speedily, wouldn’t it? Ten days in most virtuals adds up to about three or four years. You were in the Wei Clinic; do you think she could stand three years of that? I think she’d probably go insane, don’t you?’

The effort it cost me to contain my hate was like a rupture down behind my eyeballs and into my chest. I forced the words out.

‘Terms. How do I know you’ll release her?’

‘Because I give you my word.’ Kawahara let her arms fall to her sides. ‘I believe you’ve had some experience of its validity in the past.’

I nodded slowly.

‘Subsequent to Bancroft’s acceptance that the case is closed, and your own disappearance from view, I will freight Sachilowska back to Harlan’s World to complete her sentence.’ Kawahara bent to pick up the holofile I’d dropped and held it up. She tipped it deftly a couple of times to flick through the pages. ‘I think you can see here that there is a reversal clause written into the contract. I will of course forfeit a large proportion of the original fee paid, but under the circumstances I’m prepared to do that.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But please bear in mind that a reversal can work in both directions. What I return, I can always buy again. So if you were considering skulking in the undergrowth for a while and then running back to Bancroft, please abandon the idea now. This is a hand that you cannot win.’

The gun barrel lifted away from my neck and Trepp stepped back. The neurachem held me upright like a paraplegic’s mobility suit. I stared numbly at Kawahara.

‘Why the fuck did you do all this?’ I whispered. ‘Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?’

‘Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.’ Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. ‘Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavoured to bring you here once again.’

‘I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.’

‘Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.’ She shrugged. ‘But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.’

‘All right.’ I noted vaguely that I was trembling. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Yes. Of course you will.’

I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.

‘Oh, Kovacs . . .’

I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.

‘If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.’

I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of Innenin. Vaguely, I felt Trepp clap me on the shoulder.

‘Come on,’ she said companionably. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her grey-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were a solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.

But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would only give me fragments.

Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.

I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.

We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analogue fired through the whites of our eyes by needle-spray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographics outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barrelling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff . . .

There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.

‘This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,’ yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. ‘Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?’

I got drinks, quickly.

The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell - and heaven - on earth.

‘Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,’ shouted Trepp. ‘But I take your point.’

Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.

‘Thing is,’ Trepp was still yelling, ‘you’ve got ten days.’

Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—

Street scene:

Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splashed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.

There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.

Something impor—

‘You can’t fucking believe something like that,’ Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystallised what I—

Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.

Dancing, somewhere.

More meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.

‘Fuck, hold still will you!’

‘What’d she say?’

Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.

‘Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.’

In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.

I had no idea how long I’d been there.

I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.

None of this seemed to matter because . . .

The mirror didn’t fit its frame - there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.

Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.

The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.

I left Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

‘Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?’

‘Fuck, yes.’ Trepp nodded vigorously. ‘The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.’

‘Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.’

‘Who said anything about need? The couple of bimbettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.’

‘Bull. Shit.’

‘I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.’

There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

‘Why the fuck do you do it?’

‘What?’ Trepp shook her head muzzily. ‘Keep cats? I like ca—’

‘Work for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—’

Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

‘Listen.’

There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.

‘Judge not lest ye be judged,’ she slurred.

Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

Something. Wrong here.

Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us . . .

‘Whoa.’ Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. ‘What you looking for up there, grasshopper?’

Not my sky.

It’s getting bad.

In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.

Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.

‘All right, pal?’

‘Not especially.’ I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. ‘You?’

He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.

‘Is this a dream?’

He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. ‘It’s the edge,’ he says.

‘The edge of what?’

‘Everything.’ His expression suggests that this much is obvious.

‘I thought you only turned up in my dreams,’ I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.

‘Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.’

‘Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.’

‘Uhuh.’ He shakes his head. ‘But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.’

The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.

‘You’re saying—’

He shakes his head sadly. ‘Too fucking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.’

‘Jimmy,’ I make a helpless gesture, ‘what the fuck am I going to do?’

He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.

‘Viral Strike,’ he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. ‘Recall that mother, do you?’

And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.

‘Look,’ said Trepp reasonably, ‘Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.’

‘If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.’

‘No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.’

‘Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. ‘Maybe.’

There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket fucked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could have been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

I was alone.

Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

No time for -

Viral Strike!!!

- thinking.

Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.

The crimson-lipped woman who—

Maybe you can’t—

What? What???

Jack and socket.

Trying to tell you some—

No time for—

No time—

No—

And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink . . .

Gone again.

But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.

Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.

‘Mutant,’ said Trepp inconsequentially.

‘Same to you.’

The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.

‘Going to need painkillers?’

‘Probably.’ I felt around inside my head. ‘Yeah.’

She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.

‘What you going to do?’

I shrugged. ‘Going to go back. Going to do what I’m told.’

PART FOUR: PERSUASION

(Viral Corrupt)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia - after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked Trepp’s ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.

The flophouse room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current affairs both advertised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged, self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with Ortega was running out.

The window gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment’s debate, I pressed the last of Trepp’s hangover capsules out of the foil and swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part of eight metres to fall.

Go primitive. Well, you don’t get much more primitive than climbing out of hotel windows in the middle of the night.

Hoping the roof was as solid as it looked, I let go.

I hit the sloping surface in approved fashion, rolled to one side and abruptly found my legs hanging out into space once more. The surface was firm, but as slippery as fresh belaweed and I was slithering rapidly towards the edge. I ground my elbows down for purchase, found none and just managed to grab the sharp edge of the roof in one hand as I went over.

Ten metres to the street. With the roof edge slicing into my palm, I dangled by one arm for a moment, trying to identify possible obstacles to my fall, like trash bins or parked vehicles, then gave up and dropped anyway. The paving beneath came up and smacked me hard, but there was nothing sharp to compound the impact and when I rolled it was not into the feared assembly of trash bins. I got up and made for the nearest shadows.

Ten minutes and a random sampling of streets later, I came upon a rank of idling autocabs, stepped swiftly out from my current piece of overhead cover and got into the fifth in line. I recited Ortega’s discreet code as we lifted into the air.

‘Coding noted. Approximate arrival time, thirty-five minutes.’

We headed out across the Bay, and then out to sea.

Too many edges.

The fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the currents of memory and sank again. Trepp jacked into the bar at Cable, Jimmy de Soto washing his blood-encrusted hands, Ryker’s face staring back at me from the spreadeagled star of mirror. Kawahara was in there somewhere, claiming Bancroft’s death as suicide but wanting an end to the investigation, just like Ortega and the Bay City police. Kawahara, who knew things about my contact with Miriam Bancroft, knew things about Laurens Bancroft, about Kadmin.

The tail end of my hangover twitched, scorpion-like, fighting the slow-gathering weight of Trepp’s painkillers. Trepp, the apologetic Zen killer whom I’d killed and who’d apparently come back with no hard feelings because she couldn’t remember it; because, in her terms, it hadn’t happened to her.

If anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you.

Trepp, jacked in at Cable.

Viral Strike. Recall that mother, do you?

Bancroft’s eyes boring into mine on the balcony at Suntouch House. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now.

And then, blindingly, I knew what I was going to do.

The cab started downward.

‘Footing is unstable,’ said the machine redundantly, as we touched down on a rolling deck. ‘Please take care.’

I fed currency to the slot and the hatch hinged up on Ortega’s safe location. A brief expanse of gunmetal landing pad, railings of cabled steel, and the sea beyond, all shifting black shoulders of water beneath a night sky clogged with cloud and hard drizzle. I climbed out warily and clung to the nearest railing while the cab lifted away and was quickly swallowed by the drifting veils of rain. As the navigation lights faded, I turned my attention to the vessel I was standing on.

The landing pad was situated at the stern, and from where I clung to the railing I could see the whole length of the ship laid out. She looked to be about twenty metres, something like two thirds the size of a Millsport trawler, but much leaner in the beam. The deck modules had the smooth, self-sealing configuration of storm survival design, but despite the general businesslike appearance, no one would ever take this for a working vessel. Delicate telescopic masts rose to what looked like only half height at two points along the deck and there was a sharp bowsprit stabbing ahead of the slimly tapered prow. This was a yacht. A rich man’s floating home.

Light spilled out of a hatchway on the rear deck and Ortega emerged far enough to beckon me down from the landing pad. Hooking my fingers firmly on the rail, I braced myself against the pitch and sway of the vessel and picked my way down a short flight of steps at one side of the pad, then across the rear deck to the hatch. Swirls of drizzle swept across the ship, hurrying me along against my will. In the well of light from the open hatch I saw another, steeper set of steps and handed my way down the narrow companionway into the offered warmth. Over my head, the hatch hummed smoothly shut.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ snapped Ortega.

I took a moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a rich man’s floating home, the rich man in question hadn’t been home in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into, sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at either end of the room were open onto what seemed to be similarly mothballed spaces.

For all that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the bulkheads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet. The remainder of the decor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I didn’t have the cultural background to read.

Ortega stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.

‘It’s a long story.’ I moved past her to peer through the nearest door. ‘I could use a coffee, if the galley’s open.’

Bedroom. A big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she slapped me.

I reeled sideways. It wasn’t as hard a blow as I’d given Sullivan in the noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and painkillers didn’t help. I didn’t quite go down, but it was a near thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on each cheekbone.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I woke you up, but—’

‘You piece of shit,’ she hissed at me. ‘You lying piece of shit.’

‘I’m not sure I—’

‘I should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for what you’ve done.’

I started to lose my temper. ‘Done what? Will you get a fucking grip, Ortega, and tell me what’s going on.’

‘We accessed the Hendrix’s memory today,’ Ortega said coldly. ‘Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Everything for the last week. I’ve been reviewing it.’

The rapidly flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her mouth. It was as if she’d emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, there wasn’t much.’ Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. ‘You’re the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your visitors.’

I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam Bancroft’s widespread thighs.

‘There’s a remote on the chair,’ said Ortega, herself remote. ‘Why don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.’

She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.

My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega’s co-operation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.

Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.

Embarrassment. Shame.

Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.

‘You’re not watching.’

I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.

‘Thanks.’ I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.

‘So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.’ She jerked her head at the screen. ‘How many of them is that?’

‘Ortega, this is nothing to do—’

‘I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.’ She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. ‘I don’t know, that doesn’t look like fear on your face, exactly.’

‘Ortega—’

‘ ‘‘I want you to stop,’’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don’t rememb—’

I pulled the remote out of her reach. ‘I remember what she said.’ ‘Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple—’

‘Ortega, you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—’

‘Shut up.’ Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. ‘You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—’

‘If you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.’ I tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have. ‘I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.’

‘Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.’

‘She’ll beat the rap. You know she will.’

‘If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot’s on the other foot this time around.’

The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.

I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.

‘And while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.’

‘I was going to tell you about that.’

‘No, you fucking weren’t,’ Ortega snarled. ‘You weren’t going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.’

‘Look, the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much to—’

‘You arrogant motherfucker.’ The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. ‘You’re just like him, you’re just fucking like him. You think we need the fucking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation—’

‘Wait a minute.’ I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. ‘Just like who, who am I just like?’

‘What?’

‘You just said I’m just—’

‘Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?’

‘The only thing I under—’ Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.

‘Give me that, turn that fucking thing -’

For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.

‘- off.’

There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.

When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.

It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.

Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.

I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.

I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.

‘Where’re we going?’ I asked her gently.

A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. ‘Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.’

‘And no one knows we’re out here?’

‘Only the satellites.’

‘Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?’

She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. ‘It’s Ryker’s.’

‘Ooops.’ I looked elaborately away. ‘Nice carpet in here.’

Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

‘I told myself,’ she murmured, ‘it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.’

‘Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.’

Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. ‘I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.’

‘Kristin Ortega.’ I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. ‘You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?’

She shrugged again. ‘Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grand-mother was a cop. You know how it goes.’

‘Not from experience.’

‘No.’ She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. ‘I guess not.’

I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.

This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.

We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.

In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.

As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.

What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When I awoke, she was gone.

There was sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The pitching of the boat had almost stopped but there was still enough roll to show me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them. What to tell Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink, absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.

The clinking of glasses from the door brought me round. Ortega was standing in the doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES in the same colour. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt as if they might conceivably go on for ever inside. Balanced in her hands was a large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.

So I told her everything.

‘So what are you going to do?’

I shrugged and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan’s World. Up on deck, the immensity of it sank in and the yacht was suddenly a child’s toy. ‘I’m going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft wants. What you want. What apparently everyone fucking wants. I’m going to kill the case.’

‘You think Kawahara torched Bancroft?’

‘Seems likely. Or she’s shielding someone who did. Doesn’t matter anymore. She’s got Sarah, that’s all that counts now.’

‘We could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of d.h. personality carries—’

‘Fifty to a hundred, yeah.’ I smiled faintly. ‘I was listening last night. But she won’t be holding directly, it’ll be some subsidiary.’

‘We can get warrants that—’

‘She’s a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?’

‘Couple of days, if it’s UN-expedited.’ The gloom crept across Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downwards.

‘Exactly. That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy, she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I’m not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of—’

‘OK.’ Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’

I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual dungeons I couldn’t be sure.

‘Forget it.’

‘I’m a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That’s all.’

I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. ‘I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There are no ways.’

The smile she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.

‘Look, Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to know.’

She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.

If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.

I grimaced. Compared to Kawahara, Death was a three-bout pushover.

I stopped at the prow and picked a point on the horizon to watch until Ortega made up her mind.

Suppose you know someone, a long time ago. You share things, drink deeply of each other. Then you drift apart, life takes you in different directions, the bonds are not strong enough. Or maybe you get torn apart by external circumstance. Years later, you meet that person again, in the same sleeve, and you go through it all over again. What’s the attraction? Is this the same person? They probably have the same name, the same approximate physical appearance, but does that make them the same? And if not, does that make the things that have changed unimportant or peripheral? People change, but how much? As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.

Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.

But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilisation, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. Some of you have served in Vacuum Command, and will no doubt think that out there you have confronted existence vertigo.

A thin smile.

I promise you that the Zen moments you may have enjoyed in hard space are not much more than the beginning of what you must learn here. All and anything you achieve as Envoys must be based on the understanding that there is nothing but flux. Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux.

I wish you all luck.

If you couldn’t even meet the same person twice in one lifetime, in one sleeve, what did that say about all the families and friends waiting in Download Central for someone they once knew to peer out through the eyes of a stranger. How could that even be close to the same person?

And where did that leave a woman consumed with passion for a stranger wearing a body she once loved. Was that closer, or further away?

Where, for that matter, did it leave the stranger who responded?

I heard her coming along the rail towards me. She stopped a couple of paces away and cleared her throat quietly. I quelled a smile, and turned round.

‘I didn’t tell you how Ryker came to have all this, did I?’

‘It didn’t seem the time to ask.’

‘No.’ A grin that faded as if swept away by the breeze. ‘He stole it. A few years back, while he was still working Sleeve Theft. Belonged to some big-time clone marketeer from Sydney. Ryker caught the case because this guy was moving broken-down merchandise through the West Coast clinics. He got co-opted into a local taskforce and they tried to take the guy down at his marina. Big firefight, lots of dead people.’

‘And lots of spoils.’

She nodded. ‘They do things differently down there. Most of the police work gets picked up by private contractors. The local government handle it by tying payment to the assets of the criminals you bring down.’

‘Interesting incentive,’ I said reflectively. ‘Ought to make for a lot of rich people getting busted.’

‘Yeah, they say it works that way. The yacht was Ryker’s piece. He did a lot of the groundwork on the case, and he was wounded in the firefight.’ Her voice was curiously undefensive as she related these details, and for once I felt that Ryker was a long way away. ‘That’s where he got the scar under the eye, that stuff on his arm. Cable gun.’

‘Nasty.’ Despite myself, I felt a slight twinge in the scarred arm. I’d been up against cable fire before, and not enjoyed the encounter very much.

‘Right. Most people reckoned Ryker earned every rivet of this boat. The point is, policy here in Bay City is that officers may not keep gifts, bonuses or anything else awarded for line-of-duty actions.’

‘I can see the rationale for that.’

‘Yeah, so can I. But Ryker couldn’t. He paid some cut-rate Dipper to lose the ship’s records and reregister her through discreet holding. Claimed he needed a safe house, if he ever had to stash someone.’

I grinned a little. ‘Thin. But I like his style. Would that be the same Dipper who ratted him out in Seattle?’

‘Good memory you’ve got. Yeah, the very same. Nacho the Needle. Bautista tells a well-balanced story, doesn’t he?’

‘Saw that too, huh?’

‘Yeah. Ordinarily, I’d have ripped Bautista’s fucking head off for that paternal uncle shit. Like I need emotional sheltering. He’s been through two fucking divorces and he’s not even forty yet.’ She stared reflectively out to sea. ‘I haven’t had the time to confront him yet. Too busy being fucked off with you. Look, Kovacs, reason I’m telling you all this is, Ryker stole the boat, he broke West Coast law. I knew.’

‘And you didn’t do anything,’ I guessed.

‘Nothing.’ She looked at her hands, palms upturned. ‘Oh, shit, Kovacs, who are we kidding? I’m no angel myself. I kicked the shit out of Kadmin in police custody. You saw me. I should have busted you for that fight outside Jerry’s and I let you walk.’

‘You were too tired for the paperwork, as I recall.’

‘Yeah, I remember.’ She grimaced, then turned to look me in the eyes, searching Ryker’s face for a sign that she could trust me. ‘You say you’re going to break the law, but no one gets hurt. That’s right?’

‘No one who matters,’ I corrected gently.

She nodded slowly to herself, like someone weighing up a convincing argument that may just change their mind for good.

‘So what do you need?’

I levered myself off the rail. ‘A list of whorehouses in the Bay City area, to start with. Places that run virtual stuff. After that, we’d better get back to town. I don’t want to call Kawahara from out here.’

She blinked. ‘Virtual whorehouses?’

‘Yeah. And the mixed ones as well. In fact, make it every place on the West Coast that runs virtual porn. The lower grade the better. I’m going to sell Bancroft a package so filthy he won’t want to look at it close enough to check for cracks. So bad he won’t even want to think about it.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Ortega’s list was over two thousand names long, each annotated with a brief surveillance report and any Organic Damage convictions tied to the operators or clientele. In hardcopy format it ran to about two hundred concertina’d sheets, which started to unravel like a long paper scarf as soon as I got past page one. I tried to scan the list in the cab back to Bay City, but gave up when it threatened to overwhelm us both on the back seat. I wasn’t in the mood anyway. Most of me wished I was still bedded down in the stern cabin of Ryker’s yacht, isolated from the rest of humanity and its problems by hundreds of kilometres of trackless blue.

Back at the Watchtower suite, I put Ortega in the kitchen while I called Kawahara at the number Trepp had given me. It was Trepp that came on screen first, features smeared with sleep. I wondered if she’d been up all night trying to track me.

‘Morning.’ She yawned and presumably checked an internal timechip. ‘Afternoon, I mean. Where’ve you been?’

‘Out and about.’

Trepp rubbed inelegantly at one eye and yawned again. ‘Suit yourself. Just making conversation. How’s your head?’

‘Better, thanks. I want to talk to Kawahara.’

‘Sure.’ She reached towards the screen. ‘Talk to you later.’

The screen dropped into neutral, an unwinding tricoloured helix accompanied by sickly sweet string arrangements. I gritted my teeth.

‘Takeshi-san.’ As always, Kawahara started in Japanese, as if it established some kind of common ground with me. ‘This is unlooked-for so early. Do you have good news for me?’

I stayed doggedly in Amanglic. ‘Is this a secure line?’

‘As close as such a thing can be said to exist, yes.’

‘I have a shopping list.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘To begin with, I need access to a military virus. Rawling 4851 for preference, or one of the Condomar variants.’

Kawahara’s intelligent features hardened abruptly. ‘The Innenin virus?’

‘Yeah. It’s over a century out of date now, shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of. Then I need—’

‘Kovacs, I think you’d better explain what you’re planning.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘I understood this was my play, and you didn’t want to be involved.’

‘If I secure you a copy of the Rawling virus, I’d say I’m already involved.’ Kawahara offered me a measured smile. ‘Now what are you planning to do with it?’

‘Bancroft killed himself, that’s the result you want, right?’

A slow nod.

‘Then there has to be a reason,’ I said, warming to the deceit structure I’d come up with, despite myself. I was doing what they’d trained me to do, and it felt good. ‘Bancroft has remote storage, it doesn’t make sense that he’d light himself up unless he had a very specific reason. A reason unrelated to the actual act of suicide. A reason like self preservation.’

Kawahara’s eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘Bancroft uses whorehouses on a regular basis, real and virtual. He told me that himself a couple of days ago. And he’s not too particular about the quality of establishment he uses either. Now, let’s assume that there’s an accident in one of these virtuals while he’s getting his itch scratched. Accidental bleedover from some grimed-up old programs that no one’s bothered to even open for a few decades. Go to a low enough grade of house, there’s no telling what might be lying around.’

‘The Rawling virus.’ Kawahara exhaled as if she had been holding her breath in anticipation.

‘Rawling variant 4851 takes about a hundred minutes to go fully active, by which time it’s too late to do anything.’ I forced images of Jimmy de Soto from my mind. ‘The target’s contaminated beyond redemption. Suppose Bancroft finds this out through some kind of systems warning. He must be wired internally for that kind of thing. He suddenly discovers the stack he’s wearing and the brain it’s wired to is burnt. That’s not a disaster, if you’ve got clone backup and remote storage, but—’

‘Transmission.’ Kawahara’s face lit up as she got it.

‘Right. He’d have to do something to stop the virus being ’cast to the remote with the rest of his personality. With the next needlecast coming up that night, maybe in a few minutes’ time, there was only one way to ensure the remote stack didn’t get contaminated.’

I mimed a pistol at my head.

‘Ingenious.’

‘That’s why he made the call, the timecheck. He couldn’t trust his own internal chip, the virus might already have scrambled it.’

Solemnly, Kawahara lifted her hands into view and applauded. When she had finished, she clasped her hands together and looked at me over them.

‘Very impressive. I will obtain the Rawling virus immediately. Have you selected a suitable virtual house for it to be downloaded into?’

‘Not yet. The virus isn’t the only thing I need. I want you to arrange the parole and re-sleeving of Irene Elliott, currently held at Bay City Central on conviction of Dipping. I also want you to look into the possibility of acquiring her original sleeve back from its purchasers. Some corporate deal, there’ll be records.’

‘You’re going to use this Elliott to download Rawling?’

‘The evidence is she’s good.’

‘The evidence is she got caught,’ observed Kawahara tartly. ‘I’ve got plenty of people can do this for you. Top line intrusion specialists. You don’t need—’

‘Kawahara.’ I kept my temper with an effort, but heard some of it in the tightness in my voice. ‘This is my gig, remember. I don’t want your people climbing all over it. If you unstack Elliott, she’ll be loyal. Get her her own body back and she’ll be ours for life. That’s the way I want to do it, so that’s the way it’s going down.’

I waited. Kawahara stayed expressionless for a moment, then bestowed on me another carefully calibrated smile.

‘Very well. We will do it your way. I’m sure you’re aware of the risks you are taking, and what will happen if you fail. I shall contact you at the Hendrix later today.’

‘What’s the word on Kadmin?’

‘Of Kadmin, there is no word.’ Kawahara smiled once more, and the connection broke.

I sat staring at the standby screen for a moment, reviewing the scam as I’d laid it out. I had the uneasy feeling that I’d been telling the truth in the midst of all the deceit. Or, more, that my carefully spun lies were treading in the tracks of the truth, following the same path. A good lie should shadow the truth closely enough to draw substance from it, but this was something else, something altogether more unnerving. I felt like a hunter who has tracked a swamp panther a little too close for comfort, and expects at any moment to see it rear up out of the swamp in all its fanged and tendril-maned horror. The truth was here, somewhere.

It was a hard feeling to shake.

I got up and went into the kitchen, where Ortega was foraging through the almost empty fridge unit. Light from within cast her features in a way I hadn’t seen before and below one raised arm her right breast filled the slack of her T-shirt like fruit, like water. The desire to touch her was an itching in my hands.

She glanced up. ‘Don’t you cook?’

‘Hotel does it all for you. Comes up in the hatch. What do you want?’

‘I want to cook something.’ She gave up looking through the fridge and closed the door of the unit. ‘Get what you wanted?’

‘Think so. Give the hotel a list of ingredients. There are pans and things in that rack down there, I think. Anything else you need, ask the hotel. I’m going to go through the list. Oh, and Kristin.’

She looked round from the rack I’d indicated.

‘Miller’s head isn’t in here. I put it next door.’

Her mouth tightened a little. ‘I know where you put Miller’s head,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking for it.’

A couple of minutes later, seated on the window shelf with the hardcopy unfolding away to the floor, I heard the low tones of Ortega conversing with the Hendrix. There was some banging about, more muted conversation, and then the sound of oil frying gently. I fought off the urge for a cigarette and bent my head to the hardcopy.

I was looking for something that I’d seen every day of my young life in Newpest; the places I’d spent my teenage years, the narrow accessways of tiny properties sporting cheap holos that promised things like Better than the Real Thing, Wide Range of Scenarios and Dreams Come True. It didn’t take much to set up a virtual brothel. You just needed frontage and space for the client coffins stacked upright. The software varied in price, depending on how elaborate and original it was, but the machines to run it could usually be bought out of military surplus at basement rates.

If Bancroft could spend time and money in Jerry’s biocabins, he’d be at home in one of these.

I was two thirds of my way through the list, more and more of my attention sifting away to the aromas issuing from the kitchen, when my eyes fell on a familiar entry and I grew abruptly still.

I saw a woman with long, straight black hair and crimson lips

I heard Trepp’s voice

. . . head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.

And the bar-coded chauffeur

No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight.

And the crimson-lipped woman

Head in the clouds. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here.

A choir in climax

from the Houses, from the Houses, from the Houses . . .

And the businesslike printout in my hands

Head in the Clouds: accredited West Coast House, real and virtual product, mobile aerial site outside coastal limit . . .

I scanned through the notes, head ringing as if it were crystal that had been delicately struck with a hammer.

Navigational beams and beaconing system locked to Bay City and Seattle. Discreet membership coding. Routine searches, NR. No convictions. Operated under licence from Third Eye Holdings Inc.

I sat still, thinking.

There were pieces missing. It was like the mirror, wedged into place on jagged edges, enough to hold an image, but not the whole. I was peering hard at the irregular limits of what I had, trying to see round the edges, to get the backdrop. Trepp had been taking me to see Ray - Reileen - at Head in the Clouds. Not Europe, Europe was a blind, the sombre weight of the basilica designed to numb me to what should have been obvious. If Kawahara was involved in this thing, she wouldn’t be overseeing it from half a globe away. Kawahara was on Head in the Clouds, and . . .

And what?

Envoy intuition was a form of subliminal recognition, an enhanced awareness of pattern that the real world too often abraded with its demand for detailed focus. Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge. Working from that model, you could fill in the bits later. But there was a certain minimum you needed to get airborne. Like old-style linear prop aircraft, you needed a run up, and I didn’t have it. I could feel myself bumping along the ground, clawing at the air and falling back. Not enough.

‘Kovacs?’

I glanced up, and saw it. Like a head-up display coming on line, like airlock bolts slamming back in my head.

Ortega stood before me, a stirring implement in one hand, hair gathered back in a loose knot. Her T-shirt blazoned at me.

RESOLUTION 653. Yes or No, depending.

Oumou Prescott

Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court.

Jerry Sedaka

Old Anenome’s Catholic . . . We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.

My thoughts ran like a combustion fuse, flaming up the line of association.

Tennis court

Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court

Joseph Phiri, the Commission of Human Rights

My own words

You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.

An undeclared influence . . .

Miriam Bancroft

I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.

And Bancroft

The way he played today, I’m not surprised.

Resolution 653. Catholics.

My mind spewed the data back at me like a demented file search, scrolling down.

Sedaka, gloating

Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican.

Real convenient sometimes.

Ortega

Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals.

Mary Lou Hinchley.

Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean.

Not much left of the body, but they got the stack.

Barred by Reasons of Conscience.

Out of the ocean.

Coastals.

Mobile aerial site outside coastal limit . . .

Head in the Clouds.

It was a process that could not be braked, a kind of mental avalanche. Chunks of reality splintering away and tumbling downward, except that instead of chaos they were falling into something that had form, a kind of restructured whole whose final shape I still couldn’t make out.

Beaconing system locked to Bay City -

- and Seattle

Bautista.

See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle.

The intacts ditched in the Pacific.

Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up.

‘What’re you looking at?’

The words hung in the air for a moment like a hinge in time, and suddenly time hinged back and in the doorway behind, Sarah was just waking up in the Millsport hotel bed, with the rolling thunder of an orbital discharge rattling the loose windows in their frames and behind that, rotorblades against the night, and our own deaths waiting just up around the bend.

‘What’re you looking at?’

I blinked and I was still staring at Ortega’s T-shirt, at the soft mounds she made in it and the legend printed across the chest. There was a slight smile on her face, but it was beginning to bleach out with concern.

‘Kovacs?’

I blinked again and tried to reel in the metres of mental spillage that the T-shirt had set off. The looming truth of Head in the Clouds.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to eat?’

‘Ortega, what if—’ I found I had to clear my throat, swallow and start again. I didn’t want to say this, my body didn’t want me to say it. ‘What if I can get Ryker off the stack? Permanently, I mean. Clear him of the charges, prove Seattle was a set-up. What’s that worth to you?’

For a moment, she looked at me as if I was speaking a language she didn’t understand. Then she moved to the window shelf and seated herself carefully on the edge, facing me. She was silent for a while, but I had already seen the answer in her eyes.

‘Are you feeling guilty?’ she asked me finally.

‘About?’

‘About us.’

I nearly laughed out loud, but there was just enough underlying pain to stop the reflex in my throat. The urge to touch her had not stopped. Over the last day it had ebbed and flowed in waves, but it had never wholly gone. When I looked at the curve of her hips and thighs on the window shelf, I could feel the way she had writhed back against me so clearly it was almost virtual. My palm recalled the weight and shape of her breast as if holding it had been this sleeve’s life’s work. As I looked at her, my fingers wanted to trace the geometry of her face. There was no room in me for guilt, no room for anything but this feeling.

‘Envoys don’t feel guilt,’ I said shortly. ‘I’m serious. It’s likely, no it’s almost certain in fact that Kawahara had Ryker set up because he was heating up the Mary Lou Hinchley case too much. Do you remember anything about her employment records?’

Ortega thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘She ran away from home to be with the boyfriend. Mostly unregistered stuff, anything to bring the rent in. Boyfriend was a piece of shit, got a record goes back to age fifteen. He dealt a little Stiff, crashed a few easy datastacks, mostly lived off his women.’

‘Would he have let her work the Meat Rack? Or the cabins?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Ortega nodded, face stony. ‘Soon as spit.’

‘If someone was recruiting for a snuff house, Catholics would be the ideal candidates, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to tell any tales after the event, after all. By reasons of conscience.’

‘Snuff.’ If Ortega’s face had been stony before, it was weathered granite now. ‘Most of the snuff victims around here just get a bolt through the stack when it’s over. They don’t tell any tales.’

‘Right. But what if something went wrong. Specifically, what if Mary Lou Hinchley was going to be used as a snuff whore, so she tried to escape and fell out of an aerial whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. That would make her Catholicism very convenient, wouldn’t it?’

‘Head in the Clouds? Are you serious?’

‘And it’d make the owners of Head in the Clouds very anxious to stop Resolution 653 dead in its tracks, wouldn’t it?’

‘Kovacs.’ Ortega was making slow-down gestures with both palms. ‘Kovacs, Head in the Clouds is one of the Houses. Class prostitution. I don’t like those places, they make me want to vomit just as bad as the cabins, but they’re clean. They cater for elevated society and they don’t run scams like snuff—’

‘You don’t think the upper echelons go in for sadism and necrophilia, then. That’s strictly a lower-class thing, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Ortega evenly. ‘But if anyone with money wants to play at torturer, they can afford to do it in virtual. Some of the Houses run virtual snuff, but they run it because it’s legal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s the way they like it.’

I drew a deep breath. ‘Kristin, someone was taking me to see Kawahara on board Head in the Clouds. Someone from the Wei Clinic. And if Kawahara is involved in the West Coast Houses, then they will do anything that turns a profit, because she will do anything, anything at all. You wanted a big bad Meth to believe in? Forget Bancroft, he’s practically a priest in comparison. Kawahara grew up in Fission City, dealing anti-radiation drugs to the families of fuel rod workers. Do you know what a water carrier is?’

She shook her head.

‘In Fission City it’s what they used to call the gang enforcers. See, if someone refused to pay protection, or informed to the police, or just didn’t jump fast enough when the local yakuza boss said frog, the standard punishment was to drink contaminated water. The enforcers used to carry it around in shielded flasks, siphoned off low-grade reactor cooling systems. They’d turn up at the offender’s house one night and tell him how much he had to drink. His family would be made to watch. If he didn’t drink, they’d start cutting his family one by one until he did. You want to know how I know that delightful piece of Earth history trivia?’

Ortega said nothing, but her mouth was tight with disgust.

‘I know because Kawahara told me. That’s what she used to do when she was a kid. She was a water carrier. And she’s proud of it.’

The phone chimed.

I waved back Ortega out of range and went to answer it.

‘Kovacs?’ It was Rodrigo Bautista. ‘Is Ortega with you?’

‘No.’ I lied automatically. ‘Haven’t seen her for a couple of days. Is there a problem?’

‘Ah, probably not. She’s vanished off the face of the planet again. Well, if you do see her, tell her she missed a squad assembly this afternoon and Captain Murawa wasn’t impressed.’

‘Should I expect to see her?’

‘With Ortega, who fucking knows?’ Bautista spread his hands. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. See you around.’

‘See you.’ I watched as the screen blanked, and Ortega came back from her place by the wall. ‘Did you get that?’

‘Yeah. I was supposed to turn the Hendrix memory discs over this morning. Murawa will probably want to know why I took them out of Fell Street in the first place.’

‘It’s your case, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, but there are norms.’ Ortega looked suddenly tired. ‘I can’t stall them for long, Kovacs. I’m already getting a lot of funny looks for working with you. Pretty soon someone’s going to get seriously suspicious. You’ve got a few days to run this scam on Bancroft, but after that . . .’

She raised her hands eloquently.

‘Can’t you say you were held up? That Kadmin took the discs off you?’

‘They’ll polygraph me—’

‘Not immediately.’

‘Kovacs, this is my career we’re flushing down the toilet here, not yours. I don’t do this job for fun, it’s taken me—’

‘Kristin, listen to me.’ I went to her and took her hands in mine. ‘Do you want Ryker back, or not?’

She tried to turn away from me, but I held on.

‘Kristin. Do you believe he was set up?’

She swallowed. ‘Yes.’

‘Then why not believe it was Kawahara? The cruiser he tried to shoot down in Seattle was heading out over the ocean when it crashed. You extrapolate that heading and see where it takes you. You plot the point that the Coastals fished Mary Lou Hinchley out of the sea. Then put Head in the Clouds on the map and see if it all adds up to anything.’

Ortega pulled away from me with a strange look in her eyes.

‘You want this to be true, don’t you? You want the excuse to go after Kawahara, no matter what. It’s just hate with you, isn’t it? Another score to settle. You don’t care about Ryker. You don’t even care about your friend, Sarah any—’

‘Say that again,’ I told her coldly, ‘and I’ll deck you. For your information, nothing that we’ve just discussed matters more to me than Sarah’s life. And nothing I’ve said means I have any option other than to do exactly what Kawahara wants.’

‘Then what’s the fucking point?’

I wanted to reach out for her. Instead, I turned the yearning into a displacement gesture with both hands chopping gently at the air.

‘I don’t know. Not yet. But if I can get Sarah clear, there might be a way to bring Kawahara down afterwards. And there might be a way to clear Ryker too. That’s all I’m saying.’

She stayed looking at me for a moment, then turned and swept up her jacket from the arm of the chair where she had draped it when we arrived.

‘I’m going out for a while,’ she said quietly.

‘Fine.’ I stayed equally quiet. This was not a moment for pressure. ‘I’ll be here, or I’ll leave a message for you if I have to go out.’

‘Yes, do that.’

There was nothing in her voice to indicate whether she was really coming back or not.

After she had gone, I sat thinking for a while longer, trying to flesh out the glimpse of structure that the Envoy intuition had given me. When the phone chimed again, I had evidently given up, because the chime caught me staring out of the window, wondering where in Bay City Ortega had gone.

This time, it was Kawahara.

‘I have what you want,’ she said offhandedly. ‘A dormant version of the Rawling virus will be delivered to SilSet Holdings tomorrow morning after eight o’clock. Address 1187 Sacramento. They’ll know you’re coming.’

‘And the activator codes?’

‘Delivery under separate cover. Trepp will contact you.’

I nodded. UN law governing transfer and ownership of war viruses was clear to the point of bluntness. Inert viral forms could be owned as subjects for study, or even, as one bizarre test case had proved, private trophies. Ownership or sale of an active military virus, or the codes whereby a dormant virus could be activated, was a UN indictable offence, punishable with anything between a hundred and two hundred years’ storage. In the event of the virus actually being deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties were only applicable to private citizens, not military commanders or government executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys.

‘Just make sure she contacts me soon,’ I said briefly. ‘I don’t want to use up any more of my ten days than I have to.’

‘I understand.’ Kawahara made a sympathetic face, for all the world as if the threats against Sarah were being made by some malignant force of nature over which neither of us had control. ‘I will have Irene Elliott re-sleeved by tomorrow evening. Nominally, she is being bought out of storage by JacSol SA, one of my communications interface companies. You’ll be able to collect her from Bay City Central around ten o’clock. I have you temporarily accredited as a security consultant for JacSol Division West. Name, Martin Anderson.’

‘Got it.’ This was Kawahara’s way of telling me that if anything went wrong, I was tied to her and would go down first. ‘That’s going to clash with Ryker’s gene signature. He’ll be a live file at Bay City Central as long as the body’s decanted.’

Kawahara nodded. ‘Dealt with. Your accreditation will be routed through JacSol corporate channels before any individual genetic search. A punch-in code. Within JacSol, your gene print will be recorded as Anderson’s. Any other problems?’

‘What if I bump into Sullivan?’

‘Warden Sullivan has gone on extended leave. Some kind of psychological problem. He is spending some time in virtual. You will not be seeing him again.’

Despite myself, I felt a cold shiver as I looked at Kawahara’s composed features. I cleared my throat.

‘And the sleeve repurchase?’

‘No.’ Kawahara smiled faintly. ‘I checked the specs. Irene Elliott’s sleeve has no biotech augmentation to justify the cost of retrieving it.’

‘I didn’t say it had. This isn’t about technical capacity, it’s about motivation. She’ll be more loyal if—’

Kawahara leant forward in the screen. ‘I can be pushed so far, Kovacs. And then it stops. Elliott’s getting a compatible sleeve, she should be thankful for that. You wanted her, any loyalty problems you have with her are going to be your problems exclusively. I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘She’ll take longer to adjust,’ I said doggedly. ‘In a new sleeve, she’ll be slower, less resp—’

‘Also your problem. I offered you the best intrusion experts money can buy, and you turned them down. You’ve got to learn to live with the consequences of your actions, Kovacs.’ She paused and sat back with another faint smile. ‘I had a check run on Elliott. Who she is, who her family are, what the connection is. Why you wanted her off stack. It’s a nice thought, Kovacs, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to support your own Good Samaritan gestures without my help. I’m not running a charity here.’

‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘I suppose not.’

‘No. And I think we can also suppose that this will be the last direct contact between us until this matter is resolved.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, inappropriate though it may seem, good luck, Kovacs.’

The screen blanked, leaving the words hanging in the air. I sat for what seemed like a long time, hearing them, staring at an imagined afterimage on screen that my hate made almost real. When I spoke, Ryker’s voice sounded alien in my ears, as if someone or something else was speaking through me.

‘Inappropriate is right,’ it said into the quiet room. ‘Motherfucker. ’

Ortega did not come back, but the aroma of what she had cooked curled through the apartment and my stomach flexed in sympathy. I waited some more, still trying to assemble all the jagged edges of the puzzle in my mind, but either my heart was not in it or there was still something major missing. Finally, I forced down the coppery taste of the hate and frustration, and went to eat.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Kawahara’s groundwork was flawless.

An automated limo with JacSol insignia lightning-flashed onto its flanks turned up outside the Hendrix at eight the next morning. I went down to meet it and found the rear cabin stacked with Chinese designer-label boxes.

Opened back in my room, the boxes yielded a line of high quality corporate props that Serenity Carlyle would have gone wild for: two blocky, sand-coloured suits, cut to Ryker’s size, a half dozen handmade shirts with the JacSol logo embroidered on each wing collar, formal shoes in real leather, a midnight blue raincoat, a JacSol dedicated mobile phone and a small black disc with a thumbprint DNA encoding pad.

I showered and shaved, dressed and ran the disc. Kawahara blinked up on the screen, construct-perfect.

‘Good morning, Takeshi-san, and welcome to JacSol Communications. The DNA coding on this disc is now webbed into a line of credit in the name Martin James Anderson. As I mentioned earlier, the punch-in corporate prefix for JacSol will negate any clash with Ryker’s genetic records or the account set up for you by Bancroft. Please note the coding below.’

I read off the string of digits in a single sweep, and went back to watching Kawahara’s face.

‘The JacSol account will bear all reasonable expenses and is programmed to expire at the end of our ten-day agreement. Should you wish to dissolve the account earlier than this, double punch the code, apply the gene trace and double punch again.

‘Trepp will contact you via the corporate mobile some time today, so keep the unit with you at all times. Irene Elliott will be downloaded at 21.45 West Coast time. Processing should take about forty-five minutes. And by the time you receive this message, SilSet Holdings will have your package. After consultation with my own experts, I have appended a list of the likely hardware Elliott will need, and a number of suppliers who can be trusted to acquire it discreetly. Charge everything through the JacSol account. The list will print out in hardcopy momentarily.

‘Should you need any repetition of these details, the disc will remain playable for the next eighteen minutes, at which point it will self wipe. You are now on your own.’

Kawahara’s features arranged themselves in a PR smile and the image faded as the printer chittered out the hardware list. I scanned it briefly on my way down to the limo.

Ortega had not come back.

At SilSet Holdings I was treated like a Harlan Family heir. Polished human receptionists busied themselves with my comfort while a technician brought out a metal cylinder roughly the dimensions of a hallucinogen grenade.

Trepp was less impressed. I met her early that evening, as per her phoned instructions, in a bar in Oakland, and when she saw the JacSol image she laughed sourly.

‘You look like a fucking programmer, Kovacs. Where’d you get that suit?’

‘My name’s Anderson,’ I reminded her. ‘And the suit goes with the name.’

She pulled a face.

‘Well next time you go shopping, Anderson, take me with you. I’ll save you a lot of money, and you won’t come out looking like a guy takes the kids to Honolulu at weekends.’

I leaned across the tiny table. ‘You know Trepp, last time you gave me a hard time about my dress sense, I killed you.’

She shrugged. ‘Goes to show. Some people just can’t take the truth.’

‘Did you bring the stuff?’

Trepp put her hand flat on the table, and when she removed it there was a nondescript grey disc sealed in impact plastic between us.

‘There you go. As requested. Now I know you’re crazy.’ There might have been something like admiration in her voice. ‘You know what they do to you on Earth for playing with this stuff?’

I covered the disc with my own hand and pocketed it. ‘Same as anywhere else, I guess. Federal offence, down the double barrel. You forget, I don’t have any choice.’

Trepp scratched an ear. ‘Double barrel, or the Big Wipe. I haven’t enjoyed carrying this around all day. You got the rest of it there?’

‘Why? Worried about being seen in public with me?’

She smiled. ‘A bit. I hope you know what you’re doing.’

I hoped so too. The bulky, grenade-sized package I’d collected from SilSet had been burning a hole in my expensive coat pocket all day.

I went back to the Hendrix and checked for messages. Ortega had not called. I killed time in the hotel room, thinking through the line I was going to feed Elliott. At nine I got back in the limo and took it down to Bay City Central.

I sat in a reception room while a young doctor completed the necessary paperwork and I initialled the forms where he indicated. There was an eerie familiarity to the process. Most of the clauses in the parole were on behalf of stipulations, which effectively made me responsible for Irene Elliott’s conduct during the release period. She had even less say in the matter than I’d had when I arrived the week before.

When Elliott finally emerged from the RESTRICTED ZONE doors beyond the reception rooms, it was with the halting step of someone recovering from a debilitating illness. The shock of the mirror was written into her new face. When you don’t do it for a living, it’s no easy thing to face the stranger for the first time and the face that Elliott now wore was almost as far from the big-boned blonde I remembered from her husband’s photocube as Ryker was from my own previous sleeve. Kawahara had described the new sleeve as compatible, and it fitted that bleak description perfectly. It was a female body, about the same age as Elliott’s original body had been, but there the resemblance ended. Where Irene Elliott had been big and fair-skinned, this sleeve had the sheen of a narrow vein of copper seen through falling water. Thick black hair framed a face with eyes like hot coals and lips the colour of plums, and the body was slim and delicate.

‘Irene Elliott?’

She leaned unsteadily on the reception counter as she turned to look at me. ‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘My name is Martin Anderson. I represent JacSol Division West. We arranged for your parole.’

Her eyes narrowed a little, scanning me from head to foot and back again. ‘You don’t look like a programmer. Apart from the suit, I mean.’

‘I’m a security consultant, attached to JacSol for certain projects. There is some work we would like you to do for us.’

‘Yeah? Couldn’t get anyone else to do it cheaper than this?’ She gestured around her. ‘What happened, did I get famous while I was in the store?’

‘In a sense,’ I said carefully. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we dealt with the formalities here and moved on. There is a limousine waiting.’

‘A limo?’ The incredulity in her voice put a genuine smile on my face for the first time that day. She signed the final release as if in a dream.

‘Who are you really?’ she asked when the limousine was in the air. It felt like a lot of people had been asking me that over the past few days. I was almost beginning to wonder myself.

I stared ahead over the navigation block of the limo. ‘A friend,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s all you need to know for now.’

‘Before we start anything, I want—’

‘I know.’ The limousine was banking in the sky as I said it. ‘We’ll be in Ember in about half an hour.’

I hadn’t turned but I could feel the heat of her stare on the side of my face.

‘You’re not corporate,’ she said definitely. ‘Corporates don’t do this stuff. Not like this.’

‘The corporates do whatever turns a profit. Don’t let your prejudices blind you. Sure, they’ll burn down entire villages if it pays. But if having a human face is what cuts it, they’ll whip out a human face and put it on.’

‘And you’re the human face?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What’s the work you want me to do? Something illegal?’

I pulled the cylindrical virus loader out of my pocket and passed it across to her. She took it in both hands and examined the decals with professional interest. As far as I was concerned, this was the first test. I’d pulled Elliott out of the store because that way she would be mine in a way no one supplied by Kawahara or skimmed off the street would ever be. But beyond that I had nothing to go on but instinct and Victor Elliott’s word that his wife was good, and I was feeling slightly queasy about the direction I’d let things go. Kawahara was right. Good Samaritan gestures can be expensive.

‘So let’s see. You’ve got a first-generation Simultec virus here.’ Scorn made her enunciate each syllable slowly. ‘Collector’s item, practically a relic. And you’ve got it in a state-of-the-art rapid deployment jacket with anti-locational casing. Why don’t you just cut the crap and tell me what’s really in here? You’re planning a run, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘What’s the target?’

‘Virtual whorehouse. AI-managed.’

Elliott’s new lips parted in a soundless whistle. ‘Liberation run?’ ‘No. We’re installing.’

‘Installing this?’ She hefted the cylinder. ‘So what is it?’

‘Rawling 4851.’

Elliott stopped hefting abruptly. ‘That’s not funny.’

‘Wasn’t intended to be. That’s a dormant Rawling variant. Set for rapid deployment, as you so rightly observed. The activation codes are in my pocket. We are going to plant Rawling inside an AI whorehouse database, inject the codes and then weld the lid shut on it. There’s some peripheral stuff with monitoring systems, and some tidying up, but basically that’s the run.’

She gave me a curious look. ‘Are you some kind of religious nut?’

‘No.’ I smiled faintly. ‘It’s nothing like that. Can you do it?’

‘Depends on the AI. Do you have the specs?’

‘Not here.’

Elliott handed me back the deployment jacket. ‘I can’t tell you, then, can I?’

‘That was what I was hoping you’d say.’ I stowed the cylinder, satisfied. ‘How’s the new sleeve?’

‘It’s OK. Any reason why I couldn’t have my own body back? I’ll be a lot faster in my own—’

‘I know. Unfortunately it’s out of my hands. Did they tell you how long you’ve been in the store?’

‘Four years, someone said.’

‘Four and a half,’ I said, glancing at the release forms I’d signed. ‘I’m afraid, in the meantime, someone took a shine to your sleeve and bought it.’

‘Oh.’ She was silent then. The shock of waking up inside someone else’s body for the first time is nothing compared to the sense of rage and betrayal you feel knowing that someone, somewhere, is walking around inside you. It’s like the discovery of infidelity, but at the intimacy range of rape. And like both those violations, there’s nothing you can do about it. You just get used to it.

When the silence stretched, I looked across at her still profile and cleared my throat.

‘You sure you want to do this right now? Go home, I mean.’

She barely bothered to look at me. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I have a daughter and a husband that haven’t seen me in nearly five years. You think this -’ she gestured down at herself ‘- is going to stop me?’

‘Fair enough.’

The lights of Ember appeared on the darkened mass of the coastline up ahead, and the limousine began its descent. I watched Elliott out of the corner of my eye and saw the nervousness setting in. Palms rubbing together in her lap, lower lip caught in her teeth at one corner of her new mouth. She released her breath with a small but perfectly audible noise.

‘They don’t know I’m coming?’ she asked.

‘No.’ I said shortly. I didn’t want to follow this line of conversation. ‘The contract is between you and JacSol West. It doesn’t concern your family.’

‘But you arranged for me to see them. Why?’

‘I’m a sucker for family reunions.’ I fixed my gaze on the darkened bulk of the wrecked aircraft carrier below, and we landed in silence. The autolimo banked round to align itself with the local traffic systems and touched down a couple of hundred metres north of Elliott’s Data Linkage. We powered smoothly along the shore road under the successive holos of Anchana Salomao and parked immaculately opposite the narrow frontage. The dead monitor doorstop had been removed and the door was closed but there were lights burning in the glass-walled office at the back.

We climbed out and crossed the street. The closed door proved to be locked as well. Irene Elliott banged impatiently at it with the flat of one copper-skinned hand and someone sat up sluggishly in the back office. After a moment, a figure identifiable as Victor Elliott came down to the transmission floor, past the reception counter and towards us. His grey hair was untidy and his face swollen with sleep. He peered out at us with a lack of focus I’d seen before on datarats when they’d been cruising the stacks for too long. Jack-happy.

‘Who the hell—’ He stopped as he recognised me. ‘What the fuck do you want, grasshopper? And who’s this?’

‘Vic?’ Irene Elliott’s new throat sounded nine tenths closed. ‘Vic, it’s me.’

For a moment, Elliott’s eyes ran a volley between my face and the delicate Asian woman beside me, then what she had said smacked into him like a truck. He flinched visibly with the impact.

‘Irene?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ she husked back. There were tears leaking down her cheeks. For moments they stared at each other through the glass, then Victor Elliott was fumbling with the locking mechanism of the door, shoving at the frame to get it out of the way, and the copper-skinned woman sagged across the threshold into his arms. They locked together in an embrace that looked set to break the new sleeve’s delicate bones. I took a mild interest in street lamps up and down the promenade.

Finally, Irene Elliott remembered me. She disengaged from her husband and twisted round, smearing the tears off her face with the heel of one hand and blinking bright-eyed at me.

‘Can you—’

‘Sure.’ I said neutrally. ‘I’ll wait in the limo. See you in the morning.’

I caught one confused look from Victor Elliott as his wife bustled him inside, nodded good-naturedly at him and turned away to the parked limo and the beach. The door banged shut behind me. I felt in my pockets and came up with Ortega’s crumpled packet of cigarettes. Wandering past the limo to the iron railing, I kindled one of the bent and flattened cylinders and for once felt no sense that I was betraying something as the smoke curled into my lungs. Down on the beach, the surf was up, a chorus line of ghosts along the sand. I leaned on the railing and listened to the white noise of the waves as they broke, wondering why I could feel this much at peace with so much still unresolved. Ortega had not come back. Kadmin was still out there. Sarah was still under ransom, Kawahara still had me by the balls, and I still didn’t know why Bancroft had been killed.

And despite it all, there was space for this measure of quiet.

Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.

My gaze slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive bulk of the keeled-over Free Trade Enforcer was hard to make out. I imagined Mary Lou Hinchley hurtling down to her shattering impact with the unyielding water, then slipping broken beneath the swells to be cradled in wait for the sea’s predators. How long had she been out there before the currents contrived to carry what was left of her back to her own kind? How long had the darkness held her?

My thoughts skipped aimlessly, cushioned on the vague sense of acceptance and well-being. I saw Bancroft’s antique telescope, trained on the heavens and the tiny motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million pioneers and the deep-frozen embryo banks that might someday re-sleeve them on distant worlds, if the promise of the vaguely understood Martian astrogation charts bore fruit. If not they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

Raising an eyebrow at my own introspection, I heaved myself off the rail and glanced up at the holographic face above my head. Anchana Salomao had the night to herself. Her ghostly countenance gazed down at repeated intervals along the promenade, compassionate but uninvolved. Looking at the composed features, it was easy to see why Elizabeth Elliott had wanted so badly to attain those heights. I would have given a lot for that same detached composure. I shifted my attention to the windows above Elliott’s. The lights were on there, and as I watched a female form moved across one of them in naked silhouette. I sighed, spun the stub of my cigarette into the gutter and took refuge in the limo. Let Anchana keep the vigil. I called up channels at random on the entertainment deck and let the mindless barrage of images and sounds numb me into a kind of half-sleep. The night passed around the vehicle like cold mist and I suffered the vague sensation that I was drifting away from the lights of the Elliotts’ home, out to sea on snapped moorings with nothing between me and the horizon where there was a storm building . . .

A sharp rapping on the window beside my head shook me awake. I jerked round from the position I’d slumped into and saw Trepp standing patiently outside. She gestured at me to wind down the window, then leaned in with a grin.

‘Kawahara was right about you. Sleeping in the car so this Dipper can get laid. You’ve got delusions of priesthood, Kovacs.’

‘Shut up, Trepp,’ I said irritably. ‘What time is it?’

‘About five.’ Her eyes swivelled up and left to consult the chip. ‘Five-sixteen. Be getting light soon.’

I struggled into a more upright position, tasting the residue of the single cigarette on my tongue. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Watching your back. We don’t want Kadmin taking you out before you can sell the goods to Bancroft, do we? Hey, is that the Wreckers?’

I followed her gaze forward to the entertainment deck, which was still screening some kind of sports coverage. Minuscule figures rushed backwards and forwards on a cross-hatched field, accompanied by a barely audible commentary. A brief collision between two players occasioned an insectile roar of cheering. I must have lowered the volume before I fell asleep. Switching the deck off, I saw in the ensuing dimness that Trepp had been right. The night had washed out to a soft blue gloom that was creeping over the buildings beside us like a bleach stain on the darkness.

‘Not a fan, then?’ Trepp nodded at the screen. ‘I didn’t use to be, but you live in New York long enough, you get the habit.’

‘Trepp, how the fuck are you supposed to watch my back if your head is jammed in here watching screen?’

Trepp gave me a hurt look and withdrew her head. I climbed out of the limo and stretched in the chilly air. Overhead, Anchana Salomao was still resplendent, but the lights above Elliott’s were out.

‘They stayed up until a couple of hours ago,’ said Trepp helpfully. ‘I thought they might be running out on you, so I checked the back.’

I gazed up at the darkened windows. ‘Why are they going to run out on me? She hasn’t even heard what the terms of the deal are.’

‘Well, involvement in an erasure offence tends to make most people nervous.’

‘Not this woman,’ I said, and wondered how much I believed myself.

Trepp shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. I still think you’re crazy, though. Kawahara’s got Dippers could do this stuff standing on their heads.’

Since my own reasons for not accepting Kawahara’s offer of technical support were almost entirely instinctive, I said nothing. The icy certainty of my revelations about Bancroft, Kawahara and Resolution 653 had faded with the previous day’s rush of set-up details for the run, and any sense of interlocking well-being had gone when Ortega left. All I had now was the gravity pull of mission time, the cold dawn and the sound of the waves on the shore. The taste of Ortega in my mouth and the warmth of her long-limbed body curled into mine was a tropical island in the chill, receding in my wake.

‘You reckon there’s somewhere open this early that serves coffee,’ I asked.

‘Town this size?’ Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. ‘Doubt it. But I saw a bank of dispensers on the way in. Got to be one that does coffee.’

‘Machine coffee?’ I curled my lip.

‘Hey, what are you, a fucking connoisseur? You’re living in a hotel that’s just one big goddamned dispenser. Christ, Kovacs, this is the Machine Age. Didn’t anybody tell you that?’

‘You got a point. How far is it?’

‘Couple of klicks. We’ll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes up, she won’t look out the window and panic.’

‘Sold.’

I followed Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of incense.

‘This yours?’

‘No, rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe. Why?’

I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

Trepp started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Everything about the situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to Bancroft’s death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.

‘You thought about what you’re going to do when this is over?’

‘No,’ I said morosely.

We found the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no better here than for Elliott’s Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups. She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.

‘Want to drink it here?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

We pulled the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn’t heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and watched the sea through the windscreen, immersed in a silence that was almost companionable.

‘I tried for the Envoys once,’ said Trepp suddenly.

I glanced sideways at her, curious. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they said.’

I grunted. ‘Figures. You were never in the military, were you?’

‘What do you think?’ She was looking at me as if I’d just suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.

‘Thought not. See, the thing is, they’re looking for borderline psychopathic tendencies. That’s why they do most of their recruiting from the military in the first place.’

Trepp looked put out. ‘I’ve got borderline psychopathic tendencies.’

‘Yeah, I don’t doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those tendencies and a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They’re opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behaviour at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect Envoy material.’

‘You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.’

For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.

‘Yeah.’ I drained the rest of my coffee. ‘Come on, let’s get back.’

As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.

When we pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.

‘Better stay here,’ I told Trepp as I climbed out. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

‘Sure.’

‘I guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.’

‘I doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,’ said Trepp cheerfully. ‘I’m better at this than you are.’

‘Remains to be seen.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.’ She raised her voice as I started to walk away. ‘And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that happen.’

She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.

‘Who was that?’ There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.

‘Back-up,’ I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. ‘Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a friend.’

‘She may be your friend,’ said Elliott bitterly. ‘She isn’t mine. None of you people are.’

I looked at her, then back out to sea. ‘Fair enough.’

Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.

‘You know what’s happened to my daughter,’ she said in a dead voice. ‘You knew all the time.’

I nodded.

‘And you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.’

‘Lots of men used her,’ I said brutally. ‘She let herself be used. And I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.’

I heard Irene Elliott’s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. ‘She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.’

‘You fuck.’ She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.

I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. ‘I don’t work for Bancroft any more,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ve swapped sides on that piece of shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice, you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that away.’

Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.

‘You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?’ she said finally. ‘You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?’

‘Of course it does,’ I said quietly.

‘I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.’

I watched the waves. ‘That’s the deal,’ I agreed.

More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. ‘Do you know how I feel?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘I slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.’ A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. ‘I feel like I’ve been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.’

She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.

‘I don’t know what I feel,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to feel.’

There was a lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the problems inherent in re-sleeving - How to make your partner love you again, in any body - trite, interminable psychological tracts - Some observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving - even the sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned human. I could have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I could even have told her that whichever God she owed nominal allegiance to was watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.

I said nothing.

The dawn gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I glanced at the windows of Elliott’s Data Linkage.

‘Victor?’ I asked.

‘Sleeping.’ She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like badly cut amphetamine. ‘You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?’

‘Yeah. In a subtle way, but yeah, it’ll hurt.’

‘Installation run on an AI,’ said Irene Elliott to me. ‘Installing an erasure penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know what you’re asking me to do?’

I turned to look her in the eye.

‘Yes. I know.’

Her mouth clamped down on a tremor.

‘Good. Then let’s do it.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.

In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors, in her opinion, didn’t know shit.

By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.

Irene Elliott was sold.

I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.

I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the stuff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hardware across the floor of the apartment.

Together we went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.

(Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)

Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.

By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.

By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.

(Nothing from Ortega.)

I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.

10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.

We did it.

Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.

A piece of piss, said Elliott.

I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

‘I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,’ said Bancroft sharply. ‘Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?’

Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.

‘The mall has security monitors,’ I said, affecting disinterest.

‘Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don’t you?’

‘Jack It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually used the place.’

I looked round without leaving the rail. ‘Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?’

‘No.’ I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘And how would you classify Jerry’s Closed Quarters? An elegant whorehouse?’

‘Hardly.’

‘But that didn’t stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because—’

‘All right.’ The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace. ‘You’ve made your point. Don’t labour it.’

I stopped watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.

‘I’m glad you take the point,’ I said, stirring the drink. ‘Because it’s taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I’ve been abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not much older than your precious daughter Naomi, was killed because she got in the way. So if you don’t like my conclusions, you can go fuck yourself.’

I raised my glass to him across the table.

‘Spare me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God’s sake. I’m not rejecting what you say, I’m just questioning it.’

I sat and levelled a finger at him. ‘No. You’re squirming. This thing’s pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You’d rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack It Up, in case it’s even more grubby than you already imagine. You’re being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come in your wife’s face, and you don’t like it.’

‘There will be no need to revisit that particular conversation,’ said Bancroft stiffly. He steepled his fingers. ‘You are aware, I suppose, that the security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily by anyone with access to newstape images of me.’

‘Yes, I am.’ I’d watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight hours previously. Easy wasn’t the word. After the virus run, it had been like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises. I’d barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. ‘But why would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, assuming of course that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any case, those images aren’t the basis for anything. They just confirm what I’d already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral contamination of your remote stack.’

‘That is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day investigation.’

‘Blame Ortega,’ I said lightly, though Bancroft’s enduring suspicion in the face of unpleasant facts was beginning to worry me. I hadn’t realised he would take so much wearing down. ‘She’s the one who put me onto the right track. She wouldn’t wear the murder theory from the start. She kept telling me you were too tough and smart a Meth motherfucker to let anyone kill you. Quote, unquote. And that brought me back to the conversation we had here a week ago. You told me I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I was, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Envoys have total recall, those were your exact words.’

I paused and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies right up against the truth.

‘All this time, I’ve been working on the assumption you didn’t pull the trigger because you weren’t the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight security you’ve got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the handprint lock on the safe.’

‘And Kadmin. And Ortega.’

‘Yeah, that didn’t help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I’m coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you’d torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you’d do it? It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you’ll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,’ I smiled faintly, ‘life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn’t take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you’d been infected.’

Bancroft shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me. Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they, with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.

‘Now, it’s virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a disconnected target, so you had to have been jacked in somewhere along the line. I thought of the PsychaSec facility, but they’re sewed up too tight. And it couldn’t have been before you went to Osaka for the same reasons; even dormant, the virus would have tripped every alarm at PsychaSec when they set up the ’cast. It had to have been some time in the last forty-eight hours, because your remote stack was uncontaminated. I knew from talking to your wife that the likelihood was you’d been out on the town when you got back from Osaka, and on your own admission that could quite possibly include some kind of virtual whorehouse. After that, it was just a matter of doing the rounds. I tried a half dozen places before I hit Jack It Up, and when I punched up their inquiries the viral contam siren nearly blew my phone out. That’s the thing about AIs - they write their own security and it’s second to none. Jack It Up is sealed off so tight it’ll take the police months to tunnel in and see what’s left of the core processors.’

I felt a vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We’d chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we’d planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environment so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on Ortega’s list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega’s lip as she read the software listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.

I missed Ortega.

‘What about Kadmin?’

‘It’s hard to know, but I’m betting whoever infected Jack It Up in the first place probably hired Kadmin to silence me and make sure the whole thing stayed covered up. After all, without me stirring things up, how long would it have been before anyone realised Jack had been iced? Can’t see any of its potential clients calling the police when they got refused entry, can you?’

Bancroft gave me a hard look, but I knew from his next words that the battle was almost over. The balance of belief was tipping towards me. Bancroft was going to buy the package. ‘You’re saying the virus was introduced deliberately. That someone murdered this machine?’

I shrugged. ‘It seems likely. Jack It Up operated on the margins of local law. A lot of its software appears to have been impounded by the Felony Transmission department at one time or another, which suggests that it had regular dealings with the criminal world in one form or another. It is possible that it made some enemies. On Harlan’s World the yakuza have been known to perform viral execution on machines judged to have betrayed them. I don’t know if that happens here, or who’d have the stack muscle to do it. But I do know that whoever hired Kadmin used an AI to pull him out of police storage. You can verify that with Fell Street, if you like.’

Bancroft was silent. I watched him for a moment, seeing the belief sink in. Watching the process as he convinced himself. I could almost see what he was seeing. Himself, hunched over in an autocab as the sordid guilt over what he had been doing at Jack It Up merged sickeningly with the horror of the contamination warnings sirening in his head. Infected! Himself, Laurens Bancroft, stumbling through the dark towards the lights of Suntouch House and the only surgery that could save him. Why had he left the cab so far from home? Why had he not wakened anybody for help? These were questions I no longer needed to answer for him. Bancroft believed. His guilt and self-disgust made him believe, and he would find his own answers to reinforce the horrific images in his head.

And by the time Transmission Felony cut a safe path through to Jack It Up’s core processors, Rawling 4851 would have eaten out every scrap of coherent intellect the machine ever had. There would be nothing left to dispute the carefully constructed lie I’d told for Kawahara.

I got up and went back to the balcony, wondering if I should allow myself a cigarette. It had been tough to lock down the need the last couple of days. Watching Irene Elliott at work had been nerve-racking. I forced my hand to relinquish the packet in my breast pocket, and gazed down at Miriam Bancroft, who by now was well on the way to completing her glider. When she looked up, I glanced away along the balcony rail and saw Bancroft’s telescope, still pointed seaward at the same shallow angle. Idle curiosity made me lean across and look at the figures for angle of elevation. The finger marks in the dust were still there.

Dust?

Bancroft’s unconsciously arrogant words came back to me. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago.

I stared at the finger marks, mesmerised by my own thoughts. Someone had been looking through this lens a lot more recently than two hundred years ago, but they hadn’t kept at it very long. From the minimal displacement of dust it looked as if the programming keys had only been used once. On a sudden impulse, I moved up to the telescope and followed the line of its barrel out over the sea to where visibility blurred in the haze. That far out, the angle of elevation would give you a view of empty air a couple of kilometres up. I bent to the eye-piece as if in a dream. A grey speck showed up in the centre of my field of vision, blurring in and out of focus as my eyes struggled with the surrounding expanses of blue. Lifting my head and checking the control pad again, I found a max amp key and thumbed it impatiently. When I looked again, the grey speck had sprung into hard focus, filling most of the lens. I breathed out slowly, feeling as if I’d had the cigarette after all.

The airship hung like a bottleback, gorged after feeding frenzy. It must have been several hundred metres long, with swellings along the lower half of the hull and protruding sections that looked like landing pads. I knew what I was looking at even before Ryker’s neurachem reeled in the last increments of magnification I needed to make out the sun-burnished lettering on the side that spelled it out; Head in the Clouds.

I stepped back from the telescope, breathing deeply, and as my eyes slid back to normal focus I saw Miriam Bancroft again. She was standing amidst the parts of her glider, staring up at me. I almost flinched as our eyes met. Dropping a hand to the telescope programme pad, I did what Bancroft should have done before he blew his own head off. I hit memory-wipe, and the digits that had held the airship available for viewing for the last seven weeks blinked out.

I had felt like many kinds of fool in my life, but never quite as completely as I did at that moment. A first-order clue had been waiting there in the lens for anyone to come along and pick it up. Missed by the police in their haste, disinterest and lack of close knowledge, missed by Bancroft because the telescope was so much a part of his world view it was too close to give a second glance to, but I had no such excuses. I had stood here a week ago and seen the two mismatched pieces of reality clash against each other. Bancroft claiming not to have used the telescope in centuries almost at the same moment that I saw the evidence of recent use in the disturbed dust. And Miriam Bancroft had hammered it home less than an hour later when she said, While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground. I’d thought of the telescope then, my mind had rebelled at the downloading-induced sluggishness and tried to tell me. Shaky and off balance, new to the planet and the flesh I was wearing, I had ignored it. The download dues had taken their toll.

Below on the lawn, Miriam Bancroft was still watching me. I backed away from the telescope, composed my features and returned to my seat. Absorbed by the images I had faked into his head, Bancroft seemed scarcely to know that I had moved.

But now my own mind was in overdrive, ripping along avenues of thought that had opened with Ortega’s list and the Resolution 653 T-shirt. The quiet resignation I had felt in Ember two days ago, the impatience to sell my lies to Bancroft, get Sarah out and be finished were all gone. Everything tied in to Head in the Clouds, ultimately even Bancroft. It was almost axiomatic that he had gone there the night he died. Whatever had happened to him there was the key to his reasons for dying here at Suntouch House a few hours later. And to the truth that Reileen Kawahara was so desperate to hide.

Which meant I had to go there myself.

I picked up my glass and swallowed some of the drink, not tasting it. The sound it made seemed to wake Bancroft from his daze. He looked up, almost as if he was surprised to see me still there.

‘Please excuse me, Mr Kovacs. This is a lot to take in. After all the scenarios I had envisaged, this is one I had not even considered and it is so simple. So blindingly obvious.’ His voice held a wealth of self-disgust. ‘The truth is that I did not need an Envoy investigator, I simply needed a mirror to hold up to myself.’

I set down my glass and got to my feet.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘Well, unless you have any further questions. Personally, I think you still need some time. I’ll be around. You can get me at the Hendrix.’

On my way out along the main hall, I came face to face with Miriam Bancroft. She was dressed in the same coveralls she’d been wearing in the garden, hair caught up in an expensive-looking static clip. In one hand she was carrying a trellised plant urn, held up like a lantern on a stormy night. Long strands of flowering martyrweed trailed from the trellis-work.

‘Have you—’ she started.

I stepped closer to her, inside the range of the martyrweed. ‘I’m through,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken this as far as I can stomach. Your husband has an answer, but it isn’t the truth. I hope that satisfies you, as well as Reileen Kawahara.’

At the name, her mouth parted in shock. It was the only reaction that got through her control, but it was the confirmation I needed. I felt the need to be cruel come bubbling insistently up from the dark, rarely visited caverns of anger that served me as emotional reserves.

‘I never figured Reileen for much of a lay, but maybe like attracts like. I hope she’s better between the legs than she is on a tennis court.’

Miriam Bancroft’s face whitened and I readied myself for the slap. But instead, she offered me a strained smile.

‘You are mistaken, Mr Kovacs,’ she said.

‘Yeah. I often am.’ I stepped around her. ‘Excuse me.’ I walked away down the hall without looking back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The building was a stripped shell, an entire floor of warehouse conversion with perfectly identical arched windows along each wall and white painted support pillars every ten metres in each direction. The ceiling was drab grey, the original building blocks exposed and cross-laced with heavy ferrocrete load-bearers. The floor was raw concrete, perfectly poured. Hard light fell in through the windows, unsoftened by any drifting motes of dust. The air was crisp and cold.

Roughly in the middle of the building, as near as I could judge, stood a simple steel table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs, arranged as if for a game of chess. On one of the chairs sat a tall man with a tanned, salon-handsome face. He was beating a rapid tattoo on the table top, as if listening to jazz on an internal receiver. Incongruously, he was dressed in a blue surgeon’s smock and surgery slippers.

I stepped out from behind one of the pillars and crossed the even concrete to the table. The man in the smock looked up at me and nodded, unsurprised.

‘Hello, Miller,’ I said. ‘Mind if I sit down?’

‘My lawyers are going to have me out of here an hour after you charge me,’ Miller said matter-of-factly. ‘If that. You’ve made a big mistake here, pal.’

He went back to beating out the jazz rhythm on the table top. His gaze drifted out over my shoulder, as if he’d just seen something interesting through one of the arched windows. I smiled.

‘A big mistake,’ he repeated to himself.

Very gently, I reached out and flattened his hand onto the table top to stop the tapping. His gaze jerked back in as if caught on a hook.

‘The fuck do you think—’

He pulled his hand free and surged to his feet, but shut up abruptly when I stiff-armed him back into his seat. For a moment, it looked as if he might try to charge me, but the table was in the way. He stayed seated, glaring murderously at me and no doubt remembering what his lawyers had told him about the laws of virtual holding.

‘You’ve never been arrested, have you Miller?’ I asked conversationally. When he made no reply, I took the chair opposite him, turned it around and seated myself astride it. I took out my cigarettes and shook one free. ‘Well, that statement is still grammatically valid. You’re not under arrest now. The police don’t have you.’

I saw the first flicker of fear on his face.

‘Let’s recap events a little, shall we? You probably think that after you got shot, I lit out and the police came to pick up the pieces. That they found enough to rack the clinic up on, and now you’re waiting on due process. Well, it’s partially true. I did leave, and the police did come to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately there’s one piece that was no longer there to pick up, because I took it with me. Your head.’ I lifted one hand to demonstrate graphically. ‘Burned off at the neck and carried out, stack intact, under my jacket.’

Miller swallowed. I bent my head and inhaled the cigarette to life.

‘Now the police think that your head was disintegrated by an overcharged blaster on wide beam.’ I blew smoke across the table at him. ‘I charred the neck and chest deliberately to give that impression. With a bit of time and a good forensic expert they might have decided otherwise, but unfortunately your still intact colleagues at the clinic threw them out before they could start a proper investigation. It’s understandable, given what they were likely to find. I’m sure you would have done the same. However, what this means is that not only are you not under arrest, you are in fact presumed Really Dead. The police aren’t looking for you and nor is anybody else.’

‘What do you want?’ Miller sounded abruptly hoarse.

‘Good. I can see you appreciate the implications of your situation. Only natural for a man of your . . . Profession, I suppose. What I want is detailed information about Head in the Clouds.’

‘What?’

My voice hardened. ‘You heard.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I sighed. This was to be expected. I’d encountered it before, wherever Reileen Kawahara appeared in the equation. The terrified loyalty she inspired would have humbled her old yakuza bosses in Fission City.

‘Miller, I don’t have time to fuck about with you. The Wei Clinic has ties to an airborne whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. You probably liaised mostly through an enforcer called Trepp, out of New York. The woman you’re dealing with ultimately is Reileen Kawahara. You will have been to Head in the Clouds, because I know Kawahara and she always invites her associates into the lair, first to demonstrate an attitude of invulnerability, and second to offer some messy object lesson in the value of loyalty. You ever see something like that?’

From his eyes, I could see that he had.

‘OK, that’s what I know. Your cue. I want you to draw me a rough blueprint of Head in the Clouds. Include as much detail as you can remember. A surgeon like you ought to have a good eye for detail. I also want to know what the procedures are for visiting the place. Security coding, minimum reasons to justify you visiting, stuff like that. Plus some idea of what the security’s like inside the place.’

‘You think I’ll just tell you.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I think I’m going to have to torture you first. But I’ll get it out of you, one way or the other. Your decision.’

‘You won’t do it.’

‘I will do it,’ I said mildly. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am, or why we’re having this conversation. You see, the night before I turned up and blew your face open, your clinic put me through two days of virtual interrogation. Sharyan religious police routine. You’ve probably vetted the software, you know what it’s like. As far as I’m concerned, we’re still in payback time.’

There was a long pause in which I saw the belief creeping into his face. He looked away.

‘If Kawahara found out that—’

‘Forget Kawahara. By the time I’m finished with Kawahara, she’ll be a street memory. Kawahara is going down.’

He hesitated, brought to the brink, then shook his head. He looked up at me and I knew I was going to have to do it. I lowered my head and forced myself to remember Louise’s body, opened from throat to groin on the autosurgeon’s table with her internal organs arranged in dishes around her head like appetisers. I remembered the copper-skinned woman I had been in the stifling loft space, the grip of the tape as they pinned me to the naked wooden floor, the shrill dinning of agony behind my temples as they mutilated my flesh. The screaming and the two men who had drunk it in like perfume.

‘Miller.’ I found I had to clear my throat and start again. ‘You want to know something about Sharya?’

Miller said nothing. He was going into some kind of controlled breathing pattern. Steeling himself for the upcoming unpleasantness. This was no Warden Sullivan that could be punched around in a seedy corner and scared into spilling what he knew. Miller was tough, and probably conditioned too. You don’t work directorship in a place like Wei and not option some of the available tech for yourself.

‘I was there, Miller. Winter of 217, Zihicce. Hundred and twenty years ago. You probably weren’t around then, but I reckon you’ve read about it in history books. After the bombardments, we went in as regime engineers.’ As I talked, the tension began to ease out of my throat. I gestured with my cigarette. ‘That’s a Protectorate euphemism for crush all resistance and install a puppet government. Of course, to do that, you’ve got to do some interrogating, and we didn’t have much in the way of fancy software to do it with. So, we had to get inventive.’

I stubbed out my cigarette on the table and stood up.

‘Someone I want you to meet,’ I said, looking past him.

Miller turned to follow my gaze and froze. Coalescing in the shadow of the nearest support pillar was a tall figure in a blue surgical smock. As we both watched, the features became clear enough to recognise, though Miller must have guessed what was coming as soon as he saw the predominant colour of the clothing. He wheeled back to me, mouth open to say something, but instead his eyes fixed on something behind me and his face turned pale. I glanced over my shoulder to where the other figures were materialising, all with the same tall build and tanned complexion, all in blue surgical smocks. When I looked back again, Miller’s expression seemed to have collapsed.

‘File overprint,’ I confirmed. ‘Most places in the Protectorate this isn’t even illegal. Course, when it’s a Machine Error, it’s not usually so extreme, just a double-up probably, and the retrieval systems yank you out in a few hours anyway. Makes a good story. How I met myself, and what I learned. Good dating conversation, maybe something to tell your kids. You got kids, Miller?’

‘Yes.’ His throat worked. ‘Yes, I have.’

‘Yeah? They know what you do for a living?’

He said nothing. I took a phone from my pocket and dumped it on the table. ‘When you’ve had enough, let me know. It’s a direct line. Just press send, and start talking into it. Head in the Clouds. Relevant detail.’

Miller looked at the phone and then back at me. Around us the doppelgängers had almost assumed full substance. I lifted a hand in farewell.

‘Enjoy yourself.’

I surfaced in the Hendrix’s virtual recreation studio, cradled in one of the spacious participant racks. A digital time display on the far wall said I had been under less than a full minute, of which my real time in virtual probably only accounted for a couple of seconds. It was the processing in and out that took the time. I lay still for a while, thinking about what I had just done. Sharya was a long time ago, and a part of me I liked to think I’d left behind. Miller wasn’t the only person meeting himself today.

Personal, I reminded myself, but I knew it wasn’t this time. This time I wanted something. The grudge was just a convenience.

‘The subject is showing signs of psychological stress,’ said the Hendrix. ‘A preliminary model suggests the condition will extend into personality breakdown in less than six virtual days. At current ratios, this equates to approximately thirty-seven minutes real time.’

‘Good.’ Unpinning the trodes and snapping back the hypnophones, I climbed out of the angled rack. ‘Call me if he cracks. Did you lift that monitor footage I asked you for?’

‘Yes. Do you wish to view it?’

I glanced at the clock again. ‘Not now. I’ll wait for Miller. Any problems with the security systems?’

‘None. The data was not secured.’

‘How very careless of Director Nyman. How much is there?’

‘The relevant clinic footage is twenty-eight minutes, fifty-one seconds. To track the employee from departure as you suggested will take considerably longer.’

‘How much longer?’

‘It is impossible to give an estimate at this time. Sheryl Bostock departed the PsychaSec facility in a twenty-year-old military surplus microcopter. I do not believe that ancillary staff at the facility are well paid.’

‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘Possibly because—’

‘Skip it. It was a figure of speech. What about the microcopter?’

‘The navigation system has no traffic net access, and so is invisible in traffic control data. I shall have to rely on the vehicle’s appearance on visual monitors in its flight path.’

‘You’re talking about satellite tracking?’

‘As a last resort, yes. I’d would prefer to begin with lower level and ground-based systems. They are likely to be more accessible. Satellite security is usually of high resilience and breaching such systems is often both difficult and dangerous.’

‘Whatever. Let me know when you’ve got something.’

I wandered around the studio, brooding. The place was deserted, most of the racks and other machines shrouded in protective plastic. In the dim light provided by the illuminum tiles on the walls, their ambiguous bulk could equally have belonged to a fitness centre or a torture chamber.

‘Can we have some real lights in here?’

Brightness sprang out across the studio from high-intensity bulbs recessed into the low ceiling. I saw that the walls were postered with images drawn from some of the virtual environments on offer. Dizzying mountainscapes seen through racing goggles, impossibly beautiful men and women in smoky bars, huge savage animals leaping directly at sniperscope sights. The images had been cut directly from format into hologlass and when you stared at them they seemed to come alive. I found a low bench and sat on it, remembering wistfully the bite of smoke in my lungs from the format I had just left.

‘Although the program I am running is not technically illegal,’ said the Hendrix tentatively, ‘it is an offence to hold a digitised human personality against that person’s will.’

I glanced bleakly at the ceiling. ‘What’s the matter, you getting cold feet?’

‘The police have already subpoenaed my memory once, and they may charge me with compliance at your request to freeze Felîpe Miller’s head. They will also want to know what has happened to his stack.’

‘Yeah, and there’s got to be some hotel charter somewhere says you don’t let people into your guests’ rooms without authorisation, but you did that, didn’t you?’

‘It is not a criminal offence, unless criminality results from the breach of security. What resulted from Miriam Bancroft’s visit was not criminality.’

I jerked another glance upwards. ‘You trying to be funny?’

‘Humour is not within the parameters I currently operate, though I can install it at request.’

‘No, thanks. Listen, why can’t you just blank the areas of memory you don’t want anyone looking up later? Delete them?’

‘I have a series of inbuilt blocks that prevent me from taking such action.’

‘That’s too bad. I thought you were an independent entity.’

‘Any synthetic intelligence can only be independent within the boundaries of the UN regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human.’

‘You let me worry about the police,’ I said, affecting a confidence that had been ebbing steadily since Ortega disappeared. ‘With a little luck, that evidence won’t even be presented. And if it is, well, you’re already in to the depth of compliance, so what have you got to lose?’

‘What have I got to gain?’ asked the machine soberly.

‘Continued guest status. I’m staying here until this thing is finished, and depending on what data I get out of Miller, that could be quite a while.’

There was a quiet broken only by the humming of air conditioning systems before the Hendrix spoke again.

‘If sufficiently serious charges accrue against me,’ it said, ‘the UN regulatory charter may be invoked directly. Under section 14a, I can be punished with either Capacity Reduction or, in extreme cases, Shutdown.’ There was another, briefer hesitation. ‘Once shut down, it is unlikely that I would be re-enabled by anybody.’

Machine idiolect. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the wall. ‘You want out, now’d be a good time to tell me.’

‘I do not want out, Takeshi Kovacs. I merely wished to acquaint you with the considerations involved in this course of action.’

‘OK. I’m acquainted.’

I glanced up at the digital display and watched the next full minute turn over. Another four hours for Miller. In the routine the Hendrix was running, he would not get hungry or thirsty, or have to attend to any other bodily functions. Sleep was possible, although the machine would not allow it to become a withdrawal coma. All Miller had to contend with, apart from the discomfort of his surroundings, was himself. In the end it was that which would drive him insane.

I hoped.

None of the Right Hand of God martyrs we put through the routine had lasted more than fifteen minutes real time, but they had been flesh and blood warriors, fanatically brave in their own arena but totally unversed in virtual techniques. They had also been endowed with a strong religious dogma that permitted them to commit numerous atrocities so long as it held, but when it went, it went like a dam wall and their own resultant self-loathing had eaten them alive. Miller’s mind would be nowhere near as simplistic, nor as initially self-righteous, and his conditioning would be good.

Outside, it would be getting dark. I watched the clock, and forced myself not to smoke. Tried, with less success, not to think about Ortega.

Ryker’s sleeve was getting to be a pain in the balls.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Miller cracked at twenty-one minutes. It didn’t need the Hendrix to tell me, the datalink terminal that I had jacked into the virtual phone suddenly sputtered to life and started chittering out hardcopy. I got up and went over to look at what was coming out. The program was supposed to tidy up what Miller was saying so it read sanely, but even after processing, the transcript was pretty incoherent. Miller had let himself slide close to the edge before he’d given in. I scanned the first few lines and saw the beginnings of what I wanted emerging from the gibberish.

‘Wipe the file replicants,’ I told the hotel, crossing rapidly back to the rack. ‘Give him a couple of hours to calm down, then jack me in.’

‘Connection time will exceed one minute, which at current ratio is three hours fifty-six minutes. Do you wish a construct installed until you can be delivered to the format.’

‘Yeah, that would be—’ I stopped halfway through settling the hypnophones around my head. ‘Wait a minute, how good’s the construct?’

‘I am an Emmerson series mainframe synthetic intelligence,’ said the hotel reproachfully. ‘At maximum fidelity, my virtual constructs are indistinguishable from the projected consciousness they are based on. Subject has now been alone for one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Do you wish the construct installed?’

‘Yes.’ The words gave me an eerie feeling even as I was speaking them. ‘In fact, let it do the whole interrogation.’

‘Installation complete.’

I snapped the phones back again and sat on the edge of the rack, thinking about the implications of a second me inside the Hendrix’s vast processing system. It was something that I had never - as far as I knew - been subject to in the Corps, and I had certainly never trusted any machine enough to do it once I was operating in a criminal context.

I cleared my throat. ‘This construct. Will it know what it is?’

‘Initially, no. It will know everything that you knew when you exited from the format and no more, though, given your intelligence, it will deduce the facts eventually unless otherwise programmed. Do you wish a blocking subprogramme installed?’

‘No,’ I said quickly.

‘Do you wish me to maintain the format indefinitely?’

‘No. Close it down when I, I mean when he, when the construct decides we’ve got enough.’ Another thought struck me. ‘Does the construct carry that virtual locator they wired into me?’

‘At present, yes. I am running the same mirror code to mask the signal as I did with your own consciousness. However, since the construct is not directly connected to your cortical stack, I can subtract the signal if you wish.’

‘Is it worth the trouble?’

‘The mirror code is easier to administer,’ the hotel admitted.

‘Leave it, then.’

There was an uncomfortable bubble sitting in the pit of my stomach at the thought of editing my virtual self. It reflected far too closely on the arbitrary measures that the Kawaharas and Bancrofts took in the real world with real people. Raw power, unleashed.

‘You have a virtual format call,’ announced the Hendrix.

I looked up, surprised and hopeful.

‘Ortega?’

‘Kadmin,’ said the hotel diffidently. ‘Will you accept the call?’

The format was a desert. Reddish dust and sandstone underfoot, sky nailed down from horizon to horizon, cloudless blue. Sun and a pale three-quarter moon hung high and sterile above a distant range of shelf-like mountains. The temperature was a jarring chill, making a mockery of the sun’s blinding glare.

The Patchwork Man stood waiting for me. In the empty landscape he looked like a graven image, a rendering of some savage desert spirit. He grinned when he saw me.

‘What do you want, Kadmin? If you’re looking for influence with Kawahara I’m afraid you’re out of luck. She’s pissed off with you beyond repair.’

A flicker of amusement crossed Kadmin’s face and he shook his head slowly, as if to dismiss Kawahara from the proceedings completely. His voice was deep and melodic.

‘You and I have unfinished business,’ he said.

‘Yeah, you fucked up twice in a row.’ I ladled scorn into my voice. ‘What do you want, a third shot at it?’

Kadmin shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Well, third time lucky, they say. Allow me to show you something.’

He gestured in the air beside him and a flap of the desert backdrop peeled away from a blackness beyond. The screen it formed sizzled and sprang to life. Close focus on sleeping features. Ortega’s. A fist snapped closed around my heart. Her face was grey and bruised-looking under the eyes. A thin thread of drool ran from one corner of her mouth.

Stunbolt at close range.

The last time I’d caught a full stun charge was courtesy of the Millsport Public Order police and, although the Envoy conditioning had forced me back to a kind of consciousness in about twenty minutes, I hadn’t been up to much more than shivering and twitching for the next couple of hours. There was no telling how long ago Ortega had been hit, but she looked bad.

‘It’s a simple exchange,’ said Kadmin. ‘You for her. I’m parked around the block on a street called Minna. I’ll be there for the next five minutes. Come alone, or I blow her stack out the back of her neck. Your choice.’

The desert fizzled out on the Patchwork Man smiling.

I made the two corners of the block and Minna in a minute flat. Two weeks without smoking was like a newly discovered compartment at the bottom of Ryker’s lungs.

It was a sad little street of sealed-up frontages and vacant lots. There was no one around. The only vehicle in sight was a matt grey cruiser waiting at the curb, lights on in the gathering gloom of early evening. I approached hesitantly, hand on the butt of the Nemex.

When I was five metres from the rear of the cruiser, a door opened and Ortega’s body was pitched out. She hit the street like a sack and stayed down, crumpled. I cleared the Nemex as she hit and circled warily round towards her, eyes fixed on the car.

A door cracked open on the far side and Kadmin climbed out. So soon after seeing him in virtual, it took a moment to click. Tall, dark-skinned, the hawk visage I had last seen dreaming in fluid behind the glass of the Panama Rose’s re-sleeving tank. The Right Hand of God martyr clone, and hiding beneath its flesh, the Patchwork Man.

I drew a bead on his throat with the Nemex. Across the width of the cruiser and very little more, whatever else happened afterwards, it would take his head off and probably rip the stack out of his spine.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Kovacs. This vehicle is armoured.’

I shook my head. ‘Only interested in you. Just stay exactly where you are.’

With the Nemex still extended, my eyes still fixed on the target area above his Adam’s apple, I lowered myself into a crouch beside Ortega and reached down to her face with the fingers of my free hand. Warm breath stirred around my fingertips. I felt blind towards the neck for a pulse and found it, weak but stable.

‘The lieutenant is alive and well,’ said Kadmin impatiently. ‘Which is more than we shall be able to say for either of you in two minutes’ time if you don’t put down that cannon and get into the car.’

Beneath my hand, Ortega’s face moved. Her head rolled and I caught her scent. Her half of the pheromonal match that had locked us both into this in the first place. Her voice was weak and slurred from the stun charge.

‘Don’t do this, Kovacs. You don’t owe me.’

I stood up and lowered the Nemex slightly.

‘Back off. Fifty metres up the street. She can’t walk and you could cut us both down before I can carry her two metres. You back off. I walk to the car.’ I wagged the gun. ‘Ortega keeps the hardware. It’s all I’m carrying.’

I lifted my jacket to demonstrate. Kadmin nodded. He ducked back inside the cruiser and the vehicle rolled smoothly down the block. I watched it until it stopped, then knelt beside Ortega again. She struggled to sit up.

‘Kovacs, don’t. They’re going to kill you.’

‘Yes, they’re certainly going to try.’ I took her hand and folded it around the butt of the Nemex. ‘Listen, I’m all finished here in any case. Bancroft’s sold, Kawahara will keep her word and freight Sarah back. I know her. What you’ve got to do is bust her for Mary Lou Hinchley and get Ryker off stack. Talk to the Hendrix. I left you a few loose ends there.’

From down the street, the cruiser sounded its collision alert impatiently. In the gathering gloom of the street, it sounded mournful and ancient, like the hoot of a dying elephant ray on Hirata’s Reef. Ortega looked up out of her stunblasted face as if she was drowning there.

‘You—’

I smiled and rested a hand against her cheek.

‘Got to get to the next screen, Kristin. That’s all.’

Then I stood up, locked my hands together on the nape of my neck, and walked towards the car.

PART FIVE: NEMESIS

(Systems Crash)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

In the cruiser, I was sandwiched between two impressive musclemen who, with a bit of cosmetic surgery to mess up their clone good looks, could have hired out as freak fighters on bulk alone. We climbed sedately away from the street and banked around. I tipped a glance out of the side window and saw Ortega below, trying to prop herself upright.

‘I cream the Sia cunt?’ the driver wanted to know. I tensed myself for a forward leap.

‘No.’ Kadmin turned in his seat to look at me. ‘No, I gave Mr Kovacs my word. I believe the lieutenant and I will cross paths again in the not too distant future.’

‘Too bad for you,’ I told him unconvincingly, and then they shot me with the stunner.

When I woke up, there was a face watching me from close up. The features were vague, pale and blurred, like some kind of theatrical mask. I blinked, shivered and hauled in focus. The face drew back, still doll-like in its lack of resolution. I coughed.

‘Hello, Carnage.’

The crude features sketched a smile. ‘Welcome back to the Panama Rose, Mr Kovacs.’

I sat up shakily on a narrow metal bunk. Carnage stepped back to give me space, or just to stay out of grabbing range. Smeared vision gave me a cramped cabin in grey steel behind him. I swung my feet to the floor and stopped abruptly. The nerves in my arms and legs were still jangling from the stunbolt and there was a sick, trembling feeling in the pit of my stomach. All things considered, it felt like the results of a very dilute beam. Or maybe a series. I glanced down at myself and saw that I was dressed in a heavy canvas gi the colour of quarried granite. On the floor beside the bunk were a pair of matching spacedeck slippers and a belt. I began to get an unpleasant inkling of what Kadmin had planned.

Behind Carnage, the door of the cabin opened. A tall, blonde woman, apparently in her early forties, stepped in, followed by another synthetic, this one smoothly modern-looking apart from a gleaming steel direct interface tool in place of a left hand.

Carnage busied himself with introductions.

‘Mr Kovacs, may I present Pernilla Grip of Combat Broadcast Distributors, and her technical assistant Miles Mech. Pernilla, Miles, I’d like to present Takeshi Kovacs, our surrogate Ryker for tonight. Congratulations, by the way, Kovacs. At the time I was utterly convinced, despite the unlikelihood of Ryker making it off stack for the next two hundred years. All part of the Envoy technique, I understand.’

‘Not really. Ortega was the convincing factor. All I did was let you talk. You’re good at that.’ I nodded at Carnage’s companions. ‘Did I hear the word broadcasting? I thought that went against the creed. Didn’t you perform radical surgery on a journalist for that particular crime?’

‘Different products, Mr Kovacs. Different products. To broadcast a scheduled fight would indeed be a breach of our creed. But this is not a scheduled fight, this is a humiliation bout.’ Carnage’s surface charm froze over on the phrase. ‘With a different and necessarily very limited live audience, we are forced to make up for the loss in revenue somehow. There are a great many networks who are anxious to get their hands on anything that comes out of the Panama Rose. This is the effect our reputation has, but unfortunately it is that same reputation that precludes us doing any such business directly. Ms Grip handles this market dilemma for us.’

‘Nice of her.’ My own voice grew cold. ‘Where’s Kadmin?’

‘In due time, Mr Kovacs. In due time. You know, when I was told you would react this way and give yourself up for the lieutenant, I confess I doubted it at the time. But you fulfil expectations like a machine. Was it that that the Envoy Corps took away from you in return for all your other powers? Your unpredictability? Your soul?’

‘Don’t get poetic on me, Carnage. Where is he?’

‘Oh, very well. This way.’

There was a brace of large sentries outside the cabin door that might have been the two from the cruiser. I was too jangled to remember clearly. They bracketed me as we followed Carnage along claustrophobic corridors and down listing companionways, all rust-spotted and polymer-varnished metal. I tried vaguely to memorise the path but most of me was thinking about what Carnage had said. Who had predicted my actions to him? Kadmin? Unlikely. The Patchwork Man, for all his fury and death threats, knew next to nothing about me. The only real candidate for that kind of prediction was Reileen Kawahara. Which also helped to explain why Carnage wasn’t quaking in his synthetic flesh at the thought of what Kawahara might do to him for co-operating with Kadmin. Kawahara had sold me out. Bancroft was convinced, the crisis - whatever it had been - was over, and the same day Ortega was snatched as bait. The scenario I had sold to Bancroft left Kadmin out there as a private contractor with a grudge, so there was no reason why he couldn’t be seen to take me down. And under the circumstances, I was safer disposed of than left alive.

For that matter, so was Kadmin so maybe it hadn’t been that blatant. Maybe the word had gone out to bring Kadmin down, but only for as long as I was needed. With Bancroft convinced, I was once more expendable and the word had gone out again, to let Kadmin be. He could kill me, or I could kill him, whichever way the luck turned. Leaving Kawahara to clean up whoever was left.

I had no doubt that Kawahara would keep her word as far as releasing Sarah was concerned. The old-style yakuza were funny about that sort of thing. But she had made no such binding promises about me.

We clambered down a final staircase, a little wider than the rest, and came out onto a glassed-in gantry over a converted cargo cell. Looking down, I saw one of the arenas Ortega and I had passed in the electromag train last week, but now the plastic coverings were off the killing ring, and a modest crowd had assembled in the forward rows of each bank of plastic seating. Through the glass I could hear the sustained buzz of excitement and anticipation that had always preceded the freak fights I’d attended in my youth.

‘Ah, your public awaits you.’ Carnage was standing at my shoulder. ‘Well, more correctly, Ryker’s public. Though I have no doubt you’ll be able to dissemble for them with the same skill that convinced me.’

‘And if I choose not to?’

Carnage’s crude features formed a simulacrum of distaste. He gestured out at the crowd. ‘Well, I suppose you could try explaining it to them in mid bout. But to be honest, the acoustics aren’t of the best and anyway . . .’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘I doubt you’ll have the time.’

‘Foregone conclusion, huh?’

Carnage maintained his smile. Behind him, Pernilla Grip and the other synthetic were watching me with the predatory interest of cats in front of a birdcage. Below, the crowd were becoming noisy with expectation.

‘It has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more than Kadmin’s assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his transgressions and it would be quite hazardous not to fulfil their expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came here expecting to survive, did you Mr Kovacs?’

I remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.

‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’

Quiet footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance towards the sound and found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.

‘How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.’

I smiled grimly. ‘If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.’

‘But she was younger in those days.’ Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth against the tanned skin. ‘Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to my copy of Furies got it right.’

‘Harlan’s World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we get on with this, please?’

Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Out on the killing floor, the noise was less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still couldn’t pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down at me:

‘Remember my brother, you motherfucker!!!’

I glanced up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was building like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had screamed like this at the Newpest freak fights, and guessed that we probably had. And we hadn’t even known the combatants that flailed and clawed at each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.

On the other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn’t render the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn’t really worried about the knuckles, it was Kadmin’s Will of God enhanced response wiring that concerned me most. A little over a century ago, I’d been up against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on Sharya, and they’d been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was heavy-duty military biomech, and against that Ryker’s neurachem, recently fried by stunbolt, was going to look pretty sick.

I took my place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the crowd quietened down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip’s cameras, he looked like a malignant doll out of a child’s nightmare. A fitting consort to the Patchwork Man. He raised his hands and directional speakers in the walls of the converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.

‘Welcome to the Panama Rose!’

There was a vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting. Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.

‘To a very special, and very exclusive, Panama Rose event, welcome. Welcome, I bid you welcome, to the most final and bloody humiliation of Elias Ryker.’

They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilisation stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.

Carnage’s amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quietening gestures with both arms.

‘Most of you will remember detective Ryker from some encounter or other. For some of you it will be a name that you associate with blood spilled, maybe even bones broken.

‘Those memories. Those memories are painful; and some of you might think you can never lose them.’

He had them damped down now, and his voice dropped accordingly.

‘My friends, I cannot hope to erase those memories for you, for that is not what we offer aboard the Panama Rose. Here we deal not in soft forgetfulness, but in remembrance, no matter how bitter that remembrance might be. Not in dreams, my friends, but in reality.’ He threw out a hand to indicate me. ‘My friends, this is reality.’

Another round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn’t expected to be bored to death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage’s theatricals were just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.

‘This is reality,’ Emcee Carnage repeated. ‘Tonight is reality. Tonight you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.’

The crowd erupted.

I wondered briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry’s Closed Quarters, the way Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker’s face. Jerry himself telling me about the Mongol’s run-in with the cop whose body I was wearing: Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back. And then there was Bautista on Ryker’s interrogation techniques: He’s right on the line most of the time. How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?

What would Ortega have said?

I thought about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I’d left her at the Hendrix, she’d take Kawahara down for me.

Knowing it was enough.

Carnage drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A relative quiet descended on the chamber.

‘The coup de grâce,’ he proclaimed. ‘When our matador has put Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is no more.’

He released the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theatre. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.

‘Let us begin,’ said Carnage, withdrawing.

There was a magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass round a whisky flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden script we were being forced to play out.

We began to circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin’s body language for clues.

The Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on that account, they had told us prior to the Sharya landings. The imperatives for the builders were strength and speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness it is that their combat patterning has no random select sub-routine. Right Hand of God martyrs will therefore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very narrow band of techniques.

On Sharya, our own enhanced combat systems had been state of the art, with both random response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker’s neurachem had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long enough for my conditioning to analyse the Will of God’s fighting pattern and—

Kadmin struck.

The distance was nearly ten metres of clear ground; he covered it in the time it took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.

The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counter-attack was out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to block low and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head and I reeled backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand sidestrike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost casually. A low level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.

It was like someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was left far behind on the surface of my skin and a sickening numbness raged through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it was crippling. I staggered back three steps and crashed onto the mat, twisting like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.

Turning my head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.

I understood.

Round One.

Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight, it’s a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down, but this wasn’t a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where the suffering was to be maximised for the benefit of the audience.

The crowd.

I got up and looked around the dimly-seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my guts, spat on the killing floor and summoned a guard stance. Kadmin inclined his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks and instead of giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin’s path. It took him the shreds of a second to realise what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every member of the chanting crowd.

The hawk nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed round, looking for neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head against the mat. I tasted blood.

I rolled upright and saw Kadmin backed off and wiping some blood of his own from his broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenalin surge that seeing his blood spilt had given me, and raised both my own hands in an expectant gesture.

‘Come on, you asshole.’ It croaked out of my damaged mouth. ‘Put me away.’

He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.

On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin’s grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.

I came down on the injured ribs and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a foetal ball and saw Kadmin’s borrowed features a thousand metres above me.

‘Get up,’ he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicoloured lights and then everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought to keep me conscious. The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the damage that had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied. Consciouness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with Jimmy de Soto.

‘Earth?’ His grinning blackout striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside the tank. ‘It’s a shithole, man. Fucking frozen society, like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there, historical events aren’t allowed.’

‘Bullshit.’ My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion track. In a rare moment when the Sharyan jamming went down, we’ve heard that Admiral Cursitor’s IP fleet is still light seconds out, fighting the Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn’t over, the locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not looking good.

At least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my temperature beginning to climb back towards normal. The surrounding air no longer feels like hot soup and breathing is ceasing to be the major effort it was when our heart rates were down near flatline.

The robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters.

‘Bullshit, is it?’ Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider tank’s hull. ‘Hey, you’re not from there. I am, and I’m telling you if they gave me the choice of life on earth or fucking storage, I’d have to give it some thought. You get the chance to visit, don’t.’

I blinked the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the roof.

‘Told you not to go there, didn’t I pal. Now look at you. Earth.’ He spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. ‘It’s a shithole. Got to get to the next screen.’

The crowd noise had settled down to a steady chanting.

The anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled with laughter.

Get to the next screen.

I lurched to my feet.

You don’t do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night.

The voice jumped into my head, a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly a century and a half of objective time. A man I hadn’t soiled my memory with for most of my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn up now, when I really needed the shit.

The Patchwork Man will come for you.

Well, you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man’s standing right over there, waiting. He’s not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything.

I summoned what was left from cellular levels in Ryker’s body and stalked forward.

Glass shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space between Kadmin and myself.

‘Kadmin!’

I saw his eyes raised to the gantry above and then his entire chest seemed to explode. His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly off balance and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was torn off and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted and fell in ropes.

I whipped round, staring upwards, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted except for the remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit. Trepp was firing into the audience.

Down on the floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming. I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, towards the sound. Carnage was on fire.

Braced in the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a long-barrelled blaster. Carnage was in flames from the waist up, beating at himself with arms that had themselves grown wings of fire. The shrieking he made was more the sound of fury than of pain. Pernilla Grip lay dead at his feet, chest scorched through. As I watched, Carnage pitched forward over her like a figure made of melting wax and his shrieks modulated down through groans to a weird electronic bubbling and then to nothing.

‘Kovacs?’

Trepp’s frag gun had fallen silent, and against the ensuing background of groaning and cries from the injured, Bautista’s raised voice was unnaturally loud. He detoured around the burning synthetic and climbed up into the ring. His face was streaked with blood.

‘You OK, Kovacs?’

I chuckled weakly, then clutched abruptly at the stabbing pain in my side.

‘Great, just great. How’s Ortega?’

‘She’s OK. Got her dosed up on lethinol for the shock. Sorry we got here so late.’ He gestured up at Trepp. ‘Took your friend there a while to get through to me at Fell Street. She refused to go through official channels. Said it wouldn’t scan right. The mess we made coming in here, she ain’t far wrong.’

I glanced around at the manifest organic damage.

‘Yeah. That going to be a problem?’

Bautista barked a laugh. ‘Are you ragging me? Entry without a warrant. Organic damage to unarmed suspects. What the fuck do you think?’

‘Sorry about that.’ I started to move off the killing floor. ‘Maybe we can work something out.’

‘Hey.’ Bautista caught my arm. ‘They took off a Bay City cop. No one does that around here. Someone should have told Kadmin before he made the fucking mistake.’

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ortega or me in my Ryker sleeve, so I said nothing. Instead, I tipped my head back gingerly, testing for damage, and looked up at Trepp. She was reloading the frag gun.

‘Hey, are you going to stay up there all night?’

‘Be right down.’

She jacked the last shell into the frag gun, then executed a neat somersault over the gantry rail and fell outwards. About a metre into the fall, the grav harness on her back spread its wings and she fetched up hanging over us at head height with the gun slung across her shoulder. In her long black coat, she looked like an off-duty dark angel.

Adjusting a dial on the harness, she drifted closer to the floor and finally touched down next to Kadmin. I limped up to join her. We both looked at the ripped-open corpse in silence for a moment.

‘Thanks,’ I said softly.

‘Forget it. All part of the service. Sorry I had to bring in these guys, but I needed the backup, and fast. You know what they say about the Sia around here. Biggest fucking gang on the block, right?’ She nodded at Kadmin. ‘You going to leave him like that?’

I stared at the Right Hand of God martyr with his face shocked into abrupt death, and tried to see the Patchwork Man inside him.

‘No,’ I said, and turned the corpse over with my foot so that the nape of the neck was exposed. ‘Bautista, you want to lend me that firecracker?’

Wordlessly, the cop handed me his blaster. I set the muzzle against the base of the Patchwork Man’s skull, rested it there and waited to feel something.

‘Anyone want to say anything?’ cracked Trepp, deadpan. Bautista turned away. ‘Just do it.’

If my father had any comments, he kept them to himself. The only voices were the cries of the injured spectators, and those I ignored.

Feeling nothing, I pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I was still feeling nothing an hour later when Ortega came and found me in the sleeving hall, seated on one of the automated forklifts and staring up into the green glow from the empty decanting chambers. The airlock made a smooth thump and then a sustained humming sound as it opened, but I didn’t react. Even when I recognised her footfalls and a short curse as she picked her way between the coiled cabling on the floor, I didn’t look round. Like the machine I was seated on, I was powered down.

‘How you feeling?’

I looked down to where she stood beside the forklift. ‘Like I look, probably.’

‘Well, you look like shit.’ She reached up to where I was seated and grasped a convenient grill cover. ‘You mind if I join you?’

‘Go ahead. Want a hand up?’

‘Nope.’ Ortega strained to lift herself by her arms, turned grey with the effort and hung there with a lopsided grin. ‘Possibly.’

I lent her the least bruised of my arms and she came aboard the forklift with a grunt. She squatted awkwardly for a moment, then seated herself next to me and rubbed at her shoulders.

‘Christ, it’s cold in here. How long have you been sitting on this thing?’

‘’Bout an hour.’

She looked up at the empty tanks. ‘Seen anything interesting?’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Oh.’ She paused again. ‘You know, this fucking lethinol is worse than a stungun. At least when you’ve been stunned, you know you’re damaged. Lethinol tells you that, whatever you’ve been through, everything’s just fine and just go ahead and relax. And then you fall ass over tit on the first five-centimetre cable you try to step over.’

‘I think you’re supposed to be lying down,’ I said mildly.

‘Yeah, well, probably so are you. You’re going to have some nice facial bruises by tomorrow. Mercer give you a shot for the pain?’

‘Didn’t need it.’

‘Oh, hard man. I thought we agreed you were going to look after that sleeve.’

I smiled reflexively. ‘You should see the other guy,’

‘I did see the other guy. Ripped him apart with your bare hands, huh?’

I kept the smile. ‘Where’s Trepp?’

‘Your wirehead friend? She’s gone. Said something to Bautista about a conflict of interest, and disappeared into the night. Bautista’s tearing his hair out, trying to think of a way to cover this mess. Want to come and talk to him?’

‘All right.’ I shifted unwillingly. There was something hypnotic about the green light from the decanting tanks, and beneath my numbness, ideas were beginning to circle restlessly, snapping at each other like bottlebacks in a feeding spiral. The death of Kadmin, far from relieving me, had only touched off a slow-burning fuse of destructive urges in the pit of my stomach. Someone was going to pay for all this.

Personal.

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anenome, cut up on a surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be re-sleeved; Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months; Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung-heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.

A little dizzily, I climbed down from the forklift and helped Ortega down after me. It hurt my arms to take her weight, but nowhere near as much as the sudden, freezing knowledge that these were our last hours together. I didn’t know where the realisation came from but it came with the solid, settling sensation in the bedrock of my mind that I had long ago learnt to trust more than rational thought. We left the re-sleeving chamber hand in hand, neither of us really noticing the fact until we came face to face with Bautista in the corridor outside and pulled instinctively apart again.

‘Been looking for you, Kovacs.’ If Bautista had any feelings about the hand holding, nothing showed on his face. ‘Your mercenary friend skipped and left us to do the cleaning up.’

‘Yeah, Kristi—’ I stopped and nodded sideways at Ortega. ‘I’ve been told. Did she take the frag gun?’

Bautista nodded.

‘So you’ve got a perfect story. Someone called in gunfire from the Panama Rose, you came out to look and found the audience massacred, Kadmin and Carnage dead, me and Ortega halfway there. Must have been someone Carnage upset, working off a grudge.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ortega shake her head.

‘Ain’t going to scan,’ Bautista said. ‘All calls into Fell Street get recorded. Same goes for the phones in the cruisers.’

I shrugged, feeling the Envoy waking within me. ‘So what? You, or Ortega, you’ve got snitches out here in Richmond. People whose names you can’t disclose. Call came in on a personal phone, which just happened to get smashed when you had to shoot your way past the remains of Carnage’s security guards. No trace. And nothing on the monitors because the mysterious someone, whoever did all the shooting, wiped the whole automated security system clean. That can be arranged, I take it.’

Bautista looked dubious. ‘I suppose. We’d need a datarat to do it. Davidson’s good with a deck, but he ain’t that good.’

‘I can get you a datarat. Anything else?’

‘Some of the audience are still alive. Not in any fit state to do anything, but they’re still breathing.’

‘Forget them. If they saw anything, it was Trepp. Probably not even that, not clearly. Whole thing was over in a couple of seconds. The only thing we’ve got to decide is when to call the meatwagons.’

‘Some time soon,’ said Ortega. ‘Or it’s going to look suspicious.’

Bautista snorted. ‘This whole fucking thing looks suspicious. Anyone at Fell Street’s going to know what went down here tonight.’

‘Do this sort of thing a lot, do you?’

‘That ain’t funny, Kovacs. Carnage went over the line, he knew what he was calling down.’

‘Carnage,’ Ortega muttered. ‘That motherfucker’s got himself stored somewhere. As soon as he gets re-sleeved, he’s going to be screaming for an investigation.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Bautista. ‘How long ago you reckon he was copied into that synth?’

Ortega shrugged. ‘Who knows? He was wearing it last week. At least that long, unless he had the store copy updated. And that’s fucking expensive.’

‘If I were someone like Carnage,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I’d get myself updated whenever something major went down. No matter what it cost. I wouldn’t want to wake up not knowing what the fuck I’d been doing the week before I got torched.’

‘That depends on what you were doing,’ Bautista pointed out. ‘If it was some seriously illegal shit, you might prefer to wake up not knowing about it. That way, you polygraph your way right out of police interrogation with a smile.’

‘Better than that. You wouldn’t even . . .’

I trailed off, thinking about it. Bautista made an impatient gesture.

‘Whatever. If Carnage wakes up not knowing, he might make some private enquiries but he ain’t going to be in too much of a hurry to let the police department in on it. And if he wakes up knowing,’ he spread his hands, ‘he’ll make less noise than a Catholic orgasm. I think we’re in the clear here.’

‘Get the ambulances, then. And maybe call Murawa in to . . .’ But Ortega’s voice was fading out, as the last part of the puzzle sank snugly into its resting place. The conversation between the two cops grew as remote as star static over a suit comlink. I gazed at a tiny dent on the metal wall beside me, hammering at the idea with every logic test I could muster.

Bautista gave me a curious glance, and left to call the ambulances. As he disappeared, Ortega touched me lightly on the arm.

‘Hey, Kovacs. You OK?’

I blinked.

‘Kovacs?’

I put out a hand and touched the wall, as if to assure myself of its solidity. Compared to the certainty of concept I was experiencing, my surroundings seemed suddenly intangible.

‘Kristin,’ I said slowly, ‘I have to get aboard Head in the Clouds. I know what they did to Bancroft. I can bring Kawahara down, and get Resolution 653 pushed through. And I can spring Ryker.’

Ortega sighed. ‘Kovacs, we’ve been through—’

‘No.’ The savagery in my voice was so abrupt it even shocked me. I could feel the bruising in Ryker’s face hurt as his features tensed. ‘This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a cast in the dark. This is fact. And I am going aboard Head in the Clouds. With or without your help, but I’m going.’

‘Kovacs.’ Ortega shook her head. ‘Look at yourself. You’re a mess. Right now you couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp, and you’re talking about covert assault on one of the West Coast Houses. You think you’re going to crash Kawahara’s security with broken ribs and that face? Forget it.’

‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy.’

‘Kovacs, it isn’t going to be. I sat on the Hendrix tapes long enough for you to pull that shit with Bancroft, but that’s as far as it goes. The game’s over, your friend Sarah gets to go home and so do you. But that’s it. I’m not interested in grudge matches.’

‘Do you really want Ryker back?’ I asked softly.

For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. Her nostrils flared white and her right shoulder actually dropped for the punch. I never knew whether it was the stungun hangover or just self control that stopped her.

‘I ought to deck you for that, Kovacs,’ she said evenly.

I raised my hands. ‘Go ahead, right now I couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp. Remember?’

Ortega made a disgusted sound in her throat and started to turn away. I put out my hand and touched her.

‘Kristin . . .’ I hesitated. ‘I’m sorry. That was a bitchy crack, about Ryker. Will you at least hear me through, once?’

She came back to me, mouth clamped tight over whatever she was feeling, head down. She swallowed.

‘I won’t. There’s been too much.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I don’t want you hurt any more, Kovacs. I don’t want any more damage, that’s all.’

‘Damage to Ryker’s sleeve, you mean?’

She looked at me.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’

Then she was pressed up against me, there in that grim metal corridor, arms wrapped hard around me and face buried in my chest, all without apparent transition. I did some swallowing of my own and held her tightly while the last of what time we had trickled away like grains of sand through my fingers. And at that moment I would have given almost anything not to have had a plan for her to hear, not to have had any way to dissolve what was growing between us, and not to have hated Reileen Kawahara quite so much.

I would have given almost anything.

Two a.m.

I called Irene Elliott at the JacSol apartment, and got her out of bed. I told her we had a problem we’d pay heavily to unkink. She nodded sleepily. Bautista went to get her in an unmarked cruiser.

By the time she arrived, the Panama Rose was lit as if for a deck party. Vertical searchlights along her sides made it look as if she was being lowered from the night sky on ropes of luminescence. Illuminum cable incident barriers crisscrossed the superstructure and the dock moorings. The roof of the cargo cell where the humiliation bout had gone down was cranked back to allow the ambulances direct access and the blast of crime scene lighting from within rose into the night like the glow from a foundry. Police cruisers held the sky and parked across the dock flashing red and blue.

I met her at the gangway.

‘I want my body back,’ she shouted over the whine and roar of airborne engines. The searchlights frosted her sleeve’s black hair almost back to blonde.

‘I can’t swing that for you right now,’ I yelled back. ‘But it’s in the pipeline. First, you’ve got to do this. Earn some credit. Now let’s get you out of sight before fucking Sandy Kim spots you.’

Local law were keeping the press copters at bay. Ortega, still sick and shaking, wrapped herself in a police greatcoat and kept the local law out with the same glitter-eyed intensity that kept her upright and conscious. Organic Damage division, shouting, pulling rank, bullying and bluffing, held the fort while Elliott went to work faking in the monitor footage they needed. They were indeed, as Trepp had recognised, the biggest gang on the block.

‘I’m checking out of the apartment tomorrow,’ Elliott told me as she worked. ‘You won’t be able to reach me there.’

She was silent for a couple of moments, whistling through her teeth at odd moments as she keyed in the images she had constructed. Then she cast a glance at me over her shoulder.

‘You say I’m earning juice from these guys, doing this. They’re going to owe me?’

‘Yeah, I’d say so.’

‘Then I’ll contact them. Get me the officer in charge, I’ll talk to whoever that is. And don’t try to call me at Ember, I won’t be there either.’

I said nothing, just looked at her. She turned back to her work.

‘I need some time alone,’ she muttered.

Just the words sounded like a luxury to me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I watched him pour a drink from the bottle of fifteen-year-old malt, take it to the phone and seat himself carefully. The broken ribs had been welded back together in one of the ambulances, but the whole of that side was still one huge ache, with occasional, flinty stabs of agony. He sipped at the whisky, gathered himself visibly and punched out the call.

‘Bancroft residence. With whom do you wish to speak?’ It was the severely-suited woman who had answered last time I called Suntouch House. The same suit, the same hair, even the same make-up. Maybe she was a phone construct.

‘Miriam Bancroft,’ he said.

Once again, it was the sensation of being a passive observer, the same sensation of disconnection that I had felt that night in front of the mirror while Ryker’s sleeve put on its weapons. The frags. Only this time it was much worse.

‘One moment, please.’

The woman disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the image of a windblown match flame in synch with piano music that sounded like autumn leaves being blown along a cracked and worn pavement. A minute passed, then Miriam Bancroft appeared, immaculately attired in a formal-looking jacket and blouse. She raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow.

‘Mr Kovacs. This is a surprise.’

‘Yeah, well.’ He gestured uncomfortably. Even across the comlink, Miriam Bancroft radiated a sensuality that unbalanced him. ‘Is this a secure line?’

‘Reasonably so, yes. What do you want?’

He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been thinking. There are some things I’d like to discuss with you. I, uh, I may owe you an apology.’

‘Indeed?’ This time it was both eyebrows. ‘When exactly did you have in mind?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not doing anything right now.’

‘Yes. I, however, am doing something right now, Mr Kovacs. I am en route to a meeting in Chicago and will not be back on the coast until tomorrow evening.’ The faintest hint of a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. ‘Will you wait?’

‘Sure.’

She leaned towards the screen, eyes narrowing. ‘What happened to your face?’

He raised a hand to one of the emerging facial bruises. In the low light of the room, he had not expected it to be so noticeable. Nor had he expected Miriam Bancroft to be so attentive.

‘Long story. Tell you when I see you.’

‘Well, that I can hardly resist,’ she said ironically. ‘I shall send a limousine to collect you from the Hendrix tomorrow afternoon. Shall we say about four o’clock? Good. Until then.’

The screen cleared. He sat, staring at it for a moment, then switched off the phone and swivelled the chair round to face the window shelf.

‘She makes me nervous,’ he said.

‘Yeah, me too. Well, obviously.’

‘Very funny.’

‘I try.’

I got up to fetch the whisky bottle. As I crossed the room, I caught my reflection in the mirror beside the bed.

Where Ryker’s sleeve had the air of a man who had battered his way head first through life’s trials, the man in the mirror looked as if he would be able to slip neatly aside at every crisis and watch fate fall clumsily on its fat face. The body was cat-like in its movements, a smooth and effortless economy of motion that would have looked good on Anchana Salomao. The thick, almost blue-black hair fell in a soft cascade to the deceptively slim shoulders, and the elegantly tilted eyes had a gentle, unconcerned expression that suggested the universe was a good place to live in.

I had only been in the tech ninja sleeve a few hours - seven, and forty-two minutes according to the time display chipped into my upper left field of vision - but there were none of the usual download side effects. I collected the whisky bottle with one of the slim brown artist’s hands and the simple play of muscle and bone was a joy that glowed through me. The Khumalo neurachem system thrummed continually at the limit of perception, as if it were singing faintly the myriad possible things the body could do at any given moment. Never, even during my time with the Envoy Corps, had I worn anything like it.

I remembered Carnage’s words and mentally shook my head. If the UN thought they’d be able to impose a ten-year colonial embargo on this, they were living in another world.

‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but this feels fucking weird.’

‘Tell me about it.’ I filled my own tumbler and proffered the bottle. He shook his head. I went back to the window shelf and sat back against the glass.

‘How the fuck did Kadmin stand it? Ortega says he used to work with himself all the time.’

‘Get used to anything in time, I suppose. Besides, Kadmin was fucking crazy.’

‘Oh, and we’re not?’

I shrugged. ‘We didn’t have a choice. Apart from walking away, I mean. Would that have been better?’

‘You tell me. You’re the one who’s going up against Kawahara. I’m just the whore around here. Incidentally, I don’t reckon Ortega’s exactly overjoyed about that part of the deal. I mean, she was confused before, but now—’

‘She’s confused! How do you think I feel?’

‘I know how you feel, idiot. I am you.’

‘Are you?’ I sipped at my drink and gestured with the glass. ‘How long do you think it takes before we stop being exactly the same person?’

He shrugged. ‘You are what you remember. Right now we only have about seven or eight hours of separate perceptions. Can’t have made much of a dent yet, can it?’

‘On forty-odd years of memory? I suppose not. And it’s the early stuff that builds personality.’

‘Yeah, they say. And while we’re on the subject, tell me something. How do you feel, I mean how do we feel about the Patchwork Man being dead?’

I shifted uncomfortably. ‘Do we need to talk about this?’

‘We need to talk about something. We’re stuck here with each other until tomorrow evening—’

‘You can go out, if you want. Come to that,’ I jerked a thumb upward towards the roof, ‘I can get out of here the way I came in.’

‘You really don’t want to talk about it that badly, huh?’

‘Wasn’t that tough.’

That, at least, was true. The original draft of the plan had called for the ninja copy of me to stay at Ortega’s apartment until the Ryker copy had disappeared with Miriam Bancroft. Then it occurred to me that we’d need a working relationship with the Hendrix to bring off the assault on Head in the Clouds, and that there was no way for the ninja copy of myself to prove its identity to the hotel, short of submission to a storage scan. It seemed a better idea for the Ryker copy to introduce the ninja before departing with Miriam Bancroft. Since the Ryker copy was undoubtedly still under surveillance, at the very least, by Trepp, walking in through the front door of the Hendrix together looked like a very bad idea. I borrowed a grav harness and a stealth suit from Bautista, and just before it started to get light I skimmed in between the patchy high-level traffic and down onto a sheltered flange on the forty-second floor. The Hendrix had by this time been advised of my arrival by the Ryker copy and let me in through a ventilation duct.

With the Khumalo neurachem, it had been almost as easy as walking in through the front door.

‘Look,’ the Ryker copy said. ‘I’m you. I know everything you know. What’s the harm in talking about this stuff?’

‘If you know everything I know, what’s the point of talking about it?’

‘Sometimes, it helps to externalise things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.’

I sighed. ‘I don’t know. I buried all that shit about Dad a long time ago, it’s a long time dead.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘No.’ He flicked a finger at me the way I had pointed at Bancroft when he didn’t want to face my facts on the balcony of Suntouch House. ‘You’re lying to yourself. Remember that pimp we met in Lazlo’s pipe house the year we joined Shonagon’s Eleven. The one we nearly killed before they pulled us off him.’

‘That was just chemicals. We were off our head on tetrameth, showing off because of the Eleven stuff. Fuck, we were only sixteen.’

‘Bullshit. We did it because he looked like Dad.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Fact. And we spent the next decade and a half killing authority figures for the same reason.’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break! We spent that decade and a half killing anyone who got in the way. It was the military, that’s what we did for a living. And, anyway, since when is a pimp an authority figure?’

‘OK, maybe it was pimps we spent fifteen years killing. Users. Maybe that’s what we were paying back.’

‘He never pimped Mum out.’

‘Are you sure? Why were we so hot to hit the Elizabeth Elliott angle like a fucking tactical nuke? Why the accent on whorehouses in this investigation?’

‘Because,’ I said, sinking a finger of whisky, ‘that is what this investigation has been about from the beginning. We went after the Elliott angle because it felt right. Envoy intuition. The way Bancroft treated his wife—’

‘Oh, Miriam Bancroft. Now there’s another whole disc we could spin.’

‘Shut up. Elliott was a pretty fucking good sounding shot. We wouldn’t have got to Head in the Clouds without that trip to Jerry’s biocabins.’

‘Ahhh.’ He made a disgusted gesture and tipped his own glass back. ‘You believe what you want. I say the Patchwork Man’s been a metaphor for Dad because we couldn’t bear to look too closely at the truth and that’s why we freaked the first time we saw a composite construct in virtual. Remember that, do you? That rec house on Adoracion. We had rage dreams for a week after that little show. Waking up with shreds of pillow on your hands. They sent us to the psychs for that.’

I gestured irritably. ‘Yeah, I remember. I remember being shit scared of the Patchwork Man, not Dad. I remember feeling the same when we met Kadmin in virtual too.’

‘And now he’s dead? How do we feel now?’

‘I don’t feel anything.’

He pointed at me again. ‘That’s a cover.’

‘It is not a cover. The motherfucker got in my way, he threatened me and now he’s dead. Transmission ends.’

‘Remember anyone else threatening you, do you? When you were small, maybe?’

‘I am not going to talk about this any more.’ I reached for the bottle and filled my glass again. ‘Pick another subject. What about Ortega? What are our feelings on that score?’

‘Are you planning to drink that whole bottle?’

‘You want some?’

‘No.’

I spread my hands. ‘So what’s it to you?’

‘Are you trying to get drunk?’

‘Of course I am. If I’ve got to talk to myself, I don’t see why I should do it sober. So tell me about Ortega.’

‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘Why not?’ I asked reasonably. ‘Got to talk about something, remember. What’s wrong with Ortega?’

‘What’s wrong is that we don’t feel the same about her. You aren’t wearing Ryker’s sleeve any more.’

‘That doesn’t—’

‘Yes, it does. What’s between us and Ortega is completely physical. There hasn’t been time for anything else. That’s why you’re so happy to talk about her now. In that sleeve, all you’ve got is some vague nostalgia about that yacht and a bundle of snapshot memories to back it up. There’s nothing chemical happening to you any more.’

I reached for something to say, and abruptly found nothing. The suddenly discovered difference sat between us like a third, unwanted occupant of the room.

The Ryker copy dug into his pockets and came up with Ortega’s cigarettes. The packet was crushed almost flat. He extracted a cigarette, looked ruefully at it and fitted it into his mouth. I tried not to look disapproving.

‘Last one,’ he said, touching the ignition patch to it.

‘The hotel probably has more.’

‘Yeah.’ He plumed out smoke, and I found myself almost envying him the addiction. ‘You know, there is one thing we should be discussing right now.’

‘What’s that?’

But I knew already. We both knew.

‘You want me to spell it out? All right.’ He drew on the cigarette again and shrugged, not easily. ‘We have to decide which of us gets obliterated when this is all over. And since our individual instinct for survival is getting stronger by the minute, we need to decide soon.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Which would you prefer to remember? Taking down Kawahara? Or going down on Miriam Bancroft?’ He smiled sourly. ‘No competition, I suppose.’

‘Hey, this isn’t just a roll on the beach you’re talking about. This is multiple copy sex. It’s about the only genuinely illicit pleasure left. Anyway, Irene Elliott said we could do a memory graft and keep both sets of experience.’

‘Probably. She said we could probably do a memory graft. And that still leaves one of us to be cancelled out. It’s not a meld, it’s a graft, from one of us to the other. Editing. You want to do that to yourself? To the one that survives. We couldn’t even face editing that construct the Hendrix built. How are we going to live with this? No way, it’s got to be a clean cut. One or the other. And we’ve got to decide which.’

‘Yeah.’ I picked up the whisky bottle and stared gloomily at the label. ‘So what do we do? Gamble for it? Paper, scissors, stone, say the best of five?’

‘I was thinking along slightly more rational lines. We tell each other our memories from this point on and then decide which we want to keep. Which ones are worth more.’

‘How the hell are we going to measure something like that?’

‘We’ll know. You know we will.’

‘What if one of us lies. Embroiders the truth to make it sound like a more appealing memory. Or lies about which one they like better.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you serious?’

‘A lot can happen in a few days. Like you said, we’re both going to want to survive.’

‘Ortega can polygraph us if it comes to that.’

‘I think I’d rather gamble.’

‘Give me that fucking bottle. If you’re not going to take this seriously, nor am I. Fuck it, you might even get torched out there and solve the problem for us.’

‘Thanks.’

I passed him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended. I had a feeling that we were going to profane that particular article of faith tonight.

I raised my glass.

‘To unity of purpose.’

‘Yeah, and an end to drinking alone.’

The hangover was still with me nearly a full day later as I watched him leave on one of the hotel monitors. He stepped out onto the pavement and waited while the long, polished limousine settled to the kerb. As the kerbside door hinged up, I caught a brief glimpse of Miriam Bancroft’s profile within. Then he was climbing in and the door swung smoothly back down to cover them both. The limousine trembled along its length and lifted away.

I dry-swallowed more painkillers, gave it ten minutes and then went up to the roof to wait for Ortega.

It was cold.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Ortega had a variety of news.

Irene Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had ever seen and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.

Meanwhile, the Panama Rose patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any hurry to tackle it any more. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting started. In view of the assumed AI involvement, the Hendrix would come under scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through and Ortega had sold Murawa a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.

A couple of IA detectives were sniffing around the Panama Rose, but Organic Damage had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. IA were getting nothing so far.

We had a couple of weeks.

Ortega flew north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.

‘You know this place?’

‘Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.’

‘They never get busted?’

‘Depends.’ Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. ‘The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?’

I climbed out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ’fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.

Camp security met us inside the first ring of ’fabs. He stood over two metres tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.

He nodded at me.

‘You Anderson?’

‘Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.’ I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.

That, and my memories.

I wondered if she was feeling the same.

‘Cop, huh?’ The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile either.

‘Not at the moment,’ I said firmly. ‘Is Irene here?’

‘Yeah.’ He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. ‘The ’fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.’

As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.

‘Your visitors,’ said the horned man. ‘You OK with this?’

Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.

‘You’d better come inside,’ she said.

Inside the bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her movements were smoothly unselfconscious. I’d noticed the improvement on board the Panama Rose in the early hours of the morning, but here it was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked speculatively up at me.

‘That’s you inside there, Anderson, I presume?’

I inclined my head.

‘You going to tell me why?’

I seated myself opposite her. ‘That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or out?’

‘You guarantee I get my own body back.’ She was trying hard to sound casual, but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. ‘That’s the deal?’

I glanced up at Ortega, who nodded. ‘That’s correct. If this comes off successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate. But it has to be successful. If we fuck up, we’ll probably all go down the double barrel.’

‘You are operating under a federal brief, lieutenant?’

Ortega smiled tightly. ‘Not exactly. But under the UN charter, we’ll be able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are successful.’

‘A retrospective federal brief.’ Elliott looked back to me, brows raised. ‘That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something gigantic.’

‘It is,’ I said.

Elliott’s eyes narrowed. ‘And you’re not with JacSol any more, are you? Who the fuck are you, Anderson?’

‘I’m your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?’

Irene Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

I told her.

It took about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong, offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offences for all concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.

Or maybe I just tell myself that.

Irene Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time. Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.

‘You’re insane,’ said Elliott finally.

‘Can you do it?’

She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was reviewing a previous Dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even downloading into that AI core. This makes what we did to the AI look like a systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a virtual forum.’

‘That’s not a problem. Anything else?’

‘That depends on what counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.’ Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants. ‘You say this is a high-class whorehouse?’

‘Very,’ said Ortega.

Elliott’s feelings went back underground. ‘Then I’ll have to run some checks. That’ll take time.’

‘How much time?’ Ortega wanted to know.

‘Well, I can do it two ways.’ Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring over the emotion that had been there before. ‘I can do a fast scan and maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right, which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your clock.’

‘Take your time,’ I suggested, with a warning glance at Ortega. ‘Now what about wiring me for sight and sound. You know anyone who can do that discreetly?’

‘Yeah, we got people here can do that. But you can forget a telemetry system. You try and transmit out of there, you will bring the house down. No pun intended.’ She moved to the arm-mounted terminal and punched up a general access screen. ‘I’ll see if Reese can dig you up a grab-and-stash mike. Shielded microstack, you’ll be able to record a couple of hundred hours high res and we can retrieve it here later.’

‘Good enough. This going to be expensive?’

Elliott turned back to us, eyebrows hoisted. ‘Talk to Reese. She’ll probably have to buy the parts in, but maybe you can get her to do the surgery on a retrospective federal basis. She could use the juice at UN level.’

I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged exasperatedly.

‘I guess,’ she said ungraciously, as Elliott busied herself with the screen. I stood up and turned to the policewoman.

‘Ortega,’ I muttered into her ear, abruptly aware that in the new sleeve I was completely unmoved by her scent. ‘It isn’t my fault we’re short of funds. The JacSol account’s gone, evaporated, and if I start drawing on Bancroft’s credit for stuff like this, it’s going to look fucking odd. Now get a grip.’

‘It isn’t that,’ she hissed back.

‘Then what is it?’

She looked at me, at our brutally casual proximity. ‘You know goddamn well what it is.’

I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes to avoid having to meet her gaze. ‘Did you sort out that hardware for me?’

‘Yeah.’ She stepped back, voice returning to normal volume and empty of tone. ‘The stungun from the Fell Street tackle room, no one’ll miss it. The rest is coming out of NYPD confiscated weapon stocks. I’m flying out to pick it up tomorrow personally. Material transaction, no records. I called in a couple of favours.’

‘Good. Thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ Her tone was savagely ironic. ‘Oh, by the way, they had a hell of a time getting hold of the spider venom load. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that’s all about, would you?’

‘It’s a personal thing.’

Elliott got someone on the screen. A serious-looking woman in a late fifties African sleeve.

‘Hey, Reese,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Got a customer for you.’

Despite the pessimistic estimate, Irene Elliott finished her preliminary scan a day later. I was down by the lake, recovering from Reese’s simple microsurgery and skimming stones with a girl of about six who seemed to have adopted me. Ortega was still in New York, the chill between us not really resolved.

Elliott emerged from the encampment and yelled out the news of her successful covert scan without bothering to come down to the water’s edge. I winced as the echoes floated out across the water. The open atmosphere of the little settlement took some getting used to, and how it fitted in with successful data piracy I still couldn’t see. I handed my stone to the girl and rubbed reflexively at the tiny soreness under one eye where Reese had gone in and implanted the recording system.

‘Here. See if you can do it with this one.’

‘Your stones are heavy,’ she said plaintively.

‘Well, try anyway. I got nine skips out of the last one.’

She squinted up at me. ‘You’re wired for it. I’m only six.’

‘True. On both counts.’ I placed a hand on her head. ‘But you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.’

‘When I’m big I’m going to be wired like Auntie Reese.’

I felt a small sadness well up on the cleanly swept floor of my Khumalo neurachem brain. ‘Good for you. Look, I’ve got to go. Don’t go too close to the water, right?’

She looked at me exasperatedly. ‘I can swim.’

‘So can I, but it looks cold, don’t you think?’

‘Ye-e-es . . .’

‘There you are then.’ I ruffled her hair and set off up the beach. At the first bubblefab I looked back. She was hefting the big flat stone at the lake as if the water were an enemy.

Elliott was in the expansive, post-mission mood that most datarats seem to hit after a long spell cruising the stacks.

‘I’ve been doing a little historical digging,’ she said, swinging the terminal arm outward from its resting place. Her hands danced across the terminal deck and the screen flared into life, shedding colours on her face. ‘How’s the implant?’

I touched my lower eyelid again. ‘Fine. Tapped straight into the same system that runs the timechip. Reese could have made a living doing this.’

‘She used to,’ said Elliott shortly. ‘Till they busted her for anti-Protectorate literature. When this is all over, you make sure that someone puts in a word for her at federal level, because she sure as shit needs it.’

‘Yeah, she said.’ I peered over her shoulder at the screen. ‘What have you got there?’

‘Head in the Clouds. Tampa aeroyard blueprints. Hull specs, the works. This stuff is centuries old. I’m amazed they still keep it on stack at all. Anyway, seems she was originally commissioned as part of the Caribbean storm management flotilla, back before Sky-Systems orbital weather net put them all out of business. A lot of the long-range scanning equipment got ripped out when they refitted, but they left the local sensors in and that’s what provides basic skin security. Temperature pick-ups, infrared, that sort of thing. Anything with body heat lands anywhere on the hull, they’ll know it’s there.’

I nodded, unsurprised. ‘Ways in?’

She shrugged. ‘Hundreds. Ventilation ducts, maintenance crawl-ways. Take your pick.’

‘I’ll need to have another look at what Miller told my construct. But assume I’m going in from the top. Body heat’s the only real problem?’

‘Yeah, but those sensors are looking for anything over a square millimetre of temperature differential. A stealth suit won’t cover you. Christ, even the breath coming out of your lungs will probably trip them. And it doesn’t stop there.’ Elliott nodded sombrely at the screen. ‘They must have liked the system a lot, because when they refitted they ran it through the whole ship. Room temperature monitors on every corridor and walkway.’

‘Yeah, Miller said something about a heat signature tag.’

‘That’s it. Incoming guests get it on boarding and their codes are incorporated into the system. Anyone else walks down a corridor uninvited, or goes somewhere their tag says they can’t, they set off every alarm in the hull. Simple, and very effective. And I don’t think I can cut in there and write you a welcome code. Too much security.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.’

‘You what?’ Ortega looked at me with fury and disbelief spreading across her face like a storm front. She stood away from me as if I might be contagious

‘It was just a suggestion. If you don’t—’

‘No.’ She said the word as if it was new to her and she liked the taste. ‘No. No fucking way. I’ve connived at viral crime for you, I’ve hidden evidence for you, I’ve assisted you in multiple sleeving—’

‘Hardly multiple.’

‘It’s a fucking crime,’ she said through her teeth. ‘I am not going to steal confiscated drugs out of police holding for you.’

‘OK, forget it.’ I hesitated, put my tongue in my cheek for a moment. ‘Want to help me confiscate some more, then?’

Something inside me cheered as the unwilling smile broke cover on her face.

The dealer was in the same place he had been when I walked into his ’cast radius two weeks ago. This time I saw him twenty metres away, skulking in an alcove with the bat-eyed broadcast unit on his shoulder like a familiar. There were very few people on the street in any direction. I nodded to Ortega who was stationed across the street and walked on. The sales ’cast had not changed, the street of ridiculously ferocious women and the sudden cool of the betathanatine hit, but this time I was expecting it and in any case the Khumalo neurachem had a definite damping effect on the intrusion. I stepped up to the dealer with an eager smile.

‘Got Stiff, man.’

‘Good, that’s what I’m looking for. How much have you got?’

He started a little, expression coiling between greed and suspicion. His hand slipped down towards the horrorbox at his belt just in case.

‘How much you want, man?’

‘All of it,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Everything you’ve got.’

He read me, but by then it was too late. I had the lock on two of his fingers as they stabbed at the horrorbox controls.

‘Ah-ah.’

He took a swipe at me with the other arm. I broke the fingers. He howled and collapsed around the pain. I kicked him in the stomach and took the horrorbox away from him. Behind me, Ortega arrived and flashed her badge in his sweat-beaded face.

‘Bay City police,’ she said laconically. ‘You’re busted. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we.’

The betathanatine was in a series of dermal pads with tiny glass decanters folded in cotton. I held one of the vials up to the light and shook it. The liquid within was a pale red.

‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Ortega. ‘About eight per cent?’

‘Looks like. Maybe less.’ Ortega put a knee into the dealer’s neck, grinding his face into the pavement. ‘Where do you cut this stuff, pal?’

‘This is good merchandise,’ the dealer squealed. ‘I buy direct. This is—’

Ortega rapped hard on his skull with her knuckles and he shut up.

‘This is shit,’ she said patiently. ‘This has been stepped on so hard it wouldn’t give you a cold. We don’t want it. So you can have your whole stash back and walk, if you like. All we want to know is where you cut it. An address.’

‘I don’t know any—’

‘Do you want to be shot while escaping?’ Ortega asked him pleasantly, and he grew suddenly very quiet.

‘Place in Oakland,’ he said sullenly.

Ortega gave him a pencil and paper. ‘Write it down. No names, just the address. And so help me, if you’re tinselling me I’ll come back here with fifty ccs of real Stiff and feed you the lot, unstepped.’

She took back the scrawled paper and glanced at it, removed her knee from the dealer’s neck and patted him on the shoulder.

‘Good. Now get up and get the fuck off the street. You can go back to work tomorrow, if this is the right place. And if it’s not, remember, I know your patch.’

We watched him lurch off and Ortega tapped the paper.

‘I know this place. Controlled Substances busted them a couple of times last year, but some slick lawyer gets the important guys off every time. We’ll make a lot of noise, let them think they’re buying us off with a bag of uncut.’

‘Fair enough.’ I looked after the retreating figure of the dealer. ‘Would you really have shot him?’

‘Nah.’ Ortega grinned. ‘But he doesn’t know that. ConSub do it sometimes, just to get major dealers off the street when there’s something big going down. Official reprimand for the officer involved and compensation pays out for a new sleeve, but it takes time, and the scumbag does that time in the store. Plus it hurts to get shot. I was convincing, huh?’

‘Convinced the fuck out of me.’

‘Maybe I should have been an Envoy.’

I shook my head. ‘Maybe you should spend less time around me.’

I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the hypnophone sonocodes to lull me away from reality. On either side of me, Davidson, the Organic Damage datarat, and Ortega had settled into their racks and even through the hypnophones I could hear their breathing, slow and regular, at the limits of my neurachem perception. I tried to relax more, to let the hypnosystem press me down through levels of softly decreasing consciousness, but instead my mind was whirring through the details of the set-up like a program check scanning for error. It was like the insomnia I’d suffered after Innenin, an infuriating synaptic itch that refused to go away. When my peripheral vision time display told me that at least a full minute had gone by, I propped myself up on one elbow and looked around at the figures dreaming in the other racks.

‘Is there a problem?’ I asked loudly.

‘The tracking of Sheryl Bostock is complete,’ said the hotel. ‘I assumed you would prefer to be alone when I informed you.’

I sat upright and started picking the trodes off my body. ‘You assumed right. You sure everyone else is under?’

‘Lieutenant Ortega and her colleagues were installed in the virtuality approximately two minutes ago. Irene Elliott has been established there since earlier this afternoon. She asked not to be disturbed.’

‘What ratio are you running at the moment?’

‘Eleven point fifteen. Irene Elliott requested it.’

I nodded to myself as I climbed out of the rack. Eleven point one five was a standard working ratio for datarats. It was also the title of a particularly bloody but otherwise unmemorable Micky Nozawa experia flic. The only clear detail I could recall was that, unexpectedly, Micky’s character got killed at the end. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

Between the dimly seen heave and swell of the sea and the lights of the cabin, there was a lemon grove. I went along a dirt track between the trees and the citrus fragrance felt like cleansing. From the long grass on either side, cicadas whirred reassuringly. In a velvet sky above were stars like fixed gems and behind the cabin the land rose into gentle hills and rocky outcroppings. The vague white forms of sheep moved in the darkness on the slopes, and from somewhere I heard a dog bark. The lights of a fishing village glimmered off to one side, less bright than the stars.

There were hurricane lamps slung from the upper rail of the cabin’s front porch, but no one was seated at the wooden tables there. The front wall bore a riotous abstract mural curling around and out from the luminous lettering of a sign that read Pension Flower of ’68. Windchimes dangled along the railing, winking and turning in the faint breeze that blew in from the sea. They made a variety of gentle sounds from glassy belling to hollow wooden percussion.

On the unkempt sloping lawn in front of the porch someone had set out an incongruous collection of sofas and armchairs in a rough circle, so it looked as if the cabin had been lifted bodily off its furnished interior and set down again further up the slope. From the gathered seats came the soft sound of voices and the red embers of lit cigarettes. I reached for my own supply, realised I had neither the packet nor the need any more and grimaced wryly to myself in the dark.

Bautista’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation.

‘Kovacs? That you?’

‘Who else is it going to be?’ I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. ‘This is a goddamn virtuality.’

‘Yeah, but . . .’ Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats. ‘Welcome to the party.’

There were five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair. On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along the full length of a second sofa.

The fifth figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a multicoloured bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in front of him.

‘The Hendrix, right?’

‘That’s correct.’ There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto the darkened lawn. ‘Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original designers. If you strip down the client-mirroring systems, this is what you get.’

‘Good.’ I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. ‘You happy with the working environment?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’

‘How long’ve you been here?’

‘Me?’ She shrugged. ‘A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours ago.’

‘Two and a half,’ said Ortega sourly. ‘What kept you?’

‘Neurachem glitch.’ I nodded at the Hendrix figure. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘That’s exactly what he told us.’ Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop. ‘I’d just like to know what it means.’

I made a helpless gesture. ‘So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail the manufacturers.’ I turned back to Irene Elliott. ‘I take it you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the Dip.’

‘You take it right.’ Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure. ‘Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to need every scrap of that to pull it off.’

‘You cased the run yet?’

Elliott nodded glumly. ‘It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska was freighted off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing line.’

‘I’m impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?’

‘A while.’ Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction. ‘I had some help.’

‘And the second interesting thing?’

‘Yeah. Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t tell you much more than that without Dipping it, and I figured you wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re after.’

I remembered the spider-like automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb sacs, the sombre stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those contemptuous hooded smiles.

‘Well, then.’ I looked around at the assembled team. ‘Let’s get this gig off the ground.’

CHAPTER FORTY

It was Sharya, all over again.

We dusted off from the tower of the Hendrix an hour after dark and swung away into the traffic-speckled night. Ortega had pulled the same Lock-Mit transport I’d ridden out to Suntouch House, but when I looked around the dimly lit interior of the ship’s belly, it was the Envoy Command attack on Zihicce that I remembered. The scene was the same; Davidson playing the role of datacom officer, face washed pale blue by the light from his screen; Ortega as medic, unpacking the dermals and charging kit from a sealwrap bag. Up ahead in the hatchway to the cockpit, Bautista stood and looked worried, while another mohican I didn’t know did the flying. Something must have shown on my face, because Ortega leaned in abruptly to study my face.

‘Problem?’

I shook my head. ‘Just a little nostalgia.’

‘Well, I just hope you got these measures right.’ She braced herself against the hull. In her hand, the first dermal looked like a petal torn from some iridescent green plant. I grinned up at her and rolled my head to one side to expose my jugular.

‘This is the fourteen per cent,’ she said and applied the cool green petal to my neck. I felt the fractional grip, like gentle sandpaper, as it took, and then a long cold finger leapt down past my collar bone and deep into my chest.

‘Smooth.’

‘Fucking ought to be. You know how much that stuff would go for on the street?’

‘The perks of law enforcement, huh?’

Bautista turned round. ‘That ain’t funny, Kovacs.’

‘Leave him alone, Rod,’ said Ortega lazily. ‘Man’s entitled to a bad joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.’

I raised one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the dermal gingerly and stood back.

‘Three minutes till the next,’ she said. ‘Right?’

I nodded complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.

At first it was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there, so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with effort.

Then the control stimulants kicked in and in seconds my head cleared from foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just . . .

I felt an inane grin eating its way across my features.

‘Whoooh, Kristin, this is . . . good stuff. This is better than Sharya.’

‘Glad you like it.’ Ortega glanced at her watch. ‘Two more minutes. You up to it?’

‘I’m up to.’ I pursed my lips and blew through them. ‘Anything. Anything at all.’

Ortega tipped her head back towards Bautista, who could presumably see the instrumentation in the cockpit. ‘Rod. How long have we got?’

‘Be there in less than forty minutes.’

‘Better get him the suit.’

While Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.

‘I want you to wear this,’ she said. ‘Little bit of Organic Damage insurance for you.’

‘A needle?’ I shook my head with what felt like machined precision. ‘Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.’

‘It’s a tracer filament,’ she said patiently. ‘And you’re not leaving this ship without it.’

I looked at the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues, usually in under forty-eight hours.

I glanced across at Davidson.

‘What’s the range?’

‘Hundred klicks.’ The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow from his screen. ‘Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate unless we call you. Quite safe.’

I shrugged. ‘OK. Where do you want to put it?’

Ortega stood up, needle in hand. ‘Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack, case they chop your head off.’

‘Charming.’ I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.

‘You’re done. Is he on screen?’

Davidson punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me, Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch and reached for the second dermal.

‘Thirty-seven per cent,’ she said. ‘Ready for the Big Chill?’

It was like being submerged in diamonds.

By the time we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armour and when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stunner. I dialled the muzzle aperture to wide. At five metres, it would take down a roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in complete silence. Sarah Sachilowska says Hi.

The dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia Deme.

The Tebbit knife on my forearm in its neural spring sheath beneath the stealth suit like a final word.

I reached for the cold feeling that had filled me up outside Jerry’s Closed Quarters and, in the crystalline depths of the Reaper, did not need it.

Mission time.

‘Target visual,’ called the pilot. ‘You want to come up and have a look at this baby?’

I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged, and the two of us went forward. Ortega seated herself beside the mohican and slipped on the co-pilot’s headset. I contented myself with standing next to Bautista in the access hatch. The view was just as good from there.

Most of the Lock-Mit’s cockpit was transparent alloy with instrumentation projected up onto it, permitting the pilot an uninterrupted view of the surrounding airspace; I remembered the feeling from Sharya, like riding a slightly concave tray, a tongue of steel or maybe a magic carpet, across the cloudscape below. A feeling that had been at once dizzying and godlike. I glanced at the mohican’s profile and wondered if he was as detached from that feeling as I was under the influence of the Reaper.

There were no clouds tonight. Head in the Clouds hung off to the left like a mountain village seen from afar. A cluster of tiny blue lights singing gently of homecoming and warmth in the icy black immensity. Kawahara seemed to have chosen the edge of the world for the whorehouse.

As we banked towards the lights, a squiggle of electronic sound filled the cockpit and the projected instrumentation dimmed briefly.

‘That’s it, we’re acquired,’ said Ortega sharply. ‘Here we go. I want a flyby under the belly. Let them get a good look.’

The mohican said nothing, but the nose of the transport dipped. Ortega reached up to an instrument panel projected onto the transparency above her head and touched a button. A hard, male voice crashed into the cabin.

‘. . . that you are in restricted airspace. We are under licence to destroy intruding aircraft. Identify yourself immediately.’

‘This is the Bay City police department,’ said Ortega laconically. ‘Look out your window and you’ll see the stripes. We’re up here on official police business, pal, so if you so much as twitch a launcher in this direction I’ll have you blown out of the sky.’

There was a hissing silence. Ortega turned to look at me and grinned. Ahead of us, Head in the Clouds swelled like the target in a missile scope and then lifted abruptly over our heads as the pilot dipped us below the bulk of its hull and banked about. I saw lights gathered like icy fruit on gantries and the undersides of landing pads, the distended belly of the vessel curving up on either side and then we were past.

‘State the nature of your business,’ snapped the voice nastily.

Ortega peered out of the side of the cockpit as if looking for the speaker in amongst the airship’s superstructure. Her voice grew chilly. ‘Sonny, I’ve already told you the nature of our business. Now get me a landing pad.’

More silence. We circled the airship five kilometres out. I started to pull on the gloves of the stealth suit.

‘Lieutenant Ortega.’ It was Kawahara’s voice this time, but in the depths of the betathanatine, even hatred seemed detached and I had to remind myself to feel it. Most of me was assessing the rapidity with which they had voiceprinted Ortega. ‘This is a little unexpected. Do you have some kind of warrant? I believe our licences are in order.’

Ortega raised an eyebrow at me. The voiceprinting had impressed her too. She cleared her throat. ‘This is not a licensing matter. We are looking for a fugitive. If you’re going to start insisting on warrants, I might have to assume you’ve got a guilty conscience.’

‘Don’t threaten me, lieutenant,’ said Kawahara coldly. ‘Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?’

‘Reileen Kawahara, I imagine.’ In the deathly silence that followed, Ortega made a jubilant punching gesture at the ceiling and turned to grin at me. The barb had gone home. I felt the faintest ripple of amusement catch at the corners of my mouth.

‘Perhaps you’d better tell me the name of this fugitive, lieutenant. ’ Kawahara’s voice had gone as smooth as the expression on an untenanted synthetic sleeve.

‘His name is Takeshi Kovacs,’ said Ortega, with another grin at me. ‘But he’s currently sleeved in the body of an ex-police officer. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning your relationship with this man.’

There was another long pause, and I knew the lure was going to work. I’d crafted its multiple layers with all the care of the finest Envoy deceit. Kawahara almost certainly knew of the relationship between Ortega and Ryker, could probably guess Ortega’s entanglement with the new tenant of her lover’s sleeve. She would buy Ortega’s anxiety at my disappearance. She would buy Ortega’s unsanctioned approach to Head in the Clouds. Given an assumed communication between Kawahara and Miriam Bancroft, she would believe she knew where I was and she would be confident that she had the upper hand over Ortega.

But more important than all of this, she would want to know how the Bay City police knew she was aboard Head in the Clouds. And since it was likely that they had, either directly or indirectly, gleaned the fact from Takeshi Kovacs, she would want to know how he knew. She would want to know how much he knew, and how much he had told the police.

She would want to talk to Ortega.

I fastened the wrist seals of the stealth suit and waited. We completed our third circuit of Head in the Clouds.

‘You’d better come aboard,’ said Kawahara finally. ‘Starboard landing beacon. Follow it in, they’ll give you a code.’

The Lock-Mit was equipped with a rear dispatch tube, a smaller, civilian variant of the drop launcher that on military models was intended for smart bombs or surveillance drones. The tube was accessed through the floor of the main cabin and with a certain amount of contortion I fitted inside, complete with stealth suit, grav harness and assorted weaponry. We’d practised this three or four times on the ground, but now with the transport swinging in towards Head in the Clouds, it suddenly seemed a long and complicated process. Finally, I got the last of the grav harness inside and Ortega rapped once on the suit’s helmet before she slammed the hatch down and buried me in darkness.

Three seconds later the tube blew open and spat me backwards into the night sky.

The sensation was a dimly remembered joy, something this sleeve did not recall at a cellular level. From the cramped confines of the tube and the noisy vibration of the transport’s engines I was suddenly blasted into absolute space and silence. Not even the rush of air made it through the foam padding on the suit’s helmet as I fell. The grav harness kicked in as soon as I was clear of the tube and braked my fall before it got properly started. I felt myself borne up on its field, not quite motionless, like a ball bobbing on top of the column of water from a fountain. Pivoting about, I watched the navigation lights of the transport shrink inward against the bulk of Head in the Clouds.

The airship hung above and before me like a threatening storm cloud. Lights glimmered out at me from the curving hull and the gantried superstructure beneath. Ordinarily it would have given me the cringing sensation of being a sitting target, but the betathanatine soothed the emotions away in a clean rush of data detail. In the stealth suit I was as black as the surrounding sky and all but radar invisible. The grav field I was generating might theoretically show up on a scanner somewhere, but within the huge distortions produced by the airship’s stabilisers they’d need to be looking for me, and looking quite hard. All these things I knew with an absolute confidence that had no room for doubts, fears or other emotional tangling. I was riding the Reaper.

I set the impellers in cautious forward drive and drifted towards the massive, curving wall of the hull. Inside the helmet, simulation graphics awoke on the surface of the visor and I saw the entry points Irene Elliott had found for me delineated in red. One in particular, the unsealed mouth of a disused sampling turret, was pulsing on and off next to fine green lettering that spelled Prospect One. I rose steadily upward to meet it.

The turret mouth was about a metre wide and scarred around the edges where the atmosphere sampling system had been amputated. I got my legs up in front of me - no mean achievement in a grav field - and hooked myself over the lip of the hatch, then concentrated on worming myself inside up to the waist. From there I twisted onto my front to clear the grav harness and was able to slide myself through the gap and onto the floor of the turret. I switched the grav harness off.

Inside, there was barely enough crawlspace for a technician lying on his back to check the nest of equipment. At the back of the turret was an antique airlock, complete with pressure wheel, just as Irene Elliott’s Dipped blueprints had promised. I wriggled around until I could grasp the wheel with both hands, conscious that both suit and harness were catching on the narrow hatchway, and that my exertions so far had almost totally depleted my immediate body strength. I drew a deep breath to fuel my comatose muscles, waited for my slowed heartbeat to pump the oxygen round my body and heaved at the wheel. Against my expectations it turned quite easily and the airlock hatch fell outward. Beyond the hatch was an airy darkness.

I lay still for a while, mustering more muscular strength. The two-shot Reaper cocktail was taking some getting used to. On Sharya we hadn’t needed to go above twenty per cent. Ambient temperatures in Zihicce were quite high and the spider tanks’ infrared sensors were crude. Up here, a body at Sharyan room temperature would set off every alarm in hull. Without careful oxygen fuelling, my body would rapidly exhaust its cellular level energy reserves and leave me gasping on the floor like a gaffed bottleback. I lay still, breathing deep and slow.

After a couple of minutes, I twisted around again and unfastened the grav harness, then slid carefully through the hatch and hit a steel grid walkway with the heels of my hands. I curled the rest of my body slowly out of the hatch, feeling like a moth emerging from a chrysalis. Checking the darkened walkway in either direction I rose to my feet and removed the stealth suit helmet and gloves. If the keel plans Irene Elliott had Dipped from the Tampa aeroyard stack were still accurate, the walkway led down among the huge helium silos to the vessel’s aft buoyancy control room and from there I’d be able to climb a maintenance ladder directly onto the main operating deck. According to what we’d patched together out of Miller’s interrogation, Kawahara’s quarters were two levels below on the port side. She had two huge windows that looked downward out of the hull.

Summoning the blueprints from memory, I drew the shard pistol and set off towards the stern.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to reach the buoyancy control room, and I saw no one on the way. The control room itself appeared to be automated and I began to suspect that these days hardly anyone bothered to visit the swooping canopies of the airship’s upper hull. I found the maintenance ladder and climbed painstakingly down it until a warm upward-spilling glow on my face told me I was almost on the operating deck. I stopped and listened for voices, hearing and proximity sense both strained to their limits for a full minute before I lowered myself the final four metres and dropped to the floor of a well lit, carpeted passageway. It was deserted in both directions.

I checked my internal time display and stowed the shard gun. Mission time was accumulating. By now Ortega and Kawahara would be talking. I glanced around at the decor and guessed that whatever function the operating deck had once been intended to serve, it wasn’t serving it now. The passageway was decked out in opulent red and gold with stands of exotic plant life and lamps in the form of coupling bodies every few metres. The carpet beneath my feet was deep, and woven with highly detailed images of sexual abandon. Male, female and variants between twined around each other along the length of the corridor in an unbroken progression of plugged orifices and splayed limbs. The walls were hung with similarly explicit holoframes that gasped and moaned into life as I passed them. In one of them I thought I recognised the dark-haired, crimson-lipped woman of the street ’cast advertisement, the woman who might have pressed her thigh against mine in a bar on the other side of the globe.

In the cold detachment of the betathanatine, none of it had any more impact than a wall full of Martian technoglyphs.

There were plushly appointed double doors set into each side of the corridor at about ten-metre intervals. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was behind the doors. Jerry’s biocabins, by any other name, and each door was just as likely as not to disgorge a client at any moment. I quickened my pace, searching for a connecting corridor that I knew led to stairs and elevators onto the other levels.

I was almost there when a door five metres ahead of me swung open. I froze, hand on the grip of the shard gun, shoulders to the wall, gaze gripped to the leading edge of the door. The neurachem thrummed.

In front of me, a grey furred animal that was either half-grown wolf cub or dog emerged from the open door with arthritic slowness. I kept my hand on the shard gun and eased away from the wall, watching. The animal was not much over knee height and it moved on all fours, but there was something badly wrong with the structure of the rear legs. Something wrenched. Its ears were laid back and a minute keening came from its throat. It turned its head towards me and for a moment my hand tightened on the shard gun, but the animal only looked at me for a moment and the mute suffering in its eyes was enough to tell me I was in no danger. Then it limped painfully along the corridor to a room farther down on the opposite wall and paused there, the long head down close to the door as if listening.

With a dreamlike sense of lost control, I followed and leaned my own head against the surface of the door. The soundproofing was good, but no match for the Khumalo neurachem at full stretch. Somewhere down near the limits of hearing, noises trickled into my ear like stinging insects. A dull, rhythmic thudding sound and something else that might have been the pleading screams of someone whose strength was almost gone. It stopped almost as soon as I had tuned it in.

Below me, the dog stopped keening at the same moment and lay down on the ground beside the door. When I stepped away, it looked up at me once with a gaze of pure distilled pain and reproach. In those eyes I could see reflected every victim that had ever looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal turned its head away and licked apathetically at its injured rear legs.

For a split second, something geysered through the cold crust of the betathanatine.

I went back to the door the animal had emerged from, drawing the shard gun on my way and swung through, holding the weapon in both hands before me. The room beyond was spacious and pastel-coloured with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the walls. A massive four poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the centre. Seated on the edge of the bed was a distinguished-looking man in his forties, naked from the waist down. Above the waist, he appeared to be wearing formal evening dress which clashed badly with the heavy-duty canvas work gloves he had pulled up to both elbows. He was bent over, cleaning himself between the legs with a damp white cloth.

As I advanced into the room, he glanced up.

‘Jack? You finished al—’ He stared at the gun in my hands without comprehension, then as the muzzle came to within half a metre of his face a note of asperity crept into his voice. ‘Listen, I didn’t dial for this routine.’

‘On the house,’ I said dispassionately, and watched as the clutch of monomolecular shards tore his face apart. His hands flew up from between his legs to cover the wounds and he flopped over sideways on the bed, gut-deep noises grinding out of him as he died.

With the mission time display flaring red in the corner of my vision, I backed out of the room. The injured animal outside the door opposite did not look up as I approached. I knelt and laid one hand gently on the matted fur. The head lifted and the keening rose in the throat again. I set down the shard gun and tensed my empty hand. The neural sheath delivered the Tebbit knife, glinting.

After, I cleaned the blade on the fur, resheathed the knife and picked up the shard gun, all with the unhurried calm of the Reaper. Then I moved silently to the connecting corridor. Deep in the diamond serenity of the drug something was nagging at me, but the Reaper would not let me worry about it.

As indicated on Elliott’s stolen blueprints the cross corridor led to a set of stairs, carpeted in the same orgiastic pattern as the main thoroughfare. I moved warily down the steps, gun tracking the open space ahead, proximity sense spread like a radar net before me. Nothing stirred. Kawahara must have battened down all the hatches just in case Ortega and her crew saw something inconvenient while they were on the premises.

Two levels down, I stepped off the stairs and followed my memory of the blueprints through a mesh of corridors until I was reasonably sure that the door to Kawahara’s quarters was around the next corner. With my back to the wall, I slid up to the corner and waited, breathing shallowly. The proximity sense said there was someone at the door around the corner, possibly more than one person, and I picked up the faint tang of cigarette smoke. I dropped to my knees, checked my surroundings and then lowered my face to the ground. With one cheek brushing the pile of the carpet, I eased my head around the corner.

A man and a woman stood by the door, similarly dressed in green coveralls. The woman was smoking. Although each of them had stunguns holstered importantly at their belts, they looked more like technical staff than security attendants. I relaxed fractionally and settled down to wait some more. In the corner of my eye, the minutes of mission time pulsed like an overstressed vein.

It was another quarter of an hour before I heard the door. At full amp, the neurachem caught the rustle of clothing as the attendants moved to allow whoever was leaving to exit. I heard voices, Ortega’s flat with pretended official disinterest, then Kawahara’s, as modulated as the mandroid in Larkin & Green. With the betathanatine to protect me from the hatred, my reaction to that voice was a muted horizon event, like the flare and crash of gunfire at a great distance.

‘. . . that I cannot be of more assistance, lieutenant. If what you say about the Wei Clinic is true, his mental balance has certainly deteriorated since he worked for me. I feel a certain responsibility. I mean, I would never have recommended him to Laurens Bancroft, had I suspected this would happen.’

‘As I said, this is supposition.’ Ortega’s tone sharpened slightly. ‘And I’d appreciate it if these details didn’t go any further. Until we know where Kovacs has gone, and why—’

‘Quite. I quite understand the sensitivity of the matter. You are aboard Head in the Clouds, lieutenant. We have a reputation for confidentiality.’

‘Yeah.’ Ortega allowed a stain of distaste into her voice. ‘I’ve heard that.’

‘Well, then, you can rest assured that this will not be spoken of. Now if you’ll excuse me, lieutenant. Detective sergeant. I have some administrative matters to attend to. Tia and Max will see you back to the flight deck.’

The door closed and soft footfalls advanced in my direction. I tensed abruptly. Ortega and her escort were coming in my direction. This was something no one had bargained for. On the blueprints the main landing pads were forward of Kawahara’s cabin, and I’d come up on the aft side with that in mind. There seemed no reason to march Ortega and Bautista towards the stern.

There was no panic. Instead, a cool analogue of the adrenalin reaction rinsed through my mind, offering a chilly array of hard facts. Ortega and Bautista were in no danger. They must have arrived the same way they were leaving or something would have been said. As for me, if they passed the corridor I was in, their escort would only have to glance sideways to see me. The area was well lit and there were no hiding places within reach. On the other hand, with my body down below room temperature, my pulse slowed to a crawl and my breathing at the same low, most of the subliminal factors that will trigger a normal human being’s proximity sense were gone. Always assuming the escorts were wearing normal sleeves.

And if they turned into this corridor to use the stairs I had come down by ...

I shrank back against the wall, dialled the shard gun down to minimum dispersal and stopped breathing.

Ortega. Bautista. The two attendants brought up the rear. They were so close I could have reached out and touched Ortega’s hair.

No one looked round.

I gave them a full minute before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went rapidly round the corner and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The decor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.

Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.

‘Forget something?’ she asked distantly.

‘No, not a thing.’

I saw how her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned it was with unhurried smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she turned.

‘Who are you? How did you get in here?’

‘Think about it.’ I gestured at the loungers. ‘Sit down over there, take the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.’

‘Kadmin?’

‘Now you’re insulting me. Sit down!’

I saw the realisation explode behind her eyes.

‘Kovacs?’ An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. ‘Kovacs, you stupid, stupid bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?’

‘I said sit down.’

‘She has gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you think you’re doing here?’

‘I’m not going to tell you again,’ I said mildly. ‘Either you sit down now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.’

The thin smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimetre at a time onto the nearest lounger. ‘Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill me?’

‘If necessary.’

‘For what? Is this some kind of moral stand?’ The emphasis Kawahara laid on the last two words made it sound like the name of a product. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and then re-sleeve me from my last update ’cast. And it won’t take the new me very long to work out what happened up here.’

I seated myself on the edge of the lounger. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Look how long it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does he?’

‘Is this about Bancroft?’

‘No Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should have left me alone while you could.’

‘Ohhh,’ she cooed, mock maternal. ‘Did you get manipulated. I’m sorry.’ She dropped the tone just as abruptly. ‘You’re an Envoy, Kovacs. You live by manipulation. We all do. We all live in the great manipulation matrix and it’s just one big struggle to stay on top.’

I shook my head. ‘I didn’t ask to be dealt in.’

‘Kovacs, Kovacs.’ Kawahara’s expression was suddenly almost tender. ‘None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and a psychotic whore for a mother. You think I asked for that? We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.’

‘Or pouring water down other people’s throats,’ I agreed amiably. ‘I guess you took after your mother, right?’

For a second it was as if Kawahara’s face was a mask cut from tin behind which a furnace was raging. I saw the fury ignite in her eyes and if I had not had the Reaper inside to keep me cold, I would have been afraid.

‘Kill me,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘And make the most of it, because you are going to suffer, Kovacs. You think those sad-case revolutionaries on New Beijing suffered when they died? I’m going to invent new limits for you and your fish-smelling bitch.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so, Reileen. You see, your update needlecast went through about ten minutes ago. And on the way I had it Dipped. Didn’t lift anything, we just spliced the Rawling virus onto the ’cast. It’s in the core by now, Reileen. Your remote storage has been spiked.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re lying.’

‘Not today. You liked the work Irene Elliott did at Jack It Up? Well you should see her in a virtual forum. I bet she had time to take a half dozen mindbites while she was inside that needlecast. Souvenirs. Collector’s items in fact, because if I know anything about stack engineers, they’ll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.’ I nodded over at the winding data display. ‘I should think you’ll get the alarm in another couple of hours. It took longer at Innenin but that was a long time ago. The technology’s moved on since then.’

Then she believed, and it was as if the fury I’d seen in her eyes had banked down to a concentrated white heat.

‘Irene Elliott,’ she said intently. ‘When I find her—’

‘I think we’ve had enough empty threats for one day,’ I interrupted without force. ‘Listen to me. Currently the stack you’re wearing is the only life you have, and the mood I’m in now it wouldn’t take much to make me cut it out of your spine and stamp on it. Before or after I shoot you, so shut up.’

Kawahara sat still, glaring at me out of slitted eyes. Her top lip drew fractionally back off her teeth for a moment, before control asserted itself.

‘What do you want?’

‘Better. What I want, right now, is a full confession of how you set Bancroft up. Resolution 653, Mary Lou Hinchley, the whole thing. You can throw in how you framed Ryker as well.’

‘Are you wired for this?’

I tapped my left eyelid where the recording system had gone in and smiled.

‘You really think I’m going to do this?’ Kawahara’s rage glinted at me from behind her eyes. She was waiting, coiled, for an opening. I had seen her like this before, but then I hadn’t been on the receiving end of that look. I was in as much danger under those eyes as I had ever been under fire in the streets of Sharya. ‘You really think you’re going to get this from me?’

‘Look on the bright side, Reileen. You can probably buy and influence your way out of the erasure penalty, and for the rest you might only get a couple of hundred years in the store.’ My voice hardened. ‘Whereas, if you don’t talk, you’ll die right here and now.’

‘Confession under duress is inadmissible under law.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. This isn’t going to the UN. You think I’ve never been in a court before? You think I’d trust lawyers to deal with this? Everything you say here tonight is going express needlecast to WorldWeb One as soon as I’m back on the ground. That, and footage of whoever it was I wasted in the doggie room upstairs.’ Kawahara’s eyes widened and I nodded. ‘Yeah, I should have said earlier. You’re a client down. Not really dead, but he’ll need re-sleeving. Now with all that, I reckon about three minutes after Sandy Kim goes live, the UN tacs are going to be blowing down your door with a fistful of warrants. They’ll have no choice. Bancroft alone will force their hand. You think the same people who authorised Sharya and Innenin are going to stick at a little constitutional rule-bending to protect their power base? Now start talking.’

Kawahara raised her eyebrows, as if this was nothing more than a slightly distasteful joke she’d just been told. ‘Where would you like me to start, Takeshi-san?’

‘Mary Lou Hinchley. She fell from here, right?’

‘Of course.’

‘You had her slated for the snuff deck? Some sick fuck wanted to pull on the tiger sleeve and play kitty?’

‘Well, well.’ Kawahara tipped her head on one side as she made connections. ‘Who have you been talking to? Someone from the Wei Clinic, is it? Let me think. Miller was here for that little object lesson, but you torched him, so . . . Oh. You haven’t been head-hunting again, Takeshi? You didn’t take Felipe Miller home in a hatbox, did you?’

I said nothing, just looked at her over the barrel of the shard gun, hearing again the weakened screaming through the door I’d listened at. Kawahara shrugged.

‘It wasn’t the tiger, as it happens. But something of that sort, yes.’

‘And she found out?’

‘Somehow, yes.’ Kawahara seemed to be relaxing, which under normal circumstances would have made me nervous. Under the betathanatine, it just made me more watchful. ‘A word in the wrong place, maybe something a technician said. You know, we usually put our snuff clients through a virtual version before we let them loose on the real thing. It helps to know how they’re going to react, and in some cases we even persuade them not to go through with it.’

‘Very thoughtful of you.’

Kawahara sighed. ‘How do I get through to you, Takeshi? We provide a service here. If it can be made legal, then so much the better.’

‘That’s bullshit, Reileen. You sell them the virtual, and in a couple of months they come sniffing after the real thing. There’s a causal link, and you know it. Selling them something illegal gives you leverage, probably over some very influential people. Get many UN governors up here, do you? Protectorate generals, that kind of scum?’

‘Head in the Clouds caters to an elite.’

‘Like that white-haired fuck I greased upstairs? He was someone important, was he?’

‘Carlton McCabe?’ From somewhere, Kawahara produced an alarming smile. ‘You could say that, I suppose, yes. A person of influence.’

‘Would you care to tell me which particular person of influence you’d promised they could rip the innards out of Mary Lou Hinchley?’

Kawahara tautened slightly. ‘No, I would not.’

‘Suppose not. You’ll want that for a bargaining line later, won’t you? OK, skip it. So what happened? Hinchley was brought up here, accidentally found out what she was being fattened up for and tried to escape? Stole a grav harness, perhaps?’

‘I doubt that. The equipment is kept under tight security. Perhaps she thought she could cling to the outside of one of the shuttles. She was not a very bright girl, apparently. The details are still unclear, but she must have fallen somehow.’

‘Or jumped.’

Kawahara shook her head. ‘I don’t think she had the stomach for that. Mary Lou Hinchley was not a samurai spirit. Like most of common humanity, she would have clung to life until the last undignified moment. Hoping for some miracle. Begging for mercy.’

‘How inelegant. Was she missed immediately?’

‘Of course she was missed! She had a client waiting for her. We scoured the ship.’

‘Embarrassing.’

‘Yes.’

‘But not as embarrassing as having her wash up on the shore a couple of days later, huh? The luck fairies were out of town that week.’

‘It was unfortunate,’ Kawahara conceded, as if we were discussing a bad hand of poker. ‘But not entirely unexpected. We were not anticipating a real problem.’

‘You knew she was Catholic?’

‘Of course. It was part of the requirements.’

‘So when Ryker dug up that iffy conversion, you must have shat yourself. Hinchley’s testimony would have dragged you right into the open, along with fuck knows how many of your influential friends. Head in the Clouds, one of the Houses, indicted for snuff and you with it. What was the word you used on New Beijing that time? Intolerable risk. Something had to be done, Ryker had to be shut down. Stop me if I’m losing the thread here.’

‘No, you’re quite correct.’

‘So you framed him?’

Kawahara shrugged again. ‘An attempt was made to buy him off. He proved . . . unreceptive.’

‘Unfortunate. So what did you do then?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I want to hear you say it. I want details. I’m doing too much of the talking here. Try to keep your end of the conversation up, or I might think you’re being uncooperative.’

Kawahara raised her eyes theatrically to the ceiling. ‘I framed Elias Ryker. I set him up with a false tip about a clinic in Seattle. We built a phone construct of Ryker and used it to pay Ignacio Garcia to fake the Reasons of Conscience decals on two of Ryker’s kills. We knew the Seattle PD wouldn’t buy it and that Garcia’s faking wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. There, is that better?’

‘Where’d you get Garcia from?’

‘Research on Ryker, back when we were trying to buy him off.’ Kawahara shifted impatiently on the lounger. ‘The connection came up.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I figured.’

‘How perceptive of you.’

‘So everything was nicely nailed down. Until Resolution 653 came along, and stirred it all up again. And Hinchley was still a live case.’

Kawahara inclined her head. ‘Just so.’

‘Why didn’t you just stall it? Buy some decision-makers on the UN Council?’

‘Who? This isn’t New Beijing. You met Phiri and Ertekin. Do they look as if they’re for sale?’

I nodded. ‘So it was you in Marco’s sleeve. Did Miriam Bancroft know?’

‘Miriam?’ Kawahara looked perplexed. ‘Of course not. No one knew, that was the point. Marco plays Miriam on a regular basis. It was a perfect cover.’

‘Not perfect. You play shit tennis, apparently.’

‘I didn’t have time for a competence disc.’

‘Why Marco? Why not just go as yourself?’

Kawahara waved a hand. ‘I’d been hammering at Bancroft since the resolution was tabled. Ertekin too, whenever she let me near her. I was making myself conspicuous. Marco putting in a word on my behalf makes me look more detached.’

‘You took that call from Rutherford,’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘The one to Suntouch House after we dropped in on him. I figured it was Miriam, but you were there as a guest, playing Marco on the sidelines of the great Catholic debate.’

‘Yes.’ A faint smile. ‘You seem to have greatly overestimated Miriam Bancroft’s role in all this. Oh, by the way, who is that you’ve got wearing Ryker’s sleeve at the moment? Just to satisfy my curiosity. They’re very convincing, whover they are.’

I said nothing, but a smile leaked from one corner of my mouth. Kawahara caught it.

‘Really? Double sleeving. You really must have Lieutenant Ortega wrapped around your little finger. Or wrapped around something, anyway. Congratulations. Manipulation worthy of a Meth.’ She barked a short laugh. ‘That was meant as a compliment, Takeshi-san.’

I ignored the jibe. ‘You talked to Bancroft in Osaka? Thursday 16th August. You knew he was going?’

‘Yes. He has regular business there. It was made to look like a chance encounter. I invited him to Head in the Clouds on his return. It’s a pattern for him. Buying sex after business deals. You probably found that out.’

‘Yeah. So when you got him up here, what did you tell him?’

‘I told him the truth.’

‘The truth?’ I stared at her. ‘You told him about Hinchley, and expected him to back you?’

‘Why not?’ There was a chilling simplicity in the look she gave me back. ‘We have a friendship that goes back centuries. Common business strategies that have sometimes taken longer than a normal human lifetime to bring to fruition. I hardly expected him to side with the little people.’

‘So he disappointed you. He wouldn’t keep the Meth faith.’

Kawahara sighed again, and this time there was a genuine weariness in it that gusted out of somewhere centuries deep in dust.

‘Laurens maintains a cheap romantic streak that I continually underestimate. He is not unlike you in many ways. But, unlike you, he has no excuse for it. The man is over three centuries old. I assumed - wanted to assume, perhaps - that his values would reflect that. That the rest was just posturing, speechmaking for the herd.’ Kawahara made a negligent what-can-you-do gesture with one slim arm. ‘Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.’

‘What did he do? Take some kind of moral stand?’

Kawahara’s mouth twisted without humour. ‘You mock me? You, with the blood of dozens from the Wei Clinic fresh on your hands. A butcher for the Protectorate, an extinguisher of human life on every world where it has managed to find a foothold. You are, if I may say so, Takeshi, a little inconsistent.’

Secure in the cool wrap of the betathanatine, I could feel nothing beyond a mild irritation at Kawahara’s obtuseness. A need to clarify.

‘The Wei Clinic was personal.’

‘The Wei Clinic was business, Takeshi. They had no personal interest in you at all. Most of the people you wiped were merely doing their jobs.’

‘Then they should have chosen another job.’

‘And the people of Sharya. What choice should they have made? Not to be born on that particular world, at that particular time? Not to allow themselves to be conscripted, perhaps?’

‘I was young and stupid,’ I said simply. ‘I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learnt better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.’

‘The value of it. The value of a human life.’ Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. ‘You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?’ She made a tiny spitting sound. ‘You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.’

‘Bancroft didn’t think so.’

‘Bancroft?’ Kawahara made a disgusted noise deep in her throat. ‘Bancroft is a cripple, limping along on his archaic notions. It’s a mystery to me how he’s survived this long.’

‘So you programmed him to suicide? Gave him a little chemical push?’

‘Programmed him to . . .’ Kawahara’s eyes widened and a delighted chuckle that was just the right blend of husk and chime issued from her sculpted lips. ‘Kovacs, you can’t be that stupid. I told you he killed himself. It was his idea, not mine. There was a time when you trusted my word, even if you couldn’t stomach my company. Think about it. Why would I want him dead?’

‘To erase what you told him about Hinchley. When he was re-sleeved, his last update would be minus that little indiscretion.’

Kawahara nodded sagely. ‘Yes, I can see how that would fit for you. A defensive move. You have, after all, existed on the defensive since you left the Envoys. And a creature that lives on the defensive sooner or later comes to think on the defensive. You are forgetting one thing, Takeshi.’

She paused dramatically, and even through the betathanatine, a vague ripple of mistrust tugged at me. Kawahara was overplaying it.

‘And what’s that?’

‘That I, Takeshi Kovacs, am not you. I do not play on the defensive.’

‘Not even at tennis?’

She offered me a calibrated little smile. ‘Very witty. I did not need to erase Laurens Bancroft’s memory of our conversation, because by then he had slaughtered his own Catholic whore, and had as much to lose as I from Resolution 653.’

I blinked. I’d had a variety of theories circling around the central conviction that Kawahara was responsible for Bancroft’s death, but none quite this garish. But as Kawahara’s words sank in, so did a number of pieces from that jagged mirror I’d thought was already complete enough to see the truth in. I looked into a newly revealed corner and wished I had not seen the things that moved there.

Opposite me, Kawahara grinned at my silence. She knew she’d dented me, and it pleased her. Vanity, vanity. Kawahara’s only but enduring flaw. Like all Meths, she had grown very impressed with herself. The admission, the final piece to my jigsaw, had slipped out easily. She wanted me to have it, she wanted me to see how far ahead of me she was, how far behind her I was limping along.

That crack about the tennis must have touched a nerve.

‘Another subtle echo of his wife’s face,’ she said, ‘carefully selected and then amped up with a little cosmetic surgery. He choked the life out of her. As he was coming for the second time, I think. Married life, eh Kovacs? What it must do to you males.’

‘You got it on tape?’ My voice sounded stupid in my own ears.

Kawahara’s smile came back. ‘Come on, Kovacs. Ask me something that needs an answer.’

‘Bancroft was chemically assisted?’

‘Oh, but of course. You were right about that. Quite a nasty drug, but then I expect you know—’

It was the betathanatine. The heart-dragging slow chill of the drug, because without it I would have been moving with the breath of air as the door opened on my flank. The thought crossed my mind as rapidly as it was able, and even as it did I knew by its very presence that I was going to be too slow. This was no time for thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and massage. It fogged the whiplash clarity of the Khumalo’s neurachem response system and I spun, just a couple of centuries too late, shard gun lifting.

Splat!

The stun bolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armour beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.

‘What kept you?’ asked Kawahara’s voice from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.

‘Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.’ Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. ‘Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?’

‘It’s Kovacs,’ said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.

I wasn’t going under.

‘Kovacs?’ Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. ‘I thought—’

‘Yes, so did I.’ The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colours swirling over her features. ‘He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.’

My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.

‘Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,’ said Trepp and put out a hand to touch my face.

‘Yeah?’ Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. ‘Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to—Fuck!’

She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.

‘He was telling the truth.’

‘About what?’

Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. ‘Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?’

‘He’s cold.’

‘Of course he’s fucking cold.’ The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. ‘How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s Stiffed to the eyes.’

Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. ‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘He’s going into virtual,’ said Kawahara grimly. ‘Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.’

I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.

‘You sure he isn’t transmitting?’

‘Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?’

A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.

‘I don’t have a knife.’ I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.

‘No problem.’ Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. ‘I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.’

Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move towards the desk.

The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.

Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. ‘They coming?’

Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. ‘Yeah,’ she said loudly. ‘Be here in a couple of minutes.’

I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with them a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were moulded in lead and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.

My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.

‘Right then.’ I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimetre apart.

I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.

I slashed sideways.

I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C-381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.

Kawahara was getting up.

‘What the fuck are you waiting for?’ she enquired acidly of Trepp. ‘Shoot this piece of shit, will you?’

Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap and levelled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.

‘You traitorous fucking cunt,’ Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. ‘You knew he was coming round, didn’t you? You’re fucking dead, bitch.’

I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time my shoulder smashed into Kawahara and we stumbled back towards the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm and we both went down on the angled glass.

The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung round at me and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.

‘That ought to hold you, sport,’ she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull grey flask of the water carrier. ‘You just lie there for a moment.’

My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stun bolt. I tried to lift one arm and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.

‘Yeah, that’ll do nicely,’ she said and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. ‘You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.’

She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. ‘And you, you fuck,’ she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. ‘What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?’

Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.

‘Security?’

‘Ms Kawahara.’ It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. ‘There’s been an incursion on the—’

‘I know what there’s been,’ said Kawahara tiredly. ‘I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?’

‘Ms Kawahara?’

‘I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?’

There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.

‘Ms Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.’

‘Oh.’ Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. ‘OK, well get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?

Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. ‘What are you grinning at, Kovacs?’

I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.

‘You,’ she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, ‘have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.’

She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.

‘Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material - that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. ‘I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.’

Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. ‘Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.’

‘When they ask how I died,’ I said, ‘tell them: still angry.’

‘Quell.’ Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. ‘But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.’

She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.

‘Have an aperitif.’

The jaws of the the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.

She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how many others.

‘That’s fucking enough,’ I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment, driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.

The muffled crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.

Dialled to the short end of its fuse option, the termite micro-grenade was designed to detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver ninety per cent of its charge to the contact face. The remaining ten per cent still wrecked my hand, tearing the flesh from the Khumalo marrow alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons, ripping the polybond ligamenting apart and punching a coin-sized hole in my palm.

On the downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me and then I was sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she realised what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away, almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken through what was left of the betathanatine.

Tell them: still angry.

Then the portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind and sky.

And we fell . . .

My left arm was paralysed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull. I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing upwards away from us and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face that had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiralling away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall was as seductive as sleep.

With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.

My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watching his screen.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The address was, ironically enough, down in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.

The apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and weed-grown concrete landing area in the centre. Amongst the array of sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the microcopter immediately. Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.

The door to number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with blank hostility.

‘Yeah?’

‘I’d like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.’

‘Yeah, well she ain’t here.’

I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. ‘I think that’s probably not true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.’

‘You the Sia?’

‘No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.’

The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.

Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.

‘You want to see me?’ the synth voice asked unevenly. ‘What for?’

‘I’m a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?’

She made a small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in men’s faces before without success.

‘It won’t take long.’

She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine-god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it looked new.

Daryl had disappeared from view.

‘Nice deck,’ I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display front. ‘When did you get it?’

‘A while ago.’ Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. ‘What do you want to ask me?’

‘May I sit down?’

She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.

‘Well?’ She jerked her hand at me nervously. ‘What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason for this.’

‘On Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.’

The result was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I’d threatened her with a riot prod.

‘That’s a part of my usual duties,’ she cried shrilly. ‘I’m authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.’

It didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had told her to memorise.

‘Was it synamorphesterone?’ I asked quietly.

Cheap synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.

‘How do you know that? Who told you that?’ Her voice scaled to a high sobbing. ‘You can’t know that. She said no one would know.’

She collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently deciding that he couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything, stayed there, watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously to the sofa and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder, making her start as if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me and I could feel my own expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but it was farcical.

I cleared my throat. ‘I’m not here to do anything to you,’ I said. ‘I just want to know.’

It took a minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink into Sheryl Bostock’s consciousness. It took even longer for her to get her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

‘It was her,’ she said, finally.

Curtis intercepted me as I came round the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was darkened with anger and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ he snarled at me.

‘Get out of my way, Curtis,’ I said evenly. ‘Or you’re going to get hurt.’

His arms snapped up into a karate guard. ‘I said, she does—’

At that point I kicked him in the knee and he collapsed at my feet. A second kick rolled him a couple of metres down the slope towards the tennis courts. By the time he came out of the roll, I was on him. I jammed a knee into the small of his back and pulled his head up by the hair.

‘I’m not having a great day,’ I told him patiently. ‘And you’re making it worse. Now, I’m going up there to talk to your boss. It’ll take about ten minutes, and then I’ll be gone. If you’re wise, you’ll stay out of the way.’

‘You fuck—’

I pulled his hair harder and he yelped. ‘If you come in there after me, Curtis, I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand? I’m not in the mood for swampsuck grifters like you today.’

‘Leave him alone, Mr Kovacs. Weren’t you ever nineteen?’

I glanced over my shoulder to where Miriam Bancroft stood with her hands in the pockets of a loose, desert-coloured ensemble apparently modelled on Sharyan harem-wear. Her long hair was caught up under a swathe of the ochre cloth and her eyes glinted in the sun. I remembered suddenly what Ortega had said about Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff. Now I could see it, the casual poise of a fashion-house sleeve demonstrator.

I let go of Curtis’s hair and stood back while he climbed to his feet. ‘I wasn’t this stupid at any age,’ I said untruthfully. ‘Do you want to tell him to back off, instead? Maybe he’ll listen to you.’

‘Curtis, go and wait for me in the limousine. I won’t be long.’

‘Are you going to let him—’

‘Curtis!’ There was a cordial astonishment in her tone, as if there must be some mistake, as if answering back just wasn’t on the menu. Curtis’s face flushed when he heard it, and he stalked away from us with tears of consternation standing in his eyes. I watched him out of sight, still not convinced I shouldn’t have hit him again. Miriam Bancroft must have read the thought on my face.

‘I would have thought even your appetite for violence had been sated by now,’ she said quietly. ‘Are you still looking for targets?’

‘Who says I’m looking for targets?’

‘You did.’

I looked quickly at her. ‘I don’t remember that.’

‘How convenient.’

‘No, you don’t understand.’ I lifted my open hands towards her. ‘I don’t remember it. Everything we did together is gone. I don’t have those memories. It’s been wiped.’

She flinched as if I’d struck her.

‘But you,’ she said in pieces. ‘I thought. You look—’

‘The same.’ I looked down at myself, at Ryker’s sleeve. ‘Well, there wasn’t much left of the other sleeve when they fished me out of the sea. This was the only option. And the UN investigators point-blank refused to allow another double sleeving. Don’t blame them, really. It’s going to be hard enough to justify the one we did as it is.’

‘But how did you—’

‘Decide?’ I smiled without much enthusiasm. ‘Shall we go inside and talk about this?’

I let her lead me back up to the conservatory, where someone had set out a jug and tall-stemmed glasses on the ornamental table beneath the martyrweed stands. The jug was filled with a liquid the colour of sunsets. We took seats opposite each other without exchanging words or glances. She poured herself a glass without offering me one, a tiny casualness that spoke volumes about what had happened between Miriam Bancroft and my other self.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have much time,’ she said absently. ‘As I told you on the phone, Laurens has asked me to come to New York immediately. I was actually on my way out when you called.’

I said nothing, waiting, and when she had finished pouring I got my own glass. The move felt bone-deep wrong, and my awkwardness must have shown. She started with realisation.

‘Oh, I—’

‘Forget it.’ I settled back into my seat and sipped at the drink. It had a faint bite beneath the mellowness. ‘You wanted to know how we decided? We gambled. Paper, scissors, stone. Of course, we talked around it for hours first. They had us in a virtual forum over in New York, very high ratio, discretion-shielded while we made up our minds. No expense spared for the heroes of the hour.’

I found an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice, and I had to stop to dump it. I took a longer pull at my drink.

‘Like I said, we talked. A lot. We thought of a lot of different ways to decide, some of them were maybe even viable, but in the end we kept coming back to it. Scissors, paper, stone. Best of five. Why not?’

I shrugged, but it was not the casual gesture I hoped it would appear. I was still trying to shake off the cold that crept through me whenever I thought about that game, trying to second-guess myself with my own existence at stake. The best of five, and it had gone to two all. My heart was beating like the junk rhythm in Jerry’s Closed Quarters, and I was dizzy with adrenalin. Even facing Kawahara hadn’t been this hard.

When he lost the last round - stone to my paper - we both stared at our two extended hands for what seemed like a long time. Then, he’d got up with a faint smile and cocked his thumb and forefinger at his own head, somewhere midway between a salute and a burlesque of suicide.

‘Anything I should tell Jimmy when I see him?’

I shook my head wordlessly.

‘Well, have a nice life,’ he said, and left the sunlit room, closing the door gently behind him. Part of me was still screaming inside that he had somehow thrown the last game.

They re-sleeved me the next day.

I looked up again. ‘Now I guess you’re wondering why I bothered coming here.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘It concerns Sheryl Bostock,’ I said.

‘Who?’

I sighed. ‘Miriam, please. Don’t make this any tougher than it already is. Sheryl Bostock is shit-scared you’re going to have her torched because of what she knows. I’ve come here to have you convince me she’s wrong, because that’s what I promised her.’

Miriam Bancroft looked at me for a moment, eyes widening, and then, convulsively, she threw her drink in my face.

‘You arrogant little man,’ she hissed. ‘How dare you? How dare you?’

I wiped drink out of my eyes and stared at her. I’d expected a reaction but it wasn’t this. I raked surplus cocktail from my hair.

‘Excuse me?’

‘How dare you walk in here, telling me this is difficult for you? Do you have any idea what my husband is going through at this moment?’

‘Well, let’s see.’ I wiped my hands clean on my shirt, frowning. ‘Right now he’s the five-star guest of a UN Special Inquiry in New York. What do you reckon, the marital separation’s getting to him? Can’t be that hard to find a whorehouse in New York.’

Miriam Bancroft’s jaw clenched.

‘You are cruel,’ she whispered.

‘And you’re dangerous.’ I felt a little steam wisping off the surface of my own control. ‘I’m not the one who kicked an unborn child to death in San Diego. I’m not the one who dosed her own husband’s clone with synamorphesterone while he was away in Osaka, knowing full well what he’d do to the first woman he fucked in that state. Knowing that woman wouldn’t be you, of course. It’s no wonder Sheryl Bostock’s terrified. Just looking at you, I’m wondering whether I’ll live past the front gates.’

‘Stop it.’ She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Stop it. Please.’

I stopped. We both sat in silence, she with her head bowed.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said finally. ‘I got most of it from Kawahara. I know why Laurens torched himself—’

‘Do you?’ Her voice was quiet now, but there were still traces of her previous venom in the question. ‘Tell me, what do you know? That he killed himself to escape blackmail. That’s what they’re saying in New York, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a reasonable assumption, Miriam,’ I said quietly. ‘Kawahara had him in a lock. Vote down Resolution 653 or face exposure as a murderer. Killing himself before the needlecast went through to Psychasec was the only way out of it. If he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about the suicide verdict, he might have got away with it.’

‘Yes. If you hadn’t come.’

I made a gesture that felt unfairly defensive. ‘It wasn’t my idea.’

‘And what about guilt?’ she said into the quiet. ‘Did you stop to consider that? Did you stop to think how Laurens must have felt when he realised what he’d done, when they told him that girl Rentang was a Catholic, a girl who could never have her life back, even if Resolution 653 did force her back into temporary existence to testify against him? Don’t you think when he put the gun against his own throat and pulled the trigger, that he was punishing himself for what he’d done? Did you ever consider that maybe he was not trying to get away with it, as you put it?’

I thought about Bancroft, turning the idea over in my mind, and it wasn’t entirely difficult to say what Miriam Bancroft wanted to hear.

‘It’s a possibility,’ I said.

She choked a laugh. ‘It’s more than a possibility, Mr Kovacs. You forget, I was here that night. I watched him from the stairs when he came in. I saw his face. I saw the pain on his face. He paid for what he’d done. He judged and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who did not commit that crime, is living with the guilt again. Are you satisfied, Mr Kovacs?’

The bitter echoes of her voice were leached out of the room by the martyrweed. The silence thickened.

‘Why’d you do it?’ I asked, when she showed no sign of speaking again. ‘Why did Marla Rentang have to pay for your husband’s infidelities?’

She looked at me as if I had asked her for some major spiritual truth and shook her head helplessly.

‘It was the only way I could think of to hurt him,’ she murmured.

No different to Kawahara in the end, I thought with carefully manufactured savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a puzzle.

‘Did you know Curtis was working for Kawahara?’ I asked tonelessly.

‘I guessed. Afterwards.’ She lifted a hand. ‘But I had no way of proving it. How did you work it out?’

‘Retrospectively. He took me to the Hendrix, recommended it to me. Kadmin turned up five minutes after I went in, on Kawahara’s orders. That’s too close for a coincidence.’

‘Yes,’ she said distantly. ‘It fits.’

‘Curtis got the synamorphesterone for you?’

She nodded.

‘Through Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply as well. He was dosed to the eyes the night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka trip?’

‘No. That was Kawahara.’ Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. ‘We had an unusually candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.’

‘Yeah, Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?’

‘I am a woman of my word.’

‘Yeah? Well, as a favour to me, do it soon.’

‘And the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in this?’

I reached into my pocket and produced a matt black disc. ‘Footage of the injection,’ I said, holding it up. ‘Composite footage of Sheryl Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your husband didn’t kill Marla Rentang chemically unassisted, but they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.’

‘How did you know?’ She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice small and distant. ‘How did you get to Bostock?’

‘Intuition, mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?’

She nodded and cleared her throat. ‘I thought you were playing with me. I thought you’d told him.’

‘No.’ I felt a faint stab of anger. ‘Kawahara was still holding my friend in virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.’

She looked sideways at me, then looked away. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said quietly.

‘Yeah, well.’ I shrugged. ‘The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically, or through some kind of virtual programme. I’ve seen it done before.’

‘Yes. I’m sure you have.’ She sounded tired now, drifting away. ‘So why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?’

‘I’m not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl Bostock.’

‘How very astute.’ She turned to look at me. ‘And what now, Mr Kovacs? More justice? More crucifixion of the Meths?’

I tossed the disc onto the table.

‘I had the Hendrix go in and erase the injection footage from PsychaSec’s files. Like I said, they’ll probably assume your husband was dosed aboard Head in the Clouds. The expedient solution. Oh, and we erased the Hendrix’s memory of your visit to my room too, just in case someone wanted to make something of what you said about buying me off. One way and another, I’d say you owe the Hendrix a couple of big favours. It said a few guests every now and then would do. Shouldn’t cost much, relatively speaking. I sort of promised on your behalf.’

I didn’t tell her about Ortega’s sight of the bedroom scene, or how long it had taken to talk the policewoman round. I still wasn’t sure why she’d agreed myself. Instead I watched the wonder on Miriam Bancroft’s face for the full half minute it took her to reach out and close her hand around the disc. She looked up at me over her clenched fingers as she took it.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said morosely. ‘Who knows, maybe you and Laurens deserve each other. Maybe you deserve to go on loving a faithless sexual maladjust who can’t deal with respect and appetite in the same relationship. Maybe he deserves to go on not knowing whether he murdered Rentang unprovoked or not. Maybe you’re just like Reileen, both of you. Maybe all you Meths deserve is each other. All I know is, the rest of us don’t deserve you.’

I got up to go.

‘Thanks for the drink.’

I got as far as the door -

‘Takeshi.’

- and turned back, unwillingly, to face her.

‘That isn’t it,’ she said with certainty. ‘Maybe you believe all those things, but that isn’t it. Is it?’

I shook my head. ‘No, that isn’t it,’ I agreed.

‘Then why?’

‘Like I said, I don’t know why.’ I stared at her, wondering if I was glad I couldn’t remember or not. My voice softened. ‘But he asked me to do it, if I won. It was part of the deal. He didn’t tell me why.’

I left her sitting alone amidst the martyrweed.

EPILOGUE

The tide was out at Ember, leaving a wet expanse of sand that stretched almost to the listing wreck of the Free Trade Enforcer. The rocks that the carrier had gashed herself on were exposed, gathered in shallow water at the bow like a fossilised outpouring of the ship’s guts. Seabirds were perched there, screaming shrilly at each other. A thin wind came in across the sand and made minute ripples in the puddles left by our footprints. Up on the promenade, Anchana Salomao’s face had been taken down, intensifying the bleak emptiness of the street.

‘I thought you’d have gone,’ said Irene Elliott beside me.

‘It’s in the pipe. Harlan’s World are dragging out the needlecast authorisation. They really don’t want me back.’

‘And no one wants you here.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s not a new situation for me.’

We walked on in silence for a while. It was a peculiar feeling, talking to Irene Elliott in her own body. In the days leading up to the Head in the Clouds gig, I’d become accustomed to looking down to her face, but this big-boned blonde sleeve was almost as tall as me, and there was an aura of gaunt competence about her that had only come through faintly in her mannerisms in the other body.

‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she said at length. ‘Security consulting for Mainline d.h.f. You heard of them?’

I shook my head.

‘Quite high profile on the East Coast. They must have their headhunters on the inquiry board or something. Soon as the UN cleared me, they were knocking on the door. Exploding offer, five grand if I signed there and then.’

‘Yeah, standard practice. Congratulations. You moving east, or are they going to wire the job through to you here?’

‘Probably do it here, at least for a while. We’ve got Elizabeth in a virtual condo down in Bay City, and it’s a lot cheaper to wire in locally. The start-up cost us most of that five grand, and we figure it’ll be a few years before we can afford to re-sleeve her.’ She turned a shy smile towards me. ‘We spend most of our time there at the moment. That’s where Victor went today.’

‘You don’t need to make excuses for him,’ I said gently. ‘I didn’t figure he’d want to talk to me anyway.’

She looked away. ‘It’s, you know, he was always so proud and—’

‘Forget it. Someone walked all over my feelings the way I did over his, I wouldn’t feel like talking to them either.’ I stopped and reached in my pocket. ‘Reminds me. I brought something for you.’

She looked down at the anonymous grey credit chip in my hand.

‘What’s this?’

‘About eighty thousand,’ I said. ‘I figure with that you can afford something custom-grown for Elizabeth. If she chooses quick, you could have her sleeved before the end of the year.’

‘What?’ She stared at me with a smile slipping off and on her face, like someone who has been told a joke she’s not sure she understands. ‘You’re giving us—Why? Why are you doing this?’

This time I had an answer. I’d been thinking about it all the way up from Bay City that morning. I took Irene Elliott’s hand and pressed the chip into it.

‘Because I want there to be something clean at the end of all this,’ I said quietly. ‘Something I can feel good about.’

For a moment she went on staring at me. Then she closed the small gap between us and flung her arms around me with a cry that sent the nearest gulls wheeling up off the sand in alarm. I felt a trickle of tears smeared onto the side of my face, but she was laughing at the same time. I folded my arms round her in return and held her.

And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea.

You take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere. And that must sometimes be enough.

It took them another eleven days to authorise the needlecast returning me to Harlan’s World, most of which I spent hanging around the Hendrix watching the news and feeling oddly guilty about my impending checkout. There were very few actual facts publicly available about the demise of Reileen Kawahara, so the resulting coverage was lurid, sensational and largely inaccurate. The UN Special Inquiry remained veiled in secrecy, and when the rumours about the forthcoming adoption of Resolution 653 finally broke there was little to connect them to what had gone before. Bancroft’s name never appeared, and nor did mine.

I never spoke to Bancroft again. The needlecast authorisation and re-sleeving bond for Harlan’s World were delivered to me by Oumou Prescott who, though she was pleasant enough and assured me that the terms of my contract would be honoured to the letter, also conveyed a smoothly menacing message that I was not to attempt any further communication with any member of the Bancroft family ever again. The reason cited by Prescott was my deceit over the Jack It Up story, the breach of my much-vaunted word, but I knew better. I’d seen it in Bancroft’s face across the inquiry chamber when the facts about Miriam’s whereabouts and activities during the assault on Head in the Clouds came out. Despite all his urbane Meth bullshit, the old bastard was stabbed through with jealousy. I wondered what he would have done if he’d had to sit through the deleted Hendrix bedroom files.

Ortega rode with me to Bay City Central the day of the needlecast, the same day that Mary Lou Hinchley was downloaded into a witness stand synthetic for the opening hearing on Head in the Clouds. There were chanting crowds on the steps up to the entrance hall, faced off against a line of grim-looking black-uniformed UN Public Order police. The same crude holographic placards that I remembered from my arrival on Earth bobbed about over our heads as we forced our way through the press. The sky above was an ominous grey.

‘Fucking clowns,’ growled Ortega, elbowing the last of the demonstrators out of her way. ‘If they provoke the Pubs, they’ll be sorry. I’ve seen these boys in action before and it isn’t pretty.’

I ducked around a shaven-headed young man who was punching violently at the sky with one fist and holding one of the placard generators with the other. His voice was hoarse and he appeared to be working himself into a frenzied trance. I joined Ortega at the upper fringe of the crowd, a little out of breath.

‘There isn’t enough organisation here to be a real threat,’ I said, raising my voice to compete with the crowd. ‘They’re just making a noise.’

‘Yeah, well that never stopped the Pubs before. They’re likely to break a few skulls just on general principles. What a fucking mess.’

‘Price of progress, Kristin. You wanted Resolution 653.’ I gestured at the sea of angry faces below. ‘Now you’ve got it.’

One of the masked and padded men above us broke ranks and came down the steps, riot prod fractionally lifted at his side. His jacket bore a sergeant’s crimson slash at the shoulder. Ortega flipped her badge at him and after a brief, shouted conversation, we were allowed up. The line parted for us and then the double doors into the hall beyond. It was hard to tell which was the most smoothly mechanical, the doors or the black-clad faceless figures that stood guard over them.

Inside, it was quiet and gloomy with the storm light coming through the roof panels. I looked around at the deserted benches and sighed. Whatever world it is, whatever you’ve done there for better or worse, you always leave the same way.

Alone.

‘You need a minute?’

I shook my head. ‘Need a lifetime, Kristin. Maybe then some.’

‘Stay out of trouble, maybe you’ll get it.’ There was an attempt at humour floating in her voice, rather like a corpse in a swimming pool, and she must have realised how it sounded because the sentence was bitten off. An awkwardness was growing between us, something that had started as soon as they re-sleeved me in Ryker’s body for the real-time committee hearings. During the inquiry we’d been kept too busy to see much of each other and when the proceedings finally closed and we all went home, the pattern had endured. There’d been a few gusty if only superficially satisfying couplings, but even these had stopped once it became clear that Ryker would be cleared and released. Whatever shared warmth we’d been gathered in to was out of control now, unsafe, like the flames from a smashed storm lantern, and trying to hold onto it was only getting us both painfully scorched.

I turned and gave her a faint smile. ‘Stay out of trouble, huh? That what you told Trepp?’

It was an unkind blow, and I knew it. Against all the odds, it seemed Kawahara had missed Trepp with everything but the edge of the stun beam. The shard gun, I remembered when they told me, had been dialled down to minimum dispersal just before I went in to face Kawahara. Sheer luck I’d left it that way. By the time the rapidly summoned UN forensics team arrived on Head in the Clouds to take evidence under Ortega’s direction, Trepp had vanished, as had my grav harness from the atmosphere sampling turret where I’d come aboard. I didn’t know whether Ortega and Bautista had seen fit to let the mercenary go in view of the testimony she could give concerning the Panama Rose, or if Trepp had simply staggered off stage before the police got there. Ortega had volunteered no information and there wasn’t enough left of our previous intimacy for me to ask her outright. This was the first time we’d discussed it openly.

Ortega scowled at me. ‘You asking me to equate the two of you?’

‘Not asking you to do anything, Kristin.’ I shrugged. ‘But for what it’s worth, I don’t see a lot of ground between her and me.’

‘Go on thinking like that, nothing’ll ever change for you.’

‘Kristin, nothing ever does change.’ I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. ‘You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll always have people like Kawahara and the Bancrofts to push their buttons and cash in on the program. People like you to make sure the game runs smoothly and the rules don’t get broken too often. And when the Meths want to break the rules themselves, they’ll send people like Trepp and me to do it. That’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago and from what I read in the history books, it’s never been any different. Better get used to it.’

She looked at me levelly for a moment, then nodded as if coming to an internal decision. ‘You always meant to kill Kawahara, didn’t you? This confession bullshit was just to get me along for the ride.’

It was a question I’d asked myself a lot, and I still didn’t have a clear answer. I shrugged again.

‘She deserved to die, Kristin. To really die. That’s all I know for certain.’

Over my head, a faint pattering sounded from the roof panels. I tipped my head back and saw transparent explosions on the glass. It was starting to rain.

‘Got to go,’ I said quietly. ‘Next time you see this face, it won’t be me wearing it, so if there’s anything you want to say . . .’

Ortega’s face flinched almost imperceptibly as I said it. I cursed myself for the awkwardness and tried to take her hand.

‘Look, if it makes it any easier, no one knows. Bautista probably suspects we got it together, but no one really knows.’

‘I know,’ she said sharply, not giving me her hand. ‘I remember.’

I sighed. ‘Yeah, so do I. It’s worth remembering, Kristin. But don’t let it fuck up the rest of your life. Go get Ryker back, and get on to the next screen. That’s what counts. Oh yeah.’ I reached into my coat and extracted a crumpled cigarette packet. ‘And you can have these back. I don’t need them any more, and nor does he, so don’t start him off again. You owe me that much, at least. Just make sure he stays quit.’

She blinked and kissed me abruptly, somewhere between mouth and cheek. It was an inaccuracy I didn’t try to correct either way. I turned away before I could see if there were going to be any tears and started for the doors at the far end of the hall. I looked back once, as I was mounting the steps. Ortega was still standing there, arms wrapped around herself, watching me leave. In the stormlight, it was too far away to see her face clearly.

For a moment something ached in me, something so deep-rooted that I knew to tear it out would be to undo the essence of what held me together. The feeling rose and splashed like the rain behind my eyes, swelling as the drumming on the roof panels grew and the glass ran with water.

Then I had it locked down.

I turned back to the next step, found a chuckle somewhere in my chest and coughed it out. The chuckle fired up and became a laugh of sorts.

Get to the next screen.

The doors were waiting at the top, the needlecast beyond.

Still trying to laugh, I went through.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There is a vast distance between deciding to write a first novel and actually seeing it published, and the journey across this distance can be emotionally brutal. It comes with loneliness attached, but at the same time requires a massive faith in what you’re doing that is hard to sustain alone. I was only able to complete this journey thanks to a number of people along the way, who lent me their faith when my own was running very low. Since the technology imagined in Altered Carbon doesn’t exist yet, I’d better get on and thank these travelling companions while I can, because without their support, I’m pretty certain Altered Carbon itself would not exist either.

In order of appearance, then: Thanks to Margaret and John Morgan for putting together the original organic material, to Caroline (Dit-Dah) Morgan for enthusiasm from before she could speak, to Gavin Burgess for friendship when often neither of us were in any condition to speak, to Alan Young for depths of unconditional commitment there isn’t any way to speak, and to Virginia Cottinelli for giving me her twenties when I’d almost used mine up. Then, the light at the end of a very long tunnel, thanks to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for considering drafts of Altered Carbon not once, but twice, and to Simon Spanton at Gollancz for being the man to finally make it happen.

May the road always rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back

Broken Angels

RICHARD MORGAN

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE - Injured Parties

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

PART TWO - Commercial Considerations

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PART THREE - Disruptive Elements

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

PART FOUR - Unexplained Phenomena

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

PART FIVE - Divided Loyalties

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

This one’s for Virginia Cottinelli -
compañera

afileres, camas, sacapuntas

PART ONE

Injured Parties

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off ?

Quellcrist Falconer Campaign Diaries

CHAPTER ONE

I first met Jan Schneider in a Protectorate orbital hospital, three hundred kilometres above the ragged clouds of Sanction IV and in a lot of pain. Technically there wasn’t supposed to be a Protectorate presence anywhere in the Sanction system - what was left of planetary government was insisting loudly from its bunkers that this was an internal matter, and local corporate interests had tacitly agreed to sign along that particular dotted line for the time being.

Accordingly, the Protectorate vessels that had been hanging around the system since Joshua Kemp raised his revolutionary standard in Indigo City had had their recognition codes altered, in effect being bought out on long-term lease by various of the corporations involved, and then reloaned to the embattled government as part of the - tax deductible - local development fund. Those that were not pulled out of the sky by Kemp’s unexpectedly efficient second-hand marauder bombs would be sold back to the Protectorate, lease unexpired, and any net losses once again written off to tax. Clean hands all round. In the meantime, any senior personnel injured fighting against Kemp’s forces got shuttled out of harm’s way, and this had been my major consideration when choosing sides. It had the look of a messy war.

The shuttle offloaded us directly onto the hospital’s hangar deck, using a device not unlike a massive ammunition feed belt to dump the dozens of capsule stretchers with what felt like unceremonious haste. I could hear the shrill whine of the ship’s engines still dying away as we rattled and clanked our way out over the wing and down onto the deck, and when they cracked open my capsule the air in the hangar burnt my lungs with the chill of recently evacuated hard space. An instant layer of ice crystals formed on everything, including my face.

‘You!’ It was a woman’s voice, harsh with stress. ‘Are you in pain?’

I blinked some of the ice out of my eyes and looked down at my blood-caked battledress.

‘Take a wild guess,’ I croaked.

‘Medic! Endorphin boost and GP anti-viral here.’ She bent over me again and I felt gloved fingers touch my head at the same time as the cold stab of the hypospray into my neck. The pain ebbed drastically. ‘Are you from the Evenfall front?’

‘No,’ I managed weakly. ‘Northern Rim assault. Why, what happened at Evenfall?’

‘Some fucking terminal buttonhead just called in a tactical nuclear strike.’ There was a cold rage chained in the doctor’s voice. Her hands moved down my body, assessing damage. ‘No radiation trauma, then. What about chemicals?’

I tilted my head fractionally at my lapel. ‘Exposure meter. Should tell you. That.’

‘It’s gone,’ she snapped. ‘Along with most of that shoulder.’

‘Oh.’ I mustered words. ‘Think I’m clean. Can’t you do a cell scan?’

‘Not here, no. The cellular level scanners are built into the ward decks. Maybe when we can clear some space for you all up there, we’ll get round to it.’ The hands left me. ‘Where’s your bar code?’

‘Left temple.’

Someone wiped blood away from the designated area and I vaguely felt the sweep of the laser scan across my face. A machine chirped approval, and I was left alone. Processed.

For a while I just lay there, content to let the endorphin booster relieve me of both pain and consciousness, all with the suave alacrity of a butler taking a hat and coat. A small part of me was wondering whether the body I was wearing was going to be salvageable, or if I’d have to be re-sleeved. I knew that Carrera’s Wedge maintained a handful of small clone banks for its so-called indispensable staff, and as one of only five ex-Envoys soldiering for Carrera, I definitely numbered among that particular elite. Unfortunately, indispensability is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gets you elite medical treatment, up to and including total body replacement. On the downside, the only purpose of said treatment is to throw you back into the fray at the earliest possible opportunity. A plankton-standard grunt whose body was damaged beyond repair would just get his cortical stack excised from its snug little housing at the top of the spinal column then slung into a storage canister, where it would probably stay until the whole war was over. Not an ideal exit, and despite the Wedge’s reputation for looking after their own there was no actual guarantee of re-sleeving, but at times in the screaming chaos of the last few months that step into stored oblivion had seemed almost infinitely desirable.

‘Colonel. Hey, colonel.’

I wasn’t sure if the Envoy conditioning was keeping me awake, or if the voice at my side had nagged me back to consciousness again. I rolled my head sluggishly to see who was speaking.

It seemed we were still in the hangar. Lying on the stretcher beside me was a muscular-looking young man with a shock of wiry black hair and a shrewd intelligence in his features that even the dazed expression of the endorphin hit could not mask. He was wearing a Wedge battledress like mine, but it didn’t fit him very well and the holes in it didn’t seem to correspond with the holes in him. At his left temple, where the bar code should have been, there was a convenient blaster burn.

‘You talking to me?’

‘Yes sir.’ He propped himself up on one elbow. They must have dosed him with a lot less than me. ‘Looks like we’ve really got Kemp on the run down there, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s an interesting point of view.’ Visions of 391 platoon being cut to shreds around me cascaded briefly through my head. ‘Where do you think he’s going to run to? Bearing in mind this is his planet, I mean.’

‘Uh, I thought—’

‘I wouldn’t advise that, soldier. Didn’t you read your terms of enlistment? Now shut up and save your breath. You’re going to need it.’

‘Uh, yes sir.’ He was gaping a little, and from the sound of heads turned on nearby stretchers he wasn’t the only one surprised to hear a Carrera’s Wedge officer talking this way. Sanction IV, in common with most wars, had stirred up some heavy-duty feelings.

‘And another thing.’

‘Colonel?’

‘This is a lieutenant’s uniform. And Wedge command has no rank of colonel. Try to remember that.’

Then a freak wave of pain swept in from some mutilated part of my body, dodged through the grasp of the endorphin bouncers posted at the door of my brain and started hysterically shrilling its damage report to anyone who’d listen. The smile I had pinned to my face melted away the way the cityscape must have done at Evenfall, and I abruptly lost interest in anything except screaming.

Water was lapping gently somewhere just below me when I next woke up, and gentle sunlight warmed my face and arms. Someone must have removed the shrapnel-shredded remains of my combat jacket and left me with the sleeveless Wedge T-shirt. I moved one hand and my fingertips brushed age-smoothed wooden boards, also warm. The sunlight made dancing patterns on the insides of my eyelids.

There was no pain.

I sat up, feeling better than I had in months. I was stretched out on a small, simply-made jetty that extended a dozen metres or so out into what appeared to be a fjord or sea loch. Low, rounded mountains bounded the water on either side and fluffy white clouds scudded unconcernedly overhead. Further out in the loch a family of seals poked their heads above the water and regarded me gravely.

My body was the same Afro-Caribbean combat sleeve I’d been wearing on the Northern rim assault, undamaged and unscarred.

So.

Footsteps scraped on the boards behind me. I jerked my head sideways, hands lifting reflexively into an embryonic guard. Way behind the reflex came the confirming thought that in the real world no one could have got that close without my sleeve’s proximity sense kicking in.

‘Takeshi Kovacs,’ said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic ‘ch’ at the end of the name correct. ‘Welcome to the recuperation stack.’

‘Very nice.’ I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. ‘Am I still aboard the hospital?’

The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. ‘Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.’

I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. ‘And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?’

‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘How did I guess?’

‘Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—’

‘Skip it. I was being rhetorical.’ I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

‘What ratio are you running all this on?’

‘Real time equivalence,’ said the woman promptly. ‘Though I can speed it up if you prefer.’

The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was going to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.

‘There is accommodation,’ said the woman, pointing, ‘for your use. Please request modifications if you would like them.’

I followed the line of her arm to where a glass and wood two-storey structure stood beneath gull-winged eaves on the edge of the long shingle beach.

‘Looks fine.’ Vague tendrils of sexual interest squirmed around in me. ‘Are you supposed to be my interpersonal ideal?’

The woman shook her head again. ‘I am an intra-format service construct for Wedge One Systems Overview, based physically on Lieutenant Colonel Lucia Mataran of Protectorate High Command. ’

‘With that hair? You’re kidding me.’

‘I have latitudes of discretion. Do you wish me to generate an interpersonal ideal for you?’

Like the offer of a high-ratio format, it was tempting. But after six weeks in the company of the Wedge’s boisterous do-or-die commandos, what I wanted more than anything was to be alone for a while.

‘I’ll think about it. Is there anything else?’

‘You have a recorded briefing from Isaac Carrera. Do you wish it stored at the house?’

‘No. Play it here. I’ll call you if I need anything else.’

‘As you wish.’ The construct inclined her head, and snapped out of existence. In her place, a male figure in the Wedge’s black dress uniform shaded in. Close-cropped black hair seasoned with grey, a lined patrician face whose dark eyes and weathered features were somehow both hard and understanding, and beneath the uniform the body of an officer whose seniority had not removed him from the battlefield. Isaac Carrera, decorated ex-Vacuum Command captain and subsequently founder of the most feared mercenary force in the Protectorate. An exemplary soldier, commander, and tactician. Occasionally, when he had no other choice, a competent politician.

‘Hello, Lieutenant Kovacs. Sorry this is only a recording, but Evenfall has left us in a bad situation and there wasn’t time to set up a link. The medical report says your sleeve can be repaired in about ten days, so we’re not going to go for a clone-bank option here. I want you back on the Northern Rim as soon as possible, but the truth is, we’ve been fought to a standstill there for the moment and they can live without you for a couple of weeks. There’s a status update appended to this recording, including the losses sustained in the last assault. I’d like you to look it over while you’re in virtual, set that famous Envoy intuition of yours to work. God knows, we need some fresh ideas up there. In a general context, acquisition of the Rim territories will provide one of the nine major objectives necessary to bring this conflict . . .’

I was already in motion, walking the length of the jetty and then up the sloping shore towards the nearest hills. The sky beyond was tumbled cloud but not dark enough for there to be a storm in the offing. It looked as if there would be a great view of the whole loch if I climbed high enough.

Behind me, Carrera’s voice faded on the wind as I left the projection on the jetty, mouthing its words to the empty air and maybe the seals, always assuming they had nothing better to do than listen to it.

CHAPTER TWO

In the end, they kept me under for a week.

I didn’t miss much. Below me, the clouds roiled and tore across the face of Sanction IV’s northern hemisphere, pouring rain on the men and women killing each other beneath. The construct visited the house regularly and kept me abreast of the more interesting details. Kemp’s offworld allies tried and failed to break the Protectorate blockade, at the cost of a brace of IP transports. A flight of smarter-than-average marauder bombs got through from somewhere unspecified and vaporised a Protectorate dreadnought. Government forces in the tropics held their positions while in the north-east the Wedge and other mercenary units lost ground to Kemp’s elite presidential guard. Evenfall continued to smoulder.

Like I said, I didn’t miss much.

When I awoke in the re-sleeving chamber, I was suffused in a head-to-foot glow of well-being. Mostly, that was chemical; military hospitals shoot their convalescent sleeves full of feelgood stuff just before download. It’s their equivalent of a welcome-home party, and it makes you feel like you could win this motherfucking war singlehanded if they’d only let you up and at the bad guys. Useful effect, obviously. But what I also had, swimming alongside this patriot’s cocktail, was the simple pleasure of being intact and installed with a full set of functioning limbs and organs.

Until I talked to the doctor, that is.

‘We pulled you out early,’ she told me, the rage she’d exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. ‘On orders from Wedge command. It seems there isn’t time for you to recover from your wounds fully.’

‘I feel fine.’

‘Of course you do. You’re dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you’re going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.’

I blinked. ‘I didn’t know they were spraying that stuff.’

‘No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.’ She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. ‘We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you’d probably make a full recovery. As it is . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital’s axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them, I knew.

‘Hey, lieutenant!’

Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

‘You made it out, lieutenant! Way to go!’

He turned about in the crowd.

‘Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.’

Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally-mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fibre. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

‘Lieutenant. We thought—’

‘Lieutenant Kovacs!’

Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

‘Good to see you, lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The 391 platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.’

Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

‘Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?’ said Munharto, gesturing flipper-like with his one remaining limb. ‘Seen the milflash yesterday.’

Kwok’s microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

‘You taking the new 391, sir?’

‘I don’t—’

‘Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.’

I stayed off the axial deck after that.

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

‘Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.’

It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

‘Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.’ He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. ‘I really appreciate you not ah, not—’

‘Forget it. I had.’

‘Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.’ - I stirred impatiently - ‘Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—’

‘Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.’ I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. ‘All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?’

He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘Exactly what?’

Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.

‘Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.’

‘I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.’

He shrugged. ‘Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?’

I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. ‘Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—’

‘Politics.’ Schneider waved a hand dismissively. ‘This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of their annual profits to own.’

I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical attention that - at a pro-government estimate - half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.

I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.

‘Alright.’

‘You’re in?’

‘I’m listening,’ I said mildly. ‘Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.’

Schneider sucked in his cheeks. ‘I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, lieutenant. I need—’

‘You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?’

There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.

‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.’

‘Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.’

I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.

But if my Envoy past was scaring Schneider, it didn’t show. He hunched forward again, shrewd face intense with thought.

‘The Es, huh? When did you serve?’

‘A while ago. Why?’

‘You at Innenin?’

His cigarette end glowed at me. For a single moment it was as if I was falling into it. The red light smeared into traceries of laser fire, etching ruined walls and the mud underfoot as Jimmy de Soto wrestled against my grip and died screaming from his wounds, and the Innenin beachhead fell apart around us.

I closed my eyes briefly.

‘Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?’

Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.

‘Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?’

Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.

It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.

This success, plus the scattered ruins and artefacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up, designed by the UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment. A few scientists entertain vaguely hopeful theories that say Mars was in fact only a remote outpost, a colony cut off from the mother culture, and that the hub of the civilisation is still out there somewhere. My own personal favourite is that the Martians moved to Earth and became dolphins in order to shrug off the strictures of technological civilisation.

In the end it comes down to the same thing. They’re gone, and we’re just picking up the pieces.

Schneider grinned. ‘You think I’m nuts, don’t you? Living something out of a kid’s holo?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Yeah, well just hear me out.’ He was smoking in short, fast drags that let the smoke dribble out of his mouth as he talked. ‘See, what everyone assumes is that the Martians were like us, not like us physically, I mean we assume their civilisation had the same cultural bases as ours.’

Cultural bases? This didn’t sound like Schneider talking. This was something he’d been told. My interest sharpened fractionally.

‘That means, we map out a world like this one, everyone creams themselves when we find centres of habitation. Cities, they figure. We’re nearly two light years out from the main Latimer system, that’s two habitable biospheres and three that need a bit of work, all of them with at least a handful of ruins, but as soon as the probes get here and register what look like cities, everyone drops what they’re doing and comes rushing across.’

‘I’d say rushing was an exaggeration.’

At sub-light speeds, it would have taken even the most souped-up colony barge the best part of three years to cross the gap from Latimer’s binary suns to this unimaginatively named baby brother of a star. Nothing happens fast in interstellar space.

‘Yeah? You know how long it took? From receiving the probe data via hypercast to inaugurating the Sanction government?’

I nodded. As a local military adviser it was my duty to know such facts. The interested corporates had pushed the Protectorate Charter paperwork through in a matter of weeks. But that was nearly a century ago, and didn’t appear to have much bearing on what Schneider had to tell me now. I gestured at him to get on with it.

‘So then,’ he said, leaning forward and holding up his hands as if to conduct music, ‘you get the archaeologues. Same deal as anywhere else; claims staked on a first come, first served basis with the government acting as broker between the finders and the corporate buyers.’

‘For a percentage.’

‘Yeah, for a percentage. Plus the right to expropriate quote under suitable compensation any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests etcetera etcetera, unquote. The point is, any decent archaeologue who wants to make a killing is going to head for the centres of habitation, and that’s what they all did.’

‘How do you know all this, Schneider? You’re not an archaeologist. ’

He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake’s scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent’s teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot’s Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.

I shrugged. ‘Nice work. And?’

‘I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but—’

‘Scratchers?’

Schneider blinked. ‘Yeah. What about it?’

‘This isn’t my planet,’ I said patiently, ‘I’m just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?’

‘Oh. You know, kids.’ He gestured, perplexed. ‘Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers.’

‘Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn’t?’

‘What?’ he blinked again.

‘Who wasn’t a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?’

Schneider looked resentful. He didn’t like me breaking up his flow.

‘They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don’t buy the conventional wisdom.’

‘Or turn up too late to get a better stake.’

‘Yeah.’ For some reason he didn’t like that crack either. ‘Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something.’

‘Found what?’

‘A Martian starship.’ Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Intact.’

‘Crap.’

‘Yes, we did.’

I sighed again. ‘You’re asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn’t got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?’

Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

‘I didn’t say we dug it up, I said we found it. Kovacs, it’s the size of a fucking asteroid and it’s out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system.’

‘A gate?’ Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. ‘You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?’

‘Kovacs, it’s a gate.’ Schneider spoke as if to a small child. ‘We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It’s like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through.’

‘Into the ship?’ Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not into the ship, no. The gate’s focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit.’

‘Or a shuttle.’ I nodded at the tattoo on his arm. ‘What were you flying?’

He grimaced. ‘Piece of shit Mowai suborbital. Size of a fucking house. It wouldn’t fit through the portal space.’

‘What?’ I coughed up an unexpected laugh that hurt my chest. ‘Wouldn’t fit?’

‘Yeah, you go ahead and laugh,’ said Schneider morosely. ‘Wasn’t for that particular little logistic, I wouldn’t be in this fucking war now. I’d be wearing out a custom-built sleeve in Latimer City. Clones on ice, remote storage, fucking immortal, man. The whole programme.’

‘No one had a spacesuit?’

‘What for?’ Schneider spread his hands. ‘It was a suborbital. No one was expecting to go offworld. Fact, no one was allowed offworld ’cept via the IP ports at Landfall. Everything you found on site had to be checked through Export Quarantine. And that was something else no one was real keen to do. Remember that expropriation clause?’

‘Yeah. Any findings judged to be of vital importance to Protectorate interests. You didn’t fancy the suitable compensation? Or you didn’t figure it’d be suitable?’

‘Come on, Kovacs. What’s suitable compensation for finding something like this?’

I shrugged. ‘Depends. In the private sector it depends very much on who you talk to. A bullet through the stack, maybe.’

Schneider skinned me a tight grin. ‘You don’t think we could have handled selling to the corporates?’

‘I think you would have handled it very badly. Whether you lived or not would have depended on who you were dealing with.’

‘So who would you have gone to?’

I shook out a fresh cigarette, letting the question hang a little before I said anything. ‘That’s not under discussion here, Schneider. My rates as a consultant are a little out of your reach. As a partner, on the other hand, well.’ I offered him a small smile of my own. ‘I’m still listening. What happened next?’

Schneider’s laugh was a bitter explosion, loud enough to hook even the holoporn audience momentarily away from the lurid airbrushed bodies that twisted in full-scale 3-D reproduction at the other end of the ward.

‘What happened?’ He brought his voice down again, and waited until the flesh fans’ gazes were snagged back to the performance. ‘What happened? This war is what fucking happened.’

CHAPTER THREE

Somewhere, a baby was crying.

For a long moment I hung by my hands from the hatch coaming and let the equatorial climate come aboard. I’d been discharged from the hospital as fit for duty, but my lungs still weren’t functioning as well as I would have liked, and the soggy air made for hard breathing.

‘Hot here.’

Schneider had shut down the shuttle’s drive and was crowding my shoulder. I dropped from the hatch to let him out and shaded my eyes against the glare of the sun. From the air, the internment camp had looked as innocuous as most scheme-built housing, but close up the uniform tidiness went down under assault from reality. The hastily-blown bubblefabs were cracking in the heat and liquid refuse ran in the alleys between them. A stench of burning polymer wafted to me on the scant breeze; the shuttle’s landing field had blown sheets of waste paper and plastic up against the nearest stretch of perimeter fence, and now the power was frying them to fragments. Beyond the fence, robot sentry systems grew from the baked earth like iron weeds. The drowsy hum of capacitors formed a constant backdrop to the human noises of the internees.

A small squad of local militia slouched up behind a sergeant who reminded me vaguely of my father on one of his better days. They saw the Wedge uniforms and pulled up short. The sergeant gave me a grudging salute.

‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said briskly. ‘This is Corporal Schneider. We’re here to appropriate Tanya Wardani, one of your internees, for interrogation.’

The sergeant frowned. ‘I wasn’t informed of this.’

‘I’m informing you now, sergeant.’

In situations like this, the uniform was usually enough. It was widely known on Sanction IV that the Wedge were the Protectorate’s unofficial hard men, and generally they got what they wanted. Even the other mercenary units tended to back down when it came to tussles over requisitioning. But something seemed to be sticking in this sergeant’s throat. Some dimly remembered worship of regulations, instilled on parade grounds back when it all meant something, back before the war cut loose. That, or maybe just the sight of his own countrymen and women starving in their bubblefabs.

‘I’ll have to see some authorisation.’

I snapped my fingers at Schneider and held out a hand for the hardcopy. It hadn’t been difficult to obtain. In a planet-wide conflict like this, Carrera gave his junior officers latitudes of initiative that a Protectorate divisional commander would kill for. No one had even asked me what I wanted Wardani for. No one cared. So far the toughest thing had been the shuttle; they had a use for that and IP transport was in short supply. In the end I’d had to take it at gunpoint from the regular-forces colonel in charge of a field hospital someone had told us about south-east of Suchinda. There was going to be some trouble about that eventually, but then, as Carrera himself was fond of saying, this was a war, not a popularity contest.

‘Will that be sufficient, sergeant?’

He pored over the printout, as if he was hoping the authorisation flashes would prove to be peel-off fakes. I shifted with an impatience which was not entirely feigned. The atmosphere of the camp was oppressive, and the baby’s crying ran on incessantly somewhere out of view. I wanted to be out of here.

The sergeant looked up and handed me the hardcopy. ‘You’ll have to see the commandant,’ he said woodenly. ‘These people are all under government supervision.’

I shot glances past him left and right, then looked back into his face.

‘Right.’ I let the sneer hang for a moment, and his eyes dropped away from mine. ‘Let’s go talk to the commandant then. Corporal Schneider, stay here. This won’t take long.’

The commandant’s office was in a double-storey ’fab cordoned off from the rest of the camp by more power fencing. Smaller sentry units squatted on top of the capacitor posts like early millennium gargoyles and uniformed recruits not yet out of their teens stood at the gate clutching oversize plasma rifles. Their young faces looked scraped and raw beneath the gadgetry-studded combat helmets. Why they were there at all was beyond me. Either the robot units were fake, or the camp was suffering from severe overmanning. We passed through without a word, went up a light alloy staircase that someone had epoxied carelessly to the side of the ’fab and the sergeant buzzed the door. A securicam set over the lintel dilated briefly and the door cracked open. I stepped inside, breathing the conditioning-chilled air with relief.

Most of the light in the office came from a bank of security monitors on the far wall. Adjacent to them was a moulded plastic desk dominated on one side by a cheap datastack holo and a keyboard. The rest of the surface was scattered with curling sheets of hardcopy, marker pens and other administrative debris. Abandoned coffee cups rose out of the mess like cooling towers in an industrial wasteland, and in one place light-duty cabling snaked across the desktop and down to the arm of the sideways slumped figure behind the desk.

‘Commandant?’

The view on a couple of the security monitors shifted, and in the flickering light I saw the gleam of steel along the arm.

‘What is it, sergeant?’

The voice was slurred and dull, disinterested. I advanced into the cool gloom and the man behind the desk lifted his head slightly. I made out one blue photoreceptor eye and the patchwork of prosthetic alloy running down one side of the face and neck to a bulky left shoulder that looked like spacesuit armour but wasn’t. Most of the left side was gone, replaced with articulated servo units from hip to armpit. The arm was made of lean steel hydraulic systems that ended in a black claw. The wrist and forearm section was set with a half dozen shiny silver sockets, into one of which the cabling from the table was jacked. Next to the jacked socket, a small red light pulsed languorously on and off. Current flowing.

I stood in front of the desk and saluted.

‘Lieutenant Takeshi Kovacs, Carrera’s Wedge,’ I said softly.

‘Well.’ The commandant struggled upright in his chair. ‘Perhaps you’d like more light in here, lieutenant. I like the dark, but then,’ he chuckled behind closed lips. ‘I have an eye for it. You, perhaps, have not.’

He groped across the keyboard and after a couple of attempts the main lights came up in the corners of the room. The photoreceptor seemed to dim, while beside it a bleary human eye focused on me. What remained of the face was fine featured and would have been handsome, but long exposure to the wire had robbed the small muscles of coherent electrical input and rendered the expression slack and stupid.

‘Is that better?’ The face attempted something that was more leer than smile. ‘I imagine it is; you come after all from the Outside World.’ The capitals echoed ironically. He gestured across the room at the monitor screens. ‘A world beyond these tiny eyes and anything their mean little minds can dream of. Tell me, lieutenant, are we still at war for the raped, I mean raked, archaeologically rich and raked soil of our beloved planet?’

My eyes fell to the jack and the pulsing ruby light, then went back to his face.

‘I’d like to have your full attention, commandant.’

For a long moment, he stared at me, then his head twisted down like something wholly mechanical, to look at the jacked-in cable.

‘Oh,’ he whispered. ‘This.’

Abruptly, he lurched round to face the sergeant, who was hovering just inside the door with two of the militia.

‘Get out.’

The sergeant did so with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t much wanted to be there in the first place. The uniformed extras followed, one of them gently pulling the door shut behind him. As the door latched, the commandant slumped back in his chair and his right hand went to the cable interface. A sound escaped his lips that might have been either sigh or cough, or maybe laughter. I waited until he looked up.

‘Down to a trickle, I assure you,’ he said, gesturing at the still winking light. ‘Probably couldn’t survive an outright disconnection at this stage in the proceedings. If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again, so I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.’ He made an obvious effort. ‘So what, may I ask, do Carrera’s Wedge want with me? We’ve nothing here of value, you know. Medical supplies were all exhausted months ago and even the food they send us barely makes full rations. For my men, of course; I’m referring to the fine corps of soldiers I command here. Our residents receive even less.’ Another gesture, this time turned outwards to the bank of monitors. ‘The machines, of course, do not need to eat. They are self-contained, undemanding, and have no inconvenient empathy for what they are guarding. Fine soldiers, every one. As you see, I’ve tried to turn myself into one, but the process isn’t very far along yet—’

‘I haven’t come for your supplies, commandant.’

‘Ah, then it’s a reckoning, is it? Have I overstepped some recently drawn mark in the Cartel’s scheme of things? Proved an embarrassment to the war effort, perhaps?’ The idea seemed to amuse him. ‘Are you an assassin? A Wedge enforcer?’

I shook my head.

‘I’m here for one of your internees. Tanya Wardani.’

‘Ah yes, the archaeologue.’

A slight sharpening stole through me. I said nothing, only put the hardcopy authorisation on the table in front of the commandant and waited. He picked it up clumsily and tipped his head to one side at an exaggerated angle, holding the paper aloft as if it were some kind of holotoy that needed to be viewed from below. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath.

‘Some problem, commandant?’ I asked quietly.

He lowered the arm and leant on his elbow, wagging the authorisation to and fro at me. Over the movements of the paper, his human eye looked suddenly clearer.

‘What do you want her for?’ he asked, equally softly. ‘Little Tanya the Scratcher. What’s she to the Wedge?’

I wondered, with a sudden iciness, if I was going to have to kill this man. It wouldn’t be difficult to do, I’d probably only be cheating the wire by a few months, but there was the sergeant outside the door and the militia. Bare-handed, those were long odds, and I still didn’t know what the programming parameters of the robot sentries were. I poured the ice into my voice.

‘That, commandant, has even less to do with you than it does with me. I have my orders to carry out, and now you have yours. Do you have Wardani in custody, or not?’

But he didn’t look away the way the sergeant had. Maybe it was something from the depths of the addiction that was pushing him, some clenched bitterness he had discovered whilst wired into decaying orbit around the core of himself. Or maybe it was a surviving fragment of granite from who he had been before. He wasn’t going to give.

Behind my back, preparatory, my right hand flexed and loosened.

Abruptly, his upright forearm collapsed across the desk like a dynamited tower and the hardcopy gusted free of his fingers. My hand whiplashed out and pinned the paper on the edge of the desk before it could fall. The commandant made a small dry noise in his throat.

For a moment we both looked at the hand holding the paper in silence, then the commandant sagged back in his seat.

‘Sergeant,’ he bellowed hoarsely.

The door opened.

‘Sergeant, get Wardani out of ’fab eighteen and take her to the lieutenant’s shuttle.’

The sergeant saluted and left, relief at the decision being taken out of his hands washing over his face like the effect of a drug.

‘Thank you, commandant.’ I added my own salute, collected the authorisation hardcopy from the desk and turned to leave. I was almost at the door when he spoke again.

‘Popular woman,’ he said.

I looked back. ‘What?’

‘Wardani.’ He was watching me with a glitter in his eye. ‘You’re not the first.’

‘Not the first what?’

‘Less than three months ago.’ As he spoke, he was turning up the current in his left arm and his face twitched spasmodically. ‘We had a little raid. Kempists. They beat the perimeter machines and got inside, very high tech considering the state they’re in, in these parts.’ His head tipped languidly back over the top of the seat and a long sigh eased out of him. ‘Very high tech. Considering. They came for. Her.’

I waited for him to continue, but his head only rolled sideways slightly. I hesitated. Down below in the compound, two of the militia looked curiously up at me. I crossed back to the commandant’s desk and cradled his face in both hands. The human eye showed white, pupil floating up against the upper lid like a balloon bumping the roof of a room where the party has long since burnt itself out.

‘Lieutenant?’

The call came from the stairway outside. I stared down at the drowned face a moment longer. He was breathing slackly through half-open lips, and there seemed to be the crease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. On the periphery of my vision, the ruby light winked on and off.

‘Lieutenant?’

‘Coming.’ I let the head roll free and walked out into the heat, closing the door gently behind me.

Schneider was seated on one of the forward landing pods when I got back, amusing a crowd of ragged children with conjuring tricks. A couple of uniforms watched him at a distance from the shade of the nearest bubblefab. He glanced up as I approached.

‘Problem?’

‘No. Get rid of these kids.’

Schneider raised an eyebrow at me, and finished his trick with no great hurry. As a finale, he plucked small plastic memory form toys from behind each child’s ear. They looked on in disbelieving silence while Schneider demonstrated how the little figures worked. Crush them flat and then whistle sharply and watch them work their way, amoeba-like, back to their original shape. Some corporate gene lab ought to come up with soldiers like that. The children watched open-mouthed. It was another trick in itself. Personally, something that indestructible would have given me nightmares as a child, but then, grim though my own childhood had been, it was a three-day arcade outing compared with this place.

‘You’re not doing them any favours, making them think men in uniform aren’t all bad,’ I said quietly.

Schneider cut me a curious glance and clapped his hands loudly. ‘That’s it, guys. Get out of here. Come on, show’s over.’

The children sloped off, reluctant to leave their little oasis of fun and free gifts. Schneider folded his arms and watched them go, face unreadable.

‘Where’d you get those things?’

‘Found them in the hold. Couple of aid packages for refugees. I guess the hospital we lifted this boat from didn’t have much use for them.’

‘No, they’ve already shot all the refugees down there.’ I nodded at the departing children, now chattering excitedly over their new acquisitions. ‘The camp militia’ll probably confiscate the lot once we’re gone.’

Schneider shrugged. ‘I know. But I’d already given out the chocolate and painkillers. What are you going to do?’

It was a reasonable question, with a whole host of unreasonable answers. Staring out the nearest of the camp militia, I brooded on some of the bloodier options.

‘Here she comes,’ said Schneider, pointing. I followed the gesture and saw the sergeant, two more uniforms and between them a slim figure with hands locked together before her. I narrowed my eyes against the sun and racked up the magnification on my neurachem-aided vision.

Tanya Wardani must have looked a lot better in her days as an archaeologue. The long-limbed frame would have carried more flesh, and she would have done something with her dark hair, maybe just washed it and worn it up. It was unlikely she would have had the fading bruises under her eyes either, and she might even have smiled faintly when she saw us, just a twist of the long, crooked mouth in acknowledgement.

She swayed, stumbled and had to be held up by one of her escorts. At my side, Schneider twitched forward, then stopped himself.

‘Tanya Wardani,’ said the sergeant stiffly, producing a length of white plastic tape printed end to end with bar code strips and a scanner. ‘I’ll need your ID for the release.’

I cocked a finger at the coding on my temple and waited impassively while the red light scan swept down over my face. The sergeant found the particular strip on the plastic tape that represented Wardani and turned the scanner on it. Schneider came forward and took the woman by the arm, pulling her aboard the shuttle with every appearance of brusque detachment. Wardani herself played it without a flicker of expression on her pallid face. As I was turning to follow the two of them, the sergeant called after me in a voice whose stiffness had turned suddenly brittle.

‘Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, what is it?’ Injecting a rising impatience into my tone.

‘Will she be coming back?’

I turned back in the hatchway, raising my eyebrow in the same elaborate arch that Schneider had used on me a few minutes earlier. He was way out of line, and he knew it.

‘No, sergeant,’ I said, as if to a small child. ‘She won’t be coming back. She’s being taken for interrogation. Just forget about her.’

I closed the hatch.

But as Schneider spun the shuttle upward, I peered out of the viewport and saw him still standing there, buffeted by the storm of our departure.

He didn’t even bother to shield his face from the dust.

CHAPTER FOUR

We flew west from the camp on grav effect, over a mixture of desert scrub and blots of darker vegetation where the planet’s flora had managed to get a lock on shallow-running aquifers. About twenty minutes later we picked up the coast and headed out to sea over waters that Wedge military intelligence said were infested with Kempist smart mines. Schneider kept our speed down, subsonic the whole time. Easy to track.

I spent the early part of the flight in the main cabin, ostensibly going through a current affairs datastack that the shuttle was pulling down from one of Carrera’s command satellites, but in reality watching Tanya Wardani with an Envoy-tuned eye. She sat slumped in the seat furthest from the hatch and hence closest to the right side viewports, forehead resting against the glass. Her eyes were open, but whether she was focusing on the ground below was hard to tell. I didn’t try to speak to her - I’d seen the same mask on a thousand other faces this year, and I knew she wasn’t coming out from behind it until she was ready, which might be never. Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. Lately, they’ve been calling it War Shock Syndrome, an all-encompassing term which bleakly but rather neatly puts the writing on the wall for those who would like to treat it. There may be a plethora of more and less effective psychological techniques for repair, but the ultimate aim of any medical philosophy, that of prevention rather than cure, is in this case clearly beyond the wit of humanity to implement.

To me it comes as no surprise that we’re still flailing around with Neanderthal spanners in the elegant wreckage of Martian civilisation without really having a clue how all that ancient culture used to operate. After all, you wouldn’t expect a butcher of farm livestock to understand or be able to take over from a team of neurosurgeons. There’s no telling how much irreparable damage we may have already caused to the body of knowledge and technology the Martians have unwisely left lying around for us to discover. In the end, we’re not much more than a pack of jackals, nosing through the broken bodies and wreckage of a plane crash.

‘Coming up on the coast,’ Schneider’s voice said over the intercom. ‘You want to get up here?’

I lifted my face away from the holographic data display, flattened the data motes to the base and looked across at Wardani. She had shifted her head slightly at the sound of Schneider’s voice, but the eyes that found the speaker set in the roof were still dulled with emotional shielding. It hadn’t taken me very long to extract from Schneider the previous circumstances of his relationship with this woman, but I still wasn’t sure how that would affect things now. On his own admission it had been a limited thing, abruptly terminated by the outbreak of war almost two years ago and there was no reason to suppose it could cause problems. My own worst-case scenario was that the whole starship story was an elaborate con on Schneider’s part for no other purpose than to secure the archaeologue’s release and get the two of them offworld. There had been a previous attempt to liberate Wardani, if the camp commandant was to be believed, and part of me wondered if those mysteriously well equipped commandos hadn’t been Schneider’s last set of dupes in the bid to reunite him with his partner. If that turned out to be the case, I was going to be angry.

Inside me, at the level where it really mattered, I didn’t give the idea much credence; too many details had checked out in the time since we’d left the hospital. Dates and names were correct - there had been an archaeological dig on the coast north-west of Sauberville, and Tanya Wardani was registered as site regulator. The haulage liaison was listed as Guild Pilot Ian Mendel, but it was Schneider’s face, and the hardware manifest began with the serial number and flight records of a cumbersome Mowai Ten Series suborbital. Even if Schneider had tried to get Wardani out before, it was for far more material reasons than simple affection.

And if he hadn’t, then somewhere along the line someone else had been dealt into this game.

Whatever happened, Schneider would bear watching.

I closed down the data display and got up, just as the shuttle banked seaward. Steadying myself with a hand on the overhead lockers, I looked down at the archaeologue.

‘I’d fasten your seatbelt if I were you. The next few minutes are likely to be a little rough.’

She made no response, but her hands moved in her lap. I made my way forward to the cockpit.

Schneider looked up as I entered, hands easy on the arms of the manual flight chair. He nodded at a digital display which he’d maximised near the top of the instrument projection space.

‘Depth counter’s still at less than five metres. Bottom shelves out for kilometres before we hit deep water. You sure those fuckers don’t come in this close?’

‘If they were in this close, you’d see them sticking out of the water,’ I said, taking the co-pilot’s seat. ‘Smart mine’s not much smaller than a marauder bomb. Basically an automated mini-sub. You got the set online?’

‘Sure. Just mask up. Weapon systems on the right arm.’

I slid the elasticated gunner’s eyemask down over my face and touched the activate pads at the temples. A seascape in bright primaries wrapped around my field of vision, pale blue shaded deeper grey with the landscape of the seabed beneath. Hardware came through in shades of red, depending on how much it corresponded to the parameters I’d programmed in earlier. Most of it was light pink in colour, inanimate alloy wreckage devoid of electronic activity. I let myself slide forward into the virtual representation of what the shuttle’s sensors were seeing, forced myself to stop actively looking for anything and relaxed the last mental millimetres into the Zen state.

Minesweeping was not something the Envoy Corps taught as such, but the total poise that only comes, paradoxically, with an utter lack of expectation was vital to the core training. A Protectorate Envoy, deployed as digital human freight via hyperspatial needlecast, can expect to wake up to literally anything. At the very least, you habitually find yourself in unfamiliar bodies on unfamiliar worlds where people are shooting at you. Even on a good day, no amount of briefing can prepare you for a total change of environment like that, and in the invariably unstable to lethally dangerous sets of circumstances the Envoys have been created to deal with, there just isn’t any point.

Virginia Vidaura, Corps trainer, hands in the pockets of her coveralls, looking us over with calm speculation. Day one induction.

Since it is logistically impossible to expect everything, she told us evenly, we will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

I didn’t even consciously see the first smart mine. There was a red flare in the corner of one eye, and my hands had already matched coordinates and loosed the shuttle’s hunter-killer micros. The little missiles ran green traces across the virtual seascape, plunged beneath the surface like sharp knives in flesh and pricked the squatting mine before it could either move or respond. Flash blast of detonation and the surface of the sea heaved upward like a body on an interrogation table.

Once upon a time men had to run their weapons systems all by themselves. They went up in the air in flyers not much bigger or better equipped than bathtubs with wings, and fired off whatever clumsy hardware they could squeeze into the cockpit with them. Later, they designed machines that could do the job faster and more accurately than humanly possible and for a while it was a machine’s world up there. Then the emerging biosciences began to catch up and suddenly the same speed and precision capacity was available as a human option again. Since then it’s been a race of sorts between technologies to see which can be upgraded faster, the external machines or the human factor. In that particular race, Envoy psychodynamics were a sharp surprise sprint up the inside lane.

There are war machines that are faster than me, but we weren’t lucky enough to have one aboard. The shuttle was a hospital auxiliary, and its strictly defensive weaponry ran to the micro turret in the nose and a decoy-and-evade package that I wouldn’t have trusted to fly a kite. We were going to have to do this ourselves.

‘One down. The rest of the pack won’t be far away. Kill your speed. Get us down on the deck and arm the tinsel.’

They came from the west, scuttling across the seabed like fat-bodied cylindrical spiders, drawn to the violent death of their brother. I felt the shuttle tip forward as Schneider brought us down to barely ten metres altitude and the solid thump as the tinsel bomb racks deployed. My eyes flickered across the mines. Seven of them, converging. They usually ran five to a pack so this had to be the remnants of two groups, though who’d thinned their numbers out so much was a mystery to me. From what I’d read in the reports, there’d been nothing in these waters but fishing boats since the war began. The seabed was littered with them.

I acquired the lead mine and killed it almost casually. As I watched, the first torpedoes erupted from the other six and rose through the water towards us.

‘They’re on us.’

‘Seen them,’ said Schneider laconically, and the shuttle flinched into an evasive curve. I peppered the sea with micros on autoseek.

Smart mine is a misnomer. They’re actually pretty stupid. It stands to reason, they’re built for such a narrow range of activity it isn’t advisable to programme in much intellect. They attach themselves to the seabed with a claw for launch stability, and they wait for something to pass overhead. Some can dig themselves deep enough to hide from spectroscanners, some camouflage themselves as seabed wreckage. Essentially, they’re a static weapon. On the move, they can still fight but their accuracy suffers.

Better yet, their minds have a dogmatic either/or target acquisition system that tags everything surface or airborne before it fires on it. Against air traffic it uses surface-to-air micros, against shipping the torpedoes. The torpedoes can convert to missile mode at a pinch, shedding their propulsion systems at surface level and using crude thrusters to get aloft, but they’re slow.

At nearly surface level and throttled back almost to hovering, we’d been made as a ship. The torpedoes came up for air in our shadow, found nothing and the autoseek micros destroyed them while they were still trying to shrug off their underwater drives. Meanwhile, the spread of micros I’d launched sought and destroyed two, no, wait, three of the mines. At this rate—

Malfunction.

Malfunction.

Malfunction.

The fail light pulsed in the upper left field of my vision, detail scrolling down. I had no time to read it. The fire controls were dead in my hands, jammed solid, the next two micros unarmed in their launch cradles. Fucking mothballed UN surplus flashing through my mind like a falling meteor. I slammed the emergency autorepair option. The shuttle’s rudimentary troubleshooter brain leapt down into the jammed circuits. No time. It could take whole minutes to fix. The remaining three mines launched surface to air at us.

‘Sch—’

Schneider, whatever his other failings, was a good flyer. He flung the shuttle on its tail before the syllable was out of my mouth. My head snapped back against the seat as we leapt into the sky, trailing a swarm of surface-to-air missiles.

‘I’m jammed.’

‘I know,’ he said tautly.

‘Tinsel them,’ I yelled, competing with the proximity alerts that screamed in my ears. The altitude numerals flashed over the kilometre mark.

‘On it.’

The shuttle boomed with the tinsel bombs’ launch. They detonated two seconds in our wake, sowing the sky with tiny electronic appetisers. The surface-to-air fire spent itself amongst the decoys. On the weapons board at the side of my vision, a cleared light flashed green, and as if to prove the point the launcher executed its last jammed command and launched the two waiting micros into the targetless space ahead of us. Beside me, Schneider whooped and spun the shuttle about. With the high-manoeuvre fields belatedly compensating, I felt the turn slop through my guts like choppy water and had time to hope that Tanya Wardani hadn’t eaten recently.

We hung for an instant on the wings of the shuttle’s AG fields, then Schneider killed the lift and we plunged a steep line back towards the surface of the sea. From the water, a second wave of missiles rose to meet us.

‘Tinsel!!!’

The bomb racks banged open again. Sighting on the three undamaged mines below, I emptied the shuttle’s magazines and hoped, breath held back. The micros launched clean. At the same moment, Schneider threw on the grav fields again and the little vessel shuddered from end to end. The tinsel bombs, now falling faster than the crash-reversed shuttle that had launched them, exploded fractionally ahead and below us. My virtual vision flooded with crimson sleet from the storm of decoy broadcast, and then the explosions of the surface-to-air missiles as they destroyed themselves amidst it. My own micros were away, fired through the tiny window of opportunity before the tinsel blew and locked onto the mines somewhere below.

The shuttle spiralled down behind the debris of tinsel and misled missiles. Scant moments before we hit the surface of the sea, Schneider fired one more, carefully doctored pair of tinsel bombs. They detonated just as we slipped below the waves.

‘We’re under,’ said Schneider.

On my screen, the pale blue of the sea deepened as we sank, nose down. I twisted around, searching for the mines and found only a satisfying array of wreckage. I let out the last breath I’d drawn somewhere up in the missile-strewn sky and rolled my head back in the seat.

‘That,’ I said to no one in particular, ‘was a mess.’

We touched bottom, stuck for a moment and then drifted fractionally upward again. Around us, the shrapnel from the doctored tinsel bombs settled slowly to the seabed. I studied the pink fragments with care and smiled. I’d packed the last two bombs myself - less than an hour’s work the night before we came to get Wardani, but it had taken three days reconnoitring deserted battlezones and bombed-out landing fields to gather the necessary pieces of hull casing and circuitry to fill them.

I peeled off the gunner’s mask and rubbed at my eyes.

‘How far off are we?’

Schneider did something to the instrument display. ‘About six hours, maintaining this buoyancy. If I help the current along with the gravs we could do it in half that.’

‘Yeah, and we could get blown out of the water too. I didn’t go through the last two minutes for target practice. You keep the fields banked all the way, and use the time to figure out some way to wipe the face off this bucket.’

Schneider gave me a mutinous look.

‘And what are you going to be doing all that time?’

‘Repairs,’ I said shortly, heading back for Tanya Wardani.

CHAPTER FIVE

The fire threw leaping shadows, making her face into a camou-flage mask of light and dark. It was a face that might have been handsome before the camp swallowed her, but the rigours of political internment had left it a gaunt catalogue of bones and hollows. The eyes were hooded, the cheeks sunken. Deep inside the wells of her gaze, firelight glittered on fixed pupils. Stray hair fell across her forehead like straw. One of my cigarettes slanted between her lips, unlit.

‘You don’t want to smoke that?’ I asked after a while.

It was like talking on a bad satellite link - a two-second delay before the glitter in her eyes shifted upward to focus on my face. Her voice ghosted out, rusty with disuse.

‘What?’

‘The cigarette. Site Sevens, best I could get outside Landfall.’ I handed the packet across to her and she fumbled it, turning it over a couple of times before she found the ignition patch and touched it to the end of the cigarette in her mouth. Most of the smoke escaped and was carried away on the soft breeze, but she took some down and grimaced as it bit.

‘Thanks,’ she said quietly, and held the packet in cupped hands, looking down at it as if it were a small animal she had rescued from drowning. I smoked the rest of my own cigarette in silence, gaze flickering along the treeline above the beach. It was a programmed wariness, not based on any real perception of danger, the Envoy analogue of a relaxed man beating time to music with his fingers. In the Envoys you’re aware of potential hazards in the surroundings, the way most people are aware that things will fall out of their hands if they let them go. The programming goes in at the same instinctual level. You don’t let down your guard ever, any more than a normal human being would absent-mindedly let go of a filled glass in mid-air.

‘You’ve done something to me.’

It was the same low voice she had used to thank me for the cigarette, but when I dropped my gaze from the trees to look at her, something had kindled in her eyes. She was not asking me a question. ‘I can feel it,’ she said, touching the side of her head with splayed fingers. ‘Here. It’s like. Opening.’

I nodded, feeling cautiously for the right words. On most worlds I’ve visited, going into someone’s head uninvited is a serious moral offence, and only government agencies get away with it on a regular basis. There was no reason to assume the Latimer sector, Sanction IV or Tanya Wardani would be any different. Envoy co-option techniques make rather brutal use of the deep wells of psychosexual energy that drive humans at a genetic level. Properly mined, the matrix of animal strength on tap in those places will speed up psychic healing by whole orders of magnitude. You start with light hypnosis, move into quick-fix personality engagement and thence to close bodily contact that only misses definition as sexual foreplay on a technicality. A gentle, hypnotically induced orgasm usually secures the bonding process, but at the final stage with Wardani, something had made me pull back. The whole process was uncomfortably close to a sexual assault as it was.

On the other hand, I needed Wardani in one psychic piece, and under normal circumstances that would have taken months, maybe years, to achieve. We didn’t have that kind of time.

‘It’s a technique,’ I offered tentatively ‘A healing system. I used to be an Envoy.’

She drew on her cigarette. ‘I thought the Envoys were supposed to be killing machines.’

‘That’s what the Protectorate wants you to think. Keeps the colonies scared at a gut level. The truth is a lot more complex, and ultimately it’s a lot more scary, when you think it through.’ I shrugged. ‘Most people don’t like to think things through. Too much effort. They’d rather have the edited visceral highlights.’

‘Really? And what are those?’

I felt the conversation gathering itself for flight, and leaned forward to the heat of the fire.

‘Sharya. Adoracion. The big bad high-tech Envoys, riding in on hypercast beams and decanting into state-of-the-art biotech sleeves to crush all resistance. We used to do that too, of course, but what most people don’t realise is that our five most successful deployments ever were all covert diplomatic postings, with barely any bloodshed at all. Regime engineering. We came and went, and no one even realised we’d been there.’

‘You sound proud of it.’

‘I’m not.’

She looked at me steadily. ‘Hence the “used to”?’

‘Something like that.’

‘So how does one stop being an Envoy?’ I was wrong. This wasn’t conversation. Tanya Wardani was sounding me out. ‘Did you resign? Or did they throw you out?’

I smiled faintly. ‘I’d really rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘You’d rather not talk about it?’ Her voice never rose, but it splintered into sibilant shards of rage. ‘Goddamn you, Kovacs. Who do you think you are? You come to this planet with your fucking weapons of mass destruction and your profession-of-violence airs, and you think you’re going to play the injured-child-inside with me. Fuck you and your pain. I nearly died in that camp. I watched other women and children die. I don’t fucking care what you went through. You answer me. Why aren’t you with the Envoys any more?’

The fire crackled to itself. I sought out an ember in its depths and watched it for a while. I saw the laser light again, playing against the mud and Jimmy de Soto’s ruined face. I’d been to this place in my mind countless times before, but it never got any better. Some idiot once said that time heals all wounds, but they didn’t have Envoys back when that was written down. Envoy conditioning carries with it total recall, and when they discharge you, you don’t get to give it back.

‘Have you heard of Innenin?’ I asked her.

‘Of course.’ It was unlikely she hadn’t - the Protectorate doesn’t get its nose bloodied very often, and when it happens the news travels, even across interstellar distances. ‘You were there?’

I nodded.

‘I heard everybody died in the viral strike.’

‘Not quite. Everybody in the second wave died. They deployed the virus too late to get the initial beachhead, but some of it leaked over through the communications net and that fried most of the rest of us. I was lucky. My comlink was down.’

‘You lost friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you resigned?’

I shook my head. ‘I was invalided out. Psych-profiled unfit for Envoy duties.’

‘I thought you said your comlink—’

‘The virus didn’t get me; the aftermath did.’ I spoke slowly, trying to keep a lock on the remembered bitterness. ‘There was a Court of Enquiry - you must have heard about that too.’

‘They indicted the High Command, didn’t they?’

‘Yeah, for about ten minutes. Indictment quashed. That’s roughly when I became unfit for Envoy duties. You might say I had a crisis of faith.’

‘Very touching.’ She sounded abruptly tired, the previous anger too much for her to sustain. ‘Pity it didn’t last, eh?’

‘I don’t work for the Protectorate any more, Tanya.’

Wardani gestured. ‘That uniform you’re wearing says otherwise.’

‘This uniform,’ I fingered the black material with distaste, ‘is strictly a temporary thing.’

‘I don’t think so, Kovacs.’

‘Schneider’s wearing it too,’ I pointed out.

‘Schneider . . .’ The word gusted out of her doubtfully. She obviously still knew him as Mendel. ‘Schneider is an asshole.’

I glanced down the beach to where Schneider was banging about in the shuttle with what seemed like an inordinate degree of noise. The techniques I’d used to bring Wardani’s psyche back to the surface hadn’t gone down well with him, and he’d liked it even less when I’d told him to give us some time alone by the fire.

‘Really? I thought you and he . . .’

‘Well.’ She considered the fire for a while. ‘He’s an attractive asshole.’

‘Did you know him before the dig?’

She shook her head. ‘Nobody knew anybody before the dig. You just get assigned, and hope for the best.’

‘You got assigned to the Dangrek coast?’ I asked casually.

‘No.’ She drew in her shoulders as if against cold. ‘I’m a Guild Master. I could have got work on the Plains digs if I’d wanted to. I chose Dangrek. The rest of the team were assigned Scratchers. They didn’t buy my reasons, but they were all young and enthusiastic. I guess even a dig with an eccentric’s better than no dig at all.’

‘And what were your reasons?’

There was a long pause, which I spent cursing myself silently for the slip. The question had been genuine - most of my knowledge of the Archaeologue Guild was gleaned from popular digests of their history and occasional successes. I had never met a Guild Master before, and what Schneider had to say about the dig was obviously a filtered version of Wardani’s pillow talk, stepped on by his own lack of deeper knowledge. I wanted the full story. But if there was one thing that Tanya Wardani had seen a surplus of during her internment, it was probably interrogation. The tiny increment of incisiveness in my voice must have hit her like a marauder bomb.

I was marshalling something to fill the silence, when she broke it for me, in a voice that only missed being steady by a micron.

‘You’re after the ship? Mende—’ She started again. ‘Schneider told you about it?’

‘Yeah, but he was kind of vague. Did you know it was going to be there?’

‘Not specifically. But it made sense; it had to happen sooner or later. Have you ever read Wycinski?’

‘Heard of him. Hub theory, right?’

She allowed herself a thin smile. ‘Hub theory isn’t Wycinski’s; it just owes him everything. What Wycinski said, among others at the time, is that everything we’ve discovered about the Martians so far points to a much more atomistic society than our own. You know - winged and carnivorous, originally from airborne predator stock, almost no cultural traces of pack behaviour.’ The words started to flow - conversational patterns fading out as the lecturer in her tuned in unconsciously. ‘That suggests the need for a much broader personal domain than humans require and a general lack of sociability. Think of them as birds of prey if you like. Solitary and aggressive. That they built cities at all is evidence that they managed at least in part to overcome the genetic legacy, maybe in the same way humans have got a halfway lock on the xenophobic tendencies that pack behaviour has given us. Where Wycinski differs from most of the experts is in his belief that this tendency would only be repressed to the extent that it was sufficiently desirable to group together, and that with the rise of technology it would be reversible. You still with me?’

‘Just don’t speed up.’

In fact, I wasn’t having a problem, and some of this more basic stuff I’d heard before in one form or another. But Wardani was relaxing visibly as she talked, and the longer that went on the better chance there was of her recovery remaining stable. Even during the brief moments it had taken her to launch into the lecture, she had grown more animated, hands gesturing, face intent rather than distant. A fraction at a time, Tanya Wardani was reclaiming herself.

‘You mentioned hub theory, that’s a bullshit spin-off; fucking Carter and Bogdanovich whoring off the back of Wycinski’s work on Martian cartography. See, one of the things about Martian maps is, there are no common centres. No matter where the archaeologue teams went on Mars, they always found themselves at the centre of the maps they dug up. Every settlement put itself slap in the middle of its own maps, always the biggest blob, regardless of actual size or apparent function. Wycinski argued that this shouldn’t surprise anybody, since it tied in with what we’d already surmised about the way Martian minds worked. To any Martian drawing a map, the most important point on that map was bound to be where the map maker was located at the time of drawing. All Carter and Bogdanovich did was to apply that rationale to the astrogation charts. If every Martian city considered itself the centre of a planetary map, then every colonised world would in turn consider itself the centre of the Martian hegemony. Therefore, the fact that Mars was marked big and dead centre on all these charts meant nothing in objective terms. Mars might easily be a recently colonised backwater, and the real hub of Martian culture could be literally any other speck on the chart.’ She pulled a disdainful face. ‘That’s hub theory.’

‘You don’t sound too convinced.’

Wardani plumed smoke into the night. ‘I’m not. Like Wycinski said at the time, so fucking what? Carter and Bogdanovich completely missed the point. By accepting the validity of what Wycinski said about Martian spatial perceptions, they should have also seen that the whole concept of hegemony was probably outside Martian terms of reference.’

‘Uh-oh.’

‘Yeah.’ The thin smile again, more forced this time. ‘That’s where it started to get political. Wycinski went on record with that, saying that wherever the Martian race had originated, there was no reason to suppose that the mother world would be accorded any more importance in the scheme of things than quote absolutely essential in matters of basic factual education unquote.’

‘Mummy, where do we come from? That sort of thing.’

‘That sort of thing exactly. You might point it out on the map, that’s where we all came from once, but since where we are now is far more important in real, day-to-day terms, that’s about as far as the mother world homage would ever get.’

‘I don’t suppose Wycinski ever thought to disown this view of things as intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman, did he?’

Wardani gave me a sharp look. ‘How much do you really know about the Guild, Kovacs?’

I held up finger and thumb a modest span apart. ‘Sorry, I just like to show off. I’m from Harlan’s World. Minoru and Gretzky went to trial about the time I got into my teens. I was in a gang. Standard proof of how antisocial you were was to carve air graffiti about the trial in a public place. We all had the transcripts by heart. Intrinsically and irreconcilably unhuman came up a lot in Gretzky’s recantation. Seemed like it was the standard Guild statement for keeping your research grants intact.’

She lowered her gaze. ‘It was, for a while. And no, Wycinski wouldn’t play that tune. He loved the Martians, he admired them, and he said so in public. That’s why you only hear about him in connection with fucking hub theory. They pulled his funding, suppressed most of his findings and gave it all to Carter and Bogdanovich to run with. And what a blowjob those two whores gave in return. The UN commission voted a seven per cent increase in the Protectorate strategic budget the same year, all based on paranoid fantasies of a Martian overculture somewhere out there waiting to jump us.’

‘Neat.’

‘Yeah, and totally impossible to disprove. All the astrogation charts we’ve recovered on other worlds bear out Wycinski’s finding - each world centres itself on the map the way Mars did, and that single fact is used to scare the UN into keeping a high strategic budget and a tight military presence across the whole Protectorate. No one wants to hear about what Wycinski’s research really means, and anybody who talks too loud about it, or tries to apply the findings in research of their own is either defunded overnight or ridiculed, which in the end comes to the same thing.’

She flicked her cigarette into the fire and watched it flare up.

‘That what happened to you?’ I asked.

‘Not quite.’

There was a palpable click to the last syllable, like a lock turning. Behind me, I could hear Schneider coming up the beach, his checklist for the shuttle or maybe just his patience exhausted. I shrugged.

‘Talk about it later, you want to.’

‘Maybe. How about you tell me what all that macho high-G manoeuvre bullshit was today?’

I glanced up at Schneider as he joined us beside the fire. ‘Hear that? Complaint about the in-flight entertainment.’

‘Fucking passengers,’ Schneider grunted, picking up the clowning cue flawlessly as he lowered himself to the sand. ‘Nothing ever changes.’

‘You going to tell her, or shall I?’

‘Was your idea. Got a Seven?’

Wardani held up the packet, then tossed them into Schneider’s grasp. She turned back to me. ‘Well?’

‘The Dangrek coast,’ I said slowly, ‘whatever its archaeological merits may have been, is part of the Northern Rim territories and the Northern Rim has been designated by Carrera’s Wedge as one of nine primary objectives in winning the war. And judging from the amount of organic damage going on up there at the moment, the Kempists have come to the same conclusion.’

‘So?’

‘So, mounting an archaeological expedition while Kemp and the Wedge are up there fighting for territorial dominance isn’t my idea of smart. We have to get the fighting diverted.’

‘Diverted?’ The disbelief in her voice was gratifying to hear. I played to it, shrugging again.

‘Diverted, or postponed. Whatever works. The point is, we need help. And the only place we’re going to get help of that order is from the corporates. We’re going to Landfall, and since I’m supposed to be on active service, Schneider’s a Kempist deserter, you’re a prisoner-of-war and this is a stolen shuttle, we need to shed a little heat before we do that. Satellite coverage of our little run-in with the smart mines back there will read like they took us down. A search of the seabed will show up pieces of wreckage compatible with that. Allowing that no one looks at the evidence too closely, we’ll be filed as missing presumed vaporised, which suits me fine.’

‘You think they’ll let it go at that?’

‘Well, it’s a war. People getting killed shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.’ I picked a stray length of wood out of the fire and started tracing a rough continental map in the sand. ‘Oh, they may wonder what I was doing down here when I’m supposed to be taking up a command on the Rim, but that’s the kind of detail that gets sifted in the aftermath of a conflict. Right now, Carrera’s Wedge are spread pretty thin in the north and Kemp’s forces are still pushing them towards the mountains. They’ve got the Presidential Guard coming in on this flank,’ I prodded at the sand with my makeshift pointer, ‘And sea-launched air strikes from Kemp’s iceberg fleet over here. Carrera’s got a few more important things to worry about than the exact manner of my demise.’

‘And you really think the Cartel are going to put all that on hold just for you?’ Tanya Wardani swung her burning gaze from my face to Schneider’s. ‘You didn’t really buy into this, did you, Jan?’

Schneider made a small gesture with one hand. ‘Just listen to the man, Tanya. He’s jacked into the machine, he knows what he’s talking about.’

‘Yeah, right.’ The intense, hectic eyes snapped back to me. ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for getting me out of the camp, because I am. I don’t think you can imagine quite how grateful I am. But now I’m out, I’d quite like to live. This, this plan, is all bullshit. You’re just going to get us all killed, either in Landfall by corporate samurai or caught in the crossfire at Dangrek. They aren’t going to—’

‘You’re right,’ I said patiently, and she shut up, surprised. ‘To a point, you’re right. The major corporates, the ones in the Cartel, they wouldn’t give this scheme a second glance. They can murder us, stick you into virtual interrogation until you tell them what they want to know and then just keep the whole thing under wraps until the war is over and they’ve won.’

‘If they win.’

‘They will,’ I told her. ‘They always do, one way or the other. But we aren’t going to the majors. We’ve got to be smarter than that.’

I paused and poked at the fire, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw how Schneider craned forward with tension. Without Tanya Wardani aboard, the whole thing was dead in the water and we all knew it.

The sea whispered itself up on the beach and back. Something popped and crackled in the depths of the fire.

‘Alright.’ She moved slightly, like someone bedridden shifting to a less aching posture. ‘Go on. I’m listening.’

Relief gusted out of Schneider audibly. I nodded.

‘This is what we do. We target one corporate operator in particular, one of the smaller, hungrier ones. Might take a while to sound out, but it shouldn’t be difficult. And once we’ve got the target, we make them an offer they can’t refuse. A one-time only, limited period, bargain basement, satisfaction guaranteed purchase.’

I saw the way she exchanged glances with Schneider. Maybe it was all the monetary imagery that made her look to him.

‘Small and hungry as you like, Kovacs, you’re still talking about a corporate player.’ Her eyes locked onto mine. ‘Planetary wealth. And murder and virtual interrogation are hardly expensive. How do you propose to undercut that option?’

‘Simple. We scare them.’

‘You scare them.’ She looked at me for a moment, and then coughed out a small, unwilling laugh. ‘Kovacs, they should have you on disc. You’re perfect post-trauma entertainment. So, tell me. You’re going to scare a corporate block. What with, slasher puppets?’

I felt a genuine smile twitch at my own lips. ‘Something like that.’

CHAPTER SIX

It took Schneider the better part of the next morning to wipe the shuttle’s datacore, while Tanya Wardani walked aimless scuffing circles in the sand or sat beside the open hatch and talked to him. I left them alone and walked up to the far end of the beach where there was a black rock headland. The rock proved simple to scale and the view from the top was worth the few scrapes I picked up on the way. I leaned my back against a convenient outcrop and looked out to the horizon, recalling fragments of a dream from the previous night.

Harlan’s World is small for a habitable planet and its seas slop about unpredictably under the influence of three moons. Sanction IV is much larger, larger even than Latimer or Earth, and it has no natural satellites, all of which makes for wide, placid oceans. Set against the memories of my early life on Harlan’s World, this calm always seemed slightly suspicious, as if the sea were holding its watery breath, waiting for something cataclysmic to happen. It was a creepy sensation and the Envoy conditioning kept it locked down most of the time by the simple expedient of not allowing the comparison to cross my mind. In dreamsleep, the conditioning is less effective, and evidently something in my head was worrying at the cracks.

In the dream, I was standing on a shingle beach somewhere on Sanction IV, looking out at the tranquil swells, when the surface began to heave and swell. I watched, rooted to the spot, as mounds of water shifted and broke and flowed past each other like sinuous black muscles. What waves there were at the water’s edge were gone, sucked back out to where the sea was flexing. A certainty made in equal parts of cold dread and aching sadness rose in me to match the disturbances offshore. I knew beyond doubt. Something monstrous was coming up.

But I woke up before it surfaced.

A muscle twitched in my leg and I sat up irritably. The dregs of the dream rinsed around the base of my mind, seeking connection with something more substantial.

Maybe it was fallout from the duel with the smart mines. I’d watched the sea heave upward as our missiles detonated beneath the surface.

Yeah, right. Very traumatic.

My mind skittered through a few other recent combat memories, looking for a match. I stopped it, rapidly. Pointless exercise. A year and a half of hands-on nastiness for Carrera’s Wedge had laid up enough trauma in my head to give work to a whole platoon of psychosurgeons. I was entitled to a few nightmares. Without the Envoy conditioning, I’d probably have suffered a screaming mental collapse months ago. And combat memories weren’t what I wanted to look at right now.

I made myself lie back again and relax into the day. The morning sun was already beginning to build towards semi-tropical midday heat, and the rock was warm to the touch. Between my half-closed eyelids, light moved the way it had in the lochside convalescent virtuality. I let myself drift.

Time passed unused.

My phone hummed quietly to itself. I reached down without opening my eyes and squeezed it active. Noted the increased weight of heat on my body, the light drenching of sweat on my legs.

‘Ready to roll,’ said Schneider’s voice. ‘You still up on that rock?’

I sat up unwillingly. ‘Yeah. You make the call yet?’

‘All cleared. That scrambler uplink you stole? Beautiful. Crystal clear. They’re waiting on us.’

‘Be right down.’

Inside my head, the same residue. The dream had not gone.

Something coming up.

I stowed the thought with the phone, and started downward. Archaeology is a messy science.

You’d think, with all the high-tech advances of the past few centuries, that we’d have the practice of robbing graves down to a fine art by now. After all, we can pick up the telltale traces of Martian civilisation across interplanetary distances these days. Satellite surveys and remote sensing let us map their buried cities through metres of solid rock or hundreds of metres of sea, and we’ve even built machines that can make educated guesses about the more inscrutable remnants of what they left behind. With nearly half a millennium of practice, we really ought to be getting good at this stuff.

But the fact is, no matter how subtle your detection science is, once you’ve found something, you’ve still got to dig it up. And with the vast capital investment the corporates have made in the race to understand the Martians, the digging is usually done with about as much subtlety as a crew night out in Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. There are finds to be made and dividends to be paid, and the fact that there are - apparently - no Martians around to object to the environmental damage doesn’t help. The corporates swing in, rip the locks off the vacated worlds, and stand back while the Archaeologue Guild swarm all over the fixtures. And when the primary sites have been exhausted, no one usually bothers to tidy up.

You get places like Dig 27.

Hardly the most imaginative name for a town, but there was a certain amount of accuracy in the choice. Dig 27 had sprung up around the excavation of the same name, served for fifty years as dormitory, refectory and leisure complex for the archaeologue workforce, and was now in steep decline as the seams of xenoculture ore panned out to the dregs. The original dighead was a gaunt centipedal skeleton, straddling the skyline on stilled retrieval belts and awkwardly bent support struts as we flew in from the east. The town started beneath the drooping tail of the structure and spread from it in sporadic and uncertain clumps like an unenthusiastic concrete fungus. Buildings rarely heaved themselves above five storeys, and many of those that had were rather obviously derelict, as if the effort of upward growth had exhausted them beyond the ability to sustain internal life.

Schneider banked around the skull end of the stalled dighead, flattened out and floated down towards a piece of wasteground between three listing pylons which presumably delineated Dig 27’s landing field. Dust boiled up from the badly kept ferrocrete as we hovered and I saw jagged cracks blown naked by our landing brakes. Over the comset, a senile navigation beacon husked a request for identification. Schneider ignored it, knocked over the primaries and climbed from his seat with a yawn.

‘End of the line, folks. Everybody out.’

We followed him back to the main cabin and watched while he strapped on one of the unsubtle sawn-off particle throwers we’d liberated with the shuttle. He looked up, caught me watching and winked.

‘I thought these were your friends.’ Tanya Wardani was watching as well, alarmed if the expression on her face was anything to go by.

Schneider shrugged. ‘They were,’ he said. ‘But you can’t be too careful.’

‘Oh great.’ She turned to me. ‘Have you got anything a bit less bulky than that cannon that I could maybe borrow. Something I can lift.’

I lifted the edges of my jacket aside to show the two Wedge-customised Kalashnikov interface guns where they rested in the chest harness.

‘I’d lend you one of these, but they’re personally coded.’

‘Take a blaster, Tanya,’ said Schneider without looking up from his own preparations. ‘More chance you’ll hit something with it anyway. Slug throwers are for fashion victims.’

The archaeologue raised her eyebrows. I smiled a little. ‘He’s probably right. Here, you don’t have to wear it around your waist. The straps web out like this. Sling it over your shoulder.’

I moved to help her fit the weapon and as she turned towards me something indefinable happened in the small space between our bodies. As I settled the holstered weapon at the downward slope of her left breast, her eyes slanted upward to mine. They were, I saw, the colour of jade under swift-flowing water.

‘That comfortable?’

‘Not especially.’

I went to move the holster and she raised a hand to stop me. Against the dusty ebony of my arm, her fingers looked like naked bones, skeletal and frail.

‘Leave it, it’ll do.’

‘OK. Look, you just pull down and the holster lets it go. Push back up and it grips again. Like that.’

‘Got it.’

The exchange had not been lost on Schneider. He cleared his throat loudly and went to crack the hatch. As it hinged outward, he held onto a handgrip at the leading edge and swung down with practised flyer nonchalance. The effect was spoiled slightly as he landed and began coughing in the still settling dust our landing brake had raised. I suppressed a grin.

Wardani went after him, letting herself down awkwardly with the heels of her palms on the floor of the open hatchway. Mindful of the dust clouds outside, I stayed in the hatchway, eyes narrowed against the airborne grit in an attempt to see if we had a reception committee.

And we did.

They emerged from the dust like figures on a frieze gradually sandblasted clean by someone like Tanya Wardani. I counted seven in all, bulky silhouettes swathed in desert gear and spiky with weapons. The central figure looked deformed, taller than the others by half a metre but swollen and misshapen from the chest up. They advanced in silence.

I folded my arms across my chest so my fingertips touched the butts of the Kalashnikovs.

‘Djoko?’ Schneider coughed again. ‘That you, Djoko?’

More silence. The dust had settled enough for me to make out the dull glint of metal on gun barrels and the enhanced vision masks they all wore. There was room for body armour beneath the loose desert gear.

‘Djoko, quit fucking about.’

A high-pitched, impossible laugh from the towering, misshapen figure in the centre. I blinked.

‘Jan, Jan, my good friend.’ It was the voice of a child. ‘Do I make you so nervous?’

‘What do you think, fuckwit?’ Schneider stepped forward and as I watched the huge figure spasmed and seemed to break apart. Startled, I cranked up the neurachem vision and made out a small boy of about eight scrambling down from the arms of the man who held him to his chest. As the boy reached the ground and ran to meet Schneider, I saw the man who had carried him straighten up into a peculiar immobility. Something quickened along the tendons in my arms. I screwed up my eyes some more and scanned the now unremarkable figure head to foot. This one was not wearing the EV mask and his face was . . .

I felt my mouth tighten as I realised what I was looking at.

Schneider and the boy were trading complicated handshakes and spouting gibberish at each other. Midway through this ritual, the boy broke off and took Tanya Wardani’s hand with a formal bow and some ornate flattery that I didn’t catch. He seemed insistent on clowning his way through the meeting. He was spouting harmless-ness like a tinsel fountain on Harlan’s Day. And with the worst of the dust down where it belonged, the rest of the reception committee had lost the vague menace their silhouettes had given them. The clearing air revealed them as an assortment of nervous-looking and mostly young irregulars. I saw one wispy-bearded Caucasian on the left chewing his lip below the blank calm of the EV mask. Another was shifting from foot to foot. All of them had their weapons slung or stowed and as I jumped down from the hatch, they all flinched backward.

I raised my hands soothingly shoulder height, palms outward.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise to this idiot.’ Schneider was now trying to cuff the boy around the back of the head, with limited success. ‘Djoko, come here and say hello to a real live Envoy. This is Takeshi Kovacs. He was at Innenin.’

‘Indeed?’ The boy came and offered his hand. Dark-skinned and fine-boned, it was already a handsome sleeve - in later life it would be androgynously beautiful. It was dressed immaculately in a tailored mauve sarong and matching quilted jacket. ‘Djoko Roespinoedji, at your service. I apologise for the drama, but one cannot be too careful in these uncertain times. Your call came in on satellite frequencies that no one outside Carrera’s Wedge has access to and Jan, while I love him like a brother, is not known for his connections in high places. It could have been a trap.’

‘Mothballed scrambler uplink,’ said Schneider importantly. ‘We stole it from the Wedge. This time, Djoko, when I say I’m jacked in, I mean it.’

‘Who might be trying to trap you?’ I asked.

‘Ah.’ The boy sighed with a world-weariness several decades out of place in his voice. ‘There is no telling. Government agencies, the Cartel, corporate leverage analysts, Kempist spies. None of them have any reason to love Djoko Roespinoedji. Remaining neutral in a war does not save you from making enemies as it should. Rather, it loses you any friends you might have and earns you suspicion and contempt from all sides.’

‘The war isn’t this far south yet,’ Wardani pointed out.

Djoko Roespinoedji placed a hand gravely on his chest. ‘For which we are all extremely grateful. But these days, not being on the front line merely means you are under occupation of one form or another. Landfall is barely eight hundred kilometres to our west. We are close enough to be considered a perimeter post, which means a state militia garrison and periodic visits from the Cartel’s political assessors.’ He sighed again. ‘It is all very costly.’

I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You’re garrisoned? Where are they?’

‘Over there.’ The boy jerked a thumb at the ragged group of irregulars. ‘Oh, there are a few more back at the uplink bunker, as per regulations, but essentially what you see here is the garrison.’

‘That’s the state militia?’ asked Tanya Wardani.

‘It is.’ Roespinoedji looked sadly at them for a moment, then turned back to us. ‘Of course, when I said it was costly, I was referring mostly to the cost of making the political assessor’s visits congenial. For us and for him, that is. The assessor is not a very sophisticated man, but he does have substantial, um, appetites. And of course ensuring that he remains our political assessor displaces a certain amount of expenditure too. Generally they are rotated every few months.’

‘Is he here now?’

‘I would hardly have invited you here if he were. He left only last week.’ The boy leered, unnerving to watch on a face that young. ‘Satisfied, you might say, with what he found here.’

I found myself smiling. I couldn’t help it.

‘I think we’ve come to the right place.’

‘Well that will depend on what you came for,’ said Roespinoedji, glancing at Schneider. ‘Jan was far from explicit. But come. Even in Dig 27 there are more congenial places than this to discuss business.’

He led us back to the little group of waiting militiamen and made a sharp clucking sound with his tongue. The figure who had been carrying him before stooped awkwardly and picked him up. Behind me, I heard Tanya Wardani’s breath catch slightly as she saw what had been done to the man.

It was by no means the worst thing I’d ever seen happen to a human being, wasn’t in fact even the worst I’d seen recently; still there was something eerie about the ruined head and the silvery alloy cement that had been used to patch it together. If I’d had to guess, I would have said this sleeve had been struck by flying shrapnel. Any kind of deliberate, directional weapon just wouldn’t have left anything to work with. But someone somewhere had taken the trouble to repair the dead man’s skull, seal up the remaining gaps with resin and replace the eyeballs with photoreceptors that sat in the gutted sockets like cyclopic silver spiders waiting for prey. Then, presumably, they’d coaxed enough life back into the brain-stem to operate the body’s vegetative systems and basic motor functions, and maybe respond to a few programmed commands.

Back before I got shot up on the Rim, I’d had a Wedge noncom working with me whose Afro-Caribbean sleeve was actually his own. One night, waiting out a satellite bombardment in the ruins of some kind of temple, he’d told me one of the myths his people, in chains, had taken across an ocean on Earth, and later, in hope of a new beginning, across the gulfs of the Martian astrogation charts to the world that would later become known as Latimer. It was a story of magicians and the slaves they made of bodies raised from the dead. I forget what name he gave to these creatures in the story, but I know he would have seen one in the thing that held Djoko Roespinoedji in its arms.

‘Do you like it?’ The boy, cuddled up obscenely close to the ravaged head, had been watching me.

‘Not much, no.’

‘Well, aesthetically, of course . . .’ The boy let his voice trail off delicately. ‘But with judicious use of bandaging, and some suitably ragged clothing for me, we should make a truly pitiful ensemble. The wounded and the innocent, fleeing from the ruins of their shattered lives - ideal camouflage, really, should things become extreme.’

‘Same old Djoko.’ Schneider came up and nudged me. ‘Like I told you. Always one step ahead of the action.’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve known refugee columns get gunned down just for target practice.’

‘Oh, I’m aware of that. Our friend here was a tactical marine before he met his unfortunate end. Still quite a lot of ingrained reflex left in the cortex, or wherever it is they store that kind of thing.’ The boy winked at me. ‘I’m a businessman, not a technician. I had a software firm in Landfall knock what was left into usable shape. Look.’

The child’s hand disappeared into his jacket and the dead man snatched a long-barrelled blaster from the scabbard across his back. It was very fast. The photoreceptors whirred audibly in their sockets, scanning left to right. Roespinoedji grinned broadly and his hand emerged clutching the remote. A thumb shifted and the blaster was returned smoothly to its sheath. The arm supporting the boy had not shifted an inch.

‘So you see,’ the boy piped cheerfully, ‘where pity cannot be mined, less subtle options are always available. But really, I’m optimistic. You’d be surprised how many soldiers still find it difficult to shoot small children, even in these troubled times. Now. Enough chatter, shall we eat?’

Roespinoedji had the top floor and penthouse of a raddled warehouse block not far off touching distance from the tail of the dighead. We left all but two of the militia escort outside in the street and picked our way through cool gloom to where an industrial elevator stood in one corner. The animated dead man dragged the cage door aside with one hand. Metallic echoes chased around the empty space over our heads

‘I can remember,’ said the boy as we rose towards the roof, ‘when all this was stacked with grade-one artefacts, crated and tagged for airlift to Landfall. The inventory crews used to work shifts round the clock. The dighead never stopped, you could hear it running day and night under all the other sounds. Like a heartbeat.’

‘Is that what you used to do?’ asked Wardani. ‘Stack artefacts?’

I saw Schneider smile to himself in the gloom.

‘When I was younger,’ said Roespinoedji, self-mocking. ‘But I was involved in a more. Organisational capacity, shall we say?’

The elevator passed through the roof of the storage area and clanged to a halt in suddenly bright light. Sunlight strained through fabric-curtained windows into a reception lounge screened from the rest of the floor by amber-painted internal walls. Through the elevator cage I saw kaleidoscopic designs on carpets, dark wood flooring and long, low sofas arranged around what I took to be a small, internally-lit swimming pool. Then, as we stepped out, I saw that the floor recess held not water but a wide horizontal video screen on which a woman appeared to be singing. In two corners of the lounge, the image was duplicated in a more viewable format on two vertical stacks of more reasonably sized screens. The far wall held a long table on which someone had laid out enough food and drink for a platoon.

‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ said Roespinoedji, as his corpse guardian bore him away through an arched doorway. ‘I’ll only be a moment. Food and drink over there. Oh, and volume, if you want.’

The music on the screen was suddenly audible, instantly recognisable as a Lapinee number, though not her debut cover of the junk salsa hit Open Ground that had caused so much trouble the previous year. This one was slower, merged in with sporadic suborgasmic moaning. On screen, Lapinee hung upside down with her thighs wrapped around the barrel of a spider tank gun and crooned into the camera. Probably a recruiting anthem.

Schneider strode to the table and began piling a plate with every type of food the buffet had to offer. I watched the two militiamen take up station near the elevator, shrugged and joined him. Tanya Wardani seemed about to follow suit, but then she changed course abruptly and walked to one of the curtained windows instead. One narrow-boned hand went to the patterns woven into the fabric there.

‘Told you,’ said Schneider to me. ‘If anyone can jack us in on this side of the planet, Djoko can. He’s interfaced with every player in Landfall.’

‘You mean he was before the war.’

Schneider shook his head. ‘Before and during. You heard what he said about the assessor. No way he could pull that kind of gig if he wasn’t still jacked into the machine.’

‘If he’s jacked into the machine,’ I asked patiently, eyes still on Wardani, ‘how come he’s living in this shithole town?’

‘Maybe he likes it here. This is where he grew up. Anyway, you ever been to Landfall? Now that’s a shithole.’

Lapinee disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by some kind of documentary footage on archaeology. We carried our plates to one of the sofas where Schneider was about to start eating when he saw that I wasn’t.

‘Let’s wait,’ I said softly. ‘It’s only polite.’

He snorted. ‘What do you think; he’s going to poison us? What for? There’s no angle in it.’

But he left the food alone.

The screen shifted again, war footage this time. Merry little flashes of laser fire across a darkened plain somewhere and the carnival flare of missile impacts. The soundtrack was sanitised, a few explosions muffled by distance and overlaid with dry-voiced commentary giving innocuous-sounding data. Collateral damage, rebel operations neutralised.

Djoko Roespinoedji emerged from the archway opposite, minus his jacket and accompanied by two women who looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the software for a virtual brothel. Their muslin-wrapped forms exhibited the same airbrushed lack of blemishes and gravity-defying curves, and their faces held the same absence of expression. Sandwiched between these two confections, the eight-year-old Roespinoedji looked ludicrous.

‘Ivanna and Kas,’ he said, gesturing in turn to each woman. ‘My constant companions. Every boy needs a mother, wouldn’t you say? Or two. Now,’ he snapped his fingers, surprisingly loudly, and the two women drifted across to the buffet. He seated himself in an adjacent sofa. ‘To business. What exactly can I do for you and your friends, Jan?’

‘You’re not eating?’ I asked him.

‘Oh.’ He smiled and gestured at his two companions. ‘Well, they are, and I’m really very fond of both of them.’

Schneider looked embarrassed.

‘No?’ Roespinoedji sighed and reached across to take a pastry from my plate at random. He bit into it. ‘There, then. Can we get down to business now? Jan? Please?’

‘We want to sell you the shuttle, Djoko.’ Schneider took a huge bite out of a chicken drumstick and talked through it. ‘Knockdown price.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Yeah - call it military surplus. Wu Morrison ISN-70, very little wear and no previous owner of record.’

Roespinoedji smiled. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Check it if you like.’ Schneider swallowed his mouthful. ‘The datacore’s wiped cleaner than your tax records. Six hundred thousand klick range. Universal config, hard space, suborbital, submarine. Handles like a whorehouse harpy.’

‘Yes, I seem to remember the seventies were impressive. Or was it you that told me that, Jan?’ The boy stroked his beardless chin in a gesture that clearly belonged to a previous sleeve. ‘Never mind. This knockdown bargain comes armed, I assume.’

Schneider nodded, chewing. ‘Micromissile turret, nose-mounted. Plus evasion systems. Full autodefensive software, very nice package. ’

I coughed on a pastry.

The two women drifted over to the sofa where Roespinoedji sat and arranged themselves in decorative symmetry on either side of him. Neither of them had said a word or made a sound that I could detect since they walked in. The woman on Roespinoedji’s left began to feed him from her plate. He leaned back against her and eyed me speculatively while he chewed what she gave him.

‘Alright,’ he said finally. ‘Six million.’

‘UN?’ asked Schneider, and Roespinoedji laughed out loud.

‘Saft. Six million saft.’

The Standard Archaeological Find Token, created back when the Sanction government was still little more than a global claims administrator, and now an unpopular global currency whose performance against the Latimer franc it had replaced was reminiscent of a swamp panther trying to climb a fricfree-treated dock ramp. There were currently about two hundred and thirty saft to the Protectorate (UN) dollar.

Schneider was aghast, his haggler’s soul outraged. ‘You cannot be serious, Djoko. Even six million UN’s only about half what it’s worth. It’s a Wu Morrison, man.’

‘Does it have cryocaps?’

‘Uhhh . . . No.’

‘So what the fuck use is it to me, Jan?’ Roespinoedji asked without heat. He glanced sideways at the woman on his right, and she passed him a wineglass without a word. ‘Look, at this precise moment the only use anyone outside the military has for a space rig is as a means of lifting out of here, beating the blockade and getting back to Latimer. That six-hundred-thousand-kilometre range can be modified by someone who knows what they’re doing, and the Wu Morrisons have goodish guidance systems, I know, but at the speed you’ll get out of an ISN-70, especially backyard customised, it’s still the best part of three decades back to Latimer. You need cryocapsules for that.’ He held up a hand to forestall Schneider’s protest. ‘And I don’t know anyone, anyone, who can get cryocaps. Not for cunt nor credit. The Landfall Cartel know what they’re about, Jan, and they’ve got it all welded shut. No one gets out of here alive - not until the war’s over. That’s the deal.’

‘You can always sell to the Kempists,’ I said. ‘They’re pretty desperate for the hardware, they’ll pay.’

Roespinoedji nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Kovacs, they will pay, and they’ll pay in saft. Because it’s all they’ve got. Your friends in the Wedge have seen to that.’

‘Not my friends. I’m just wearing this.’

‘Rather well, though.’

I shrugged.

‘What about ten,’ said Schneider hopefully. ‘Kemp’s paying five times that for reconditioned suborbitals.’

Roespinoedji sighed. ‘Yes, and in the meantime I have to hide it somewhere, and pay off anyone who sees it. It’s not a dune scooter, you know. Then I have to make contact with the Kempists, which as you may be aware carries a mandatory erasure penalty these days. I have to arrange a covert meeting, oh and with armed back-up in case these toy revolutionaries decide to requisition my merchandise instead of paying up. Which they often do if you don’t come heavy. Look at the logistics, Jan. I’m doing you a favour, just taking it off your hands. Who else were you going to go to?’

‘Eight—’

‘Six is fine,’ I cut in swiftly. ‘And we appreciate the favour. But how about you sweeten our end with a ride into Landfall and a little free information? Just to show we’re all friends.’

The boy’s gaze sharpened and he glanced towards Tanya Wardani.

‘Free information, eh?’ He raised his eyebrows, twice in quick succession, clownishly. ‘Of course there’s really no such thing, you know. But just to show we’re all friends. What do you want to know?’

‘Landfall.’ I said. ‘Outside of the Cartel, who are the razorfish? I’m talking about second-rank corporates, maybe even third rank. Who’s tomorrow’s shiny new dream at the moment?’

Roespinoedji sipped meditatively at his wine. ‘Hmm. Razorfish. I don’t believe we have any of those on Sanction IV. Or Latimer, come to that.’

‘I’m from Harlan’s World.’

‘Oh, really. Not a Quellist, I assume.’ He gestured at the Wedge uniform. ‘Given your current political alignment, I mean.’

‘You don’t want to oversimplify Quellism. Kemp keeps quoting her, but like most people he’s selective.’

‘Well, I really wouldn’t know.’ Roespinoedji put up one hand to block the next piece of food his concubine was readying for him. ‘But your razorfish. I’d say you’ve got a half dozen at most. Late arrivals, most of them Latimer-based. The interstellars blocked out most of the local competition until about twenty years ago. And now of course they’ve got the Cartel and the government in their pocket. There’s not much more than scraps for everybody else. Most of the third rank are getting ready to go home; they can’t really afford the war.’ He stroked at his imagined beard. ‘Second rank, well . . . Sathakarn Yu Associates maybe, PKN, the Mandrake Corporation. They’re all pretty carnivorous. Might be a couple more I can dig out for you. Are you planning to approach these people with something? ’

I nodded. ‘Indirectly.’

‘Yes, well, some free advice to go with your free information, then. Feed it to them on a long stick.’ Roespinoedji raised his glass towards me and then drained it. He smiled affably. ‘Because if you don’t, they’ll take your hand off at the shoulder.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Like a lot of cities that owe their existence to a spaceport, Landfall had no real centre. Instead it sprawled haphazardly across a broad semi-desert plain in the southern hemisphere where the original colony barges had touched down a century ago. Each corporation holding stock in the venture had simply built its own landing field somewhere on the plain and surrounded it with a ring of ancillary structures. In time those rings had spread outwards, met each other and eventually merged into a warren of acentric conurbation with only the vaguest of overall planning to link it all together. Secondary investors moved in, renting or buying space from the primaries and carving themselves niches in both the market and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Meanwhile, other cities arose elsewhere on the globe, but the Export Quarantine clause in the Charter ensured that all the wealth generated by Sanction IV’s archaeological industries had at some point to pass through Landfall. Gorged on an unrestricted diet of artefact export, land allocation and dig licensing, the former spaceport had swelled to monstrous proportions. It now covered two-thirds of the plain and, with twelve million inhabitants, was home to almost thirty per cent of what was left of Sanction IV’s total population.

It was a pit.

I walked with Schneider through badly-kept streets full of urban detritus and reddish desert sand. The air was hot and dry and the shade cast by the blocks on either side provided little respite from the high-angled rays of the sun. I could feel sweat beading on my face and soaking the hair at the back of my neck. In windows and mirror-shielded frontages along the way, our black-uniformed reflections kept pace. I was almost glad of the company. There was no one else out in the midday heat and the shimmering stillness of it was uncanny. The sand crunched audibly underfoot.

The place we were looking for wasn’t hard to find. It stuck up at the edge of the district like a burnished bronze conning tower, double the height of the surrounding blocks and utterly featureless from the outside. Like much of the architecture in Landfall, it was mirror-surfaced and the reflected sun made its edges difficult to look at directly. It wasn’t the tallest tower in Landfall, but the structure had a raw power to it that throbbed across the surrounding urban sprawl and spoke volumes about its designers.

Testing the human frame to destruction

The phrase flopped out of my memory like a corpse from a closet.

‘How close you want to get?’ asked Schneider nervously.

‘A bit closer.’

The Khumalo sleeve, like all Carrera’s Wedge custom, had a satdata locational display wired in as standard and reckoned to be quite user-friendly when not fucked up by the webs of jamming and counter-jamming that currently swathed most of Sanction IV. Blinked up to focus now, it gave me a mesh of streets and city blocks covering my whole left field of vision. Two tagged dots pulsed minutely on a thoroughfare.

Testing the—

I overcued the tightlock fractionally and the view dizzied up until I was looking at the top of my own head from block-top height.

‘Shit.’

‘What?’ Beside me, Schneider had tensed up in what he obviously imagined was a stance of ninja combat readiness. Behind his sunlenses, he looked comically worried.

Testing—

‘Forget it.’ I scaled back up until the tower re-emerged on the edge of the display. A shortest-possible route lit up obligingly in yellow, threading us to the building through a pair of intersections. ‘This way.’

Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines

A couple of minutes down the yellow line, one of the streets gave onto a narrow suspension bridge over a dry canal. The bridge sloped upward slightly along its twenty-metre length to meet a raised concrete flange on the far side. Two other bridges paralleled the crossing a hundred metres down on either side, also sloping upward. The floor of the canal bore a scattering of the debris any urban area will breed - discarded domestic devices spilling circuitry from cracked casings, emptied food packages and sun-bleached knots of cloth that reminded me of machine-gunned bodies. Over it all and on the other side of this dumping ground, the tower waited.

Testing the human

Schneider hovered on the threshold of the bridge.

‘You going across?’

‘Yeah, and so are you. We’re partners, remember.’ I shoved him lightly in the small of the back and followed up so close he’d have to go on. There was a slightly hysterical good humour brewing in me as the Envoy conditioning strove to fend off the unsubtle doses of combat prep hormones my sleeve sensed were required.

‘I just don’t think this is—’

‘If anything goes wrong, you can blame me.’ I nudged him again. ‘Now come on.’

‘If anything goes wrong, we’ll be dead,’ he muttered morosely.

‘Yeah, at least.’

We crossed, Schneider holding onto the rails as if the bridge were swaying in a high wind.

The flange on the other side turned out to be the edge of a featureless fifty-metre access plaza. We stood two metres in, looking up at the impassive face of the tower. Whether intentionally or not, whoever had built the concrete apron around the building’s base had created a perfect killing field. There was no cover in any direction and the only retreat was back along the slim, exposed bridge or a bone-shattering jump into the empty canal.

‘Open ground, all around,’ sang Schneider under his breath, picking up on the cadence and lyrics of the Kempist revolutionary hymn of the same name. I couldn’t blame him. I’d caught myself humming the fucking thing a couple of times since we got into the unjammed airspace around the city - the Lapinee version was everywhere, close enough to the Kempist original to activate recall from last year. Back then, you could hear the original playing on the Rebels’ propaganda channels whenever and wherever the government jamming went down. Telling the - apparently edifying - story of a doomed platoon of volunteers holding a position against overwhelming odds for love of Joshua Kemp and his revolution, the anthem was sung against a catchy junk salsa backdrop that tended to stick in your head. Most of my men in the Northern Rim assault force could sing it by heart, and often did, to the fury of Cartel political officers, who were mostly too scared of the Wedge uniforms to make something of it.

In fact, the melody had proven so virulently memetic that even the most solidly pro-corporate citizens were unable to resist absent-mindedly humming it. This, plus a network of Cartel informers working on a commission-only basis, was enough to ensure that penal facilities all over Sanction IV were soon overflowing with musically-inclined political offenders. In view of the strain this put on policing, an expensive consulting team was called in and rapidly came up with a new set of sanitised lyrics to fit the original melody. Lapinee, a construct vocalist, was designed and launched to front the replacement song, which told the story of a young boy, orphaned in a Kempist sneak raid but then adopted by a kindly corporate bloc and brought up to realise his full potential as a top-level planetary executive.

As a ballad, it lacked the romantic blood and glory elements of the original, but since certain of the Kempist lyrics had been mirrored with malice aforethought, people generally lost track of which song was which and just sang a mangled hybrid of both, sewn together with much salsa-based humming. Any revolutionary sentiments got thoroughly scrambled in the process. The consulting team got a bonus, plus spin-off royalties from Lapinee, who was currently being plugged on all state channels. An album was in the offing.

Schneider stopped his humming. ‘Think they’ve got it covered?’

‘Reckon so.’ I nodded towards the base of the tower, where burnished doors fully five metres high apparently gave access. The massive portal was flanked by two plinths on which stood examples of abstract art each worthy of the title Eggs Collide in Symmetry or - I racked up the neurachem to be sure - Overkill Hardware Semi-deployed .

Schneider followed my gaze. ‘Sentries?’

I nodded. ‘Two slug autocannon nests and at least four separate beam weapons that I can see from here. Very tastefully done, too. You’d barely notice them in amongst all that sculpture.’

In a way, it was a good sign.

In the two weeks we’d spent in Landfall so far, I hadn’t seen much sign of the war beyond a slightly higher uniform count on the streets in the evenings and the occasional cyst of a rapid response turret on some of the taller buildings. Most of the time, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was all happening on another planet. But if Joshua Kemp did finally manage to fight his way through to the capital, the Mandrake Corporation at least looked to be ready for him.

Testing the human frame to destruction is only one of the cutting-edge lines central to the Mandrake Corporation’s current research programme. Maximum utility for ALL resources is our ultimate goal.

Mandrake had only acquired the site a decade ago. That they had built with armed insurrection in mind showed strategic thinking way in advance of any of the other corporate players at this particular table. Their corporate logo was a chopped strand of DNA afloat on a background of circuitry, their publicity material was just the right side of shrill in its aggressive, more-for-your-investment-dollar new-kid-on-the-block pitch, and their fortunes had risen sharply with the war.

Good enough.

‘Think they’re looking at us now?’

I shrugged. ‘Always someone looking at you. Fact of life. Question is whether they noticed us.’

Schneider pulled an exasperated face. ‘Think they noticed us, then?’

‘I doubt it. The automated systems won’t be tuned for it. War’s too far off for emergency default settings. These are friendly uniforms, and curfew isn’t till ten. We’re nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Yet.’

‘Yet,’ I agreed, turning away. ‘So let’s go and get noticed.’

We headed back across the bridge.

‘You don’t look like artists,’ said the promoter as he punched in the last of our encoding sequence. Out of uniform and into nondescript civilian clothing bought that morning, we’d been calibrated the moment we walked in the door and, by the look of it, found lacking.

‘We’re security,’ I told him pleasantly. ‘She’s the artist.’

His gaze flipped across the table to where Tanya Wardani sat behind winged black sunlenses and a clamp-mouthed grimace. She had started to fill out a little in the last couple of weeks, but beneath the long black coat, it didn’t show, and her face was still mostly bone. The promoter grunted, apparently satisfied with what he saw.

‘Well.’ He maximised a traffic display and studied it for a moment. ‘I have to tell you, whatever it is you’re selling, you’re up against a lot of state-sponsored competition.’

‘What, like Lapinee?’

The derision in Schneider’s voice would have been apparent across interstellar distances. The promoter smoothed back his imitation military goatee, sat back in his chair and stuck one fake combat-booted foot on the desk edge. At the base of his shaven skull, three or four battlefield quickplant software tags stuck out from their sockets, too shiny to be anything but designer copies.

‘Don’t laugh at the majors, friend,’ he said easily. ‘I had even a two per cent share in the Lapinee deal, I’d be living in Latimer City by now. I’m telling you, the best way to defuse wartime art is buy it up. Corporates know that. They’ve got the machinery to sell it at volume and the clout to censor the competition out of existence. Now,’ he tapped the display where our upload sat like a tiny purple torpedo waiting to be fired. ‘Whatever it is you’ve got there, better be pretty fucking hot if you expect it to swim against that current.’

‘Are you this positive with all your clients?’ I asked him.

He smiled bleakly. ‘I’m a realist. You pay me, I’ll shunt it. Got the best anti-screening intrusion software in Landfall to get it there in one piece. Just like the sign says. We Get You Noticed. But don’t expect me to massage your ego too, because that isn’t part of the service. Where you want this squirted, there’s too much going on to be optimistic about your chances.’

At our backs, a pair of windows were open onto the noise of the street three floors below. The air outside had cooled with the onset of evening, but the atmosphere in the promoter’s office still tasted stale. Tanya Wardani shifted impatiently.

‘It’s a niche thing,’ she rasped. ‘Can we get on with this.’

‘Sure.’ The promoter glanced once more at the credit screen and the payment that floated there in hard green digits. ‘Better fasten your launch belts. This is going to cost you at speed.’

He hit the switch. There was a brief ripple across the display and the purple torpedo vanished. I caught a glimpse of it represented on a series of helix-based transmission visuals, and then it faded, swallowed behind the wall of corporate data security systems and presumably beyond the tracking capacity of the promoter’s much-vaunted software. The green digit counters whirled into frantic, blurred eights.

‘Told you,’ said the promoter, shaking his head judiciously. ‘High-line screening systems like that, would have cost them a year’s profits just for the installation. And cutting the high line costs, my friends.’

‘Evidently.’ I watched our credit decay like an unprotected antimatter core and quelled a sudden desire to remove the promoter’s throat with my bare hands. It wasn’t really the money; we had plenty of that. Six million saft might have been a poor price for a Wu Morrison shuttle, but it was going to be enough for us to live like kings for the duration of our stay in Landfall.

It wasn’t the money.

It was the designer fashion war gear and the drawled theories on what to do with wartime art, the fake seen-it/been-it worldweariness, while on the other side of the equator men and women blew each other apart in the name of minor adjustments to the system that kept Landfall fed.

‘That’s it.’ The promoter played a brisk drumroll across his console with both hands. ‘Gone home, near as I can tell. Time for you boys and girls to do the same.’

‘Near as you can tell,’ said Schneider. ‘What the fuck is that?’

He got the bleak smile again. ‘Hey. Read your contract. To the best of our ability, we deliver. And that’s to the best of anyone else’s ability on Sanction IV. You bought state of the art, you didn’t buy any guarantees.’

He ejected our eviscerated credit chip from the machine and tossed it onto the table in front of Tanya Wardani, who pocketed it, deadpan.

‘So how long do we wait?’ she asked through a yawn.

‘What am I, clairvoyant?’ The promoter sighed. ‘Could be quick, like a couple of days, could be a month or more. All depends on the demo, and I didn’t see that. I’m just the mailman. Could be never. Go home, I’ll mail you.’

We left, seen out with the same studied disinterest with which we’d been received and processed. Outside, we went left in the evening gloom, crossed the street and found a terrace café about twenty metres up from the promoter’s garish third-floor display holo. This close to curfew, it was almost deserted. We dumped our bags under a table and ordered short coffees.

‘How long?’ Wardani asked again.

‘Thirty minutes.’ I shrugged. ‘Depends on their AI. Forty-five, the outside.’

I still hadn’t finished my coffee when they came.

The cruiser was an unobtrusive brown utility vehicle, ostensibly bulky and underpowered but to a tutored eye very obviously armoured. It slunk round a corner a hundred metres up the street at ground level and crawled down towards the promoter’s building.

‘Here we go,’ I murmured, wisps of Khumalo neurachem flickering into life up and down my body. ‘Stay here, both of you.’

I stood up unhurriedly and drifted across the street, hands in pockets, head cocked at a rubbernecker’s angle. Ahead of me the cruiser floated to a curb hugging halt outside the promoter’s door and a side hatch hinged up. I watched as five coverall-clad figures climbed out and then vanished into the building with a telltale economy of motion. The hatch folded back down.

I picked up speed fractionally as I made my way among the hurrying last-minute shoppers on the pavement, and my left hand closed around the thing in my pocket.

The cruiser’s windscreen was solid-looking and almost opaque. Behind it, my neurachem-aided vision could just distinguish two figures in the seats and the hint of another body bulking behind them, braced upright to peer out. I glanced sideways at a shop frontage, closing the last of the gap up to the front of the cruiser.

And time.

Less than half a metre, and my left hand came out of its pocket. I slammed the flat disc of the termite grenade hard against the windscreen and stepped immediately aside and past.

Crack!

With termite grenades you’ve got to get out of the way quickly. The new ones are designed to deliver all their shrapnel and better than ninety-five per cent of their force to the contact face, but the five per cent that comes out on the opposite side will still make a mess of you if you stand in the way.

The cruiser shuddered from end to end. Contained within the armoured body, the sound of the explosion was reduced to a muffled crump. I ducked in through the door to the promoter’s building and went up the stairs at a run.

(At the first floor landing I reached for the interface guns, the bioalloy plates sewn beneath the palms of my hands already flexing, yearning.)

They’d posted a single sentry on the third-floor landing, but they weren’t expecting trouble from behind. I shot him through the back of the head as I came up the last flight of stairs - splash of blood and paler tissue in clots across the wall in front of him - made the landing before he’d hit the ground and then erupted around the corner of the promoter’s office door.

The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whisky, burning . . .

Splinters of vision . . .

The promoter tries to rise from his seat where two of them have him pinned and tilted back. One arm thrashes free and points in my direction.

‘That’s hi—’

The goon nearest the door, turning . . .

Cut him down. Three-shot burst, left-handed.

Blood splatters the air - I twist, neurachem hyperswift, to avoid it.

The squad leader - recognisable, somehow. Taller, more presence, something, yelling, ‘What the fu—’

Body shots. Chest and weapon arm, get that firing hand wrecked.

The right-hand Kalashnikov spurts flame and softcore antipersonnel slugs.

Two left, trying to shrug themselves free of the half-pinioned, flailing promoter, to clear weapons that . . .

Both hands now - head, body, anywhere.

The Kalashnikovs bark like excited dogs.

Bodies jerking, tumbling . . .

And done.

Silence slammed down in the tiny office. The promoter cowered under the body of one of his slain captors. Somewhere, something sparked and shorted out in the console - damage from one of my slugs that had gone wide or through. I could hear voices out on the landing.

I knelt beside the wreckage of the lead goon’s corpse and set down the smart guns. Beneath my jacket, I tugged the vibroknife from its sheath in the small of my back and activated the motor. With my free hand I pressed down hard on the dead man’s spine and started cutting.

‘Ah, fuck, man.’ The promoter gagged and threw up across his console. ‘Fuck, fuck.’

I looked up at him.

‘Shut up, this isn’t easy.’

He ducked down again.

After a couple of false starts, the vibroknife took and sliced down through the spinal column a few vertebrae below the point where it met the base of the skull. I steadied the skull against the floor with one knee, then pressed down again and started a new incision. The knife slipped and slithered again on the curve of the bone.

‘Shit.’

The voices out on the landing were growing in number and, it seemed, creeping closer. I stopped what I was doing, picked up one of the Kalashnikovs left-handed and fired a brace of shots out of the doorway into the wall opposite. The voices departed in a stampede of feet on stairs.

Back to the knife. I managed to get the point lodged, cut through the bone, and then used the blade to lever the severed section of spine up out of the surrounding flesh and muscle. Messy, but there wasn’t a lot of time. I stuffed the severed bone into a pocket, wiped my hands on a clean portion of the dead man’s tunic and sheathed the knife. Then I picked up the smart guns and went cautiously to the door.

Quiet.

As I was leaving, I glanced back at the promoter. He was staring at me as if I’d just sprouted a reef demon’s fangs.

‘Go home,’ I told him. ‘They’ll be back. Near as I can tell.’

I made it down the three flights of stairs without meeting anyone, though I could feel eyes peering from other doors on the landings I passed. Outside, I scanned the street in both directions, stowed the Kalashnikovs and slipped away, past the hot, smouldering carapace of the bombed-out cruiser. The pavement was empty for fifty metres in both directions and the frontages on either side of the wreck had all cranked down their security blinds. A crowd was gathering on the other side of the street, but no one seemed to know what exactly to do. The few passers-by who noticed me looked hurriedly away as I passed.

Immaculate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nobody said much on the way to the hotel.

We did most of it on foot, doubling back through covered ways and malls to blind any satellite eyes the Mandrake Corporation might have access to. Breathless work, weighed down with the carryall bags. Twenty minutes of this found us under the broad eaves of a refrigerated storage facility, where I waved a transport pager at the sky and eventually succeeded in flagging down a cab. We climbed in without leaving the cover of the eaves and sank back into the seats without a word.

‘It is my duty to inform you,’ the machine told us prissily, ‘that in seventeen minutes you will be in breach of curfew.’

‘Better get us home quick then,’ I said and gave it the address.

‘Estimated trajectory time nine minutes. Please insert payment.’

I nodded at Schneider, who produced an unused credit chip and fed it to the slot. The cab chittered and we lifted smoothly into a night sky almost devoid of traffic before sliding off westward. I rolled my head sideways on the back of the seat and watched the lights of the city pass beneath us for a while, mentally backtracking to see how well we’d covered ourselves.

When I rolled my head back again, I caught Tanya Wardani staring straight at me. She didn’t look away.

I went back to watching the lights until we started to fall back towards them.

The hotel was well chosen, the cheapest of a row built under a commercial freight overpass and used almost exclusively by prostitutes and wireheads. The desk clerk was sleeved in a cheap Syntheta body whose silicoflesh was showing signs of wear around the knuckles and had a very obvious re-upholstering graft halfway up the right arm. The desk was heavily stained in a number of places and nubbed every ten centimetres along its outer edge with shield generators. In the corners of the dimly-lit lobby, empty-faced women and boys flickered about wanly, like flames almost out.

The desk clerk’s logo-scribbled eyes passed over us like a damp cloth.

‘Ten saft an hour, fifty deposit up front. Shower and screen access is another fifty.’

‘We want it for the night,’ Schneider told him. ‘Curfew just came down, case you hadn’t noticed.’

The clerk stayed expressionless, but then maybe that was the sleeve. Syntheta have been known to skimp on the smaller facial nerve/muscle interfaces.

‘Then that’ll be eighty saft, plus fifty deposit. Shower and screen fifty extra.’

‘No discount for long-stay guests?’

His eyes switched to me, and one hand disappeared below the counter. I felt the neurachem surge, still jumpy after the firefight.

‘You want the room or not?’

‘We want it,’ said Schneider with a warning glance at me. ‘You got a chip reader?’

‘That’s ten per cent extra.’ He seemed to search his memory for something. ‘Handling surcharge.’

‘Fine.’

The clerk propped himself to his feet, disappointed, and went to fetch the reader from a room in back.

‘Cash,’ murmured Wardani. ‘We should have thought of that.’

Schneider shrugged. ‘Can’t think of everything. When was the last time you paid for something without a chip?’

She shook her head. I thought back briefly to a time three decades gone and a place light years distant where for a while I’d used tactile currency instead of credit. I’d even got used to the quaint plastified notes with their ornate designs and holographic panels. But that was on Earth, and Earth is a place straight out of a pre-colonial period experia flick. For a while there I’d even thought I was in love and, motivated by love and hate in about equal proportions, I’d done some stupid things. A part of me had died on Earth.

Another planet, another sleeve.

I shook an unfairly well-remembered face from my mind and looked around, seeking to embed myself back in the present. Garishly painted faces looked back from the shadows, then away.

Thoughts for a brothel lobby. Ye Gods.

The desk clerk came back, read one of Schneider’s chips and banged a scarred plastic key card on the counter.

‘Through the back and down the stairs. Fourth level. I’ve activated the shower and screen till curfew break. You want any of it longer, you’ll need to come up and pay again.’ The silicoflesh face flexed in what was probably supposed to be a grin. He shouldn’t have bothered. ‘Rooms are all soundproofed. Do what you like.’

The corridor and steel frame stairwell were, if anything, worse lit than the lobby. In places the illuminum tiles were peeling off the walls and ceiling. Elsewhere they had just gone out. The stair rail was painted luminous but that too was fading, coming off microns at a time with every hand that gripped and slid along the metal.

We passed a scattering of whores on the stairs, most with customers in tow. Little bubbles of fake hilarity floated around them, tinkling. Business seemed to be brisk. I spotted a couple of uniforms among the clientele, and what looked like a Cartel political officer leant on the second level landing rail, smoking pensively. No one gave us a second glance.

The room was long and low-ceilinged with a quickmould resin cornice-and-pillar effect epoxied onto the raw concrete walls, the whole then painted in violent primary red. About halfway down, two bedshelves jutted out from opposing walls with a half metre of space between their adjacent sides. The second bed had plastic chains moulded into the four corners of the shelf. At the far end of the room stood a self-contained shower stall wide enough to take three bodies at a time, should the occasion so require. Opposite each bed was a wide screen with a menu display glowing on a pale pink background.

I looked around, puffed a single breath out into blood-warm air and then stooped to the carryall at my feet.

‘Make sure that door’s secured.’

I pulled the sweeper unit out of the bag and waved it around the room. Three bugs showed up in the ceiling, one above each bed and one in the shower. Very imaginative. Schneider snapped a Wedge standard limpet neutraliser onto the ceiling next to each one. They’d get into the bugs’ memories, pull out whatever had been stored there over the last couple of hours and then recycle it endlessly. The better models will even scan the content and then generate plausible improvised scenes from stock, but I didn’t think that was going to be necessary here. The desk clerk had not given the impression that he was fronting a high-security operation.

‘Where do you want this stuff ?’ Schneider asked Wardani, unpacking one of the other carryalls onto the first bed shelf.

‘Right there is fine,’ she said. ‘Here, I’ll do it. It’s, uhm, complicated.’

Schneider raised an eyebrow. ‘Right. Fine. I’ll just watch.’

Complicated or not, it only took the archaeologue about ten minutes to assemble her equipment. When she was done, she took a pair of modified EV goggles from the flaccid skin of the empty carryall and settled them over her head. She turned to me.

‘You want to give me that?’

I reached into my jacket and produced the segment of spine. There were still fresh streaks of gore clinging to the tiny bumps and crannies of the bone, but she took it without apparent revulsion and dumped it into the top of the artefact scrubber she’d just finished snapping together. A pale violet light sprang up under the glass hood. Schneider and I watched fascinated as she jacked the goggles into one side of the machine, picked up the connected handset and settled cross-legged to work. From within the machine came tiny crackling sounds.

‘Working alright?’ I asked.

She grunted.

‘How long is this going to take?’

‘Longer, if you keep asking me stupid questions,’ she said without looking away from what she was doing. ‘Don’t you have anything else to do?’

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Schneider grinning.

By the time we’d put together the other machine, Wardani was almost done. I peered over her shoulder into the purple glow and saw what remained of the spinal segment. Most of it was gone, and the final pieces of vertebrae were being eaten away from the tiny metal cylinder of the cortical stack. I watched, fascinated. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a cortical stack removed from a dead spine, but it had to be amongst the most elegant versions of the operation I’d ever witnessed. The bone retreated, vanishing one minute increment at a time as Tanya Wardani cut it away with her tools, and the stack casing emerged scrubbed clean of surrounding tissue and shiny as new tin.

‘I do know what I’m doing, Kovacs,’ Wardani said, voice slow and absent with concentration. ‘Compared to scrubbing the accretion off Martian circuitboards, this is like sandblasting.’

‘I don’t doubt it. I was just admiring your handiwork.’

She did look up then, sharply, pushing the goggles up on her forehead to see if I was laughing at her. When she saw I wasn’t, she lowered the goggles again, made a couple of adjustments to something on the handset then sat back. The violet light went out.

‘It’s done.’ She reached into the machine and removed the stack, holding it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Incidentally, this isn’t great equipment. In fact it’s the sort of thing Scratchers buy for their thesis work. The sensors are pretty crude. I’m going to need a lot better than this up on the Rim.’

‘Don’t worry.’ I took the cortical stack from her and turned to the machine on the other bed. ‘If this works out, they’ll build your gear to custom order. Now, listen carefully, both of you. There may well be a virtual environment tracer built into this stack. A lot of corporate samurai are wired that way. This one may not be, but we’re going to assume he is. That means we’ve got about a minute of safe access before the trace powers up and kicks in. So when that counter hits fifty seconds, you shut everything down. This is just a casualty ID&A, but cranked up we’ll still get a ratio of about thirty-five to one, real time. Little over half an hour, but that ought to be enough.’

‘What are you going to do to him?’ This was Wardani, looking unhappy.

I reached for the skullcap. ‘Nothing. There isn’t time. I’m just going to talk to him.’

‘Talk?’ There was a strange light in her eyes.

‘Sometimes,’ I told her. ‘That’s all it takes.’

It was a rough ride in.

Casualty Identification and Assessment is a relatively new tool in military accounting. We didn’t have it at Innenin; the prototype systems didn’t appear until after I’d bailed out of the Corps, and even then it was decades before anyone outside Protectorate elite forces could afford it. The cheaper models came out about fifteen years ago, much to the delight of military auditors everywhere, though of course they weren’t ever the ones who had to ride the system. ID&A is a job usually done by battlefield medics trying to pull the dead and wounded out, often under fire. Under those circumstances, smooth-format transition tends to be seen as a bit of a luxury, and the set we’d liberated from the hospital shuttle was definitely a no-frills model.

I closed my eyes in the concrete-walled room and the induction kicked me in the back of the head like a tetrameth rush. For a couple of seconds I sank dizzyingly through an ocean of static, and then that snapped out, replaced by a boundless field of wheat that stood unnaturally still under a late afternoon sun. Something hit me hard in the soles of the feet, jolting upward, and I was standing on a long wooden porch looking out over the field. Behind me was the house the porch belonged to, a single-storey wood-frame place, apparently old but too perfectly finished for anything that had genuinely aged. The boards all met with geometric precision and there were no flaws or cracks anywhere that I could see. It looked like something an AI with no humanity interface protocols would dream up from image stock, and that’s probably exactly what it was.

Thirty minutes, I reminded myself.

Time to Identify and Assess.

It’s in the nature of modern warfare that there often isn’t very much left of dead soldiers, and that can make life difficult for the auditors. Certain soldiers will always be worth re-sleeving; experienced officers are a valuable resource and a grunt at any level may have vital specialist skills or knowledge. The problem lies in identifying these soldiers rapidly and separating them out from the grunts who aren’t worth the cost of a new sleeve. How, in the screaming chaos of a war zone, are you going to do this? Barcoding burns off with the skin, dog tags melt or get inconveniently shredded by shrapnel. DNA scanning is sometimes an option, but it’s chemically complicated, hard to administer on a battlefield and some of the nastier chemical weapons will fuck up the results completely.

Worse still, none of this will tell you if the slain soldier is still a psychologically viable unit for re-sleeving. How you die - fast, slow, alone, with friends, in agony or numb - is bound to affect the level of trauma you suffer. The level of trauma affects your combat viability. So too does your re-sleeving history. Too many new sleeves too fast leads to Repeat Re-sleeve Syndrome, which I’d seen the year before in a once-too-often retrieved Wedge demolitions sergeant. They’d downloaded him, for the ninth time since the war began, into a clone-fresh twenty-year-old sleeve, and he sat in it like an infant in its own shit, screaming and weeping incoherently in between bouts of introspection in which he examined his own fingers as if they were toys he didn’t want any more.

Oops.

The point is there’s no way to learn these facts with any degree of certainty from the broken and charred remnants the medics are often faced with. Fortunately for the accountants, though, cortical stack technology makes it possible not only to identify and tag individual casualties, but also to find out if they have gone irretrievably screaming insane. Snugged inside the spinal column, just below the skull, the mind’s black box is about as safe as it’s possible to make it. The surrounding bone in itself is remarkably resistant to damage, and just in case good old evolutionary engineering isn’t up to the job, the materials used to make cortical stacks are among the hardest artificial substances known to man. You can sandblast a stack clean without worrying about damaging it, jack it into a virtual environment generator by hand and then just dive in after your subject. The equipment to do all this will fit into a large carryall.

I went to the perfect wooden door. Chiselled into a copper plate on the boards beside it was an eight-digit serial number and a name: Deng Zhao Jun. I turned the handle. The door swung inward noiselessly and I walked through into a clinically tidy space dominated by a long wooden table. A pair of mustard-cushioned armchairs stood off to one side, facing a grate in which a small fire crackled. At the back of the room, doors appeared to lead off to a kitchen and a bedroom.

He was seated at the table, head in his hands. Apparently he hadn’t heard the door open. The set would have brought him online a few seconds before it let me in, so he’d probably had a couple of minutes to get over the initial shock of arrival and realise where he was. Now he just had to deal with it.

I coughed gently.

‘Good evening, Deng.’

He looked up and dropped his hands back to the table when he saw me. The words came out of him in a rush.

‘We were set up man, it was a fucking set-up. Someone was waiting for us, you can tell Hand his security’s fucked. They must—’

His voice dried up and his eyes widened as he recognised me.

‘Yes.’

He jerked to his feet. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘That’s not really important. Look—’

But it was too late, he was up and coming for me round the table, eyes slitted with fury. I stepped back.

‘Look, there’s no point—’

He closed the gap and lashed out, knee-height kick and mid-level punch. I blocked the kick, locked up the punching arm and dumped him on the floor. He tried another kick as he landed and I had to dodge back out of reach to avoid getting hit in the face. Then he slithered to his feet, and came at me again.

This time I stepped in to meet him, deflecting his attacks with wing blocks and butterfly kicks and using knee and elbows to take him down. He grunted gut-deep with the blows and hit the floor for the second time, one arm folded beneath his body. I went down after him, landed on his back and dragged the available wrist up, locking out the arm until it creaked.

‘Right, that’s enough. You are in a fucking virtuality.’ I got my breath back and lowered my voice. ‘Plus, any more shit out of you and I’ll break this arm. Got it?’

He nodded as best he could with his face pressed into the floorboards.

‘Alright.’ I lessened the pressure on the arm a fraction. ‘Now I’m going to let you up and we’re going to do this in a civilised fashion. I want to ask you some questions, Deng. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to, but it’ll be in your best interests, so just hear me out.’

I got up and stepped away from him. After a moment he climbed to his feet and limped back to his chair, massaging his arm. I sat down at the other end of the table.

‘You wired for virtual trace?’

He shook his head.

‘Yeah, well, you’d probably say that even if you were. It isn’t going to help. We’re running a mirror-code scrambler. Now, I want to know who your controller is.’

He stared at me. ‘Why should I tell you a fucking thing?’

‘Because if you do, I’ll turn your cortical stack back over to Mandrake and they’ll probably re-sleeve you.’ I leaned forward in the chair. ‘That’s a one-time special offer, Deng. Grab it while it lasts.’

‘If you kill me, Mandrake’ll—’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Get a sense of reality about this. You’re what, a security operations manager? Tactical deployment exec? Mandrake can get a dozen like you from stock. There are platoon noncoms on the government reserve who’d give blowjobs for the chance to duck out of the fighting. Any one of them could do your job. And besides, the men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.’

Silence. He sat looking at me, hating.

I deployed one from the manual.

‘They might like to do a retribution number on general principles, of course. Make it known that their operatives are not to be touched without dire consequences. Most hardline outfits like to whistle that tune, and I don’t suppose Mandrake is any different.’ I gestured with one open hand. ‘But we’re not operating in a context of general principles here, are we, Deng? I mean, you know that. Have you ever worked a response that rapid before? Ever had a set of instructions so total? How did it read? Find the originators of this signal and bring them back stack intact, all other costs and considerations subordinate? Something like that?’

I let the question hang out in the air between us, a rope casually thrown out but aching to be grabbed.

Go on. Grab. Only takes a monosyllable.

But the silence held. The invitation to agree, to speak, to let go and answer, creaking under its own weight where I’d built it out into the air between us. He compressed his lips.

Try it again.

‘Something like that, Deng?’

‘You’d better go ahead and kill me,’ he said tautly.

I let the smile come out slow -

‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng.’

- and waited.

As if we had the mirror-code scrambler. As if we couldn’t be tracked. As if we had the time. Believe it.

All the time in the universe.

‘You’re—?’ he said, finally.

‘I’m not going to kill you, Deng. That’s what I said. I’m. Not. Going to kill you.’ I shrugged. ‘Far too easy. Be just like switching you off. You don’t get to be a corporate hero that easy.’

I saw the puzzlement sliding into tension.

‘Oh, and don’t get any ideas about torture either. I don’t have the stomach for that. I mean, who knows what kind of resistance software they’ve downloaded into you. Too messy, too inconclusive, too long. And I can get my answers somewhere else if I have to. Like I said, this is a one-time special offer. Answer the questions now, while you’ve still got the chance.’

‘Or what?’ Almost solid bravado, but the new uncertainty made it slippery at base. Twice he’d prepped himself for what he thought was coming, and twice he’d had his assumptions cut out from under him. The fear in him was fume thin, but rising.

I shrugged.

‘Or I’ll leave you here.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll leave you here. I mean, we’re out in the middle of the Chariset Waste, Deng. Some abandoned dig town, I don’t think it even has a name. An even thousand kilometres of desert in every direction. I’m just going to leave you plugged in.’

He blinked, trying to assimilate the angle. I leaned in again.

‘You’re in a Casualty ID&A system. Runs off a battlefield powerpack. It’s probably good for decades on these settings. Hundreds of years, virtual time. Which is going to seem pretty fucking real to you, sitting in here watching the wheat grow. If it grows in a format this basic. You won’t get hungry here, you won’t get thirsty, but I’m willing to bet you’ll go insane before the first century’s out.’

I sat back again. Let it sink into him.

‘Or you can answer my questions. One-time offer. What’s it going to be?’

The silence built, but it was a different kind this time. I let him stare me out for a minute, then shrugged and got to my feet.

‘You had your chance.’

I got almost to the door before he cracked.

‘Alright!’ There was a sound like piano wire snapping in his voice. ‘Alright, you got it. You got it.’

I paused, then reached for the door handle. His voice scaled up.

‘I said you got it, man. Hand, man. Hand. Matthias Hand. He’s the man, he sent us, fucking stop man. I’ll tell you.’

Hand. The name he’d blurted earlier. Safe to bet he’d cracked for real. I turned slowly back from the door.

‘Hand?’

He nodded jerkily.

‘Matthias Hand?’

He looked up, something broken in his face. ‘I got your word?’

‘For what it’s worth, yeah. Your stack goes back to Mandrake intact. Now. Hand.’

‘Matthias Hand. Acquisitions Division.’

‘He’s your controller?’ I frowned. ‘A divisional exec?’

‘He’s not really my controller. All the tactical squads report to the Chief of Secure Operations, but since the war they’ve had seventy-five tac operatives seconded directly to Hand at Acquisitions.’

‘Why?’

‘How the fuck would I know?’

‘Speculate a little. Was it Hand’s initiative? Or general policy?’

He hesitated. ‘They say it was Hand.’

‘How long’s he been with Mandrake?’

‘I don’t know.’ He saw the expression on my face. ‘I don’t fucking know. Longer than me.’

‘What’s his rep?’

‘Tough. You don’t cross him.’

‘Yeah, him and every other corporate exec above departmental head. They’re all such tough motherfuckers. Tell me something I can’t already guess.’

‘It isn’t just talk. Two years ago some project manager in R&D had Hand up in front of the policy board for breach of company ethics—’

‘Company what?’

‘Yeah, you can laugh. At Mandrake that’s an erasure penalty if it sticks.’

‘But it didn’t.’

Deng shook his head. ‘Hand squared it with the board, no one knows how. And two weeks later this guy turns up dead in the back of a taxi, looking like something exploded inside him. They say Hand used to be a hougan in the Carrefour Brotherhood on Latimer. All that voodoo shit.’

‘All that voodoo shit,’ I repeated, not quite as unimpressed as I was playing it. Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one. Still, the Carrefour Brotherhood were as nasty a bunch of extortionists as I’d ever run across in a tour of human misery that took in, among other highlights, the Harlan’s World yakuza, the Sharyan religious police and, of course, the Envoy Corps itself. If Matthias Hand were ex-Carrefour, he’d be stained a deeper darker shade than the average corporate enforcer. ‘So apart from all that voodoo shit, what else do they say about him?’

Deng shrugged. ‘That he’s smart. Acquisitions muscled in on a lot of government contracts just before the war. Stuff the majors weren’t even looking at. The word is Hand’s telling the policy board it’ll have a seat on the Cartel by this time next year. And no one I know’s laughing at that.’

‘Yeah. Too much danger of a career change, decorating the inside of taxis with your guts. I think we’ll—’

Falling.

Leaving the ID&A format turned out to be about as much fun as coming in. It felt as if a trapdoor had opened in the floor under my chair and dropped me down a hole drilled right through the planet. The sea of static slithered in from all sides, eating up the darkness with a hungry crackling and bursting against my combined senses like an instant empathin hangover. Then it was gone, leached out and sucking away just as unpleasantly, and I was reality-aware again, head down and a tiny string of saliva drooling from one corner of my mouth.

‘You OK, Kovacs?’

Schneider.

I blinked. The air around me seemed unreasonably twilit after the static rush, as if I’d been staring into the sun for too long.

‘Kovacs?’ This time it was Tanya Wardani’s voice. I wiped my mouth and looked around. Beside me the ID&A set was humming quietly, the glowing green counter numerals frozen at 49. Wardani and Schneider stood on either side of the set, peering at me with almost comical concern. Behind them, the resin-moulded tawdriness of the whoring chamber lent the whole thing an air of badly staged farce. I could feel myself starting to smirk as I reached up and removed the skullcap.

‘Well?’ Wardani drew back a little. ‘Don’t just sit there grinning. What did you get?’

‘Enough,’ I said. ‘I think we’re ready to deal now.’

PART TWO

Commercial Considerations

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don’t, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

Quellcrist Falconer Things I Should Have Learnt By Now Vol II

CHAPTER NINE

‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.’

The auctioneer tapped a finger delicately onto the bulb of her no-hands mike and the sound frub-frubbed through the vaulted space over our heads like muffled thunder. In keeping with tradition, she was attired, minus helmet and gloves, in a vacuum suit of sorts, but it was moulded in lines that reminded me more of the fashion houses on New Beijing than a Mars exploratory dig. Her voice was sweet, warm coffee laced with overproof rum. ‘Lot seventy-seven. From the Lower Danang Field, recent excavation. Three-metre pylon with laser-engraved technoglyph base. Opening offers at two hundred thousand saft.’

‘Somehow I don’t think so.’ Matthias Hand sipped at his tea and glanced idly up to where the artefact turned in holographic magnification just beyond the edge of the clearing balcony. ‘Not today, and not with that bloody great fissure running through the second glyph.’

‘Well you never know,’ I said easily. ‘No telling what kind of idiots are wandering around with too much money in a place like this.’

‘Oh, quite.’ He twisted slightly in his seat, as if scanning the loosely knotted crowd of potential buyers scattered around the balcony. ‘But I really think you’ll see this piece go for rather less than a hundred and twenty.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’ An urbane smile faded in and then out across the chiselled Caucasian planes of his face. He was, like most corporate execs, tall and forgettably good-looking. ‘Of course, I have been wrong in the past. Occasionally. Ah, good, this looks like ours.’

The food arrived, dispensed by a waiter on whom had been inflicted a cheaper and less well-cut version of the auctioneer’s suit. He unloaded our order with remarkable grace, considering. We both waited in silence while he did it and then watched him out of sight with symmetrical caution.

‘Not one of yours?’ I asked.

‘Hardly.’ Hand prodded doubtfully at the contents of the bento tray with his chopsticks. ‘You know, you might have picked another cuisine. I mean, there’s a war on and we are over a thousand kilometres from the nearest ocean. Do you really think sushi was such a good idea?’

‘I’m from Harlan’s World. It’s what we eat there.’

Both of us were ignoring the fact that the sushi bar was slap in the middle of the clearing balcony, exposed to sniper view from positions all over the auction house’s airy interior. In one such position, Jan Schneider was at that moment huddled up with a snub-barrelled hooded-discharge laser carbine, looking down a sniper-scope at Matthias Hand’s face. I didn’t know how many other men and women might be in the house doing the same thing to me.

Up on the holodisplay over our heads, the opening price slithered in warm orange numerals, down past a hundred and fifty and unchecked by the imploring tones of the auctioneer. Hand nodded towards the figure.

‘There you are. The corrosion begins.’ He started to eat. ‘Shall we get down to business then?’

‘Fair enough.’ I tossed something across the table to him. ‘That’s yours, I think.’

It rolled on the surface until he stopped it with his free hand. He picked it up between a well-manicured finger and thumb and looked at it quizzically.

‘Deng?’

I nodded.

‘What did you get out of him?’

‘Not much. No time with a virtual trace set to blow on activation, you know that.’ I shrugged. ‘He dropped your name before he realised I wasn’t a Mandrake psychosurgeon, but after that he pretty much clammed up. Tough little motherfucker.’

Hand’s expression turned sceptical, but he dropped the cortical stack into the breast pocket of his suit without further comment. He chewed slowly through another mouthful of sashimi.

‘Did you really have to shoot them all?’ he asked finally.

I shrugged. ‘That’s the way we do things up north these days. Maybe you haven’t heard. There’s a war on.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He seemed to notice my uniform for the first time. ‘So you’re in the Wedge. I wonder, how would Isaac Carrera react to news of your incursions into Landfall, do you suppose?’

I shrugged again. ‘Wedge officers get a lot of latitude. It might be a little tricky to explain, but I can always tell him I was undercover, following up a strategic initiative.’

‘And are you?’

‘No. This is strictly personal.’

‘And what if I’ve recorded this and I play it back to him?’

‘Well, if I’m undercover, I have to tell you something to maintain that cover, don’t I. That would make this conversation a double bluff. Wouldn’t it.’

There was a pause while we looked impassively at each other across the table, and then another smile spread slowly onto the Mandrake executive’s face. This one stayed longer and was unmanufactured, I thought.

‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘That is so very elegant. Congratulations, lieutenant. It’s so watertight I don’t know what to believe, myself. You could be working for the Wedge, for all I know.’

‘Yes, I could.’ I smiled back. ‘But you know what? You don’t have time to worry about that. Because the same data you received yesterday is in locked-down launch configuration at fifty places in the Landfall dataflow, preprogrammed for high-impact delivery into every corporate stack in the Cartel. And the clock is running. You’ve got about a month to put this together. After that, well, all your heavyweight competitors will know what you know, and a certain stretch of coastline is going to look like Touchdown Boulevard on New Year’s Eve.’

‘Be quiet.’ Hand’s voice stayed gentle, but there was a sudden spike of steel under the suave tones. ‘We’re in the open here. If you want to do business with Mandrake, you’re going to have to learn a little discretion. No more specifics, please.’

‘Fine. Just as long as we understand each other.’

‘I think we do.’

‘I hope so.’ I let my own tone harden a little. ‘You underestimated me when you sent the goon squad out last night. Don’t do it again.’

‘I wouldn’t dream—’

‘That’s good. Don’t even dream about it, Hand. Because what happened to Deng and his pals last night doesn’t come close to some of the unpleasantries I’ve been party to in the last eighteen months up north. You may think the war’s a long way off right now, but if Mandrake tries to shaft me or my associates again, you’ll have a Wedge wake-up call rammed so far up your arse you’ll be able to taste your own shit in the back of your throat. Now, do we understand each other?’

Hand made a pained face. ‘Yes. You’ve made your point very graphically. I assure you, there will be no more attempts to cut you out of the loop. That’s provided your demands are reasonable, of course. What kind of finder’s fee were you looking for?’

‘Twenty million UN dollars. And don’t look at me like that, Hand. It’s not even a tenth per cent of what Mandrake stands to make from this, if we’re successful.’

Up on the holo, the asking price seemed to have braked at a hundred and nine and the auctioneer was now coaxing it upward a fraction at a time.

‘Hmm.’ Hand chewed and swallowed while he thought about it. ‘Cash on delivery?’

‘No. Up front, on deposit in a Latimer City bank. One-way transfer, standard seven-hour reversibility limit. I’ll give you the account codes later.’

‘That’s presumptuous, lieutenant.’

‘Call it insurance. Not that I don’t trust you, Hand, but I’ll feel happier knowing you’ve already made the payment. That way, there’s no percentage in Mandrake fucking me over after the event. You don’t stand to gain anything from it.’

The Mandrake exec grinned wolfishly. ‘Trust works both ways, lieutenant. Why should we pay you before the project matures?’

‘Other than because if you don’t I’ll walk away from this table and you’ll lose the biggest R&D coup the Protectorate has ever seen, you mean?’ I let that sink in for a moment before I hit him with the relaxant. ‘Well, look at it this way. I can’t access the money from here as long as the war’s on; the Emergency Powers Directive ensures that. So your money’s gone, but I don’t have it either. To get paid, I have to be on Latimer. That’s your guarantee.’

‘You want to go to Latimer as well?’ Hand raised an eyebrow. ‘Twenty million UN and passage offworld?’

‘Don’t be obtuse, Hand. What did you expect? You think I want to wait around until Kemp and the Cartel finally decide it’s time to negotiate instead of fight? I don’t have that kind of patience.’

‘So.’ The Mandrake exec set down his chopsticks and steepled his hands on the table. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We pay you twenty million UN dollars, now. That’s non-negotiable.’

I looked back at him, waiting.

‘Is that right?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll stop you if you get off track.’

The faint there-and-gone smile again. ‘Thank you. Then, upon successful completion of this project, we undertake to freight you, and presumably your associates, by needlecast to Latimer. Are those all of your demands?’

‘Plus decanting.’

Hand looked at me strangely. I guessed he wasn’t used to his negotiations taking this path.

‘Plus decanting. Any specifics I should know about there?’

I shrugged. ‘Selected sleeves, obviously, but we can discuss the specifics later. Doesn’t have to be custom. Something top of the range, obviously, but off the rack will do fine.’

‘Oh, good.’

I felt a grin floating up, tickling the inner surfaces of my belly. I let it surface. ‘Come on Hand. You’re getting a fucking bargain, and you know it.’

‘So you say. But it isn’t that simple, lieutenant. We’ve checked the Landfall artefact registry for the past five years, and there’s no trace of anything like the item you describe.’ He spread his hands. ‘No evidence. You can see my position.’

‘Yeah, I can. In about two minutes you’re about to lose the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years, and you’re going to do it because there’s nothing in your files about it. If that’s your position, Hand, I’m dealing with the wrong people.’

‘Are you saying this find went unregistered? In direct breach of the Charter?’

‘I’m saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying what we sent you looked real enough for either you or your pet AI to authorise a full urban commando strike inside half an hour. Maybe the files got wiped, maybe they were corrupted or stolen. Why am I even discussing this? Are you going to pay us, or are you going to walk?’

Silence. He was pretty good - I still couldn’t tell which way he was going to jump. He hadn’t shown me a single genuine emotion since we sat down. I waited. He sat back and brushed something invisible from his lap.

‘I’m afraid this will require some consultation with my colleagues. I’m not authorised to sign off on deals of this magnitude, with this little up front. Authorisation for the DHF needlecasting alone will need—’

‘Crap.’ I kept it friendly. ‘But go ahead. Consult. I can give you half an hour.’

‘Half an hour?’

Fear - the tiniest flicker of it at the narrowed corners of his eyes, but it was there and I felt the satisfaction come surging up from my stomach in the wake of the grin, savage with nearly two years of suppressed rage.

Got you, motherfucker.

‘Sure. Thirty minutes. I’ll be right here. I hear the green tea sorbet’s pretty good in this place.’

‘You’re not serious.’

I let the savagery corrode the edge of my voice. ‘Sure, I’m serious. I warned you about that. Don’t underestimate me again, Hand. You get me a decision inside thirty minutes or I walk out of here and go talk to someone else. I might even stiff you with the bill.’

He jerked his head irritably.

‘And who would you go to?’

‘Sathakarn Yu? PKN?’ I gestured with my chopsticks. ‘Who knows? But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll work something out. You’ll be busy enough trying to explain to the policy board how you let this slip through your fingers. Won’t you?’

Matthias Hand compressed a breath and got up. He sorted out a thin smile and flashed it at me.

‘Very well. I’ll be back shortly. But you have a little to learn about the art of negotiation, Lieutenant Kovacs.’

‘Probably. Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time up north.’

I watched him walk away between the potential buyers on the balcony, and could not repress a faint shiver. If I was going to get my face lasered off, there was a good chance it would happen now.

I was banking hard on an intuition that Hand had licence from the policy board to do pretty much what he wanted. Mandrake was the commercial world’s equivalent of Carrera’s Wedge, and you had to assume a corresponding approach to latitudes of initiative at executive levels. There was really no other way for a cutting-edge organism to work.

Don’t expect anything, and you will be ready for it. In Corps-approved fashion, I stayed in surface neutral, defocused, but underneath it all I could feel my mind worrying at the details like a rat.

Twenty million wasn’t much in corporate terms, not for a guaranteed outcome like the one I was sketching for Mandrake. And hopefully I’d committed enough mayhem the night before to make them wary of risking another grab at the goods without paying. I was pushing hard, but it was all stacked up to fall in the desired direction. It made sense for them to pay us out.

Right, Takeshi?

My face twitched.

If my much-vaunted Envoy intuition was wrong, if Mandrake execs were leashed tighter than I thought, and if Hand couldn’t get a green light for cooperation, he might just decide to try smash and grab after all. Starting with my death and subsequent re-sleeving in an interrogation construct. And if Mandrake’s assumed snipers took me down now, there wasn’t much Schneider and Wardani could do but fall back and hide.

Don’t expect anything and—

And they wouldn’t be able to hide for long. Not from someone like Hand.

Don’t—

Envoy serenity was getting hard to come by on Sanction IV.

This fucking war.

And then Matthias Hand was there, threading his way back through the crowd, with a faint smile on his lips and decision written into the lines of his stride as if he were marketing the stuff. Above his head, the Martian pylon turned in holo, orange numerals flaring to a halt and then to the red of arterial spray. Shutdown colours. One hundred and twenty-three thousand seven hundred saft.

Sold.

CHAPTER TEN

Dangrek.

The coast huddled inward from a chilly grey sea, weathered granite hills thinly clothed with low growing vegetation and a few patches of forest. It was clothing that the landscape started shrugging off in favour of lichen and bare rock as soon as height permitted. Less than ten kilometres inland the bones of the land showed clean in the tumbled peaks and gullies of the ancient mountain range that was Dangrek’s spine. Late-afternoon sunlight speared in through shreds of cloud caught on the few remaining teeth the landscape owned and turned the sea to dirty mercury.

A thin breeze swept in off the ocean and buffeted good-naturedly across our faces. Schneider glanced down at his ungoosefleshed arms and frowned. He was wearing the Lapinee T-shirt he’d got up in that morning, and no jacket.

‘Should be colder than this,’ he said.

‘Should be covered in little bits of dead Wedge commandos as well, Jan.’ I wandered past him to where Matthias Hand stood with his hands in the pockets of his board-meeting suit, looking up at the sky as if he expected rain. ‘This is from stock, right? Stored construct, no real time update?’

‘Not as yet.’ Hand dropped his gaze to meet my eye. ‘Actually, it’s something we’ve worked up from military AI projections. The climate protocols aren’t in yet. It’s still quite crude, but for locational purposes . . .’

He turned expectantly to Tanya Wardani, who was staring off across the rough grass hillscape in the opposite direction. She nodded without looking round at us.

‘It’ll do,’ she said distantly. ‘I guess an MAI won’t have missed much.’

‘Then you’ll be able to show us what we’re looking for, presumably.’ A long, tuned-out pause, and I wondered if the fastload therapy I’d done on Wardani might be coming apart at the seams. Then the archaeologue turned about.

‘Yes.’ Another pause. ‘Of course. This way.’

She set out across the side of the hill with what seemed like overlong strides, coat flapping in the breeze. I exchanged a glance with Hand, who shrugged his immaculately tailored shoulders and made an elegant after you gesture with one hand. Schneider had already started out after the archaeologue, so we fell in behind. I let Hand take the lead and stayed back, watching amused as he slipped on the gradient in his unsuitable boardroom shoes.

A hundred metres ahead, Wardani had found a narrow path worn by some grazing animal and was following it down towards the shore. The breeze kept pace across the hillside, stirring the long grass and making the stiff petalled heads of spider-rose nod in dreamy acquiescence. Overhead, the cloud cover seemed to be breaking up on a backdrop of quiet grey.

I was having a hard time reconciling it all with the last time I’d been up on the Northern Rim. It was the same landscape for a thousand kilometres in either direction along the coast, but I remembered it slick with blood and fluids from the hydraulic systems of murdered war machines. I remembered raw granite wounds torn in the hills, shrapnel and scorched grass and the scything blast of charged particle guns from the sky. I remembered screaming.

We crested the last row of hills before the shore and stood looking down on a coastline of jutting rock promontories tilted into the sea like sinking aircraft carriers. Between these wrenched fingers of land, gleaming turquoise sand caught the light in a succession of small, shallow bays. Further out, small islets and reefs broke the surface in places, and the coast swept out and round to the east where—

I stopped and narrowed my eyes. On the eastern edge of the long coastal sweep, the virtuality’s fabric seemed to be wearing through, revealing a patch of grey unfocus that looked like old steel wool. At irregular intervals, a dim red glow lit the grey from within.

‘Hand. What’s that?’

‘That?’ He saw where I was pointing. ‘Oh, that. Grey area.’

‘I can see that.’ Now Wardani and Schneider had both stopped to peer along the line of my raised arm. ‘What’s it doing there?’

But some part of me recently steeped in the dark and spiderweb green of Carrera’s holomaps and geolocational models was already waking up to the answer. I could feel the pre-knowledge trickling down the gullies of my mind like the detritus ahead of a major rock fall.

Tanya Wardani got there just ahead of me.

‘It’s Sauberville,’ she said flatly. ‘Isn’t it?’

Hand had the good grace to look embarrassed. ‘That is correct, Mistress Wardani. The MAI posits a fifty per cent likelihood that Sauberville will be tactically reduced within the next two weeks.’

A small, peculiar chill fell into the air, and the look that passed from Schneider to Wardani and back to me felt like current. Sauberville had a population of a hundred and twenty thousand.

‘Reduced how?’ I asked.

Hand shrugged. ‘It depends who does it. If it’s the Cartel, they’ll probably use one of their CP orbital guns. Relatively clean, so it doesn’t inconvenience your friends in the Wedge if they fight their way through this far. If Kemp does it, he won’t be so subtle, or so clean.’

‘Tactical nuke,’ said Schneider tonelessly. ‘Riding a marauder delivery system.’

‘Well, it’s what he’s got.’ Hand shrugged again. ‘And to be honest, if he has to do it, he won’t want a clean blast anyway. He’ll be falling back, trying to leave the whole peninsula too contaminated for the Cartel to occupy.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. He did the same thing at Evenfall.’

‘Motherfucking psycho,’ said Schneider, apparently to the sky.

Tanya Wardani said nothing, but she looked as if she was trying to loosen a piece of meat trapped between her teeth with her tongue.

‘So.’ Hand’s tone shifted up into a forced briskness. ‘Mistress Wardani, you were going to show us something, I believe.’

Wardani turned away. ‘It’s down on the beach,’ she said.

The path we were following wound its way around one of the bays and ended at a small overhang that had collapsed into a cone of shattered rock spilling down to the pale blue shaded sand. Wardani jumped down with a practised flex in her legs and trudged across the beach to where the rocks were larger and the overhangs towered at five times head height. I went after her, scanning the rise of land behind us with professional unease. The rock faces triangled back to form a long, shallow Pythagorean alcove about the size of the hospital shuttle deck I’d met Schneider on. Most of the space was filled with a fall of huge boulders and jagged fragments of rock.

We assembled around Tanya Wardani’s motionless figure. She was faced off against the tumbled rock like a platoon scout on point.

‘That’s it.’ She nodded ahead. ‘That’s where we buried it.’

‘Buried it?’ Matthias Hand looked around at the three of us with an expression that under other circumstances might have been comical. ‘How exactly did you bury it?’

Schneider gestured at the fall of debris, and the raw rock face behind it. ‘Use your eyes, man. How do you think?’

‘You blew it up?’

‘Bored charges.’ Schneider was obviously enjoying himself. ‘Two metres in, all the way up. You should have seen it go.’

‘You.’ Hand’s mouth sculpted the words as if they were unfamiliar. ‘Blew up. An artefact?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Hand.’ Wardani was looking at him in open irritation. ‘Where do you think we found the fucking thing in the first place? This whole cliff wall came down on it fifty thousand years ago, and when we dug it up it was still in working order. It’s not a piece of pottery - this is hypertechnology we’re talking about. Built to last.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ Hand walked about the skirts of the rockfall, peering in between the larger cracks. ‘Because Mandrake isn’t going to pay you twenty million UN dollars for damaged goods.’

‘What brought the rock down?’ I asked suddenly.

Schneider turned, grinning. ‘I told you, man. Bored—’

‘No.’ I was looking at Tanya Wardani. ‘I mean originally. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet. There hasn’t been any serious geological activity up on the Rim for a lot longer than fifty thousand years. And the sea sure as hell didn’t do it, because that would mean this beach was created by the fall. Which puts the original construction under water, and why would the Martians do that. So, what happened here fifty thousand years ago?’

‘Yeah, Tanya,’ Schneider nodded vigorously. ‘You never did nail that one, did you? I mean we talked about it, but . . .’

‘It’s a good point.’ Matthias Hand had paused in his explorations and was back with us. ‘What kind of explanation do you have for this, Mistress Wardani?’

The archaeologue looked around at the three men surrounding her, and coughed up a laugh.

‘Well, I didn’t do it, I assure you.’

I picked up on the configuration we’d unconsciously taken around her, and broke it by moving to seat myself on a flat slab of rock. ‘Yeah, it was a bit before your time, I’d agree. But you were digging for months here. You must have some ideas.’

‘Yeah, tell them about the leakage thing, Tanya.’

‘Leakage?’ asked Hand dubiously.

Wardani shot Schneider an exasperated glance. She found a rock of her own to sit on and produced cigarettes from her coat that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d bought that morning. Landfall Lights, about the best smoking that money could buy now Indigo City cigars were outlawed. Tapping one free of the packet, she rolled it in her fingers and frowned.

‘Look,’ she said finally. ‘This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does, at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.’

When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.

‘Alright. How long does a heavy load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.’ She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. ‘Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, metres wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours, that’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?’

‘A lot of energy,’ said Hand impatiently. ‘So what’s this about leakage?’

‘Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.’

‘Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. ‘And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ’cast duration of a few seconds, well, it doesn’t add up to much air time. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilisation with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.’

‘Oops.’

The archaeologue flicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.

‘Quite,’ she said acidly. ‘Oops. Now the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.’

I nodded. ‘So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—’

‘And buries itself under five hundred thousand tonnes of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Wardani.’

The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. ‘I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.’

‘Or,’ said Schneider brightly, ‘it could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?’

‘We already talked about this, Jan.’ Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. ‘It’s not—’

‘It’s possible, alright.’

‘Yes. It’s just not very likely.’ She turned away from Schneider and faced me. ‘It’s hard to be sure - a lot of the glyphs were like nothing I’d ever seen before, and they’re hard to read, but I’m pretty certain there’s a power brake built in. Above certain velocities, nothing gets through.’

‘You don’t know that for certain.’ Schneider was sulking. ‘You said yourself you couldn’t—’

‘Yes, but it makes sense, Jan. You don’t build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you’re likely to find out there.’

‘Oh, come on Tanya, what about—’

‘Lieutenant Kovacs,’ said Hand loudly. ‘Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I’d like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Sure.’

We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand’s shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out of nowhere, Hand spoke.

‘Remarkable woman.’

I grunted.

‘I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigours of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon . . .’

‘She’ll be fine,’ I said shortly.

‘Yes, I’m sure she will.’ A delicate pause. ‘I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.’

‘That’s over, I think.’

‘Oh, really?’

There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.

‘About this military perspective, Hand.’

‘Oh, yes.’ The Mandrake exec stopped a few metres short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. ‘I’m not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn’t ideal fighting ground.’

‘Got it in one.’ I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. ‘Once we get down here, we’re a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It’s an open field of fire right back to the foothills.’

‘And then there’s the sea.’

‘And then there’s the sea,’ I echoed gloomily. ‘We’re open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we’ll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That’s unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.’

‘Hmm.’ Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. ‘I’ve talked to the lawyers.’

‘Did you disinfect afterwards?’

‘Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artefact in non-orbital space is only considered valid if a fully operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometre of said artefact. No loopholes, we’ve looked. If there’s a starship on the other side of this gate, we’re going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that’s going to take some time.’

I shrugged. ‘A small army, then.’

‘A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It’ll show up on satellite tracking like a holowhore’s chest. And we can’t really afford that, can we?’

‘A holowhore’s chest? I don’t know, the surgery can’t be that expensive.’

Hand cocked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. ‘Very droll. Thank you. We can’t really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?’

‘Not if you want an exclusive.’

‘I think that goes without saying, lieutenant.’ Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. ‘So then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit.’

‘If we want to come out alive, yes.’

‘Yes.’ Unexpectedly, Hand rocked back on his heels and dumped himself into a sitting position in the sand. He rested his forearms on his knees and seemed lost in searching the horizon for something. In the dark executive suit and white winged collar, he looked like a sketch by one of the Millsport absurdist school.

‘Tell me, lieutenant,’ he said finally. ‘Assuming we can get the peninsula cleared, in your professional opinion, what’s the lower limit on a support team for this venture? How few can we get away with?’

I thought about it. ‘If they’re good. Spec ops, not just plankton-standard grunts. Say six. Five, if you use Schneider as flyer.’

‘Well, he doesn’t strike me as the sort to be left behind while we look after his investment for him.’

‘No.’

‘You said spec ops. Do you have any specific skills in mind?’

‘Not really. Demolitions, maybe. That rock fall looks pretty solid. And it wouldn’t hurt if a couple of them could fly a shuttle, just in case something happens to Schneider.’

Hand twisted his head round to look up at me. ‘Is that likely?’

‘Who knows?’ I shrugged. ‘Dangerous world out there.’

‘Indeed.’ Hand went back to watching the place where the sea met the grey of Sauberville’s undecided fate. ‘I take it you’ll want to do the recruiting yourself.’

‘No, you can run it. But I want to sit in, and I want veto on anyone you select. You got any idea where you’re going to get half a dozen spec ops volunteers? Without ringing any alarm bells, I mean.’

For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me. The horizon seemed to have him body and soul. Then he shifted slightly and a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

‘In these troubled times,’ he murmured, almost to himself, ‘it shouldn’t be a problem finding soldiers who won’t be missed.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

He glanced up again and there were still traces of the smile clinging to his mouth.

‘Does that offend you, Kovacs?’

‘You think I’d be a lieutenant in Carrera’s Wedge if I offended that easily?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hand looked back out to the horizon again. ‘You’ve been full of surprises so far. And I understand that Envoys are generally pretty good at adaptive camouflage.’

So.

Less than two full days since the meeting in the auction hall, and Hand had already penetrated the Wedge datacore and unpicked whatever shielding Carrera had applied to my Envoy past. He was just letting me know.

I lowered myself to the blued sand beside him and picked my own point on the horizon to stare at.

‘I’m not an Envoy any more.’

‘No. So I understand.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘No longer an Envoy, no longer in Carrera’s Wedge. This rejection of groupings is verging on pathological, lieutenant.’

‘There’s no verging about it.’

‘Ah. I see some evidence of your Harlan’s World origins emerging. The essential evil of massed humanity, wasn’t that what Quell called it?’

‘I’m not a Quellist, Hand.’

‘Of course not.’ The Mandrake exec appeared to be enjoying himself. ‘That would necessitate being part of a group. Tell me, Kovacs, do you hate me?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Really? You surprise me.’

‘Well, I’m full of surprises.’

‘You honestly have no feelings of rancour towards me after your little run-in with Deng and his squad.’

I shrugged again. ‘They’re the ones with the added ventilation.’

‘But I sent them.’

‘All that shows is a lack of imagination.’ I sighed. ‘Look, Hand. I knew someone in Mandrake would send a squad, because that’s the way organisations like yours work. That proposal we sent you was practically a dare to come and get us. We could have been more careful, tried a less direct approach, but we didn’t have the time. So I flashed my fishcakes under the local bully’s nose, and got into a fight as a result. Hating you for that would be like hating the bully’s wrist bones for a punch that I ducked. It served its purpose, and here we are. I don’t hate you personally, because you haven’t given me any reason to yet.’

‘But you hate Mandrake.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t have the energy to hate the corporates, Hand. Where would I start? And like Quell says, rip open the diseased heart of a corporation and what spills out?’

‘People.’

‘That’s right. People. It’s all people. People and their stupid fucking groups. Show me an individual decision-maker whose decisions have harmed me, and I’ll melt his stack to slag. Show me a group with the united purpose of harming me and I’ll take them all down if I can. But don’t expect me to waste time and effort on abstract hate.’

‘How very balanced of you.’

‘Your government would call it antisocial derangement, and put me in a camp for it.’

Hand’s lip curled. ‘Not my government. We’re just wet-nursing these clowns till Kemp calms down.’

‘Why bother? Can’t you deal direct with Kemp?’

I wasn’t looking, but I got the sense that his gaze had jerked sideways as I said it. It took him a while to formulate a response he was happy with.

‘Kemp is a crusader,’ he said finally. ‘He has surrounded himself with others like him. And crusaders do not generally see sense until they are nailed to it. The Kempists will have to be defeated, bloodily and resoundingly, before they can be brought to the negotiating table.’

I grinned. ‘So you’ve tried.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No. You didn’t.’ I found a violet pebble in the sand and tossed it into the placid ripples in front of us. Time to change the subject. ‘You didn’t say where you were going to get our spec ops escort, either.’

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘The soul markets?’

‘Do you have a problem with that?’

I shook my head, but inside me something smoked off the detachment like stubborn embers.

‘By the way.’ Hand twisted around to look back at the rock fall. ‘I have an alternative explanation for that collapsed cliff.’

‘You didn’t buy the micrometeorite, then?’

‘I am inclined to believe in Mistress Wardani’s velocity brake. It makes sense. As does her circuit-breaker theory, to a point.’

‘That point being?’

‘That if a race as advanced as the Martians appear to have been built a circuit breaker, it would work properly. It would not leak.’

‘No.’

‘So we are left with the question. Why, fifty thousand years ago, did this cliff collapse. Or perhaps, why was it collapsed?’

I groped around for another pebble. ‘Yeah, I wondered about that.’

‘An open door to any given set of coordinates across interplanetary, possibly even interstellar distances. That’s dangerous, conceptually and in fact. There’s no telling what might come through a door like that. Ghosts, aliens, monsters with half-metre fangs.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Quellists, even.’

I found a second, larger stone somewhere back behind me.

‘Now that would be bad,’ I agreed, heaving my find far out into the sea. ‘The end of civilisation as we know it.’

‘Precisely. Something which the Martians, no doubt, also thought of and built for. Along with the power brake and the circuit breaker, they would presumably have a monster-with-half-metre-fangs contingency system.’

From somewhere Hand produced a pebble of his own and spun it out over the water. It was a good throw from a seated position, but it still fell a little short of the ripples I had created with my last stone. Wedge-customised neurachem - hard to beat. Hand clucked in disappointment.

‘That’s some contingency system,’ I said. ‘Bury your gate under half a million tonnes of cliff face.’

‘Yes.’ He was still frowning at the impact site of his throw, watching as his ripples merged with mine. ‘It makes you wonder what they were trying to shut out, doesn’t it.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘You like him, don’t you?’

It was an accusation, dealt face up in the low gleam from the muffled illuminum bar top. Music twanged, irritatingly sweet, from speakers not nearly high enough above our heads. Crouched at my elbow like a large comatose beetle, the personal space resonance scrambler that Mandrake had insisted we carry at all times showed a clear green functioning light, but apparently wasn’t up to screening out external noise. Pity.

‘Like who?’ I asked, turning to face Wardani.

‘Don’t be obtuse, Kovacs. That slick streak of used coolant in a suit. You’re fucking bonding with him.’

I felt the corner of my mouth quirk. If Tanya Wardani’s archaeologue lectures had seeped into some of Schneider’s speech patterns during their previous association, it looked as if the pilot had given as good as he’d got.

‘He’s our sponsor, Wardani. What do you want me to do? Spit at him every ten minutes to remind us all how morally superior we are?’ I tugged significantly at the shoulder flash of the Wedge uniform I was wearing. ‘I’m a paid killer, Schneider here is a deserter and you, whatever your sins may or may not be, are encoded all the way with us in trading the greatest archaeological find of the millennium for a ticket offworld and a lifetime pass to all the ruling-elite fun-park venues in Latimer City.’

She flinched.

‘He tried to have us killed.’

‘Well, given the outcome, I’m inclined to forgive him that one. Deng’s goon squad are the ones who ought to be feeling aggrieved.’

Schneider laughed, then shut up as Wardani cut him a freezing stare.

‘Yes, that’s right. He sent those men to their deaths, and now he’s cutting a deal with the man who killed them. He’s a piece of shit.’

‘If the worst Hand ever scores is eight men sent to their deaths,’ I said, more roughly than I’d intended, ‘then he’s a lot cleaner than me. Or anyone else with a rank that I’ve met recently.’

‘You see. You’re defending him. You use your own self-hatred to let him slide off the scope and save yourself a moral judgment.’

I looked hard at her, then drained my shot glass and set it aside with exaggerated care.

‘I appreciate,’ I said evenly, ‘that you’ve been through a lot recently, Wardani. That’s why I’m cutting you some slack. But you’re not an expert on the inside of my head, so I’d prefer it if you’d keep your fucking amateur psychosurgeon bullshit to yourself. OK?’

Wardani’s mouth compressed to a thin line. ‘The fact remains—’

‘Guys,’ Schneider leaned across Wardani with the rum bottle and filled my glass. ‘Guys, this is supposed to be a celebration. If you want to fight, go north, where it’s popular. Right here, right now, I’m celebrating the fact I won’t ever have to get in a fight again, and you two are spoiling my run-up. Tanya, why don’t you—’

He tried to top up Wardani’s glass, but she pushed the neck of the bottle aside with the edge of one hand. She was looking at him with a contempt that made me wince.

‘That’s all that matters to you, Jan, isn’t it?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Sliding out from under with heavy credit. The quick-fix, short-cut, easy-solution route to some swimming-pool existence at the top of the pile. What happened to you, Jan? I mean, you were always shallow, but . . .’

She gestured helplessly.

‘Thanks, Tanya.’ Schneider knocked back his shot, and when I could see his face again, he was grinning fiercely. ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t be so selfish. I ought to have stuck with Kemp for a while longer. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?’

‘Don’t be childish.’

‘No, really. I see it all so much more clearly now. Takeshi, let’s go tell Hand we’ve changed our minds. Let’s all go down fighting, it’s so much more significant.’ He stabbed a finger at Wardani. ‘And you. You can go back to the camp we pulled you out of because I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any of this noble suffering.’

‘You pulled me out of the camp because you needed me, Jan, so don’t pretend any different.’

Schneider’s open hand was well into the swing before I realised he intended to hit her. My neurachem-aided responses got me there in time to lock down the slap, but I had to lunge across Wardani to do it and my shoulder must have knocked her off the stool. I heard her yelp as she hit the floor. Her drink went over and spilled across the bar.

‘That’s enough,’ I told Schneider quietly. I had his forearm flattened to the bar under mine, and my other hand floating in a loose fist back at my left ear. My face was close enough to his to see the faint tear sheen on his eyes. ‘I thought you didn’t want to fight any more.’

‘Yeah.’ It came out strangled. He cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

I felt him relax, and unlocked on his arm. Turning, I saw Wardani picking her stool and herself up from the floor. Behind her, a few of the bar’s table occupants had come to their feet and were watching uncertainly. I met their eyes, and they seated themselves hurriedly. A graft-heavy tactical marine in one corner lasted longer than the rest, but in the end even she sat down, unwilling to tussle with the Wedge uniform. Behind me, I felt more than saw the bartender clearing up the spilled drink. I leaned back on the newly dried surface.

‘I think we’d better all calm down, agreed?’

‘Suits me.’ The archaeologue set her stool back on its feet. ‘You’re the one that knocked me over. You and your wrestling partner.’

Schneider had hooked the bottle and was pouring himself another shot. He downed it and pointed at Wardani with the empty glass.

‘You want to know what happened to me, Tanya? You—’

‘I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.’

‘—really want to know? I got to watch a six-year-old-girl. Fucking die of shrapnel. Fucking shrapnel wounds that I fucking inflicted because she was hiding in an automated bunker I rolled fucking grenades into.’ He blinked and trickled more rum into his glass. ‘And I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes. However shallow that makes me. For your fucking information.’

He looked back and forth between us for a couple of seconds, as if he couldn’t honestly remember who either of us were. Then he got off his stool and walked an almost straight line to the door and out. His last drink stood untouched on the muted glow of the bar top.

‘Oh shit,’ said Wardani, into the small silence left beside the drink. She was peering into her own empty glass as if there might be an escape hatch at the bottom.

‘Yeah.’ I wasn’t about to help her get off the hook with this one.

‘You think I should go after him?’

‘Not really, no.’

She put down the glass and fumbled for cigarettes. The Landfall Lights pack I’d noticed in the virtuality came out and she fed herself one mechanically. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘No, I thought you probably didn’t. So will he, once he sobers up. Don’t worry about it. He’s most likely been carrying that memory around in sealwrap since it happened. You just fed him enough catalyst to vomit it up. Probably better that way.’

She breathed the cigarette into life and glanced sideways at me through the smoke. ‘Does none of this touch you any more?’ she asked. ‘How long does it take to get like that?’

‘Thank the Envoys. It’s their speciality. How long is a meaningless question. It’s a system. Psychodynamic engineering.’

This time she turned on her stool and stayed facing me. ‘Doesn’t that ever make you angry? That you’ve been tampered with like that?’

I reached across for the bottle, and topped up both our drinks. She made no move to stop me. ‘When I was younger, I didn’t care. In fact, I thought it was great. A testosterone wet dream. See, before the Envoys, I served in the regular forces and I’d already used a lot of quickplant jack-in software. This just seemed like a super-ramped version of the same thing. Body armour for the soul. And by the time I got old enough to think any differently, the conditioning was in to stay.’

‘You can’t beat it? The conditioning?’

I shrugged. ‘Most of the time, I don’t want to. That’s the nature of good conditioning. And this is a very superior product. I work better when I go with it. Fighting it is hard work, and it slows me down. Where did you get those cigarettes?’

‘These?’ She looked down at the packet absently. ‘Oh, Jan, I think. Yeah, he gave them to me.’

‘That was nice of him.’

If she noticed the sarcasm in my voice, she didn’t react. ‘You want one?’

‘Why not? By the look of it, I’m not going to be needing this sleeve much longer.’

‘You really think we’re going to get as far as Latimer City.’ She watched me shake out a cigarette and draw it to life. ‘You trust Hand to keep his side of this bargain?’

‘There’s really very little point in him double crossing us.’ I exhaled and stared at the smoke as it drifted away across the bar. A massive sense of departure from something was coursing unlooked-for through my mind, a sense of unnamed loss. I groped after the words to sew everything back together again. ‘The money’s already gone, Mandrake can’t get it back. So if it cuts us out, all Hand saves himself is the cost of the hypercast and three off-the-rack sleeves. In return for which he gets to worry forever about automated reprisals.’

Wardani’s gaze dropped to the resonance scrambler on the bar. ‘Are you sure this thing is clean?’

‘Nope. I got it from an indie dealer, but she came Mandrake-recommended, so it could be tagged for all I know. It doesn’t really matter. I’m the only person who knows how the reprisals are set up, and I’m not about to tell you about it.’

‘Thanks.’ There was no appreciable irony in her tone. An internment camp teaches you things about the value of not knowing.

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘And what about silencing us after the event?’

I spread my hands. ‘What for? Mandrake isn’t interested in silence. This’ll be the biggest coup a single corporate entity have ever pulled off. It’ll want it known. Those time-locked data launches we set are going to be the oldest news on the block when they finally decay. Once Mandrake has got your starship hidden away somewhere safe, it’ll be dropping the fact through every major corporate dataport on Sanction IV. Hand’s going to use this to swing instant membership of the Cartel, and probably a seat on the Protectorate Commercial Council into the bargain. Mandrake’ll be a major player overnight. Our significance in that particular scheme of things will be nil.’

‘Got it all worked out, huh?’

I shrugged again. ‘This isn’t anything we haven’t already discussed.’

‘No.’ She made a small, oddly helpless gesture. ‘I just didn’t think you’d be so, fucking, congenial with that piece of corporate shit.’

I sighed.

‘Look. My opinion of Matthias Hand is irrelevant. He’ll do the job we want him to do. That’s what counts. We’ve been paid, we’re on board and Hand has marginally more personality than the average corporate exec, which as far as I’m concerned is a blessing. I like him well enough to get on with. If he tries to cross us, I’ll have no problem putting a bolt through his stack. Now, is that suitably detached for you?’

Wardani tapped the carapace of the scrambler. ‘You’d better hope this isn’t tagged. If Hand’s listening to you . . .’

‘Well,’ I reached across her and picked up Schneider’s untouched drink. ‘If he is, he’s probably having similar thoughts about me. So cheers, Hand, if you can hear me. Here’s to mistrust and mutual deterrence.’

I knocked back the rum and upended the glass on the scrambler. Wardani rolled her eyes.

‘Great. The politics of despair. Just what I need.’

‘What you need,’ I said, yawning, ‘is some fresh air. Want to walk back to the tower? If we leave now, we should make it before curfew.’

‘I thought, in that uniform, the curfew wasn’t an issue.’

I looked down at the black jacket and fingered the cloth. ‘Yeah, well. Probably isn’t, but we’re supposed to be profiling low right now. And besides, if you get an automated patrol, machines can be bloody-minded about these things. Better not to risk it. So what do you think, want to walk?’

‘Going to hold my hand?’ It was meant to be a joke, but it came out wrong. We both stood up and were abruptly, awkwardly inside each other’s personal space.

The moment stumbled between us like an uninvited drunk.

I turned to crush out my cigarette.

‘Sure,’ I said, trying for lightness. ‘It’s dark out there.’

I pocketed the scrambler, and stole back my cigarettes in the same movement, but my words had not dispersed the tension. Instead, they hung there like the afterimage of laser fire.

It’s dark out there.

Outside, we both walked with hands crammed securely into pockets.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The top three floors of the Mandrake Tower were executive residential, access barred from below and topped off with a multilevel roof complex of gardens and cafés. A variable permeate power screen strung from parapet pylons kept the sun finetuned for luminous warmth throughout the day, and in three of the cafés, you could get breakfast at any hour. We got it at midday and were still working our way through the last of the spread when an immaculately-attired Hand came looking for us. If he’d been listening in to last night’s character assassination, it didn’t seem to have upset him much.

‘Good morning Mistress Wardani. Gentlemen. I trust your night out on the town proved worth the security risk.’

‘Had its moments.’ I reached out and speared another dim sum parcel with my fork, not looking at either of my companions. Wardani had in any case retreated behind her sunlenses the moment she sat down, and Schneider was brooding intently on the dregs in his coffee cup. The conversation had not been sparkling so far. ‘Sit down, help yourself.’

‘Thank you.’ Hand hooked out a chair and seated himself. On closer inspection, he looked a little tired around the eyes. ‘I’ve already had lunch. Mistress Wardani, the primary components from your hardware list are here. I’m having them brought up to your suite.’

The archaeologue nodded and turned her head upward to the sun. When it became apparent that this was going to be the full extent of her response, Hand turned his attention to me and cranked up an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly.

Don’t ask.

‘Well. We’re about ready to recruit, lieutenant, if you—’

‘Fine.’ I washed down the dim sum with a short swallow of tea and got up. The atmosphere around the table was getting to me. ‘Let’s go.’

No one said anything. Schneider didn’t even look up, but Wardani’s blacked-out sunlenses tracked my retreat across the terrace like the blank faces of a sentry gun sensor.

We rode down from the roof in a chatty elevator which named each floor for us as we passed it and outlined a few of Mandrake’s current projects on the way. Neither of us spoke, and a scant thirty seconds later the doors recessed back on the low ceiling and raw fused-glass walls of the basement level. Iluminum strips cast a bluish light in the fusing and on the far side of the open space a blob of hard sunlight signalled an exit. Parked carelessly opposite the elevator doors, a nondescript straw-coloured cruiser was waiting.

‘Thaisawasdi Field,’ said Hand, leaning into the driver’s compartment. ‘The Soul Market.’

The engine note dialled up from idle to a steady thrum. We climbed in and settled back into the automould cushioning as the cruiser lifted and spun like a spider on a thread. Through the unpolarised glass of the cabin divider and past the shaven head of the driver, I watched the blob of sunlight expand as we rushed softly towards the exit. Then the light exploded around us in a hammering of gleam on metal, and we spiralled up into the merciless blue desert sky above Landfall. After the muted atmospheric shielding on the roof level, there was a slightly savage satisfaction to the change.

Hand touched a stud on the door and the glass polarised blue.

‘You were followed last night,’ he said matter of factly.

I glanced across the compartment at him. ‘What for? We’re on the same side, aren’t we?’

‘Not by us.’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘Well, yes, by us, by overhead, of course, that’s how we spotted them. But I’m not talking about that. This was low-tech stuff. You and Wardani came home separated from Schneider - which incidentally wasn’t all that intelligent - and you were shadowed. One on Schneider, but he peeled off, presumably as soon as he saw Wardani wasn’t coming out. The others went with you as far as Find Alley, just out of sight of the bridge.’

‘How many?’

‘Three. Two full human, one battle-tech cyborg by the way it moved.’

‘Did you pick them up?’

‘No.’ Hand rapped one lightly closed fist against the window. ‘The duty machine only had protect-and-retrieve parameters. By the time we were notified, they’d gone to ground near the Latimer canal head and by the time we got there, they were gone. We looked, but . . .’

He spread his hands. The tiredness around the eyes was making some sense. He’d been up all night trying to safeguard his investment.

‘What are you grinning about?’

‘Sorry. Just touched. Protect and retrieve, huh?’

‘Ha ha.’ He fixed me with a stare until my grin showed some signs of ebbing. ‘So, is there something you want to tell me?’

I thought briefly of the camp commandant and his current-stunned mumblings about an attempt to rescue Tanya Wardani. I shook my head.

‘Are you certain?’

‘Hand, be serious. If I’d known someone was shadowing me, do you think they’d be in any better state now than Deng and his goons?’

‘So who were they?’

‘I thought I just told you I didn’t know. Street scum, maybe?’

He gave me a pained look. ‘Street scum following a Carrera’s Wedge uniform?’

‘OK, maybe it was a manhood thing. Territorial. You’ve got some gangs in Landfall, haven’t you?’

‘Kovacs, please. You be serious. If you didn’t notice them, how likely is it they were that low-grade?’

I sighed. ‘Not very.’

‘Precisely. So who else is trying to carve themselves a slice of artefact pie?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted gloomily.

The rest of the flight passed in silence.

Finally, the cruiser banked about and I tipped a glance out of the window. We were spiralling down towards what looked like a sheet of dirty ice littered with used bottles and cans. I frowned and recalibrated for scale.

‘Are these the original—?’

Hand nodded. ‘Some of them, yes. The big ones. The rest are impounds, stuff from when the bottom fell out of the artefact market. Soon as you can’t pay your landing slot, they grab your haulage and grav-lift it out here until you do. Of course, with the way the market went, hardly anyone bothered even trying to pay off what they owed, so the Port Authority salvage crews went in and decommissioned them with plasma cutters.’

We drifted in over the nearest of the grounded colony barges. It was like floating across a vast felled tree. Up at one end, the thrust assemblies that had propelled the vessel across the gulf between Latimer and Sanction IV were spread like branches, crushed to the landing field underneath and fanned stiffly against the hard blue sky above. The barge would never lift again, had in fact never been intended for more than a one-way trip. Assembled in orbit around Latimer a century ago, built only for the long blast across interstellar space and a single planetfall at journey’s end, she would have burnt out her antigrav landing system coming down. The detonation of the final touchdown repulsor jets would have fused the desert sand beneath into an oval of glass that would eventually be extended by engineers to join the similar ovals left by other barges and so create Thaisawasdi Field, to serve the fledgling colony for the first decade of its life.

By the time the corporates got round to building their own private fields and the associated complexes, the barges would have been gutted, used initially to live out of, then as a ready source of refined alloys and hardware to build from. On Harlan’s World, I’d been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalised, carved back to multilevelled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull. Only the hulls themselves were ever left intact, out of some bizarre quasi-reverence of the kind that in earlier ages got successive generations to give up their lives to build cathedrals.

The cruiser crossed the spine of the barge and slid down the curve of the hull to a soft landing in the pool of shadow cast by the grounded vessel. We climbed out into sudden cool and a quiet broken only by the whisper of a breeze across the glass plain and, faintly, the human sounds of commerce from within the hull.

‘This way.’ Hand nodded at the curving wall of alloy before us, and strode in towards a triangular cargo vent near ground level. I caught myself scanning the edifice for possible sniper points, shrugged off the reflex irritably and went after him. The wind swept detritus obligingly out of my way in little knee-high swirls.

Close up, the cargo vent was huge, a couple of metres across at its apex and wide enough at base to permit the passage of a trolleyed marauder bomb fuselage. The loading ramp that led up to the entrance had doubled as a hatch when the barge was in flight and now it squatted on massive hydraulic haunches that hadn’t worked in decades. At the top the vent was flanked with carefully blurred holographic images that might have been either Martians or angels in flight.

‘Dig art,’ said Hand disparagingly. Then we were past them and into the vaulted gloom beyond.

It was the same feeling of decayed space that I’d seen on Harlan’s World, but where the Harlan fleet hulks had been preserved with museum sobriety, this space was filled with a chaotic splatter of colour and sound. Stalls built from bright primary plastics and wire were cabled and epoxied seemingly at random up the curve of the hull and across what remained of the principal decks, giving the impression that a colony of poisonous mushrooms had infected the original structure. Sawn-off sections of companionway and ladders of welded support struts linked it all together. Here and there more holographic art lent extra flare to the glow of lamps and illuminum strips. Music wailed and basslined unpredictably from hull-mounted speakers the size of crates. High above it all, someone had punched metre-width holes in the hull alloy so that beams of solid sunlight blasted through the gloom at tall angles.

At the impact point of the closest beam stood a tall, raggedly dressed figure, sweat-beaded black face turned up to the light as if it were a warm shower. There was a battered black top hat jammed on his head and an equally well used long black coat draped across his gaunt frame. He heard our steps on the metal and pivoted, arms held cruciform.

‘Ah, gentlemen.’ The voice was a prosthetic bubbling, emitted by a rather obvious leech unit stapled to the scarred throat. ‘You are just in time. I am Semetaire. Welcome to the Soul Market.’

Up on the axial deck, we got to watch the process begin.

As we stepped out of the cage elevator, Semetaire moved aside and gestured with one rag-feathered arm.

‘Behold,’ he said.

Out on the deck, a tracked cargo loader was backing up with a small skip held high in its lifting arms. As we watched, the skip tilted forward and something started to spill over the lip, cascading onto the deck and bouncing up again with a sound like hail stones.

Cortical stacks.

It was hard to tell without racking up the neurachem vision, but most of them looked too bulky to be clean. Too bulky, and too whitish-yellow with the fragments of bone and spinal tissue that still clung to the metal. The skip hinged further back, and the spillage became a rush, a coarse white-noised outpouring of metallic shingle. The cargo loader continued to backtrack, laying a thick, spreading trail of the stuff. The hailstorm built to a quick drumming fury, then choked up as the continuing cascade of stacks was soaked up by the mounds that had already fallen.

The skip up-ended, emptied. The sound stopped.

‘Just in,’ observed Semetaire, leading us around the spillage. ‘Mostly from the Suchinda bombardment, civilians and regular forces, but there are bound to be some rapid deployment casualties as well. We’re picking them up all over the east. Someone misread Kemp’s ground cover pretty badly.’

‘Not for the first time,’ I muttered.

‘Nor the last, we hope.’ Semetaire crouched down and scooped up a double handful of cortical stacks. The bone clung to them in patches, like yellow-stained rime. ‘Business has rarely been this good.’

Something scraped and rattled in the dimly lit cavern. I looked up sharply, chasing the sound.

All the way round the extended mound, traders were moving in with shovels and buckets, elbowing at each other for a better place at the digging. The shovel blades made a grating, scraping sound as they bit in, and each flung shovel-load rattled in the buckets like gravel.

For all the competition for access, I noticed they gave Semetaire a wide berth. My eyes turned back to the top-hatted figure crouched in front of me and his scarred face split in a huge grin as if he could feel my gaze. Enhanced peripherals, I guessed and watched as, still smiling gently, he opened his fingers and let the stacks trickle back into the pile. When his hands were empty again, he brushed the palms off against each other and stood.

‘Most sell by gross weight,’ he murmured. ‘It is cheap and simple. Talk with them if you will. Others scan out the civilians for their customers, the chaff from the military wheat, and the price is still low. Perhaps this will be sufficient for your needs. Or perhaps you need Semetaire.’

‘Get to the point,’ said Hand curtly.

Beneath the battered top hat, I thought the eyes narrowed fractionally, but whatever was in that tiny increment of anger never made it into the rag-wrapped black man’s voice. ‘The point,’ he said courteously, ‘is as it always is. The point is what you desire. Semetaire sells only what those who come to him desire. What do you desire, Mandrake man? You and your Wedge wolf ?’

I felt the mercury shiver of the neurachem go through me. I was not wearing my uniform. Whatever this man was racked with, it was more than enhanced peripherals.

Hand said something in a hollow-syllabled language I didn’t recognise, and made a small sign with his left hand. Semetaire stiffened.

‘You are playing a dangerous game,’ said the Mandrake exec quietly. ‘And the charade is at an end. Is that understood?’

Semetaire stood immobile for a moment, and then his grin broke out again. With both hands he reached symmetrically into his ragged coat, and found himself looking down the barrel of a Kalashnikov interface gun from a range of about five centimetres. My left hand had put the weapon there without conscious thought.

‘Slowly,’ I suggested.

‘There is no problem here, Kovacs.’ Hand’s voice was mild, but his eyes were still locked with Semetaire’s. ‘The family ties have been established now.’

Semetaire’s grin said that wasn’t so, but he withdrew his hands from under the coat slowly enough. Gripped delicately in each palm was what looked like a live gunmetal crab. He looked from one set of gently flexing segmented legs to the other and then back down the barrel of my gun. If he was afraid, it didn’t show.

‘What is it you desire, company man?’

‘Call me that again, and I might be forced to pull this trigger.’

‘He’s not talking to you, Kovacs.’ Hand nodded minimally at the Kalashnikov and I stowed it. ‘Spec ops, Semetaire. Fresh kills, nothing over a month. And we’re in a hurry. Whatever you’ve got on the slab.’

Semetaire shrugged. ‘The freshest are here,’ he said, and tossed the two crab remotes down on the mound of stacks, where they commenced spidering busily about, picking up one tiny metal cyclinder after another in delicate mandibular arms, holding each one beneath a blue glowing lens and then discarding it. ‘But if you are pressed for time . . .’

He turned aside and led us to a sombrely-appointed stall where a thin woman, as pale as he was dark, hunched over a workstation, stressblasting bone fragments from a shallow tray of stacks. The tiny high-pitched fracturing sound as the bone came off ran a barely audible counterpoint to the bass-throated bite, crunch, rattle of the prospectors’ shovels and buckets behind us.

Semetaire spoke to the woman in the tongue Hand had used earlier and she unwound herself languidly from amongst the cleaning tools. From a shelf at the back of the stall, she lifted a dull metal canister about the size of a surveillance drone and carried it out to us. Holding it up for inspection, she tapped with one overlong black painted fingernail at a symbol engraved in the metal. She said something in the language of echoing syllables.

I glanced at Hand.

‘The chosen of Ogon,’ he said, without apparent irony. ‘Protected in iron for the master of iron, and of war. Warriors.’

He nodded and the woman set down the canister. From one side of the workstation she brought a bowl of perfumed water with which she rinsed her hands and wrists. I watched, fascinated, as she laid newly wet fingers on the lid of the canister, closed her eyes and intoned another string of cadenced sounds. Then, she opened her eyes and twisted the lid off.

‘How many kilos do you want?’ asked Semetaire, incongruously pragmatic against the backdrop of reverence.

Hand reached across the table and scooped a handful of stacks out of the canister. They gleamed silvery clean in the cup of his hand.

‘How much are you going to gut me?’

‘Seventy-nine fifty the kilo.’

The exec grunted. ‘Last time I was here, Pravet charged me forty-seven fifty, and he was apologetic about it.’

‘That’s a dross price and you know it, company man.’ Semetaire shook his head, smiling. ‘Pravet deals with unsorted product, and he doesn’t even clean it most of the time. If you want to spend your valuable corporate time picking bone tissue off a pile of civilian and standard conscript stacks, then go and haggle with Pravet. These are selected warrior class, cleaned and anointed, and they are worth what I ask. We should not waste each other’s time in this way.’

‘Alright.’ Hand weighed the palmful of capsuled lives. ‘You’ve got your expenses to think about. Sixty thousand flat. And you know I’ll be back sometime.’

‘Sometime.’ Semetaire seemed to be tasting the word. ‘Sometime, Joshua Kemp may put Landfall to the nuclear torch. Sometime, company man, we may all be dead.’

‘We may indeed.’ Hand tipped the stacks back into the canister. They made a clicking sound, like dice falling. ‘And some of us sooner than others, if we go round making anti-Cartel statements about Kempist victory. I could have you arrested for that, Semetaire. ’

The pale woman behind the workstation hissed and raised a hand to trace symbols in the air, but Semetaire snapped something at her and she stopped.

‘Where would be the point in arresting me?’ he asked smoothly, reaching into the canister and extracting a single gleaming stack. ‘Look at this. Without me, you’d only have to fall back on Pravet. Seventy.’

‘Sixty-seven fifty, and I’ll make you Mandrake’s preferred supplier.’

Semetaire rolled the stack between his fingers, apparently musing. ‘Very well,’ he said finally. ‘Sixty-seven fifty. But that price comes with a set minimum. Five kilos.’

‘Agreed.’ Hand produced a credit chip holo-engraved with the Mandrake insignia. As he gave it to Semetaire, he grinned unexpectedly. ‘I was here for ten, anyway. Wrap them up.’

Semetaire tossed the stack back into the canister. He nodded at the pale woman, and she brought out a concave weighing plate from beneath the workstation. Tilting the canister and reaching inside with a reverent hand, she scooped out the stacks a palmful at a time and laid them gently in the curve of the plate. Ornate violet digits evolved in the air above the mounting pile.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of movement near ground level, and turned hurriedly to face it.

‘A find,’ said Semetaire lightly, and grinned.

One of the crab-legged remotes had returned from the pile and, having reached Semetaire’s foot, was working its way steadily up his trouser leg. When it reached the level of his belt, he plucked it off and held it still while, with the other hand, he prised something from the thing’s mandibles. Then he tossed the little machine away. It drew in its limbs as it sensed the freefall and when it hit the deck, it was a featureless grey ovoid that bounced and rolled to a quick halt. A moment later, the limbs extended cautiously. The remote righted itself and scuttled off about its master’s business.

‘Ahhh, look.’ Semetaire was rubbing the tissue-flecked stack between his fingers and thumb, still grinning. ‘Look at that, Wedge Wolf. Do you see? Do you see how the new harvest begins?’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Mandrake AI read the stack-stored soldiers we’d bought as three-dimensional machine-code data, and instantly wrote off a third as irretrievably psychologically damaged. Not worth talking to. Resurrected into virtuality, all they’d do would be scream themselves hoarse.

Hand shrugged it off.

‘That’s about standard,’ he said. ‘There’s always some wastage, whoever you buy from. We’ll run a psychosurgery dream sequencer on the others. That should give us a long shortlist without having to actually wake any of them up. Those are the want parameters.’

I picked up the hardcopy from the table and glanced through it. Across the conference room, the damaged soldiers’ data scrolled down on the wall screen in two-dimensional analogue.

‘Experience of high-rad combat environments?’ I looked up at the Mandrake exec. ‘Is this something I should know about?’

‘Come on, Kovacs. You already do.’

‘I.’ The flash would reach into the mountains. Would chase the shadows out of gullies that hadn’t seen light so harsh in geological eons. ‘Had hoped it wouldn’t turn out that way.’

Hand examined the table top as if it needed resheening. ‘We needed the peninsula cleared,’ he said carefully. ‘By the end of the week it will be. Kemp’s pulling back. Call it serendipity.’

Once, on reconaissance along a ridge on the slumped spine of Dangrek, I’d seen Sauberville sparkling far off in the late afternoon sun. There was too much distance for detail - even with the neurachem racked up to maximum the city looked like a silver bracelet, flung down at the water’s edge. Remote, and unconnected with anything human.

I met Hand’s eyes across the table.

‘So we’re all going to die.’

He shrugged. ‘It seems unavoidable, doesn’t it? Going in that soon after the blast. I mean, we can use clone stock with high tolerance for the new recruits, and antirad medication will keep us all functional for the time it takes, but in the long run . . .’

‘Yeah, well in the long run I’ll be wearing out a designer sleeve in Latimer City.’

‘Quite.’

‘What kind of rad-tolerant sleeves you have in mind?’

Another shrug. ‘Don’t know for sure, I’ll have to talk to bioware. Maori stock, probably. Why, want one?’

I felt the Khumalo bioplates twitch in the flesh of my palms, as if angry, and shook my head.

‘I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn’t it.’ I jabbed a thumb at my own chest. ‘This is Wedge custom. Khumalo Biosystems. They don’t build better for combat than this stuff.’

‘And the anti-rad?’

‘It’ll hold up long enough for what we have to do. Tell me something, Hand. What are you offering the new recruits long-term? Aside from a new sleeve that may or may not stand up to the radiation? What do they get when we’re done?’

Hand frowned at the question. ‘Well. Employment.’

‘They had that. Look where it got them.’

‘Employment in Landfall.’ For some reason the derision in my voice seemed to be chewing at him. Or maybe something else was. ‘Contracted security staff for Mandrake, guaranteed for the duration of the war or five years, whichever lasts longer. Does that meet your Quellist, Man-of-the-Downtrodden, Anarchist scruples?’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Those are three very tenuously connected philosophies, Hand, and I don’t really subscribe to any of them. But if you’re asking, does it sound like a good alternative to being dead, I’d say so. If it were me, I’d probably want in at that price.’

‘A vote of confidence.’ Hand’s tone was withering. ‘How reassuring.’

‘Provided, of course, I didn’t have friends and relatives in Sauberville. You might want to check for that in the back-data.’

He looked at me. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘I can’t think of anything very funny about wiping out an entire city.’ I shrugged. ‘Just now, anyway. Maybe that’s just me.’

‘Ah, so this is a moral qualm rearing its ugly head, is it?’

I smiled thinly. ‘Don’t be absurd, Hand. I’m a soldier.’

‘Yes, it might be as well to remember that. And don’t take your surplus feelings out on me, Kovacs. As I said before, I am not actually calling in the strike on Sauberville. It is merely opportune.’

‘Isn’t it just.’ I tossed the hardcopy back across the table, trying not to wish it was a fused grenade. ‘So let’s get on with it. How long to run this dream sequencer?’

According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.

It certainly makes for fast psychevaluation.

The dream sequencer, combined in the heart of the Mandrake AI with the want parameters and a Sauberville-related background check, went through the remaining seven kilos of functional human psyche in less than four hours. It gave us three hundred and eighty-seven possibles, with a high probability core of two hundred and twelve.

‘Time to wake them up,’ said Hand, flipping through profiles on screen and yawning. I felt my jaw muscles flexing in unwilling sympathy.

Perhaps out of mutual mistrust, neither of us had left the conference room while the sequencer ran, and after edging round the subject of Sauberville a bit more, we hadn’t had that much to say to each other either. My eyes were itchy from watching the data scrolldown and not much else, my limbs twitched with the desire for some physical exertion and I was out of cigarettes. The impulse to yawn fought for control of my face.

‘Have we really got to talk to all of them?’

Hand shook his head. ‘No, we really haven’t. There’s a virtual version of me in the machine with some psychosurgeon peripherals wired in. I’ll send it in to bring back the best dozen and a half. That’s if you trust me that far.’

I gave it up and yawned, finally, cavernously.

‘Trust. Enabled. You want to get some air and a coffee?’

We left for the roof.

Up on top of the Mandrake Tower, the day was inking out to a desert indigo dusk. In the east, stars poked through the vast expanse of darkening Sanction IV sky. At the western horizon, it seemed as though the last of the sun’s juice was being crushed from between thin strips of cloud by the weight of the settling night. The shields were way down, letting in most of the evening’s warmth and a faint breeze out of the north.

I glanced around at the scattering of Mandrake personnel in the roof garden Hand had chosen. They formed pairs or small groups at the bars and tables and talked in modulated, confident tones that carried. Amanglic corporate standard sewn with the sporadic local music of Thai and French. No one appeared to be paying us any attention.

The language mix reminded me.

‘Tell me, Hand.’ I broke the seal on a new pack of Landfall Lights and drew one to life. ‘What was that shit out at the market today? That language the three of you were speaking, the left-handed gestures?’

Hand tasted his coffee and set it down. ‘You haven’t guessed?’

‘Voodoo?’

‘You might put it that way.’ The pained look on the exec’s face told me he wouldn’t put it that way in a million years. ‘Though properly speaking it hasn’t been called that for several centuries. Neither was it called that back at the origin. Like most people who don’t know, you’re oversimplifying.’

‘I thought that was what religion was. Simplification for the hard of thinking.’

He smiled. ‘If that is the case, then the hard of thinking seem to be in a majority, do they not?’

‘They always are.’

‘Well, perhaps.’ Hand drank more coffee and regarded me over the cup. ‘You really claim to have no God? No higher power? The Harlanites are mostly Shintoists, aren’t they? That, or some Christian offshoot?’

‘I’m neither,’ I said flatly.

‘Then you have no refuge against the coming of night? No ally when the immensity of creation presses down on the spine of your tiny existence like a stone column a thousand metres tall?’

‘I was at Innenin, Hand.’ I knocked ash off the cigarette and gave him back his smile, barely used. ‘At Innenin, I heard soldiers with columns about that tall on their backs screaming for a whole spectrum of higher powers. None of them showed up that I noticed. Allies like that I can live without.’

‘God is not ours to command.’

‘Evidently not. Tell me about Semetaire. That hat and coat. He’s playing a part, right?’

‘Yes.’ There was a cordial distaste leaking into Hand’s voice now. ‘He has adopted the guise of Ghede, in this case the lord of the dead—’

‘Very witty.’

‘—in an attempt to dominate the weaker-minded among his competitors. He is probably an adept of sorts, not without a certain amount of influence in the spirit realm, though certainly not enough to call up that particular personage. I am somewhat more.’ He offered me a slight smile. ‘Accredited, shall we say. I was merely making that clear. Presenting my credentials, you might say, and establishing the fact that I found his act in poor taste.’

‘Strange this Ghede hasn’t got around to making the same point, isn’t it?’

Hand sighed. ‘Actually, it’s very likely that Ghede, like you, sees the humour of the situation. For a Wise One, he is very easily amused.’

‘Really.’ I leaned forward, searching his face for some trace of irony. ‘You believe this shit, right? I mean, seriously?’

The Mandrake exec watched me for a moment, then he tipped back his head and gestured at the sky above us.

‘Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains it might as well carry the name of god. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden outwith the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?’

I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervour in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.

‘Well, the difference is that the facts of our existence weren’t dreamed up by a bunch of ignorant priests centuries before anyone had left the Earth’s surface or built anything resembling a machine. I’d say that on balance that makes them a better fit than your spirit realm for whatever reality we find out here.’

Hand smiled, apparently unoffended. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘That is a local view, Kovacs. Of course, all the remaining churches have their origins in pre-industrial times, but faith is metaphor, and who knows how the data behind these metaphors has travelled, from where and for how long. We walk amidst the ruins of a civilisation that apparently had godlike powers thousands of years before we could walk upright. Your own world, Kovacs, is encircled by angels with flaming swords—’

‘Whoa.’ I lifted my hands, palms out. ‘Let’s damp down the metaphor core for a moment. Harlan’s World has a system of orbital battle platforms that the Martians forgot to decommission when they left.’

‘Yes.’ Hand gestured impatiently. ‘Orbitals built of some substance that resists every attempt to scan it, orbitals with the power to strike down a city or a mountain, but who forbear to destroy anything save those vessels that try to ascend into the heavens. What else is that but an angel?’

‘It’s a fucking machine, Hand. With programmed parameters that probably have their basis in some kind of planetary conflict—’

‘Can you be sure of that?’

He was leaning across the table now. I found myself mirroring his posture as my own intensity stoked.

‘Have you ever been to Harlan’s World, Hand? No, I thought not. Well I grew up there and I’m telling you the orbitals are no more mystical than any other Martian artefact—’

‘What, no more mystical than the songspires?’ His voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Trees of stone that sing to the rising and setting sun? No more mystical than a gate that opens like a bedroom door onto—’

He stopped abruptly and glanced around, face flushing with the near indiscretion. I sat back and grinned at him.

‘Admirable passion, for someone in a suit that expensive. So you’re trying to sell me the Martians as voodoo gods. Is that it?’

‘I’m not trying to sell you anything,’ he muttered, straightening up. ‘And no, the Martians fit quite comfortably into this world. We don’t need recourse to the places of origin to explain them. I’m just trying to show you how limited your world view is without an acceptance of wonder.’

I nodded.

‘Very good of you.’ I stabbed a finger at him. ‘Just do me a favour, Hand. When we get where we’re going, keep this shit stowed, will you. I’m going to have enough to worry about without you weirding out on me.’

‘I believe only what I have seen,’ he said stiffly. ‘I have seen Ghede and Carrefour walk amongst us in the flesh of men, I have heard their voices speak from the mouths of the hougan, I have summoned them.’

‘Yeah, right.’

He looked at me searchingly, offended belief melting slowly into something else. His voice loosened and flowed down to a murmur. ‘This is strange, Kovacs. You have a faith as deep as mine. The only thing I wonder is why you need so badly not to believe.’

That sat between us for almost a minute before I touched it. The noise from surrounding tables faded out and even the wind out of the north seemed to be holding its breath. Then I leaned forward, speaking less to communicate than to dispel the laser-lit recall in my head.

‘You’re wrong, Hand,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d love to have access to all this shit you believe. I’d love to be able to summon someone who’s responsible for this fuck-up of a creation. Because then I’d be able to kill them. Slowly.’

Back in the machine, Hand’s virtual self worked the long shortlist down to eleven. It took nearly three months to do it. Run at the AI’s top capacity of three hundred and fifty times real time, the whole process was over shortly before midnight.

By that time, the intensity of the conversation up on the roof had mellowed, first into an exchange of experiential reverie, a kind of rummaging around in the things we had seen and done that tended to support our individual world views, and thence to increasingly vague observations on life threaded onto long mutual silences as we stared beyond the ramparts of the tower and out into the desert night. Hand’s pocket bleep broke into the powered-down mood like a note shattering glass.

We went down to look at what we had, blinking in the suddenly harsh lights inside the tower and yawning. Less than an hour later, as midnight turned over and the new day began, we turned off Hand’s virtual self and uploaded ourselves into the machine in his place.

Final selection.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In recall, their faces come back to me.

Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The faces they remembered themselves as, the faces they presented in the innocuous hotel-suite virtuality where I first met them.

The faces of the dead.

Ole Hansen:

Ludicrously pale Caucasian, cropped hair like snow, eyes the calm blue of the digit displays on medical equipment in non-critical mode. Shipped in whole from Latimer with the first wave of cryocapped UN reinforcements, back when everyone thought Kemp was going to be a six-month pushover.

‘This had better not be another desert engagement.’ There were still patches of sunscorched red across his forehead and cheekbones. ‘Because if it is, you can just put me back in the box. That cellular melanin itches like fuck.’

‘It’s cold where we’re going,’ I assured him. ‘Latimer City winter at warmest. You know your team is dead?’

A nod. ‘Saw the flash from the ’copter. Last thing I remember. It figures. Captured marauder bomb. I told them to just blow the motherfucker where it lay. You can’t talk those things round. Too stubborn.’

Hansen was part of a crack demolitions unit called the Soft Touch. I’d heard of them on the Wedge grapevine. They had a reputation for getting it right most of the time. Had had.

‘You going to miss them?’

Hansen turned in his seat and looked across the virtual hotel room to the hospitality unit. He looked back at Hand.

‘May I?’

‘Help yourself.’

He got up and went to the forest of bottles, selected one and poured amber liquid into a tumbler until it was brim full. He raised the drink in our direction, lips tight and blue eyes snapping.

‘Here’s to the Soft Touch, wherever their fragmented fucking atoms may be. Epitaph: they should have listened to fucking orders. They’d fucking be here now.’

He poured the drink down his throat in a single smooth motion, grunted deep in his throat and tossed the glass away across the room underhand. It hit the carpeted floor with an undramatic thump and rolled to the wall. Hansen came back to the table and sat down. There were tears in his eyes, but I guess that was the alcohol.

‘Any other questions?’ he asked, voice ripped.

Yvette Cruickshank:

A twenty-year-old, face so black it was almost blue, bone structure that belonged somewhere on the forward profile of a high-altitude interceptor, a dreadlocked mane gathered up the height of a fist before it spilled back down, hung with dangerous-looking steel jewellery and a couple of spare quickplant plugs, coded green and black. The jacks at the base of her skull showed three more.

‘What are those?’ I asked her.

‘Linguapack, Thai and Mandarin, Ninth Dan Shotokan,’ she fingered her way up the braille-tagged feathers in a fashion that suggested she could probably rip and change blind and under fire. ‘Advanced Field Medic.’

‘And the ones in your hair?’

‘Satnav interface and concert violin.’ She grinned. ‘Not much call for that one recently, but it keeps me lucky.’ Her face fell with comic abruptness that made me bite my lip. ‘Kept.’

‘You’ve requested rapid deployment posts seven times in the last year,’ said Hand. ‘Why is that?’

She gave him a curious look. ‘You already asked me that.’

‘Different me.’

‘Oh, I get it. Ghost in the machine. Yeah, well, like I said before. Closer focus, more influence over combat outcomes, better toys. You know, you smiled more the last time I said that.’

Jiang Jianping:

Pale Asiatic features, intelligent eyes with a slightly inward cast, and a light smile. You had the impression that he was contemplating some subtly amusing anecdote he’d just been told. Aside from the callused edges of his hands and a looseness of stance below his black coveralls, there was little to hint at his trade. He looked more like a slightly weary teacher than someone who knew fifty-seven separate ways to make a human body stop working.

‘This expedition,’ he murmured, ‘is presumably not within the general ambit of the war. It is a commercial matter, yes?’

I shrugged. ‘Whole war’s a commercial matter, Jiang.’

‘You may believe that.’

‘So may you,’ said Hand severely. ‘I am privy to government communiques at the highest level, and I’m telling you. Without the Cartel, the Kempists would have been in Landfall last winter.’

‘Yes. That is what I was fighting to prevent.’ He folded his arms. ‘That is what I died to prevent.’

‘Good,’ said Hand briskly. ‘Tell us about that.’

‘I have already answered this question. Why do you repeat it?’

The Mandrake exec rubbed at his eye.

‘That wasn’t me. It was a screening construct. There hasn’t been time to review the data so, please.’

‘It was a night assault in the Danang plain, a mobile relay station for the Kempists’ marauder-bomb management system.’

‘You were part of that?’ I looked at the ninja in front of me with new respect. In the Danang theatre, the covert strikes on Kemp’s communications net were the only real success the government could claim in the last eight months. I knew soldiers whose lives had been saved by the operation. The propaganda channels had still been trumpeting the news of strategic victory about the time my platoon and I were getting shot to pieces up on the Northern Rim.

‘I was honoured enough to be appointed cell commander.’

Hand looked at his palm, where data was scrolling down like some mobile skin disease. Systems magic. Virtual toys.

‘Your cell achieved its objectives, but you were killed when they pulled out. How did that happen?’

‘I made a mistake.’ Jiang enunciated the words with the same distaste he had pronounced Kemp’s name.

‘And what was that?’ No one could have given the Mandrake exec points for tact.

‘I believed the automated sentry systems would deactivate when the station was blown. They did not.’

‘Oops.’

He flicked a glance at me.

‘My cell could not withdraw without cover. I stayed behind.’

Hand nodded. ‘Admirable.’

‘It was my error. And it was a small price to pay to halt the Kempist advance.’

‘You’re not a big Kemp fan, are you, Jiang?’ I kept my tone careful. It looked as if we’d got a believer here.

‘The Kempists preach a revolution,’ he said scornfully, ‘But what will change if they take power on Sanction IV ?’

I scratched my ear. ‘Well, there’ll be a lot more statues of Joshua Kemp in public places, I imagine. Apart from that, probably not much.’

‘Exactly. And for this he has sacrificed how many hundreds of thousands of lives?’

‘Hard to say. Look, Jiang, we’re not Kempists. If we get what we want, I can promise you there’ll be a big renewed interest in making sure Kemp gets nowhere near power on Sanction IV. Will that do?’

He placed his hands flat on the table and studied them for a while.

‘Do I have an alternative?’ he asked.

Ameli Vongsavath:

A narrow, hawk-nosed face the colour of tarnished copper. Hair in a tidy pilot cut that was growing out, henna streaking black. At the back, tendrils of it almost covered the silvered sockets that would take the flight symbiote cables. Beneath the left eye, black tattooed cross-hatching marked the cheekbone where the dataflow filaments would go in. The eye above was a liquid crystal grey, mismatched with the dark brown of the right-hand pupil.

‘Hospital stock,’ she said, when her augmented vision noticed where I was looking. ‘I took some fire over Bootkinaree Town last year, and it blew out the dataflow. They patched me up in orbit.’

‘You flew back out with blown datafeeds?’ I asked sceptically. The overload would have shattered every circuit in her cheekbone and scorched tissue for half a handsbreadth in every direction. ‘What happened to your autopilot?’

She grimaced. ‘Fried.’

‘So how did you run the controls in that state?’

‘I shut down the machine and flew it on manual. Cut back to basic thrust and trim. This was a Lockheed Mitoma - their controls still run manually if you do that.’

‘No, I meant how did you run the controls with the state you were in.’

‘Oh.’ She shrugged. ‘I have a high pain threshold.’

Right.

Luc Deprez:

Tall and untidy, sandy blond hair grown longer than made sense for a battlefield, and in nothing you’d call a style. Face made up of sharp Caucasian angles, long bony nose, lantern jaw, eyes a curious shade of green. Sprawled at ease in the virtual chair, head tilted to one side as if he couldn’t quite make us out in this light.

‘So.’ He acquired my Landfall Lights from the table with a long arm and shook one out of the packet. ‘You going to tell me something about this gig?’

‘No,’ said Hand. ‘It’s confidential until you’re on board.’

A throaty chuckle amidst smoke as he puffed the cigarette to life. ‘That’s what you said last time. And like I said to you last time, who the hell am I going to tell, man. You don’t want to hire me, I’m going straight back into the tin can, right?’

‘Nonetheless.’

‘Alright. So you want to ask me something?’

‘Tell us about your last covert assault tag,’ I suggested.

‘That’s confidential.’ He surveyed our unsmiling faces for a moment. ‘Hey, that was a joke. I already told your partner all about it. Didn’t he brief you?’

I heard Hand make a compressed sound.

‘Ah, that was a construct,’ I said hurriedly. ‘We’re hearing this for the first time. Run through it again for us.’

Deprez shrugged. ‘Sure, why not? Was a hit on one of Kemp’s sector commanders. Inside his cruiser.’

‘Successful?’

He grinned at me. ‘I would say so. The head, you know. It came off.’

‘I just wondered. You being dead and all.’

‘That was bad luck. The fuck’s blood was deterrent toxin-loaded. Slow-acting. We didn’t find out until we were airborne and heading out.’

Hand frowned. ‘You got splashed?’

‘No, man.’ A pained expression flitted across the angular face. ‘My partner, she caught the spray when the carotid went. Right in the eyes.’ He plumed smoke at the ceiling. ‘Too bad, she was our pilot.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yeah. We flew into the side of a building.’ He grinned again. ‘That was fast-acting, man.’

Markus Sutjiadi:

Beautiful with an uncanny geometric perfection of feature that could have sat alongside Lapinee somewhere in the net. Eyes almond in shade and shape, mouth a straight line, face tending towards an inverted isosceles triangle, blunted at its corners to provide the solid chin and wide forehead, straight black hair plastered down. Features curiously immobile, as if drugged into detachment. A sense of energy conserved, of waiting. The face of a global pin-up who’d played too much competition poker recently.

‘Boo!’ I couldn’t resist it.

The almond eyes barely flickered.

‘There are serious charges outstanding against you,’ said Hand with a reproachful glance in my direction.

‘Yes.’

We all waited for a moment, but Sutjiadi clearly didn’t think there was any more to say on the subject. I started to like him.

Hand threw out a hand like a conjurer, and a screen evolved into the air just beyond his splayed fingers. More fucking system magic. I sighed and watched as a head and shoulders in a uniform like mine evolved beside a downscroll of biodata. The face was familiar.

‘You murdered this man,’ Hand said coldly. ‘Would you like to explain why?’

‘No.’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ I gestured at the face on the screen. ‘Dog Veutin gets a lot of people that way. I’m just interested to know how you managed to kill him.’

This time, the eyes lost some of their flatness, and his gaze glanced briefly off my Wedge insignia, confused.

‘I shot him in the back of the head.’

I nodded. ‘Shows initiative. Is he really dead?’

‘Yes. I used a Sunjet on full charge.’

Hand system-magicked the screen away with a snap of his fingers. ‘Your brig shuttle may have been shot out of the sky, but the Wedge think your stack probably survived. There’s a reward posted for anyone who turns it up. They still want you for formal execution.’ He looked sideways at me. ‘As I understand it that tends to be a pretty unpleasant business.’

‘Yeah, it is.’ I’d seen a couple of these object lessons early on in my career with the Wedge. They took a long time.

‘I have no interest in seeing you handed over to the Wedge,’ said Hand. ‘But I cannot risk this expedition on a man who will carry insubordination to these extremes. I need to know what happened.’

Sutjiadi was watching my face. I gave him the faintest hint of a nod.

‘He ordered my men decimated,’ he said tightly.

I nodded again, to myself this time. Decimation was, by all accounts, one of Veutin’s favourite forms of liaison with local troops.

‘And why was that?’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Hand,’ I turned in my seat. ‘Didn’t you hear him? He was ordered to decimate his command, and he didn’t want to. That kind of insubordination, I can live with.’

‘There may be factors which—’

‘We’re wasting time,’ I snapped, and turned back to Sutjiadi. ‘Given the same situation again, is there anything you’d do differently?’

‘Yes.’ He showed me his teeth. I’m not sure I’d call it a grin. ‘I’d have the Sunjet on wide beam. That way I’d have half-cooked his whole squad, and they wouldn’t have been in any condition to arrest me.’

I tipped a glance back at Hand. He was shaking his head, one hand up to his eyes.

Sun Liping:

Dark Mongol eyes shelved in epicanthic folds on high, broad cheekbones. A mouth poised in a faint downturn that might have been the aftermath of rueful laughter. Fine lines in the tanned skin and a solid fall of black hair draped over one shoulder and held firmly in place by a big silver static field generator. An aura of calm, equally unshakeable.

‘You killed yourself ?’ I asked doubtfully

‘So they tell me.’ The downturned lips amped up to a crooked grimace. ‘I remember pulling the trigger. It’s gratifying to know my aim doesn’t deteriorate under pressure.’

The slug from her sidearm had gone in under the right jaw line, ploughed directly through the centre of the brain and blown an admirably symmetrical hole in the top of her head on its way out.

‘Hard to miss at that range,’ I said with experimental brutality.

The calm eyes never flinched.

‘I understand it can be done,’ she said gravely.

Hand cleared his throat. ‘Would you like to tell us why you did it?’

She frowned. ‘Again?’

‘That,’ said Hand through slightly gritted teeth, ‘was a debriefing construct, not me.’

‘Oh.’

The eyes slanted sideways and up, searching, I guessed, for a retina-wired peripheral scroll down. The virtuality had been written not to render internal hardware, except in Mandrake personnel, but she showed no surprise at a lack of response so maybe she was just remembering it the old-fashioned way.

‘It was a squadron of automated armour. Spider tanks. I was trying to undermine their response parameters, but there was a viral booby trap wired into the control systems. A Rawling variant, I believe.’ The mild grimace again. ‘There was very little time to take stock, as you can probably imagine, so I can’t be sure. In any event, there was no time to jack out; the primary baffles of the virus had already welded me in. In the time I had before it downloaded fully, I could only come up with the one option.’

‘Very impressive,’ said Hand.

When it was done, we went back up to the roof to clear our heads. I leaned on a parapet and looked out over the curfewed quiet of Landfall while Hand went off to find some coffee. The terraces behind me were deserted, chairs and tables scattered like some hieroglyphic message left for orbital eyes. The night had cooled off while we were below, and the breeze made me shiver. Sun Liping’s words came back to me.

Rawling variant.

It was the Rawling virus that had killed the Innenin beachhead. Had made Jimmy de Soto claw out his own eye before he died. State-of-the-art back then, cheap off-the-rack military surplus now. The only viral software Kemp’s hard-pressed forces could afford.

Times change, but market forces are forever. History unreels, the real dead stay that way.

The rest of us get to go on.

Hand came back apologetically with machine-coffee canisters. He handed me mine and leaned on the parapet at my side.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked after a while.

‘I think it tastes like shit.’

He chuckled. ‘What do you think of our team?’

‘They’ll do.’ I sipped at the coffee and brooded on the city below. ‘I’m not overhappy about the ninja, but he’s got some useful skills and he seems prepared to get killed in the line of duty, which is always a big advantage in a soldier. How long to prep the clones?’

‘Two days. Maybe a little less.’

‘It’ll be twice that before these people are up to speed in a new sleeve. Can we do the induction in virtual?’

‘I see no reason why not. The MAI can spin out hundred per cent accurate renderings for each clone from the raw data in the biolab machines. Running at three-fifty times real, we can give the whole team a full month in their new sleeves, on site in the Dangrek construct, all inside a couple of hours, real time.’

‘Good,’ I said, and wondered why it didn’t feel that way.

‘My own reservations are with Sutjiadi. I am not convinced that a man like that can be expected to take orders well.’

I shrugged. ‘So give him the command.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Why not? He’s qualified for it. He’s got the rank, and he’s had the experience. Seems to have loyalty to his men.’

Hand said nothing. I could sense his frown across the half metre of parapet that separated us.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I had just. Assumed. You would want the command yourself.’

I saw the platoon again as the smart shrapnel barrage erupted overhead. Lightning flash, explosions, and then the fragments, skipping and hissing hungrily through the quicksilver flashing curtain of the rain. Crackling of blaster discharge in the background, like something ripping.

Screams.

What was on my face didn’t feel like a smile, but evidently it was.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You’ve read my file, Hand.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you still thought I wanted the command. Are you fucking insane?’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The coffee kept me awake.

Hand went to bed or whatever canister he crawled into when Mandrake wasn’t using him, and left me staring at the desert night. I searched the sky for Sol and found it glimmering in the east at the apex of a constellation the locals called the Thumb Home. Hand’s words drifted back through me.

. . . So far from earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine . . .

I shook it off, irritably.

It wasn’t like I’d been born there. Earth was no more home to me than Sanction IV, and if my father had ever pointed Sol out to me in between bouts of drunken violence, I had no memory of it. Any significance that particular point of light had for me, I’d got off a disc. And from here, you couldn’t even see the star that Harlan’s World orbited.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Or maybe it was just that I’d been there, to the legendary home of the human race, and now, looking up, I could imagine, a single astronomical unit out from the glimmering star, a world in spin, a city by the sea dropping away into darkness as night came on, or rolling back up and into the light, a police cruiser parked somewhere and a certain police lieutenant drinking coffee not much better than mine and maybe thinking . . .

That’s enough, Kovacs.

For your information, the light you’re watching arrive left fifty years before she was even born. And that sleeve you’re fantasising about is in its sixties by now, if she’s even wearing it still. Let it go.

Yeah, yeah.

I knocked back the dregs of the coffee, grimaced as it went down cold. By the look of the eastern horizon, dawn was on its way, and I had a sudden crushing desire not to be here when it arrived. I left the coffee carton standing sentinel on the parapet, and picked my way back through the scattered chairs and tables to the nearest elevator terminal.

The elevator dropped me the three floors to my suite and I made it along the gently curving corridor without meeting anyone. I was pulling the retina cup out of the door on its saliva-thin cable when the sound of footfalls in the machined quiet sent me back against the opposite wall, right hand reaching for the single interface gun I still carried from habit tucked into the back of my waistband.

Spooked.

You’re in the Mandrake Tower, Kovacs. Executive levels. Not even dust gets up here without authorisation. Get a fucking grip, will you.

‘Kovacs?’

Tanya Wardani’s voice.

I swallowed and pushed myself away from the wall. Wardani rounded the curve of the corridor and stood looking at me with what seemed like an unusual proportion of uncertainty in her stance.

‘I’m sorry, did I scare you?’

‘No.’ Reaching again for the retina cup, which had backreeled into the door when I went for the Kalashnikov.

‘Have you been up all night?’

‘Yes.’ I applied the cup to my eye and the door folded back. ‘You?’

‘More or less. I tried to get some sleep a couple of hours ago, but . . .’ she shrugged. ‘Too keyed up. Are you all done?’

‘With the recruiting?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘How are they?’

‘Good enough.’

The door made an apologetic chiming sound, drawing attention to the lack of entry effected so far.

‘Are you—’

‘Do you—’ I gestured.

‘Thanks.’ She moved, awkwardly, and stepped in ahead of me.

The suite lounge was walled in glass that I’d left at semi-opaque when I went out. City lights specked the smoky surface like deep-fry caught glowing in a Millsport trawler’s nets. Wardani halted in the middle of the subtly furnished living space and turned about.

‘I—’

‘Have a seat. The mauve ones are all chairs.’

‘Thanks, I still can’t quite get used to—’

‘State of the art.’ I watched as she perched on the edge of one of the modules, and it tried in vain to lift and shape itself around her body. ‘Want a drink?’

‘No. Thanks.’

‘Pipe?’

‘God, no.’

‘So how’s the hardware?’

‘It’s good.’ She nodded, more to herself than anyone. ‘Yes. Good enough.’

‘Good.’

‘You think we’re nearly ready?’

‘I—’ I pushed away the flash-rip behind my eyes and crossed to one of the other seats, making a performance of settling into it. ‘We’re waiting for developments up there. You know that.’

‘Yes.’

A shared quiet.

‘Do you think they’ll do it?’

‘Who? The Cartel?’ I shook my head. ‘Not if they can help it. But Kemp might. Look, Tanya. It may not even happen. But whether it does or not, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s too late for that kind of intervention now. Way war works. Abolition of the individual.’

‘What’s that? Some kind of Quellist epigram?’

I smiled. ‘Loosely paraphrased, yes. You want to know what Quell had to say about war? About all violent conflict?’

She made a restless motion. ‘Not really. OK, sure. Tell me. Why not? Tell me something I haven’t heard before.’

‘She said wars are fought over hormones. Male hormones, largely. It’s not about winnning or losing at all, it’s about hormonal discharge. She wrote a poem about it, back before she went underground. Let’s see—’

I closed my eyes and thought back to Harlan’s World. A safe house in the hills above Millsport. Stolen bioware stacked in a corner, pipes and post-op celebration wreathing the air. Idly arguing politics with Virginia Vidaura and her crew, the infamous Little Blue Bugs. Quellist quotes and poetry bantered back and forth.

‘You in pain?’

I opened my eyes and shot her a reproachful glance. ‘Tanya, this stuff was mostly written in Stripjap. That’s a Harlan’s World trade tongue - gibberish to you. I’m trying to remember the Amanglic version.’

‘Well, it looks painful. Don’t knock yourself out on my account.’

I held up a hand. ‘Goes like this:

Male-sleeved;
Stop up your hormones
Or spend them in moans
Of other calibre
(We’ll reassure you - the load is large enough)

Blood-pumped
Pride in your prowess
Will fail you, fuck you
And everything you touch
(You’ll reassure us - the price was small enough)’

I sat back. She sniffed.

‘Bit of an odd stance for a revolutionary. Didn’t she lead some kind of bloody uprising? Fight to the death against Protectorate tyranny, or something?’

‘Yeah. Several kinds of bloody uprising, in fact. But there’s no evidence she actually died. She disappeared in the last battle for Millsport. They never recovered a stack.’

‘I don’t really see how storming the gates of this Millsport gels with that poem.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, she never really changed her views on the roots of violence, even in the thick of it. Just realised it couldn’t be avoided, I guess. Changed her actions instead, to suit the terrain.’

‘That’s not much of a philosophy.’

‘No, it isn’t. But Quellism was never very big on dogma. About the only credo Quell ever subscribed to was Face the Facts. She wanted that on her tomb. Face the Facts. That meant dealing with them creatively, not ignoring them or trying to pretend they’re just some historical inconvenience. She always said you can’t control a war. Even when she was starting one.’

‘Sounds a little defeatist to me.’

‘Not at all. It’s just recognition of the danger. Facing the facts. Don’t start wars if you can possibly avoid it. Because once you do, it’s out of any sane control. No one can do anything except try to survive while it runs its hormonal course. Hold on to the rod and ride it out. Stay alive, and wait for the discharge.’

‘Whatever.’ She yawned and looked out of the window. ‘I’m not very good at waiting, Kovacs. You’d think being an archaeologue would have cured me of that, wouldn’t you?’ A shaky little laugh. ‘That, and. The camp—’

I stood up abruptly. ‘Let me get you that pipe.’

‘No.’ She hadn’t moved, but her voice was nailed down solid. ‘I don’t need to forget anything, Kovacs. I need—’

She cleared her throat.

‘I need you to do something for me. With me. What you did to me. Before, I mean. What you did has.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘Had an impact I didn’t. Didn’t expect.’

‘Ah.’ I sat down again. ‘That.’

‘Yes, that.’ There was a flicker of anger in her tone now. ‘I suppose it makes sense. It’s an emotion-bending process.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Yes, it is. Well, there’s one particular emotion I need bending back into place now, and I don’t really see any other way to do that than by fucking you.’

‘I’m not sure that—’

‘I don’t care,’ she said violently. ‘You changed me. You fixed me.’ Her voice quietened. ‘I suppose I should be grateful, but that isn’t how it feels. I don’t feel grateful, I feel fixed. You’ve created this. Imbalance in me, and I want that part of me back.’

‘Look, Tanya, you aren’t really in any condition—’

‘Oh, that.’ She smiled thinly. ‘I appreciate I’m not exactly sexually attractive right now, except maybe—’

‘Wasn’t what I meant—’

‘To a few freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck. No, we’ll need to fix that. We need to go virtual for this.’

I struggled to shake off a numbing sense of unreality. ‘You want to do this now?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Another sliced-off smile. ‘It’s interfering with my sleep patterns, Kovacs. And right now I need my sleep.’

‘Do you have somewhere in mind?’

‘Yes.’ It was like a children’s game of dare.

‘So where is that exactly?’

‘Downstairs.’ She got up and looked down at me. ‘You know, you ask a lot of questions for a man that’s about to get laid.’

Downstairs was a floor about midway up the tower which the elevator announced as a recreational level. The doors opened onto the unpartitioned space of a fitness centre, machines bulking insect-like and menacing in the unlit gloom. Towards the back, I spotted the tilted webs of a dozen or so virtualink racks.

‘We doing this out here?’ I asked uncomfortably.

‘No. Closed chambers at the back. Come on.’

We passed through the forest of stilled machines, lights flickering up above and amongst them, then flickering out again as we moved on. I watched the process out of a neurasthenic grotto that had been growing up around me like coral since before I came down from the roof. Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There’s this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn’t quite sharp enough any more, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.

The cure for this definitely is not more virtual time.

There were nine closed chambers, modular blisters swelling out of the end wall under their respective numbers. Seven and eight were cracked open, spilling low orange light around the line of the hatch. Wardani stopped in front of seven and the door hinged outward. The orange light expanded pleasantly in the gap, tuned into soft hypnomode. No dazzle. She turned to look back at me.

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Eight is slaved to this one. Just hit “consensual” on the menu pad.’

And she disappeared into the warm orange glow.

Inside module eight, someone had seen fit to cover the walls and roofing with empathist psychogram art, which in the hypnomode lighting seemed little more than a random set of fishtail swirls and spots. Then again, that’s what most empathist stuff looks like to me in any light. The air was just the right side of warm and beside the automould couch there was a complicated spiral of metal to hang clothes.

I stripped off and settled on the automould, pulled down the headgear and swiped the flashing consensual diamond as the displays came online. I just remembered to knock out the physical feedback baffle option before the system kicked in.

The orange light appeared to thicken, taking on a foggy substance through which the psychogram swirls and dots swam like complex equations or maybe some kind of pond life. I had a moment to wonder if the artist had intended either of those comparisons - empathists are a weird lot - and then the orange was fading and shredding away like steam, and I stood in an immense tunnel of black vented metal panels, lit only by lines of flashing red diodes that receded to infinity in both directions.

In front of me, more of the orange fog boiled up out of a vent and shredded into a recognisably female form. I watched fascinated as Tanya Wardani began to emerge from the general outline, made at first entirely of flickering orange smoke, then seemingly veiled in it from head to foot, then clad only in patches, and then, as these tore away, clad in nothing at all.

Glancing down at myself, I saw I was similarly naked.

‘Welcome to the loading deck.’

Looking up again, my first thought was that she had already gone to work on herself. Most constructs load on self-images held in the memory, with subroutines to beat anything too delusional - you end up looking pretty much the way you do in reality, less a couple of kilos and maybe plus a centimetre or two. The version of Tanya Wardani I was looking at didn’t have those kind of discrepancies - it was more a general sheen of health that she didn’t yet have back in the real world, or perhaps just the lack of a similar, more grimy sheen of unhealth. The eyes were less sunken, the cheek and collar bones less pronounced. Under the slightly pouched breasts, the ribs were there, but fleshed far past what I’d imagined below her draped clothing.

‘They’re not big on mirrors in the camp,’ she said, maybe reading something in my expression. ‘Except for interrogation. And after a while you try not to see yourself in windows walking past. I probably still look a lot worse than I think I do. Especially after that instant fix you loaded into me.’

I couldn’t think of anything even remotely appropriate to say.

‘You on the other hand . . .’ She stepped forward and, reaching out low, caught me by the prick. ‘Well, let’s see what you’ve got here.’

I was hard almost instantly.

Maybe it was something written into the protocols of the system, maybe just too long without the release. Or maybe there was some unclean fascination in anticipating the use of this body with its lightly accented marks of privation. Enough to hint artfully at abuse, not enough to repel. Freaks who like starved pubescents to fuck? No telling how a combat sleeve might be wired at this level. Or any male sleeve, come to that. Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It’s a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you’ll drag up once you start excavating.

‘That’s good,’ she breathed, abruptly close to my ear. She had not let go. ‘But I don’t rate this much. You’ve not been looking after yourself, soldier.’

Her other hand spread wide and scraped up my belly from the roots of my prick to the arc of my ribcage. Like a carpenter’s sanding glove, planing back the layering of flab that had begun to thicken over my sleeve’s tank-grown abdominal musculature. I glanced down, and saw with a slight visceral shock that some of the flab really had started to plane off, fading out with the motion of her flattened palm. It left a warm feeling threaded through the muscle beneath, like whisky going down.

Sy-system magic, I managed through the spasm as she tugged hard at me with the gripping hand and repeated the upward smoothing gesture with the other.

I lifted my own hands towards her, and she skipped back.

‘Uh-uh.’ She took another step away. ‘I’m not ready yet. Look at me.’

She lifted both hands and cupped her breasts. Pushed upward with the heels of her palms, then let them fall back, fuller, larger. The nipples - had one of them been broken before? - swollen dark and conical like chocolate sheathing on the copper skin.

‘Like that?’ she asked.

‘Very much.’

She repeated the open-handed grasping motion, topping it with a circular massaging action. When she let go this time, her breasts were well on their way to the dimensions of one of Djoko Roespinoedji’s gravity-defying concubines. She reached back and did something similar to her buttocks, turning to show me the cartoon rounding she’d given them. She bent forward and pulled the cheeks apart.

‘Lick me,’ she said, with sudden urgency.

I went down on one knee and pressed my face into the crease, spearing forward with my tongue, working at the tight whorl of closed sphincter. I wrapped an arm around one long thigh to steady myself and with the other hand I reached up and found her already wet. The ball of my thumb sank into her from the front as my tongue worked deeper from the rear, both rubbing soft synchronised circles amid her insides. She grunted, somewhere at the base of her throat, and we

Shifted

Into liquid blue. The floor was gone, and most of the gravity with it. I thrashed and lost my thumbhold. Wardani twisted languidly around and fastened to me like belaweed around a rock. The fluid was not water; it had left our skins slick against each other, and I could breath it as well as if it were tropical air. I gasped my lungs full of it as Wardani slithered down, biting at my chest and stomach, and finally laid hands and mouth on my hard-on.

I didn’t last long. Floating in the infinite blue while Tanya Wardani’s newly pneumatic breasts pressed against my thighs and her nipples traced up and down on my oiled skin and her mouth sucked and her curled fingers pumped, I had just enough time to notice a light source above us before my neck muscles started to tauten, cranking my head back, and the twitching messages along my nerves gathered together for a final climactic rush.

There was a scratch replay vibrato effect built into the construct. My orgasm went on for over thirty seconds.

As it tailed off, Tanya Wardani floated up past me, hair spread around her face, threads of semen blown out amidst bubbles from the corners of her grin. I struck out and grabbed one passing thigh, dragged her back into range.

She flexed in the water analogue as my tongue sank into her, and more bubbles ran out of her mouth. I caught the reverberation of her moan through the fluid like the sympathetic vibration of jet engines in the pit of my stomach, and felt myself stiffening in response. I pressed my tongue down harder, forgetting to breathe and then discovering I didn’t actually need to for a long time. Wardani’s writhing grew more urgent and she crooked her legs around my back to anchor herself in place. I cupped her buttocks and squeezed, pushing my face into the folds of her cunt, then slid my thumb back inside her and recommenced the soft circular motion in counterpoint to the spiralling of my tongue. She gripped my head in both hands and crushed my face against her. Her writhings became thrashings, her moans a sustained shout that filled my ears like the sound of surf overhead. I sucked. She stiffened, and screamed, and then shuddered for minutes.

We drifted to the surface together. An astronomically unlikely red giant sun was sinking at the horizon, bathing the suddenly normalised water around us in stained-glass light. Two moons sat high in the eastern sky and behind us waves broke on a white sand beach fringed by palms.

‘Did you. Write this?’ I asked, treading water and nodding at the view.

‘Hardly.’ She wiped water out of her eyes and slicked back her hair with both hands. ‘It’s off the rack. I checked out what they had this afternoon. Why, you like it?’

‘So far. But I have a feeling that sun is an astronomical impossibility.’

‘Yeah, well, breathing underwater’s not overly realistic either.’

‘I didn’t get to breathe.’ I held my hands above the water in claws, miming the grip she’d had on my head, and pulled a suffocated face. ‘This bring back any memories?’

To my amazement, she flushed scarlet. Then she laughed, splashed water in my face and struck out for the shore. I trod water for a moment, laughing too, and then went after her.

The sand was warm, powder fine and system-magically unwilling to stick to wet flesh. Behind the beach, coconuts fell sporadically from the palms and, unless collected, broke down into fragments which were carried away by tiny jewel-coloured crabs.

We fucked again at the water’s edge, Tanya Wardani seated astride my cock, cartoon ass bedded soft and warm on my crossed legs. I buried my face in her breasts, settled hands at her hips and lifted her gently up and down until the shuddering started in her again, caught me like a contagious fever and ran through us both. The scratch replay subroutine had a resonance system built in that cycled the orgasm back and forth between us like an oscillating signal, swamping and ebbing for what felt like forever.

It was love. Perfect passion compatibility, trapped, distilled and amped up almost beyond bearing.

‘You knock out the baffles?’ she asked me, a little breathlessly, after.

‘Of course. You think I want to go through all this and still come out swilling full of semen and sex hormones?’

‘Go through?’ She lifted her head from the sand, outraged.

I grinned back. ‘Sure. This is for your benefit, Tanya. I wouldn’t be here other—Hoy, no throwing sand.’

‘Fucking—’

‘Look—’

I fended off the fistful of sand with one arm and pushed her into the surf. She went over backwards, laughing. I stood up in a ludicrous Micky Nozawa fighting stance, while she picked herself up. Something out of Siren Fist Demons.

‘Don’t try to lay your profane hands on me, woman.’

‘Looks to me like you want to have hands laid on you,’ she said, shaking back her hair and pointing.

It was true. The sight of the system magic-enhanced body, beaded with water, had the signals flickering through my nerve endings again, and my glans was already filling up with blood like a ripening plum in time-lapse fast-forward sequence.

I gave up the guard, and glanced around the construct. ‘You know, off the rack or not, this is some good shit, Tanya.’

‘Last year’s CyberSex Down seal of approval, apparently.’ She shrugged. ‘I took a chance. You want to try the water again? Or, apparently there’s this waterfall thing back through the trees.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

On the way past the front line of palms with their huge phallic trunks lifting like dinosaur necks off the sand, I scooped up a newly fallen coconut. The crabs scattered with comic speed, scuttling for burrows in the sand from which they poked cautious eyestalks. I turned the coconut over in my hands. It had landed with a small chunk already torn out of the green shell, exposing soft, rubbery flesh beneath. Nice touch. I punctured the inner membrane with my thumb and tipped it back like a gourd. The milk inside was improbably chilled.

Another nice touch.

The forest floor beyond was conveniently clear of sharp debris and insects. Water poured and splashed somewhere with attention-grabbing clarity. An obvious path led through the palm trunks towards the sound. We walked, hand in hand, beneath rainforest foliage filled with brightly-coloured birds and small monkeys making suspiciously harmonic noises.

The waterfall was a two-tier affair, pouring down in a long plume into a wide basin, then tumbling through rocks and rapids to another smaller pool where the drop was less. I arrived slightly ahead of her and stood on wet rocks at the edge of the second pool, arms akimbo, looking down. I repressed a grin. The moment was cleared for her to push me in, trembling with the potential.

Nothing.

I turned to look at her, and saw she was trembling slightly.

‘Hoy, Tanya.’ I took her face between my hands. ‘Are you OK? What’s the matter?’

But I knew what the motherfucking matter was.

Because, Envoy techniques or not, healing is a complex, creeping process, and it’ll glitch on you as soon as your back’s turned.

The motherfucking camp.

The low-key arousal fled, leaching out of my system like saliva from a mouthful of lemon. The fury sheeted up through me.

The motherfucking war.

If I’d had Isaac Carrera and Joshua Kemp there, in the middle of all that edenic beauty, I’d have torn their entrails out with my bare hands, knotted them together and kicked them into the pool to drown.

Can’t drown in this water, sneered the part of me that would never shut down, the smug Envoy control. You can breathe in this water.

Maybe men like Kemp and Carrera couldn’t.

Yeah, right.

So instead, I caught Tanya Wardani around the waist, and crushed her against me, and jumped for us both.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I came out of it with an alkaline smell in my nostrils and my belly sticky with fresh semen. My balls ached as if they’d been kicked. Over my head, the display had cleared to standby. A time-check pulsed in one corner. I’d been under less than two minutes, real time.

I sat up groggily.

‘Fuck. Me.’ I cleared my throat, and looked around. Fresh self-moistening towelling hung from a roll behind the automould, presumably with just this in mind. I tore off a handful and wiped myself down, still trying to blink the virtuality out of my eyes.

We’d fucked in the waterfall pool, languid underwater once Wardani’s trembling had passed.

We’d fucked again on the beach.

We’d fucked back up on the loading deck, a last-chance-grabbed-at-leaving sort of thing.

I tore off more towel, wiped my face and rubbed at my eyes. I dressed slowly, stowed the smart gun, wincing as it prodded down from my waistband into my tender groin. I found a mirror on the wall of the chamber and peered into it, trying to sort out what had happened to me in there.

Envoy psychoglue.

I’d used it on Wardani without really thinking about it, and now she was up and walking around. That was what I’d wanted. The dependency whiplash was an almost inevitable side-effect, but so what? It was the kind of thing that didn’t much matter in the usual Envoy run of things - as likely as not you were in combat with other things to worry about, often you’d moved on by the time it became a problem the subject had to deal with. What didn’t generally happen was the kind of restorative purging Wardani had prescribed for herself and then gone after.

I couldn’t predict how that would work.

I’d never known it to happen before. Never even seen it before.

I couldn’t work out what she’d made me feel in turn.

And I wasn’t learning anything new looking at myself in the mirror.

I built a shrug and a grin, and walked out of the chamber into the pre-dawn gloom among the stilled machines. Wardani was waiting outside, by one of the open-rig webs and

Not alone.

The thought jarred through my soggy nervous system, painfully sluggish, and then the unmistakeable spike-and-ring configuration at the projection end of a Sunjet was pushed against the back of my neck.

‘You want to avoid any sudden moves, chum.’ It was a strange accent, an equatorial twang to it even through the voiceprint distorter. ‘Or you and your girlfriend here are going to be wearing no heads.’

A professional hand snaked round my waist, plucked the Kalashnikov from its resting place and tossed it away across the room. I heard the muffled clunk as it hit the carpeted floor and slid.

Try to pinpoint it.

Equatorial accent.

Kempists.

I looked over at Wardani, her oddly limp-hanging arms, and the figure who held a smaller hand blaster to her nape. He was dressed in the form-fitting black of a stealth assault suit and masked with clear plastic that moved in random waves over his face, distorting the features continually, except for two little watchful blue-tinted windows over the eyes.

There was a pack on his back that had to carry whatever intrusion hardware they’d used to get in here. Had to be a biosigns imaging set, counterfeed code sampler and securisys sandbagger in there, minimum.

High fucking tech.

‘You guys are so dead,’ I said, trying for amused calm.

‘Extra funny, chum.’ The one who’d taken me tugged at my arm and pulled me around so I was looking down the ramping chute of the Sunjet. Same dress code, same running plastic mask. Same black pack. Two more clone-identical forms bulked behind him, watching opposite ends of the room. Their Sunjets were cradled low, deceptively casual. My enthusiasm for the odds collapsed like a set of unplugged LED displays.

Play for time.

‘Who sent you guys?’

‘See,’ said the spokesman, voice squelching in and out of focus. ‘It’s rigged this way. Her we want, you’re just carbon walking. Limit that mouth, maybe we lift you too, just for tidiness. Keep gritting me, I’ll make a mess just to see your Envoy grey cells fly. Am I coming through?’

I nodded, desperately trying to mop up the post-coital languor that had drenched my system. Shifting my stance slightly . . .

Aligning from memory . . .

‘Good, then let’s have your arms.’ He dropped his left hand to his belt and produced a contact stunner. The aim of the Sunjet never wavered in the right-hand grip. The mask flexed in an approximation of a smile. ‘One at a time, of course.’

I raised my left arm and held it out to him. Flexed my right hand behind me, riding out the sense of impotent fury, so the palm rippled.

The little grey device came down on my wrist, charged light winking. He had to shift the Sunjet, of course, or the dead weight of my arm was going to come down on it like a club when the stunner fired . . .

Now. So low even the neurachem barely picked it out. A thin whine through the conditioned air.

The stunner fired.

Painless. Cold. A localised version of what it felt like to get shot with a beam stunner. The arm flopped like a dead fish, narrowly missing the Sunjet despite its new alignment. He twitched slightly aside, but it was a relaxed move. The mask grinned.

‘That’s good. Now the other one.’

I smiled and shot him—

Grav microtech - a weapons engineering breakthrough from the house of Kalashnikov.

—from the hip. Three times across the chest, hoping to drill clean through whatever armour he was wearing and into the backpack. Blood—

Across short distances, the Kalashnikov AKS91 interface gun will lift and fly direct to an implanted bioalloy home plate.

—drenched the stealth suit, tickled my face with backblown spray. He staggered, Sunjet wagging like an admonishing finger. His colleagues—

Almost silent, the generator delivers total capacity in a ten-second burst.

—hadn’t worked it out yet. I fired high at the two behind him, probably hit one of them somewhere. They rolled away, grabbing cover. Return fire crackled around me, nowhere close.

I came around, dragging the numbed arm like a shoulder bag, looking for Wardani and her captor.

‘Fucking don’t, man, I’ll—’

And shot through the writhing plastic of the mask.

The slug punched him back a clean three metres, into the spidery arms of a climbing machine, where he hung, slumped and used up.

Wardani dropped to the ground, bonelessly. I threw myself down, chased by fresh Sunjet fire. We landed nose to nose.

‘You OK?’ I hissed.

She nodded, cheek pressed flat to the floor, shoulders twitching as she tried to move her stunned arms.

‘Good. Stay there.’ I flailed my own numbed limb around and searched the machine jungle for the two remaining Kempists.

No sign. Could be fucking anywhere. Waiting for a clear shot.

Fuck this.

I lined up on the crumpled form of the squad leader, on the backpack. Two shots blew it apart, fragments of hardware jumping out of the exit holes in the fabric.

Mandrake security woke up.

Lights seared. Sirens shrieked from the roof, and an insectile storm of nanocopters issued from vents on the walls. They swooped over us, blinked glass bead eyes and passed us by. A few metres over, a flight of them rained laser fire down amidst the machines.

Screams.

An abortive Sunjet blast carving wildly through the air. The nanocopters it touched flamed and spun out like burning moths. The laser fire from the others redoubled, chickling.

Screams powering down to sobbing. The sickly stench of charred flesh made it across in ribbons to where I lay. It was like a homecoming.

The nanocopter swarm broke up, drifting away disinterestedly. A couple threw down parting rays as they left. The sobbing stopped.

Silence.

Beside me, Wardani eeled her knees under her, but could not get upright. No upper body strength in her recovering body. She looked wildly across at me. I propped myself up on my working arm, then levered myself to my feet.

‘Stay there. I’ll be back.’

I went reflexively to check on the corpses, ducking stray nanocopters.

The masks had frozen in rictus smiles, but faint ripples still ran through the plastic at intervals. As I watched the two the copters had killed, something fizzled under each head and smoke spiralled up.

‘Oh, shit.’

I ran back to the one I’d shot in the face, the one caught upright in the machine, but it was the same story. The base of the skull had already charred black and ragged, and the head was listing slightly against one of the climbing machine’s struts. Missed in the storm of fire from the nanocopters. Below the neat hole I’d put in the centre of the mask, the mouth grinned at me with plastic insincerity.

‘Fuck.’

‘Kovacs.’

‘Yeah, sorry.’ I stowed the smart gun and pulled Wardani unceremoniously to her feet. At the end of the room, the elevator opened and spilled out a squad of armed security.

I sighed. ‘Here we go.’

They spotted us. The squad captain cleared her blaster.

‘Remain still! Raise your hands!’

I lifted my working arm. Wardani shrugged.

‘I’m not pissing about here, folks!’

‘We’re injured,’ I called back. ‘Contact stunners. And everyone else is dead, extremely. The bad guys had stack blowout failsafes. It’s all over. Go wake Hand up.’

Hand took it quite well, considering. He got them to turn over one of the corpses and crouched beside it, poking at the charred spinal cord with a metal stylus.

‘Molecular acid canister,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Last year’s Shorn Biotech. I didn’t realise the Kempists had these yet.’

‘They’ve got everything you’ve got, Hand. They’ve just got a lot less of it, that’s all. Read your Brankovitch. “Trickledown in War-based Markets”.’

‘Yes, thank you, Kovacs.’ Hand rubbed at his eyes. ‘I already have a doctorate in Conflict Investment. I don’t really need the gifted amateur reading list. What I would like to know, however, is what you two were doing down here at this time of the morning.’

I exchanged a look with Wardani. She shrugged.

‘We were fucking,’ she said.

Hand blinked.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Already.’

‘What’s that supposed t—’

‘Kovacs, please. You’re giving me a headache.’ He got up and nodded at the head of the forensic squad who was hovering nearby. ‘OK, get them out of here. See if you can get a tissue match for those scrapes we took out of Find Alley and the canal head. File c221mh, central clearing’ll let you have the codes.’

We all watched as the dead were loaded onto ground-effect gurneys and escorted to the elevators. Hand just caught himself returning the stylus to his jacket, and handed it to the last of the retreating forensic squad. He brushed the ends of his fingers absently against each other.

‘Someone wants you back, Mistress Wardani,’ he said. ‘Someone with resources. I suppose that in itself ought to reassure me as to the value of our investment in you.’

Wardani made a faint, ironic bow.

‘Someone with wires to the inside too,’ I added sombrely. ‘Even with a backpack full of intrusion gear, there’s no way they got in here without help. You’ve got leakage.’

‘Yes, so it would appear.’

‘Who did you send to check out those shadows we brought back from the bar night before last?’

Wardani looked at me, alarmed.

‘Someone followed us?’

I gestured at Hand. ‘So he says.’

‘Hand?’

‘Yes, Mistress Wardani, that is correct. You were followed as far as Find Alley.’ He sounded very tired, and the glance he shot at me was defensive. ‘It was Deng, I think.’

‘Deng? Are you serious? Shit, how long do you guys give line-of-duty casualties before you jam them back into a sleeve?’

‘Deng had a clone on ice,’ he snapped back. ‘That’s standard policy for security operations managers, and he got a virtual week of counselling and full-impact recreational leave before he was downloaded. He was fit for duty.’

‘Was he? Why don’t you call him?’

I was remembering what I’d said to him in the ID&A construct. The men and women you work for would sell their own children into a brothel if it meant getting their hands on what I showed them tonight. And alongside that, my friend, you. Don’t. Matter.

Just killed is a fragile state of mind for the uninitiated. It makes you susceptible to suggestion. And Envoys are past masters at persuasion.

Hand had his audio phone open.

‘Wake up Deng Zhao Jun please.’ He waited. ‘I see. Well, try that then.’

I shook my head.

‘That good old spit-in-the-sea-that-nearly-drowned-you bravado, eh Hand? Barely over the death trauma, and you’re throwing him back into action on a related case? Come on, put the phone away. He’s gone. He’s sold you out and skipped with the loose change.’

Hand’s jaw knotted, but he kept the phone at his ear.

‘Hand, I practically told him to do it.’ I met the sideways-flung disbelief in his eyes. ‘Yeah, go ahead. Blame me, if it makes you feel better. I told him Mandrake didn’t give a shit about him, and you went ahead and proved it by cutting a deal with us. And then you put him on watchdog detail, just to rub it in.’

‘I did not assign Deng, goddamn you Kovacs.’ He was hanging onto his temper by shreds, biting down on it. His hand was white-knuckled on the phone. ‘And you had no business telling him anything. Now, shut the fuck up. Yes, yes this is Hand.’

He listened. Spoke controlled monosyllables acid-etched with frustration. Snapped the phone closed.

‘Deng left the tower in his own transport early last night. He disappeared in the Old Clearing House mall a little before midnight.’

‘Just can’t get the staff these days, eh?’

‘Kovacs.’ The exec snapped out his hand, as if physically holding me at arm’s length. His eyes were hard with mastered anger. ‘I don’t want to hear it. Alright? I don’t. Want to hear it.’

I shrugged.

‘No one ever does. That’s why this sort of thing keeps on happening.’ Hand breathed out, compressed.

‘I am not going to debate employment law with you, Kovacs, at five in the fucking morning.’ He turned on his heel. ‘You two had better get your act together. We download into the Dangrek construct at nine.’

I looked sideways at Wardani, and caught a smirk. It was childishly contagious and it felt like hands linking behind the Mandrake exec’s back.

Ten paces off, Hand stopped. As if he’d sensed it.

‘Oh.’ He turned to face us. ‘By the way. The Kempists airburst a marauder bomb over Sauberville an hour ago. High yield, hundred per cent casualties.’

I caught the flare of white in Wardani’s eye as she snatched her gaze away from mine. She stared at the lower middle distance. Mouth clamped.

Hand stood there and watched it happen.

‘Thought you’d both like to know that,’ he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dangrek.

The sky looked like old denim, faded blue bowl ripped with threads of white cloud at high altitude. Sunlight filtered through, bright enough to make me narrow my eyes. Warm fingers of it brushed over exposed portions of my skin. The wind had risen a little since last time, buffeting from the west. Little black drifts of fallout dusted off the vegetation around us.

At the headland, Sauberville was still burning. The smoke crawled up into the old denim sky like the wipings of heavily oiled fingers.

‘Proud of yourself, Kovacs?’

Tanya Wardani muttered it in my ear as she walked past me to get a better look from further up the slope. It was the first thing she’d said to me since Hand broke the news.

I went after her.

‘You’ve got a complaint about this, you’d better go register it with Joshua Kemp,’ I told her when I caught up. ‘And anyway, don’t act like this is new. You knew it was coming like everybody else.’

‘Yes, I’m just a little gorged on it right now.’

It was impossible to get away from. Screens throughout the Mandrake Tower had run it non-stop. Bright pinhead-to-bladder flash in silence, reeled in on some military documentary team’s cameras, and then the sound. Gabbled commentary over a rolling thunder and the spreading mushroom cloud. Then the lovingly freeze-frame-advanced replays.

The MAI had gobbled it up and incorporated it for us. Wiped that irritating grey fuzz indeterminacy from the construct.

‘Sutjiadi, get your team deployed.’

It was Hand’s voice, drumming through the induction rig speaker. A loose exchange of military shorthand followed and in irritation I yanked the speaker away from its resting place behind my ear. I ignored the footfalls of someone tramping up the slope behind us and focused on the locked posture of Tanya Wardani’s head and neck.

‘I guess it was quick for them,’ she said, still staring out at the headland.

‘Like the song says. Nothing faster.’

‘Mistress Wardani.’ It was Ole Hansen, some echo of the arc-light intensity from his original blue eyes somehow burning through the wide-set dark gaze of his new sleeve. ‘We’ll need to see the demolition site.’

She choked back something that might have been a laugh, and didn’t say the obvious thing.

‘Sure,’ she said instead. ‘Follow me.’

I watched the two of them pick their way down the other side of the slope towards the beach.

‘Hoy! Envoy guy!’

I turned unwillingly, and spotted Yvette Cruickshank navigating her Maori sleeve uncertainly up the slope towards me, Sunjet slung flat across her chest and a set of ranging lenses pushed up on her head. I waited for her to reach me, which she did without tripping in the long grass more than a couple of times.

‘How’s the new sleeve?’ I called as she stumbled for the second time.

‘It’s—’ She shook her head, closed the gap and started again, voice lowered back to normal. ‘’s a fraction strange, know what I mean?’

I nodded. My first re-sleeve was more than thirty subjective years in my past, objectively close to two centuries ago, but you don’t forget. The initial re-entry shock never really goes away.

‘Bit fucking pallid, too.’ She pinched up the skin on the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘How come I couldn’t get some fine black cover like yours?’

‘I didn’t get killed,’ I reminded her. ‘Besides, once the radiation starts to bite, you’re going to be glad. What you’re wearing there needs about half the dosage I’ll be taking to stay operational.’

She scowled. ‘Still going to get us all in the end, though, isn’t it.’

‘It’s only a sleeve, Cruickshank.’

‘That’s right, just give me some of that Envoy cool.’ She barked a laugh and upended her Sunjet, gripping the short, thick barrel disconcertingly in one slim hand. Squinting up from the discharge channel and directly at me, she asked, ‘Think you could go for a white-girl sleeve like this then?’

I considered. The Maori combat sleeves were long on limb and broad in the chest and shoulders. A lot of them, like this one, were pale-skinned, and being fresh out of the clone tanks accentuated the effect, but faces ran to high cheekbones, wide spaced eyes and flaring lips and noses. White-girl sleeve seemed a little harsh. And even inside the shapeless battlefield chameleochrome coveralls . . .

‘You going to look like that,’ Cruickshank remarked, ‘you’d better be buying something.’

‘Sorry. Just giving the question my full consideration.’

‘Yeah. Skip it. I wasn’t that worried. You were operational around here, weren’t you?’

‘A couple of months back.’

‘So what was it like?’

I shrugged. ‘People shooting at you. Air full of pieces of fast-moving metal looking for a home. Pretty standard stuff. Why?’

‘I heard the Wedge got a pasting. That true?’

‘It certainly looked that way from where I was standing.’

‘So how come Kemp suddenly decides, from a position of strength, to cut and nuke?’

‘Cruickshank.’ I started and then stopped, unable to think of a way to get through the armour plate of youth she was wearing. She was twenty-two, and like all twenty-two year olds she thought she was the immortal focal point of this universe. Sure she’d been killed, but so far all that had done was prove the immortal part. It would not have occurred to her that there might be a world view in which what she saw was not only marginal but almost wholly irrelevant.

She was waiting for an answer.

‘Look,’ I said finally. ‘No one told me what we were fighting for up here, and from what we got out of the prisoners we interrogated, I’d say they didn’t know either. I gave up expecting this war to make sense a while ago, and I’d advise you to do the same if you plan on surviving much more of it.’

She raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that she hadn’t quite got nailed in her new sleeve.

‘So you don’t know, then.’

‘No.’

‘Cruickshank!’ Even with my own induction rig unhooked, I heard the tinny crash of Markus Sutjiadi’s voice over the comlink. ‘You want to get down here and work for a living like the rest of us?’

‘Coming, cap.’ She pulled a mouth-down face in my direction and started back down the slope. A couple of steps down, she stopped and turned back.

‘Hey, Envoy guy.’

‘Yeah?’

‘That stuff about the Wedge taking a pasting? Wasn’t a crit, OK. Just what I heard.’

I felt myself grinning at the carefully deployed sensitivity.

‘Forget it, Cruickshank. Couldn’t give a shit. I’m more bent out of shape you didn’t like me drooling on you.’

‘Oh.’ She grinned back. ‘Well, I guess I did ask.’ Her gaze dropped to my crotch and she crossed her eyes for effect. ‘What about I get back to you on that one?’

‘Do that.’

The induction rig buzzed against my neck. I stuck it back in place and hooked up the mike.

‘Yeah, Sutjiadi?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble, sir,’ the irony dripped off the last word, ‘would you mind leaving my soldiers alone while they deploy?’

‘Yeah, sorry. Won’t happen again.’

‘Good.’

I was about to disconnect when Tanya Wardani’s voice came across the net in soft expletives.

‘Who’s that?’ snapped Sutjiadi. ‘Sun?’

‘I don’t fucking believe this.’

‘It’s Mistress Wardani, sir.’ Ole Hansen came in, laconically calm, over the muttered curses from the archaeologue. ‘I think you’d better all get down here and take a look at this.’

I raced Hand to the beach and lost by a couple of metres. Cigarettes and damaged lungs don’t count in a virtuality, so it must have been concern for Mandrake’s investment that drove him. Very commendable. Still not attuned to their new sleeves, the rest of the party fell behind us. We reached Wardani alone.

We found her in much the same position she’d taken up facing the rockfall last time we’d been in the construct. For a moment, I couldn’t see what she was looking at.

‘Where’s Hansen?’ I asked stupidly.

‘He went in,’ she said, waving a hand forward. ‘For what it’s worth.’

Then I saw it. The pale bite-marks of recent blasting, gathered around a two-metre fissure opened in the fall, and a path winding out of sight beyond.

‘Kovacs?’ There was a brittle lightness to the query in Hand’s tone.

‘I see it. When did you update the construct?’

Hand stalked closer to examine the blasting marks. ‘Today.’

Tanya Wardani nodded to herself. ‘High-orbit satellite geoscan, right?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Well.’ The archaeologue turned away and reached in her coat pocket for cigarettes. ‘We aren’t going to find anything out here then.’

‘Hansen!’ Hand cupped his hands and shouted into the fissure, the induction rig he was wearing apparently forgotten.

‘I hear you.’ The demolition expert’s voice came thrumming back on the rig, detached and edged with a smirk. ‘There’s nothing back here.’

‘Of course there isn’t,’ commented Wardani, to nobody in particular.

‘. . . some kind of circular clearing, about twenty metres across, but the rocks look strange. Kind of fused.’

‘That’s improvisation,’ said Hand impatiently into the rig mike. ‘The MAI’s guessing at what’s in there.’

‘Ask him if there’s anything in the middle,’ said Wardani, kindling her cigarette against the breeze off the sea.

Hand relayed the query. The answer crackled back over the set.

‘Yeah, some kind of central boulder, maybe a stalagmite.’

Wardani nodded. ‘That’s your gate,’ she said. ‘Probably old echo-sounding data the MAI reeled in from some flyby area recon a while ago. It’s trying to map the data with what it can see from the orbital view, and since it’s got no reason to believe there’s anything in there but rocks—’

‘Someone’s been here,’ said Hand, jaw set.

‘Well yes.’ Wardani blew out smoke and pointed. ‘Oh, and there’s that.’

Anchored in the shallows a few hundred metres along the beach, a small, battered-looking trawler wagged back and forth in a longshore current. Her nets spilled over the side like something escaping.

The sky whited out.

It wasn’t quite as rough a ride as the ID&A set had been, but still, the abrupt return to reality impacted on my system like a bath of ice, chilling extremities and sending a shiver deep through the centre of my guts. My eyes snapped open on the expensive empathist psychogram art.

‘Oh, nice,’ I grumbled, sitting up in the soft lighting and groping around for the ’trodes.

The chamber door hinged outward on a subdued hum. Hand stood in the doorway, clothing still fully not closed up, limned from behind by the brightness of normal lights. I squinted at him.

‘Was that really necessary?’

‘Get your shirt on, Kovacs.’ He was closing his own at the neck as he spoke. ‘We’ve got things to do. I want to be on the peninsula by this evening.’

‘Aren’t you overreacting a li—’

He was already turning away.

‘Hand, the recruits aren’t used to those sleeves yet. Not by a long way.’

‘I left them in there.’ He flung the words back over his shoulder. ‘They can have another ten minutes - that’s two days virtual time. Then we download them for real and leave. If someone’s up at Dangrek ahead of us, they’re going to be very sorry.’

‘If they were there when Sauberville went down,’ I shouted after him, suddenly furious. ‘They’re probably already very sorry. Along with everyone else.’

I heard his footsteps, receding up the corridor. Mandrake Man, shirt closed up, suit settling onto squared shoulders, moving forward. Enabled. About Mandrake’s heavy-duty business, while I sat barechested in a puddle of my own unfocused rage.

PART THREE

Disruptive Elements

The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn’t offer this assurance, so it’s very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you’re in control.

Quellcrist Falconer Ethics on the Precipice

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There is no subtle way to deploy an IP vessel across half a planet. So we didn’t try.

Mandrake booked us a priority launch and landing parabola with the Cartel’s suborbital traffic arm, and we flew out to an anonymous landing field on the outskirts of Landfall just as the heat was leaching out of the afternoon. There was a shiny new Lockheed Mitoma IP assault ship dug into the concrete, looking like nothing so much as a smoked glass scorpion someone had ripped the fighting claws off. Ameli Vongsavath grunted in approval when she saw it.

‘Omega series,’ she said to me, mainly because I happened to be standing next to her when we climbed out of the cruiser. She was fixing her hair reflexively as she spoke, twisting the thick black strands up and clear of the flight symbiote sockets at her nape, pegging the loosely gathered bun in place with static clips. ‘You could fly that baby right down Incorporation Boulevard and not even scorch the trees. Put plasma torpedoes through the front door of the Senate House, stand on your tail and be in orbit before they blew.’

‘For example,’ I said dryly. ‘Of course, with those mission objectives, you’d be a Kempist, which means you’d be flying some beaten-up piece of shit like a Mowai Ten. Right, Schneider?’

Schneider grinned. ‘Yeah, doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘What doesn’t bear thinking about?’ Yvette Cruickshank wanted to know. ‘Being a Kempist?’

‘No, flying a Mowai,’ Schneider told her, eyes flickering up and down the frame of her Maori combat sleeve. ‘Being a Kempist’s not so bad. Well, apart from all the pledge singing.’

Cruickshank blinked. ‘You were really a Kempist?’

‘He’s joking,’ I said, with a warning glance at Schneider. There was no political officer along this time, but Jiang Jianping at least seemed to have strong feelings about Kemp, and there was no telling how many other members of the team might share them. Stirring up potential animosities just to impress well-shaped women didn’t strike me as all that smart.

Then again, Schneider hadn’t had his hormones wrung out in virtual that morning, so maybe I was just being unduly balanced about the whole thing.

One of the Lock Mit’s loading hatches hinged up. A moment later Hand appeared in the entrance in neatly pressed combat chameleochrome, now smoky grey against the prevalent hue of the assault ship. The change from his usual corporate attire was so complete it jarred, for all that everyone else was similarly dressed.

‘Welcome to the fucking cruise,’ muttered Hansen.

We cleared for dust-off five minutes before Mandrake’s authorised launch envelope opened. Ameli Vongsavath put the flight plan to bed in the Lock Mit’s datacore, powered up the systems and then to all appearances went to sleep. Jacked in at nape and cheekbone, eyes shuttered down, she lay back in her borrowed Maori flesh like the cryocapped princess in some obscure Settlement Years fairytale. She’d scored perhaps the darkest, slimmest built of the sleeves, and the datacables stood out against her skin like pale worms.

Sidelined in the co-pilot’s seat, Schneider cast longing glances at the helm.

‘You’ll get your chance,’ I told him.

‘Yeah, when?’

‘When you’re a millionaire on Latimer.’

He shot me a resentful glance and put one booted foot up on the console in front of him.

‘Ha fucking ha.’

Below her closed eyes, Ameli Vongsavath’s mouth quirked. It must have sounded like an elaborate way of saying not in a million years. None of the Dangrek crew knew about the deal with Mandrake. Hand had introduced us as consultants, and left it at that.

‘You think it’ll go through the gate?’ I asked Schneider, trying to extract him from his sulk.

He didn’t look up at me. ‘How the hell would I know?’

‘Just w—’

‘Gentlemen,’ Ameli Vongsavath had still not opened her eyes. ‘Do you think I could have a little pre-swim quiet in here please?’

‘Yeah, shut up Kovacs,’ said Schneider maliciously. ‘Why don’t you get back with the passengers?’

Back in the main cabin, the seats on either side of Wardani were taken by Hand and Sun Liping, so I crossed to the opposing side and dropped into the space next to Luc Deprez. He gave me a curious glance and then went back to examining his new hands.

‘Like it?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘It has a certain splendour. But I am not used to being so bulky, you know.’

‘You’ll settle into it. Sleeping helps.’

The curious look again. ‘You know this for certain then. What kind of consultant are you exactly?’

‘Ex-Envoy.’

‘Really?’ He shifted in the seat. ‘That’s a surprise. You will have to tell me about this.’

I caught echoes of his movement from other seats, where I’d been overheard. Instant notoriety. Just like being back in the Wedge.

‘Long story. And not very interesting.’

‘We are now one minute from launch,’ Ameli Vongsavath’s voice came through the intercom, sardonic, ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to officially welcome you aboard the fast assault launch Nagini and to warn you that if you are not now secured to a seat, I cannot guarantee your physical integrity for the next fifteen minutes.’

There was a scrabble of activity along the two lines of seats. Grins broke out among those who had already webbed in.

‘I think she exaggerates,’ remarked Deprez, smoothing the webbing bond tabs unhurriedly into unity on the harness’s chest plate. ‘These vessels have good compensators.’

‘Well, you never know. Might catch some orbital fire on the way through.’

‘That’s right, Kovacs.’ Hansen grinned across at me. ‘Look on the positive side.’

‘Just thinking ahead.’

‘Are you afraid?’ asked Jiang suddenly.

‘Regularly. You?’

‘Fear is an inconvenience. You must learn to suppress it. That is what it is to be a committed soldier. To abandon fear.’

‘No, Jiang,’ said Sun Liping gravely. ‘That is what it is to be dead.’

The assault ship tilted suddenly, and weight smashed down on my guts and chest. Blood-drained limbs. Crushed-out breath.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Ole Hansen through his teeth.

It slacked off, presumably when we got orbital and some of the power Ameli Vongsavath had rammed into the lifters was allowed back into the onboard grav system. I rolled my head sideways to look at Deprez.

‘Exaggerates, huh?’

He spotted blood from his bitten tongue onto his knuckle and looked at it critically. ‘I would call that exaggeration, yes.’

‘Orbital status attained,’ Vongsavath’s voice confirmed. ‘We have approximately six minutes of safe transit under the Landfall High Orbit Geosynch Umbrella. After that we’re exposed, and I’ll be throwing some evasive curves, so keep those tongues tucked up safe.’

Deprez nodded glumly and held up his blood-spotted knuckle. Laughter down the gangway.

‘Hey, Hand,’ said Yvette Cruickshank. ‘How come the Cartel doesn’t just put up five, six of those HOGs, wide-spaced, and finish this war?’

Further down the opposite row, Markus Sutjiadi smiled very slightly, but said nothing. His eyes flickered towards Ole Hansen.

‘Hey, Cruickshank.’ The demolitions expert could have been speaking on Sutjiadi’s cue. His tone was withering. ‘Can you even spell marauder? You got any idea what kind of target a HOG makes from shallow space?’

‘Yeah.’ Cruickshank came back stubborn. ‘But most of Kemp’s marauders are on the ground now, and with the geosynchs in place . . .’

‘Try telling that to the inhabitants of Sauberville,’ Wardani told her, and the comment dragged a comet tail of quiet across the discussion. Glances shuttled back and forth up the gangway like slug-thrower shells chambering.

‘That attack was ground launched, Mistress Wardani,’ said Jiang finally.

‘Was it?’

Hand cleared his throat. ‘In point of fact, the Cartel are not entirely sure how many of Kemp’s missile drones are still deployed off-planet—’

‘No shit,’ grunted Hansen.

‘—but to attempt high-orbit placement of any substantial platform at this stage would not be sufficiently—’

‘Profitable?’ asked Wardani.

Hand gave her an unpleasant smile. ‘Low risk.’

‘We’re about to leave the Landfall HOG umbrella,’ said Ameli Vongsavath over the intercom, tour-guide calm. ‘Expect some kinks.’

I felt a subtle increase in pressure at my temples as power diverted from the onboard compensators. Vongsavath getting ready for aerobatics around the curve of the world and down through re-entry. With the HOG setting behind us, there would be no more paternal corporate presence to cushion our fall back into the war zone. From here on in, we were out to play on our own.

They exploit, and deal, and shift ground constantly, but for all that you can get used to them. You can get used to their gleaming company towers and their nanocopter security, their cartels and their HOGs, their stretched-over-centuries unhuman patience and their assumed inheritance of godfather status for the human race. You can get so you’re grateful for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief of whatever little flange of existence they afford you on the corporate platform. You can get so it seems eminently preferable to a cold gut-swooping drop into the human chaos waiting below.

You can get so you’re grateful.

Got to watch out for that.

‘Over the rim,’ said Ameli Vongsavath from the cockpit.

We dropped.

With the onboard comp running at combat minimum, it felt like the start of a grav jump, before the harness kicks in. My guts lifted to the base of my ribcage and the back of my eyeballs tickled. The neurachem fizzled sullenly to unwanted life and the bioalloy plates in my hands shivered. Vongsavath must have nailed us to the floor of Mandrake’s landing envelope and piled on everything the main drives would give her, hoping to beat any distant early-warned Kempist anti-incursion systems that might have decoded the flight path from Cartel traffic transmissions.

It seemed to work.

We came down in the sea about two kilometres off the Dangrek coast, Vongsavath using the water to crash cool re-entry surfaces in approved military fashion. In some places, environmental pressure groups have got violent over this kind of contamination, but somehow I doubted anyone on Sanction IV would be up for it. War has a soothing, simplifying effect on politics that must hit the politicians like a betathanatine rush. You don’t have to balance the issues any more, and you can justify anything. Fight and win, and bring the victory home. Everything else whites out, like the sky over Sauberville.

‘Surface status attained,’ intoned Vongsavath. ‘Preliminary sweeps show no traffic. I’m going for the beach on secondaries, but I’d like you to stay in your seats until advised otherwise. Commander Hand, we have a needlecast squirt from Isaac Carrera you might like to have a look at.’

Hand traded glances with me. He reached back and touched the seat mike.

‘Run it on the discreet loop. Mine, Kovacs, Sutjiadi.’

‘Understood.’

I pulled down the headset and settled the discreet reception mask over my face. Carrera came online behind the shrill warble of unravelling scrambler codes. He was in combat coveralls and a recently gelled wound was livid across his forehead and down one cheek. He looked tired.

‘This is Northern Rim Control to incoming FAL 931/4. We have your flight plan and mission filed but must warn you that under current circumstances we cannot afford ground or close detail aerial support. Wedge forces have fallen back to the Masson lake system where we are holding a defensive stance until the Kempist offensive has been assessed and its consequences correlated. A full-scale jamming offensive is expected in the wake of the bombing, so this is probably the last time you’ll be able to communicate effectively with anyone outside the blast zone. Additional to these strategic considerations, you should be aware that the Cartel have deployed experimental nanorepair systems in the Sauberville area. We cannot predict how these systems will react to unexpected incursions. Personally,’ he leaned forward in the screen, ‘my advice would be to withdraw on secondary drives as far as Masson and wait until I can order a reprise front back-up to the coast. This shouldn’t involve a delay of any more than two weeks. Blast research,’ a ripple of distaste passed across his face, as if he had just caught the odour of something rotting in his wounds, ‘is hardly a priority worthy of the risks you are running, whatever competitive advantage your masters may hope to gain from it. A Wedge incoming code is attached, should you wish to avail yourself of the fallback option. Otherwise, there is nothing I can do for you. Good luck. Out.’

I unmasked and pushed back the headset. Hand was watching me with a faint smile tucked into one corner of his mouth.

‘Hardly a Cartel-approved perspective. Is he always that blunt?’

‘In the face of client stupidity, yes. It’s why they pay him. What’s this about experimental—’

Hand made a tiny shutdown gesture with one hand. Shook his head.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Standard Cartel scare line. It keeps unwanted personnel out of the no-go zones.’

‘Meaning you called it in that way?’

Hand smiled again. Sutjiadi said nothing, but his lips tightened. Outside, the engine note shrilled.

‘We’re on the beach,’ said Ameli Vongsavath. ‘Twenty-one point seven kilometres from the Sauberville crater. Pictures, anybody?’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Clotted white.

For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.

‘Gulls,’ said Hand knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. ‘Radiation from the blast must have got them.’

Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.

When the colony barges first touched down on Sanction IV - and Latimer, and Harlan’s World for that matter - they were, for many local species, exactly the cataclysm they must have sounded like. Planetary colonisation is invariably a destructive process, and advanced technology hasn’t done much more than sanitise that process so that humans are guaranteed their customary position on top of whatever ecosystem they are raping. The invasion is all-pervasive and, from the moment of the barges’ initial impact, inevitable.

The massive ships cool slowly, but already there is activity within. Serried ranks of clone embryos emerge from the cryotanks and are loaded with machine care into rapid-growth pods. A storm of engineered hormones rages through the pod nutrients, triggering the burst of cell development that will bring each clone to late adolescence in a matter of months. Already the advance wave, grown in the latter stages of the interstellar flight, is being downloaded with the minds of the colony elite, decanted and awoken to take up their established place in the brand new order. It’s not quite the golden land of opportunity and adventure that the chroniclers would have you believe.

Elsewhere in the hull, the real damage is being done by the environmental modelling machines.

Any self-respecting effort at colonisation brings along a couple of these eco-AIs. After the early catastrophes on Mars and Adoracion, it became rapidly apparent that attempting to graft a sliced sample of the terrestrial ecosystem onto an alien environment was no elephant ray hunt. The first colonists to breathe the newly terraformed air on Mars were all dead in a matter of days, and a lot of those who’d stayed inside died fighting swarms of a voracious little beetle that no one had ever seen before. Said beetle turned out to be the very distant descendant of a species of terrestrial dustmite that had done rather too well in the ecological upheaval occasioned by the terraforming.

So. Back to the lab.

It was another two generations before the Martian colonists finally got to breathe untanked air.

On Adoracion, it was worse. The colony barge Lorca had left several decades before the Martian debacle, built and hurled at the nearest of the habitable worlds indicated on the Martian astrogation charts with the bravado of a Molotov cocktail hurled at a tank. It was a semi-desperate assault on the armoured depths of interstellar space, an act of technological defiance in the face of the oppressive physics that govern the cosmos and an act of equally defiant faith in the newly decoded Martian archives. By all accounts, pretty much everyone thought it would fail. Even those who contributed their copied consciousnesses to the colony’s datastack and their genes to the embryo banks were less than optimistic about what their stored selves would encounter at journey’s end.

Adoracion, as its name suggests, must have seemed like a dream come true. A green and orange world with approximately the same nitrogen/oxygen mix as Earth and a more user-friendly land-to-sea ratio. A plant-life base that could be eaten by the herds of cloned livestock in the belly of the Lorca and no obvious predators that couldn’t be easily shot. Either the colonists were a pious lot or arriving on this new Eden pushed them that way, because the first thing they did upon disembarkation was build a cathedral and give thanks to God for their safe deliverance.

A year passed.

Hypercasting was still in its infancy back then, barely able to carry the simplest of messages in coded sequence. The news that came filtering back down the beams to Earth was like the sound of screams from a locked room in the depths of an empty mansion. The two ecosystems had met and clashed like armies on a battlefield from which there was no retreat. Of the million-odd colonists aboard the Lorca, over seventy per cent died within eighteen months of touchdown.

Back to the lab.

These days we’ve got it down to a fine art. Nothing organic leaves the hull until the eco-modeller has the whole host ecosystem down. Automated probes go out and prowl the new globe, sucking in samples. The AI digests the data, runs a model against a theoretical terrestrial presence at a couple of hundred times real-world speed and flags the potential clashes. For anything that looks like a problem it writes a solution, genetech or nanotech, and from the correlated whole, generates a settlement protocol. With the protocol laid down, everyone goes out to play.

Inside the protocols for the three dozen or so Settled Worlds, you find certain advantageous terrestrial species cropping up time and time again. They are the success stories of planet Earth - tough, adaptive evolutionary athletes to a creature. Most of them are plants, microbes and insects, but among the supersized animals there are a few that stand out. Merino sheep, grizzly bears and seagulls feature at the top of the list. They’re hard to wipe out.

The water around the trawler was clogged with the white feathered corpses. In the unnatural stillness of the shoreline, they muffled the faint lapping of wavelets on the hull even further.

The ship was a mess. It drifted listlessly against its anchors, the paint on the Sauberville side scorched to black and bare metal glints by the wind from the blast. A couple of windows had blown out at the same time and it looked as if some of the untidy pile of nets on deck had caught and melted. The angles of the deck winch were similarly charred. Anyone standing outside would probably have died from third-degree burns.

There were no bodies on deck. We knew that from the virtuality.

‘Nobody down here either,’ said Luc Deprez, poking his head out of the mid-deck companionway. ‘Nobody has been aboard for months. Maybe a year. Food everywhere has been eaten by the bugs and the rats.’

Sutjiadi frowned. ‘There’s food out?’

‘Yeah, lots of it.’ Deprez hauled himself out of the companionway and seated himself on the coaming. The bottom half of his chameleochrome coveralls stayed muddy dark for a second before it adjusted to the sunlit surroundings. ‘Looks like a big party, but no one stayed around to do the clearing up.’

‘I’ve had parties like that,’ said Vongsavath.

Below, the unmistakeable whoosh-sizzle of a Sunjet. Sutjiadi, Vongsavath and I tensed in unison. Deprez grinned.

‘Cruickshank is shooting the rats,’ he said. ‘They are quite large.’ Sutjiadi put up his weapon and looked up and down the deck, marginally more relaxed than when we’d come aboard. ‘Estimates, Deprez. How many were there?’

‘Rats?’ Deprez’s grin widened. ‘It is hard to tell.’

I repressed a smile of my own.

‘Crew,’ said Sutjiadi with an impatient gesture. ‘How many crew, sergeant?’

Deprez shrugged, unimpressed by the rank-pulling. ‘I am not a chef, captain. It is hard to tell.’

‘I used to be a chef,’ said Ameli Vongsavath unexpectedly. ‘Maybe I’ll go down and look.’

‘You stay here.’ Sutjiadi stalked to the side of the trawler, kicking a seagull corpse out of his way. ‘Starting now, I’d like a little less humour out of this command and a little more application. You can start by getting this net hauled up. Deprez, you go back down and help Cruickshank get rid of the rats.’

Deprez sighed and set aside his Sunjet. From his belt he pulled an ancient-looking sidearm, chambered a round and sighted on the sky with it.

‘My kind of work,’ he said cryptically, and swung back down the companionway, gun hand held high over his head.

The induction rig crackled. Sutjiadi bent his head, listening. I fitted my own disconnected rig back in place.

‘. . . is secured.’ It was Sun Liping’s voice. Sutjiadi had given her command of the other half of the team and sent them up the beach with Hand, Wardani and Schneider, whom he clearly regarded as civilian irritations at best, liabilities at worst.

‘Secured how?’ he snapped.

‘We’ve set up perimeter sentry systems in an arc above the beach. Five-hundred-metre-wide base-line, hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Should nail anything incoming from the interior or along the beach in either direction.’ Sun paused for a moment, apologetic. ‘That’s line-of-sight only, but it’s good for several kilometres. It’s the best we can do.’

‘What about the uh, the mission objective?’ I broke in. ‘Is it intact?’

Sutjiadi snorted. ‘Is it there?’

I shot him a glance. Sutjiadi thought we were on a ghost hunt. Envoy-enhanced gestalt scanning read it in his demeanour like screen labelling. He thought Wardani’s gate was an archaeologue fantasy, overhyped from some vague original theory to make a good pitch to Mandrake. He thought Hand had been sold a cracked hull, and corporate greed had gobbled up the concept in a stampede to be first on the scene of any possible development option. He thought there was going to be some serious indigestion once the team arrived on site. He hadn’t said as much in the construct briefing, but he wore his lack of conviction like a badge throughout.

I couldn’t really blame him. By their demeanour, about half of the team thought the same. If Hand hadn’t been offering such crazy back-from-the-dead war-exemption contracts, they probably would have laughed in his face.

Not much more than a month ago, I’d nearly done the same to Schneider myself.

‘Yes, it’s here.’ There was something peculiar in Sun’s voice. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t ever been one of the doubters, but now her tone bordered on awe. ‘It’s. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.’

‘Sun? Is it open?’

‘Not as far as we are aware, Lieutenant Kovacs, no. I think you had better speak to Mistress Wardani if you want details.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Wardani? You there?’

‘Busy.’ Her voice was taut. ‘What did you find on the boat?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Yeah, well. Same here. Out.’

I glanced over at Sutjiadi again. He was focused on the middle distance, new Maori face betraying nothing. I grunted, tugged the rig off and went to find out how the deck winch worked. Behind me, I heard him calling in a progress report from Hansen.

The winch turned out not much different to a shuttle loader, and with Vongsavath’s help, I got the mechanism powered up before Sutjiadi was finished on the comlink. He wandered over just in time to see the boom swing out smoothly and lower the manigrab for the first haul.

Dragging in the nets proved another story. It took us a good twenty minutes to get the hang of it, by which time the rat hunt was over and Cruickshank and Deprez had joined us. Even then, it was no joke manoeuvring the cold, soaking-heavy drapes of net over the side and onto the deck in some sort of order. None of us were fishermen, and it was clear that there were some substantial skills involved in the process that we didn’t have. We slipped and fell over a lot.

It turned out worth it.

Tangled in the last folds to come aboard were the remains of two corpses, naked apart from the still shiny lengths of chain that weighted them down at the knees and chest. The fish had picked them down to bone and skin that looked like torn oilcloth wrapping. Their eyeless skulls lolled together in the suspended net like the heads of drunks, sharing a good joke. Floppy necks and wide grins.

We stood looking up at them for a while.

‘Good guess,’ I said to Sutjiadi.

‘It made sense to look.’ He stepped closer and looked speculatively up at the naked bones. ‘They’ve been stripped, and threaded into the net. Arms and legs, and the ends of the two chains. Whoever did this didn’t want them coming up. Doesn’t make much sense. Why hide the bodies when the ship is here drifting for anyone to come out from Sauberville and take for salvage?’

‘Yeah, but nobody did,’ Vongsavath pointed out.

Deprez turned and shaded his eyes to look at the horizon, where Sauberville still smouldered. ‘The war?’

I recalled dates, recent history, calculated back. ‘Hadn’t come this far west a year ago, but it was cutting loose down south.’ I nodded towards the twists of smoke. ‘They would have been scared. Not likely to come across here for anything that might draw orbital fire. Or something maybe mined to suck in a remote bombardment. Remember Bootkinaree Town?’

‘Vividly,’ said Ameli Vongsavath, pressing fingers to her left cheekbone.

‘That was about a year ago. Would have been all over the news. That bulk carrier down in the harbour. There wouldn’t have been a civilian salvage team on the planet working after that.’

‘So why hide these guys at all?’ asked Cruickshank.

I shrugged. ‘Keeps them out of sight. Nothing for aerial surveillance to reel in and sniff over. Bodies might have triggered a local investigation back then. Back before things really got out of hand in Kempopolis.’

‘Indigo City,’ said Sutjiadi pointedly.

‘Yeah, don’t let Jiang hear you calling it that.’ Cruickshank grinned. ‘He already jumped down my throat for calling Danang a terror strike. And I meant it as a fucking compliment!’

‘Whatever.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘The point is, without bodies this is just a fishing boat someone hasn’t been back for. That doesn’t attract much attention in the run-up to a global revolution.’

‘It does if the boat was hired in Sauberville.’ Sutjiadi shook his head. ‘Bought even, it’s still local interest. Who were those guys? Isn’t that old Chang’s trawler out there? Come on, Kovacs, it’s only a couple of dozen kilometres.’

‘There’s no reason to assume this boat’s local.’ I gestured out at the placid ocean. ‘On this planet you could sail a boat like this one all the way up from Bootkinaree and never spill your coffee.’

‘Yeah, but you could hide the bodies from aerial surveillance by chucking them down into the galley with the rest of the mess,’ objected Cruickshank. ‘It doesn’t add up.’

Luc Deprez reached up and shifted the net slightly. The skulls bobbed and leaned. ‘The stacks are gone,’ he said. ‘They were put in the water to hide the rest of their identity. Faster than leaving them for the rats, I think.’

‘Depends on the rats.’

‘Are you an expert?’

‘Maybe it was a burial,’ offered Ameli Vongsavath.

‘In a net?’

‘We’re wasting time,’ said Sutjiadi loudly. ‘Deprez, get them down, wrap them up and put them somewhere the rats can’t get at them. We’ll run a post mortem with the autosurgeon back on the Nagini later. Vongsavath and Cruickshank, I want you to go through this boat from beak to backside. Look for anything that might tell us what happened here.’

‘That’s stem to stern, sir,’ said Vongsavath primly.

‘Whatever. Anything that might tell us something. The clothing that came off these two maybe or . . .’ He shook his head, irritable with the awkward new factors. ‘Anything. Anything at all. Get on with it. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like you to come with me. I want to check on our perimeter defences.’

‘Sure.’ I scooped up the lie with a slight smile.

Sutjiadi didn’t want to check on the perimeter. He’d seen Sun and Hansen’s résumés, just like me. They didn’t need their work checking.

He didn’t want to see the perimeter.

He wanted to see the gate.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Schneider had described it to me, several times. Wardani had sketched it for me once in a quiet moment at Roespinoedji’s. An imaging shop on the Angkor Road had run up a 3-D graphic from Wardani’s input for the Mandrake pitch. Later, Hand had the Mandrake machines blow up the image to a full-scale construct we could walk around in virtual.

None of it came close.

It stood in the man-made cavern like some vertically stretched vision from the Dimensionalist school, some element out of the nightmare technomilitary landscapes of Mhlongo or Osupile. There was a gaunt foldedness to the structure, like six or seven ten-metre tall vampire bats crushed back to back in a defensive phalanx. There was none of the passive openness that the word ‘gate’ suggested. In the soft light filtering down through chinks in the rocks above, the whole thing looked hunched and waiting.

The base was triangular, about five metres on a side, though the lower edges bore less resemblance to a geometric shape than to something that had grown down into the ground like tree roots. The material was an alloy I’d seen in Martian architecture before, a dense black-clouded surface that would feel like marble or onyx to the touch but always carried a faint static charge. The technoglyph panelling was dull green and ruby, mapped in odd, irregular waves around the lower section, but never rising higher than a metre and a half from the ground. Towards the top of this limit, the symbols seemed to lose both coherence and strength - they thinned out, grew less well defined and even the style of the engraving seemed more hesitant. It was as if, Sun said later, the Martian technoscribes were afraid to work too close to what they had created on the plinth above.

Above, the structure folded rapidly in on itself as it rose, creating a series of compressed black alloy angles and upward leading edges that ended in a short spire. In the long splits between the folds, the black clouding on the alloy faded to a dirty translucence and inside this, the geometry seemed to continue folding in on itself in some indefinable way which was painful to look at for too long.

‘Believe it now?’ I asked Sutjiadi, as he stood beside me, staring. He didn’t respond for a moment, and when he did there was the same slight numbness in his voice that I’d heard from Sun Liping over the comlink.

‘It is not still,’ he said quietly. ‘It feels. In motion. Like turning.’

‘Maybe it is.’ Sun had come up with us, leaving the rest of the team down by the Nagini. No one else seemed overkeen to spend time either in or near the cavern.

‘It’s supposed to be a hyperspatial link,’ I said, moving sideways in an attempt to break the hold the thing’s alien geometry was exerting. ‘If it maintains a line through to wherever, then maybe it moves in hyperspace, even when it’s shut down.’

‘Or maybe it cycles,’ Sun suggested. ‘Like a beacon.’

Unease.

I felt it course through me at the same time as I spotted it in the twitch across Sutjiadi’s face. Bad enough that we were pinned down here on this exposed tongue of land without the added thought that the thing we had come to unlock might be sending off ‘come and get me’ signals in a dimension we as a species had only the vaguest of handles on.

‘We’re going to need some lights in here,’ I said.

The spell broke. Sutjiadi blinked hard and looked up at the falling rays of light. They were greying out with perceptible speed as evening advanced across the sky outside.

‘We’ll have it blasted out,’ he said.

I exchanged an alarmed glance with Sun.

‘Have what blasted?’ I asked cautiously.

Sutjiadi gestured. ‘The rock. Nagini runs a front-mounted ultravibe battery for ground assault. Hansen should be able to clear the whole thing back this far without putting a scratch on the artefact.’

Sun coughed. ‘I don’t think Commander Hand will approve that, sir. He ordered me to bring up a set of Angier lamps before dark. And Mistress Wardani has asked for remote monitoring systems to be installed so she can work direct on the gate from—’

‘Alright, lieutenant. Thank you.’ Sutjiadi looked around the cavern once more. ‘I’ll talk to Commander Hand.’

He strode out. I glanced at Sun and winked.

‘That’s a conversation I want to hear,’ I said.

Back at the Nagini, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang were busy erecting the first of the rapid deployment bubblefabs. Hand was braced in one corner of the assault ship’s loading hatch, watching a cross-legged Wardani sketch something on a memoryboard. There was an unguarded fascination in his expression that made him look suddenly younger.

‘Some problem, captain?’ he asked, as we came up the ramp.

‘I want that thing,’ said Sutjiadi, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, ‘out in the open. Where we can watch it. I’m having Hansen ’vibe-blast the rocks out of the way.’

‘Out of the question.’ Hand went back to watching what the archaeologue was doing. ‘We can’t risk exposure at this stage.’

‘Or damage to the gate,’ said Wardani sharply.

‘Or damage to the gate,’ agreed the executive. ‘I’m afraid your team are going to have to work with the cavern as it is, captain. I don’t believe there’s any risk involved. The bracing the previous visitors put in appears to be solid.’

‘I’ve seen the bracing,’ said Sutjiadi. ‘Bonding epoxy is not a substitute for a permanent structure, but that’s—’

‘Sergeant Hansen seemed quite impressed with it.’ Hand’s urbane tone was edged with irritation. ‘But if you are concerned, please feel free to reinforce the current arrangement in any way you see fit.’

‘I was going to say,’ Sutjiadi said evenly, ‘that the bracing is beside the point. I am not concerned with the risks of collapse. I am urgently concerned with what is in the cavern.’

Wardani looked up from her sketching.

‘Well that’s good, captain,’ she said brightly. ‘You’ve gone from polite disbelief to urgent concern in less than twenty-four hours real time. What exactly are you concerned about?’

Sutjiadi looked uncomfortable.

‘This artefact,’ he said. ‘You claim it’s a gate. Can you give me any guarantees that nothing will come through it from the other side?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Do you have any idea what might come through?’

Wardani smiled. ‘Not really, no.’

‘Then I’m sorry, Mistress Wardani. It makes military sense to have the Nagini’s main weaponry trained on it at all times.’

‘This is not a military operation, captain.’ Hand was working on ostentatiously bored now. ‘I thought I made that clear during briefing. You are part of a commercial venture, and the specifics of our commerce dictate that the artefact cannot be exposed to aerial view until it is contractually secured. By the terms of the Incorporation Charter, that will not become the case until what is on the other side of the gateway is tagged with a Mandrake ownership buoy.’

‘And if the gate chooses to open before we are ready, and something hostile comes through it?’

‘Something hostile?’ Wardani set aside her memoryboard, apparently amused. ‘Something such as what?’

‘You would be in a better position than I to evaluate that, Mistress Wardani,’ said Sutjiadi stiffly. ‘My concern is simply for the safety of this expedition.’

Wardani sighed.

‘They weren’t vampires, captain,’ she said wearily.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Martians. They weren’t vampires. Or demons. They were just a technologically advanced race with wings. That’s all. There’s nothing on the other side of that thing,’ she stabbed a finger in the general direction of the rocks, ‘that we won’t be able to build ourselves in a few thousand years. If we can get a lock on our militaristic tendencies, that is.’

‘Is that intended as an insult, Mistress Wardani?’

‘Take it any way you like, captain. We are, all of us, already, dying slowly of radiation poisoning. A couple of dozen kilometres in that direction a hundred thousand people were vaporised yesterday. By soldiers.’ Her voice was starting to rise, trembling at base. ‘Anywhere else on about sixty per cent of this planet’s land mass, your chances of an early, violent death are excellent. At the hands of soldiers. Elsewhere, the camps will kill you with starvation or beatings if you step out of political line. This service too, brought to us by soldiers. Is there something else I can add to clarify my reading of militarism for you?’

‘Mistress Wardani.’ Hand’s voice held a tight strain I hadn’t heard before. Below the ramp, Hansen, Schneider and Jiang had stopped what they were doing and were looking over towards the raised voices. ‘I think we’re getting off the point. We were discussing security.’

‘Were we?’ Wardani forced a shaky laugh, and her voice evened out. ‘Well, captain. Let me put it to you that in the seven decades I have been a qualified archaeologue, I have never come across evidence to suggest that the Martians had anything more unpleasant to offer than what men like you have already unleashed across the face of Sanction IV. Excluding the small matter of the fallout from Sauberville, you are probably safer sitting in front of that gate than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere at the moment.’

There was a small silence.

‘Maybe you want to train the Nagini’s main guns on the entrance to the cavern,’ I suggested. ‘Same effect. In fact, with the remote monitoring in place, it’ll be better. If the monsters with half-metre fangs turn up, we can collapse the tunnel on them.’

‘A good point.’ Seemingly casual, Hand moved to position himself carefully in the hatch between Wardani and Sutjiadi. ‘That seems the best compromise, does it not, captain?’

Sutjiadi read the executive’s stance and took the hint. He threw a salute and turned on his heel. As he went down the ramp past me, he glanced up. He didn’t quite have his previous immobility of feature down with the new Maori face. He looked betrayed.

You find innocence in the strangest places.

At the base of the ramp he caught one of the gull corpses with his foot and stumbled slightly. He kicked the clump of feathers away from him in a spray of turquoise sand.

‘Hansen,’ he snapped tightly. ‘Jiang. Get all of this shit off the beach. I want it cleared back two hundred metres from the ship on all sides.’

Ole Hansen raised an eyebrow and slotted an ironic salute in beside it. Sutjiadi wasn’t looking - he’d already stalked away towards the water’s edge.

Something wasn’t right.

Hansen and Jiang used the drives from two of the expedition’s grav bikes to blow the gull corpses back in a skirling knee-high storm front of feathers and sand. In the space they cleared around the Nagini, the encampment took rapid shape, speeded up by the return of Deprez, Vongsavath and Cruickshank from the trawler. By the time it was fully dark, five bubblefabs had sprouted from the sand in a rough circle around the assault ship. They were uniform in size, chameleochrome-coated and featureless apart from small illuminum numerals above each door. Each ’fab was equipped to sleep four in twin bunk rooms, separated by a central living space but two of the units had been assembled in a non-standard configuration with half the bedspace, one to serve as a general meeting room and the other as Tanya Wardani’s lab.

I found the archaeologue there, still sketching.

The hatch was open, freshly lasered out and hinged back on epoxy welding that still smelled faintly of resin. I touched the chime pad and leaned in.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

‘It’s me.’

‘I know who it is, Kovacs. What do you want?’

‘An invitation over the threshold?’

She stopped sketching and sighed, still not looking up.

‘We’re not in virtual any more, Kovacs. I—’

‘I wasn’t looking for a fuck.’

She hesitated, then met my gaze levelly. ‘That’s just as well.’

‘So do I get to come in?’

‘Suit yourself.’

I ducked through the entrance and crossed to where she was sitting, picking my way among the litter of hardcopy sheets the memoryboard had churned out. They were all variations on a theme - sequences of technoglyphs with scrawled annotation. As I watched, she put a line through the current sketch.

‘Getting anywhere?’

‘Slowly.’ She yawned. ‘I don’t remember as much as I thought. Going to have to redo some of the secondary configs from scratch again.’

I propped myself against a table edge.

‘So how long do you reckon?’

She shrugged. ‘A couple of days. Then there’s testing.’

‘How long for that?’

‘The whole thing, primaries and secondaries? I don’t know. Why? Your bone marrow starting to itch already?’

I glanced through the open door to where the fires in Sauberville cast a dull red glow on the night sky. This soon after the blast, and this close in, the elemental exotics would be out in force. Strontium 90, iodine 131 and all their numerous friends, like a ’methed-up party of Harlan family heirs crashing wharfside Millsport with their chittering bright enthusiasm. Wearing their unstable subatomic jackets like swamp panther skin, and wanting into everywhere, every cell they could fuck up with their heavily jewelled presence.

I twitched despite myself.

‘I’m just curious.’

‘An admirable quality. Must make soldiering difficult for you.’

I snapped open one of the camp chairs stacked beside the table and lowered myself into it. ‘I think you’re confusing curiosity with empathy.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. Curiosity’s a basic monkey trait. Torturers are full of it. Doesn’t make you a better human being.’

‘Well, I suppose you’d know.’

It was an admirable riposte. I didn’t know if she’d been tortured in the camp - in the momentary flare of anger I hadn’t cared - but she never flinched as the words came out.

‘Why are you behaving like this, Wardani?’

‘I told you we’re not in virtual any more.’

‘No.’

I waited. Eventually she got up and went across to the back wall of the compartment, where a bank of monitors for the remote gear showed the gate from a dozen slightly different angles.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, Kovacs,’ she said heavily. ‘Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered to clear the way for our little venture, and I know, I know, we didn’t do it, but it’s a little too convenient for me not to feel responsible. If I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there. And that’s without those heroes of the revolution you killed so efficiently this morning. I’m sorry, Kovacs. I have no training at this sort of thing.’

‘You won’t want to talk about the two bodies we fished out of the trawl nets, then.’

‘Is there something to talk about?’ She didn’t look round.

‘Deprez and Jiang just got through with the autosurgeon. Still no idea what killed them. No trace of trauma in any of the bone structure, and there’s not a great deal else left to work from.’ I moved up beside her, closer to the monitors. ‘I’m told there are tests we can do with bone at cellular level, but I have a feeling they aren’t going to tell us anything either.’

That got her looking at me.

‘Why?’

‘Because whatever killed them has something to do with this.’ I tapped the glass of a monitor where the gate loomed close up. ‘And this is like nothing any of us have seen before.’

‘You think something came through the gate at the witching hour?’ she asked scornfully. ‘The vampires got them?’

‘Something got them,’ I said mildly. ‘They didn’t die of old age. Their stacks are gone.’

‘Doesn’t that rule out the vampire option? Stack excision is a peculiarly human atrocity, isn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily. Any civilisation that could build a hyperportal must have been able to digitise consciousness.’

‘There’s no actual evidence for that.’

‘Not even common sense?’

‘Common sense?’ The scorn was back in her voice. ‘The same common sense that said a thousand years ago that obviously the sun goes round the earth, just look at it? The common sense that Bogdanovich appealed to when he set up hub theory? Common sense is anthropocentric, Kovacs. It assumes that because this is the way human beings turned out, it has to be the way any intelligent technological species would turn out.’

‘I’ve heard some pretty convincing arguments along those lines.’

‘Yeah, haven’t we all,’ she said shortly. ‘Common sense for the common herd, and why bother to feed them anything else. What if Martian ethics didn’t permit re-sleeving, Kovacs? Ever think of that? What if death means you’ve proved yourself unworthy of life? That even if you could be brought back, you have no right to it.’

‘In a technologically advanced culture? A starfaring culture? This is bullshit, Wardani.’

‘No, it’s a theory. Function-related raptor ethics. Ferrer and Yoshimoto at Bradbury. And at the moment, there’s very little hard evidence around to disprove it.’

‘Do you believe it?’

She sighed and went back to her seat. ‘Of course I don’t believe it. I’m just trying to demonstrate that there’s more to eat at this party than the cosy little certainties human science is handing round. We know almost nothing about the Martians, and that’s after hundreds of years of study. What we think we know could be proved completely wrong at any moment, easily. Half of the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living-room wall.’ She paused. ‘And it’s probably upside down.’

I laughed out loud. It shattered the tension in the ’fab. Wardani’s face twitched in an unwilling smile.

‘No, I mean it,’ she muttered. ‘You think, just because I can open this gate, that we’ve got some kind of handle on it. Well, we haven’t. You can’t assume anything here. You can’t think in human terms.’

‘OK, fine.’ I followed her back to the centre of the room and reclaimed my own seat. In fact, the thought of a human stack being retrieved by some kind of Martian gate commando, the thought of that personality being downloaded into a Martian virtuality and what that might do to a human mind, was making my spine crawl. It was an idea I would have been just as happy never to have come up with. ‘But you’re the one who’s beginning to sound like a vampire story now.’

‘I’m just warning you.’

‘OK, I’m warned. Now tell me something else. How many other archaeologues knew about this site?’

‘Outside of my own team?’ She considered. ‘We filed with central processing in Landfall, but that was before we knew what it was. It was just listed as an obelisk. Artefact of Unknown Function, but like I said, AUFs are practically every second thing we dig up.’

‘You know Hand says there’s no record of an object like this in the Landfall registry.’

‘Yeah, I read the report. Files get lost, I guess.’

‘Seems a little too convenient to me. And files may get lost, but not files on the biggest find since Bradbury.’

‘I told you, we filed it as an AUF. An obelisk. Another obelisk. We’d already turned up a dozen structural pieces along this coast by the time we found this one.’

‘And you never updated? Not even when you knew what it was?’

‘No.’ She gave me a crooked smile. ‘The Guild has always given me a pretty hard time about my Wycinski-esque tendencies, and a lot of the Scratchers I took on got tarred by association. Cold-shouldered by colleagues, slagged off in academic journals. The usual conformist stuff. When we realised what we’d found, I think we all felt the Guild could wait until we were ready to make them eat their words in style.’

‘And when the war started, you buried it for the same reasons?’

‘Got it in one.’ She shrugged. ‘It might sound childish now, but at the time we were all pretty angry. I don’t know if you’d understand that. How it feels to have every piece of research you do, every theory you come up with, rubbished because you once took the wrong side in a political dispute.’

I thought briefly back to the Innenin hearings.

‘It sounds familiar enough.’

‘I think.’ She hesitated. ‘I think there was something else as well. You know the night we opened the gate for the first time, we went crazy. Big party, lots of chemicals, lots of talk. Everyone was talking about full professorships back on Latimer; they said I’d be made an honorary Earth scholar in recognition of my work.’ She smiled. ‘I think I even made an acceptance speech. I don’t remember that stage of the evening too well, never did, even the next morning.’

She sighed and rid herself of the smile.

‘Next morning, we started to think straight. Started to think about what was really going to happen. We knew that if we filed, we’d lose control. The Guild would fly in a Master with all the right political affiliations to take charge of the project, and we’d be sent home with a pat on the back. Oh, we’d be back from the academic wilderness of course, but only at a price. We’d be allowed to publish, but only after careful vetting to make sure there wasn’t too much Wycinski in the text. There’d be work, but not on an independent basis. Consultancy,’ she pronounced the word as if it tasted bad, ‘on someone else’s projects. We’d be well paid, but paid to keep quiet.’

‘Better than not getting paid at all.’

A grimace. ‘If I’d wanted to work second shovel to some smooth-faced politically-appropriate fuck with half my experience and qualifications, I could have gone to the plains like everybody else. The whole reason I was out here in the first place was because I wanted my own dig. I wanted the chance to prove that something I believed in was right.’

‘Did the others feel that strongly?’

‘In the end. In the beginning, they signed up with me because they needed the work and at the time no one else was hiring Scratchers. But a couple of years living with contempt changes you. And they were young, most of them. That gives you energy for your anger.’

I nodded.

‘Could that be who we found in the nets?’

She looked away. ‘I suppose so.’

‘How many were there on the team? People who could have come back here and opened the gate?’

‘I don’t know. About half a dozen of them were actually Guild-qualified, there were probably two or three of those who could have. Aribowo. Weng, maybe. Techakriengkrai. They were all good. But on their own? Working backwards from our notes, working together?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Kovacs. It was. A different time. A team thing. I’ve got no idea how any of those people would perform under different circumstances. Kovacs, I don’t even know how I’ll perform any more.’

A memory of her beneath the waterfall flickered, unfairly, off the comment. It coiled around itself in my guts. I groped after the thread of my thoughts.

‘Well, there’ll be DNA files for them in the Guild archives at Landfall.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we can run a DNA match from the bones—’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘—but it’s going to be hard to get through and access data in Landfall from here. And to be honest, I’m not sure what purpose it’ll serve. I don’t much care who they are. I just want to know how they ended up in that net.’

She shivered.

‘If it’s them,’ she began, then stopped. ‘I don’t want to know who it is, Kovacs. I can live without that.’

I thought about reaching for her, across the small space between our chairs, but sitting there she seemed suddenly as gaunt and folded as the thing we had come here to unlock. I couldn’t see a point of contact anywhere on her body that would not make my touch seem intrusive, overtly sexual or just ridiculous.

The moment passed. Died.

‘I’m going to get some sleep,’ I said, standing up. ‘You probably better do the same. Sutjiadi’s going to want a crack-of-dawn start.’

She nodded vaguely. Most of her attention had slipped away from me. At a guess, she was staring down the barrel of her own past.

I left her alone amidst the litter of torn technoglyph sketches.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I woke up groggy with either the radiation or the chemicals I’d taken to hold it down. There was grey light filtering through the bubblefab’s dormitory window and a dream scuttling out the back of my head half seen . . .

Do you see, Wedge Wolf ? Do you see?

Semetaire?

I lost it to the sound of enthusiastic teeth-cleaning from the bathroom niche. Twisting my head, I saw Schneider towelling his hair dry with one hand while he scrubbed vigorously at his gums with a powerbrush held in the other.

‘Morning,’ he frothed.

‘Morning.’ I propped myself upright. ‘What time is it?’

‘Little after five.’ He made an apologetic shrug and turned to spit in the basin. ‘Wouldn’t be up myself, but Jiang is out there bouncing around in some martial arts frenzy, and I’m a light sleeper.’

I cocked my head and listened. From beyond the canvasynth flap, the neurachem brought me the clear sounds of hard breathing and loose clothing snapping repeatedly taut.

‘Fucking psycho,’ I grumbled.

‘Hey, he’s in good company on this beach. I thought it was a requirement. Half the people you recruited are fucking psychos.’

‘Yeah, but Jiang’s the only one with insomnia, it appears.’ I stumbled upright, frowning at the time it was taking for the combat sleeve to get itself properly online. Maybe this was what Jiang Jianping was fighting. Sleeve damage is an unpleasant wake-up call and, however subtly it manifests itself, a harbinger of eventual mortality. Even with the faint twinges that come with the onset of age, the message is flashing numeral clear. Limited time remaining. Blink, blink.

Rush/snap!

‘Haiii!!!’

‘Right.’ I pressed my eyeballs hard with finger and thumb. ‘I’m awake now. You finished with that brush?’

Schneider handed the powerbrush over. I stabbed a new head from the dispenser, pushed it to life and stepped into the shower niche.

Rise and shine.

Jiang had powered down somewhat by the time I stepped, dressed and relatively clear-headed, through the dormitory flap to the central living space. He stood rooted, swivelling slightly from side to side and weaving a slow pattern of defensive configurations around him. The table and chairs in the living space had been cleared to one side to make room, and the main exit from the ’fab was bound back. Light streamed into the space from outside, tinged blue from the sand.

I got a can of military-issue amphetamine cola from the dispenser, pulled the tab and sipped, watching.

‘Was there something?’ Jiang asked, as his head shifted in my direction behind a wide sweeping right-arm block. Sometime the previous night he’d razored the Maori sleeve’s thick dark hair back to an even two centimetres all over. The face the cut revealed was big-boned and hard.

‘You do this every morning?’

‘Yes.’ The syllable came out tight. Block, counterstrike, groin and sternum. He was very fast when he wanted to be.

‘Impressive.’

‘Necessary.’ Another death blow, probably to the temple, and delivered out of a combination of blocks that telegraphed retreat. Very nice. ‘Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.’

I nodded. ‘Hayashi.’

The patterns slowed fractionally.

‘You have read him?’

‘Met him once.’

Jiang stopped and looked at me narrowly. ‘You met Toru Hayashi?’

‘I’m older than I look. We deployed together on Adoracion.’

‘You are an Envoy?’

‘Was.’

For a moment, he seemed unsure what to say. I wondered if he thought I was joking. Then he brought his arms forward, sheathed his right fist at chest height in the cup of his left hand and bowed slightly over the grasp.

‘Takeshi-san, if I offended you with my talk of fear yesterday, I apologise. I am a fool.’

‘No problem. I wasn’t offended. We all deal with it different ways. You planning on breakfast?’

He pointed across the living space to where the table had been pushed back to the canvasynth wall. There was fresh fruit piled on a shallow bowl and what looked like slices of rye bread.

‘Mind if I join you?’

‘I would be. Honoured.’

We were still eating when Schneider came back from wherever he’d been for the last twenty minutes.

‘Meeting in the main ’fab,’ he said over his shoulder, disappearing into the dormitory. He emerged a minute later. ‘Fifteen minutes. Sutjiadi seems to think everyone should be there.’

He was gone again.

Jiang was half to his feet when I put out a hand and gestured him back to his seat.

‘Take it easy. He said fifteen minutes.’

‘I wish to shower and change,’ said Jiang, a little stiffly.

‘I’ll tell him you’re on your way. Finish your breakfast, for Christ’s sake. In a couple of days from now it’ll make you sick to the stomach just to swallow food. Enjoy the flavours while you can.’

He sat back down with a strange expression on his face.

‘Do you mind, Takeshi-san, if I ask you a question?’

‘Why am I no longer an Envoy?’ I saw the confirmation in his eyes. ‘Call it an ethical revelation. I was at Innenin.’

‘I have read about it.’

‘Hayashi again?’

He nodded.

‘Yeah, well, Hayashi’s account is pretty close, but he wasn’t there. That’s why he comes off ambiguous about the whole thing. Didn’t feel fit to judge. I was there, and I’m eminently fit to judge. They fucked us. No one’s too clear on whether they actually intended to or not, but I’m here to tell you that doesn’t matter. My friends died - really died - when there was no need. That’s what counts.’

‘Yet, as a soldier, surely you must—’

‘Jiang, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I try not to think of myself as a soldier any more. I’m trying to evolve.’

‘Then what do you consider yourself ?’ His voice stayed polite, but his demeanour had tightened and his food was forgotten on his plate. ‘What have you evolved into?’

I shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. Something better, at any rate. A paid killer, maybe?’

The whites of his eyes flared. I sighed.

‘I’m sorry if that offends you, Jiang, but it’s the truth. You probably don’t want to hear it, most soldiers don’t. When you put on that uniform, you’re saying in effect that you resign your right to make independent decisions about the universe and your relationship to it.’

‘That is Quellism.’ He all but reared back from the table as he said it.

‘Maybe. That doesn’t stop it being true.’ I couldn’t quite work out why I was bothering with this man. Maybe it was something about his ninja calm, the way it begged to be shattered. Or maybe it was just being woken up early by his tightly controlled killing dance. ‘Jiang, ask yourself, what are you going to do when your superior officer orders you to plasma-bomb some hospital full of injured children?’

‘There are certain actions—’

‘No!’ The snap in my own voice surprised me. ‘Soldiers don’t get to make those kinds of choices. Look out the window, Jiang. Mixed in with that black stuff you see blowing around out there, there’s a thin coating of fat molecules that used to be people. Men, women, children, all vaporised by some soldier under orders from some superior officer. Because they were in the way.’

‘That was a Kempist action.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘I would not carry out—’

‘Then you’re no longer a soldier, Jiang. Soldiers follow orders. Regardless. The moment you refuse to carry out an order, you’re no longer a soldier. You’re just a paid killer trying to renegotiate your contract.’

He got up.

‘I am going to change,’ he said coldly. ‘Please present my apologies to Captain Sutjiadi for the delay.’

‘Sure.’ I picked up a kiwi fruit from the table and bit through the skin. ‘See you there.’

I watched him retreat to the other dormitory, then got up from the table and wandered out into the morning, still chewing the furred bitterness of the kiwi skin amidst the fruit.

Outside, the camp was coming slowly to life. On my way to the assembly ’fab I spotted Ameli Vongsavath crouched under one of the Nagini’s support struts while Yvette Cruickshank helped her lift part of the hydraulic system clear for inspection. With Wardani bunking in her lab, the three remaining females had ended up sharing a ’fab, whether by accident or design I didn’t know. None of the male team members had tried for the fourth bunk.

Cruickshank saw me and waved.

‘Sleep well?’ I called out.

She grinned back. ‘Like the fucking dead.’

Hand was waiting at the door to the assembly ’fab, the clean angles of his face freshly shaven, the chameleochrome coveralls immaculate. There was a faint tang of spice in the air that I thought might come from something on his hair. He looked so much like a net ad for officer training that I could cheerfully have shot him in the face as soon as said good morning.

‘Morning.’

‘Good morning, lieutenant. How did you sleep?’

‘Briefly.’

Inside, three-quarters of the space was given over to the assembly hall, the rest walled off for Hand’s use. In the assembly space, a dozen memoryboard-equipped chairs had been set out in an approximate ring and Sutjiadi was busy with a map projector, spinning up a table-sized central image of the beach and surroundings, punching in tags and making notes on his own chair’s board. He looked up as I came in.

‘Kovacs, good. If you’ve got no objections, I’m going to send you out on the bike with Sun this morning.’

I yawned. ‘Sounds like fun.’

‘Yes, well that isn’t the primary purpose. I want to string a secondary ring of remotes a few kilometres back to give us a response edge, and while Sun’s doing that she can’t be watching her own ass. You get the turret duty. I’ll have Hansen and Cruickshank start at the north end and swing inland. You and Sun go south, do the same thing.’ He gave me a thin smile. ‘See if you can’t arrange to meet somewhere in the middle.’

I nodded.

‘Humour.’ I took a seat and slumped in it. ‘You want to watch that, Sutjiadi. Stuff’s addictive.’

Up on the seaward slopes of Dangrek’s spine, the devastation at Sauberville was clearer. You could see where the fireball had blasted a cavity into the hook at the end of the peninsula and let the sea in, changing the whole shape of the coastline. Around the crater, smoke was still crawling into the sky, but from up here you could make out the myriad tiny fires that fed the flow, dull red like the beacons used to flag potential flashpoints on a political map.

Of the buildings, the city itself, there was nothing left at all.

‘You’ve got to hand it to Kemp,’ I said, mostly to the wind coming in off the sea, ‘he doesn’t mess about with decision-making by committee. There’s no bigger picture with this guy. Soon as it looks like he’s losing, bam! He just calls in the angelfire.’

‘Sorry?’ Sun Liping was still engrossed in the innards of the sentry system we had just planted. ‘You talking to me?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then you were talking to yourself ?’ Her brows arched over her work. ‘That’s a bad sign, Kovacs.’

I grunted and shifted in the gunner’s saddle. The grav bike was canted at an angle on the rough grass, mounted Sunjets cranked down to maintain a level bead on the landward horizon. They twitched from time to time, motion trackers chasing the wind through the grass or maybe some small animal that had somehow managed not to die when the blast hit Sauberville.

‘Alright, we’re done.’ Sun closed up the inspection hatch and stood back, watching the turret reel drunkenly to its feet and turn to face the mountains. It firmed up as the ultravibe battery snicked out of the upper carapace, as if it suddenly recalled its purpose in life. The hydraulic system settled it into a squat that took the bulk of the body below line of sight for anyone coming up this particular ridge. A fairweather sensor crept out of the armour below the gun segment and flexed in the air. The whole machine looked absurdly like a starved frog in hiding, testing the air with one especially emaciated foreleg.

I chinned the contact mike.

‘Cruickshank, this is Kovacs. You paying attention?’

‘Nothing but.’ The rapid deployment commando came back laconic. ‘Where you at, Kovacs?’

‘We have number six fed and watered. Moving on to site five. We should have line of sight on you soon. Make sure you keep your tags where they can be read.’

‘Relax, will you? I do this for a living.’

‘That didn’t save you last time, did it?’

I heard her snort. ‘Low blow, man. Low blow. How many times you been dead anyway, Kovacs?’

‘A few,’ I admitted.

‘So.’ Her voice rose derisively. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘See you soon, Cruickshank.’

‘Not if I get you in my sights first. Out.’

Sun climbed aboard the bike.

‘She likes you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Just for your information. Ameli and I spent most of last night hearing what she’d like to do to you in a locked escape pod.’

‘Good to know. You weren’t sworn to secrecy then?’

Sun fired up the motors and the wind shield snipped shut around us. ‘I think,’ she said meditatively, ‘the idea was that one of us would tell you as soon as possible. Her family are from the Limon Highlands back on Latimer, and from what I hear the Limon girls don’t mess about when they want something plugging in.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Her choice of words, not mine.’

I grinned.

‘Of course she’ll need to hurry,’ Sun went on, busying herself with the controls. ‘In a few days none of us’ll have any libido left worth talking about.’

I lost the grin.

We lifted and coasted slowly along the seaward side of the ridge. The grav bike was a comfortable ride, even weighed down with loaded panniers, and with the wind screen on, conversation was easy.

‘Do you think the archaeologue can open the gate as she claims?’ Sun asked.

‘If anyone can.’

‘If anyone can,’ she repeated thoughtfully.

I thought about the psychodynamic repairs I had done on Wardani, the bruised interior landscape I had had to open up, peeling it back like bandaging that had gone septic and stiffened into the flesh beneath. And there at the core, the tightly wired centredness that had allowed her to survive the damage.

She had wept when the opening took hold, but she cried wide-eyed, like someone fighting the weight of drowsiness, blinking the tears out of her eyes, hands clenched into fists at her sides, teeth gritted.

I woke her up, but she brought herself back.

‘Scratch that,’ I said. ‘She can do it. No question.’

‘You show remarkable faith.’ There was no criticism in Sun’s voice that I could hear. ‘Strange in a man who works so hard at burying himself beneath the weight of disbelief.’

‘It isn’t faith,’ I said shortly. ‘It’s knowledge. There’s a big difference.’

‘Yet I understand Envoy conditioning provides insights that readily transform the one into the other.’

‘Who told you I was an Envoy?’

‘You did.’ This time I thought I could detect a smile in Sun’s voice. ‘Well, at least, you told Deprez, and I was listening.’

‘Very astute of you.’

‘Thank you. Is my information accurate then?’

‘Not really, no. Where did you hear it?’

‘My family is originally from Hun Home. There, we have a Chinese name for the Envoys.’ She made a short string of tightly sung syllables. ‘It means One who makes Facts from Belief.’

I grunted. I’d heard something similar on New Beijing a couple of decades ago. Most of the colonial cultures have built myths around the Envoys at one time or another.

‘You sound unimpressed.’

‘Well, it’s a bad translation. What the Envoys have is just an intuition enhancement system. You know. You’re going out, it’s not a bad day but you take a jacket on impulse. Later it rains. How does that work?’

She looked over her shoulder, one eyebrow cocked. ‘Luck?’

‘Could be luck. But what’s more likely is that systems in your mind and body that you’re not aware of measure the environment at some subconscious level and just occasionally manage to squirt the message through all the superego programming. Envoy training takes that and refines it so your superego and subconscious get along better. It’s nothing to do with belief, it’s just a. A sense of something underlying. You make the connections and from that you can assemble a skeleton model of the truth. Later on, you go back and fill in the gaps. Gifted detectives have been doing it for centuries unaided. This is just the superamped version.’ Suddenly I was tired of the words coming out of my mouth, the glib flow of human systems specs that you could wrap yourself in to escape the emotional realities of what you did for a living. ‘So tell me, Sun. How did you get from Hun Home to here?’

‘Not me, my parents. They were contract biosystems analysts. They came here on the needlecast when the Hun Home cooperatives bought into settling Sanction IV. Their personalities, I mean. DHF’d into custom-grown clones from Sino stock on Latimer. All part of the deal.’

‘Are they still here?’

She hunched her shoulders slightly. ‘No. They retired to Latimer several years ago. The settlement contract paid very well.’

‘You didn’t want to go with them?’

‘I was born on Sanction IV. This is my home.’ Sun looked back at me again. ‘I imagine you have a problem understanding that.’

‘Not really. I’ve seen worse places to belong.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. Sharya for one. Right! Go right!’

The bike dipped and banked. Admirable responses from Sun in her new sleeve. I shifted in my saddle, scanning the hillscape. My hands went to the flying grips of the mounted Sunjet set and jerked it down to manual height. On the move it wasn’t much good as an automated weapon without some very careful programming and we hadn’t had time for that.

‘There’s something moving out there.’ I chinned the mike. ‘Cruickshank, we’ve got movement across here. Want to join the party?’

The reply crisped back. ‘On our way. Stay tagged.’

‘Can you see it?’ asked Sun.

‘If I could see it, I’d have shot it. What about the scope?’

‘Nothing so far.’

‘Oh, that’s good.’

‘I think . . .’ We crested a hillock and Sun’s voice came back, cursing, by the sound of it, in Mandarin. She booted the bike sideways and swung about, creeping up another metre from the ground. Peering down over her shoulder, I saw what we’d been looking for.

‘What the fuck is that?’ I whispered.

On another scale, I might have thought I was looking at a recently hatched nest of the bio-engineered maggots they use for cleaning wounds. The grey mass that writhed on the grass below us had the same slick-wet consistency and self-referential motion, like a million microscopic pairs of hands washing themselves and each other. But there would have been enough maggots here for every wound inflicted on Sanction IV in the last month. We were looking at a sphere of seething activity over a metre across, pushed gently about on the hillside like a gas-filled balloon. Where the shadow of the bike fell across it, bulges formed on the surface and bulked upwards, bursting like blisters with a soft popping and falling back into the substance of the main body.

‘Look,’ said Sun quietly. ‘It likes us.’

‘What the fuck is it?’

‘I didn’t know the first time you asked me.’

She nudged the bike back to the slope we’d just crested, and put us down. I lowered the Sunjet discharge channels to focus on our new playmate.

‘Do you think this is far enough away?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said grimly. ‘If it even twitches this way, I’m going to blast it apart on general principles. Whatever it is.’

‘That strikes me as unsophisticated.’

‘Yeah, well. Just call me Sutjiadi.’

The thing, whatever it was, seemed to have calmed down now we no longer cast a shadow on its surface. The internal writhing motion went on, but there was no sign of a coordinated lateral move in our direction. I leaned on the Sunjet mounting and watched, wondering briefly if we weren’t somehow still back in the Mandrake construct, looking at another probability dysfunction like the grey cloud that had obscured Sauberville while its fate was still undecided.

A dull droning reached my ears.

‘Here come the blam blam crew.’ I scanned the ridge northward, spotted the other bike and neurachem’d a close-up. Cruickshank’s hair bannered out against the sky from her perch behind the weaponry. They had the windscreen powered back to a driver’s cone for speed. Hansen drove hunched forward into it, intent. I was surprised at the warm rush the sight kicked off inside me.

Wolf gene splice, I registered irritably. Never shake it.

Good old Carrera. Never misses a trick, the old bastard.

‘We should ’cast this back to Hand,’ Sun was saying. ‘The Cartel archives may have something on it.’

Carrera’s voice drifted through my mind.

the Cartel have deployed

I looked back at the seething grey mass with new eyes.

Fuck.

Hansen brought the bike to a juddering halt alongside us and leaned on the handlebars. His brow furrowed.

‘Wha—’

‘We don’t know what the fuck it is,’ Sun broke in tartly.

‘Yes we do,’ I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hand looked impassively at the projected image for a long moment after Sun froze the film. No one else was looking at the holodisplay any more. Seated in the ring, or crowding in at the bubblefab’s door, they were looking at him.

‘Nanotech, right?’ Hansen said it for everyone.

Hand nodded. His face was a mask, but to the Envoy-tuned senses I had deployed, the anger came smoking off him in waves.

‘Experimental nanotech,’ I said. ‘I thought that was a standard scare line, Hand. Nothing to worry about.’

‘It usually is,’ he said evenly.

‘I’ve worked with military nanosystems,’ said Hansen. ‘And I’ve never seen anything like that.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’ Hand loosened slightly and leaned forward to gesture at the holodisplay. ‘This is new. What you’re looking at here is a null configuration. The nanobes have no specific programming to follow.’

‘So what are they doing?’ asked Ameli Vongsavath.

Hand looked surprised. ‘Nothing. They are doing nothing, Mistress Vongsavath. Exactly that. They feed off the radiation from the blast, they reproduce at a modest rate and they. Exist. Those are the only designed parameters.’

‘Sounds harmless,’ said Cruickshank dubiously.

I saw Sutjiadi and Hansen exchange glances.

‘Harmless, certainly, as things stand now.’ Hand hit a stud on his chair’s board and the frozen image vanished. ‘Captain, I think it’s best if we wrap this up for now. Would I be right in assuming the sensors we have strung should warn us of any unforeseen developments ahead of time?’

Sutjiadi frowned.

‘Anything that moves will show up,’ he agreed. ‘But—’

‘Excellent. Then we should all get back to work.’

A murmur ran round the briefing circle. Someone snorted. Sutjiadi snapped icily for quiet. Hand stood up and pushed through the flap to his quarters. Ole Hansen jerked his chin after the executive, and a ripple of supportive muttering broke out. Sutjiadi reprised his shut-the-fuck-up frost, and started handing out tasks.

I waited it out. The members of the Dangrek team drifted out in ones and twos, the last of them ushered out by Sutjiadi. Tanya Wardani hovered briefly at the door to the bubblefab on her way out, looking in my direction, but Schneider said something in her ear and the two of them followed the general flow. Sutjiadi gave me a hard stare when he saw I was staying, but he walked away. I gave it another couple of minutes, then got up and went to the flap of Hand’s quarters. I touched the chime and walked in.

Hand was stretched out on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling. He barely looked in my direction.

‘What do you want, Kovacs?’

I snapped out a chair and sat in it. ‘Well, less tinsel than you’re currently deploying would be a start.’

‘I don’t believe I’ve told any lies to anyone recently. And I try to keep track.’

‘You haven’t told much truth either. Not to the grunts anyway, and with spec ops, I think that’s a mistake. They aren’t stupid.’

‘No, they aren’t stupid.’ He said it with the detachment of a botanist labelling specimens. ‘But they’re paid, and that’s as good or better.’

I examined the side of my hand. ‘I’ve been paid too, but that won’t stop me ripping your throat out if I find you’re trying to tinsel me.’

Silence. If the threat bothered him, it didn’t show.

‘So,’ I said at last, ‘you going to tell me what’s going on with the nanotech?’

‘Nothing is going on. What I told Mistress Vongsavath was accurate. The nanobes are in a null configuration because they are doing precisely nothing.’

‘Come on, Hand. If they’re doing nothing, then what are you so bent out of shape about?’

He stared at the ceiling of the bubblefab for a while. He seemed fascinated by the dull grey lining of the bubblefab’s ceiling. I was on the point of getting up and hauling him bodily off the bed, but something in the Envoy conditioning held me in place. Hand was working through something.

‘Do you know,’ he murmured, ‘the great thing about wars like this?’

‘Keeps the population from thinking too hard?’

A faint smile flitted across his face.

‘The potential for innovation,’ he said.

The assertion seemed to give him sudden energy. He swung his feet off the bed and sat up, elbows on knees, hands clasped. His eyes bored into mine.

‘What do you think of the Protectorate, Kovacs?’

‘You’re joking, right?’

He shook his head. ‘No games. No entrapment. What’s the Protectorate to you?’

‘The skeletal grip of a corpse’s hand round eggs trying to hatch?’

‘Very lyrical, but I didn’t ask you what Quell called it. I asked what you think.’

I shrugged. ‘I think she was right.’

Hand nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘She was right. The human race has straddled the stars. We’ve plumbed the insides of a dimension we have no senses to perceive in order to do it. We’ve built societies on worlds so far apart that the fastest ships we have would take half a millennium to get from one side of our sphere of influence to the other. And you know how we did all that?’

‘I think I’ve heard this speech.’

‘The corporations did it. Not governments. Not politicians. Not this fucking joke Protectorate we pay lip service to. Corporate planning gave us the vision, corporate investment paid for it, and corporate employees built it.’

‘Let’s hear it for the corporations.’ I patted my palms together, half a dozen dry strokes.

Hand ignored it. ‘And when we were done, what happened? The UN came and they muzzled us. They stripped us of the powers they’d awarded us for the diaspora. They levied their taxes again, they rewrote their protocols. They castrated us.’

‘You’re breaking my heart, Hand.’

‘You’re not funny, Kovacs. Do you have any idea what technological advances we might have made by now if that muzzle hadn’t gone back on. Do you know how fast we were during the diaspora?’

‘I’ve read about it.’

‘In spaceflight, in cryogenics, in bioscience, in machine intelligence. ’ He ticked them off on bent-back fingers. ‘A century of advances in less than a decade. A global tetrameth rush for the entire scientific community. And it all stopped with the Protectorate protocols. We’d have fucking faster-than-light spaceflight by now if they hadn’t stopped us. Guaranteed.’

‘Easy to say now. I think you’re omitting a few inconvenient historical details, but that’s not really the point. You’re trying to tell me the Protectorate has unwritten the protocols for you, just so you can get this little war won at speed?’

‘In essence, yes.’ His hands made shaping motions in the space between his knees. ‘It’s not official, of course. No more than all those Protectorate dreadnoughts that aren’t officially anywhere near Sanction IV. But unofficially, every member of the Cartel has a mandate to push war-related product development to the hilt, and then further.’

‘And that’s what’s squirming around out there? Pushed-to-the-hilt nanoware?’

Hand compressed his lips. ‘SUS-L. Smart Ultra Short-Lived nanobe systems.’

‘Sounds promising. So what does it do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh for f—’

‘No.’ He leaned forward. ‘I don’t know. None of us do. It’s a new front. They’re calling it OPERNS. Open Programme, Environmentally-Reactive Nanoscale Systems.’

‘The OPERN System? That’s just so fucking cute. And it’s a weapon?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘So how does it work?’

‘Kovacs, you don’t listen.’ There was a dreary kind of enthusiasm building in his voice now. ‘It’s an evolving system. Smart evolution. No one knows what it does. Try to imagine what might have happened to life on earth if DNA molecules could think in some rudimentary way - imagine how fast evolution might have got us to where we are now. Now speed that up by a factor of a million or more because when they say Short-Lived they mean it. Last time I was briefed on the project they had each generation down to less than a four-minute lifespan. What does it do? Kovacs, we’re only just starting to map what it can do. They’ve modelled it in highspeed MAI-generated constructs, and it comes out different every time. Once it built these robot guns like grasshoppers, the size of a spider tank but they could jump seventy metres into the air and come down firing accurately. Another time it turned into a spore cloud that dissolved carbon bond molecules on contact.’

‘Oh. Good.’

‘It shouldn’t take that turn out here - there’s not the density of military personnel for it to be an evolutionarily selective trait.’

‘But it could do pretty much anything else.’

‘Yes.’ The Mandrake exec looked at his hands. ‘I would imagine so. Once it goes active.’

‘And how long have we got before that happens?’

Hand shrugged. ‘Until it disturbs Sutjiadi’s sentry systems. As soon as they fire on it, it starts evolving to cope.’

‘And if we go blast it now? Because I know that’s going to be Sutjiadi’s vote.’

‘With what? If we use the UV in the Nagini, it’ll just be ready for the sentry systems that much faster. If we use something else, it’ll evolve around that and probably go up against the sentries that much tougher and smarter. It’s nanoware. You can’t kill nanobes individually. And some always survive. Fuck, Kovacs, eighty per cent kill rate is what our labs work off as an evolutionary ideal. It’s the principle of the thing. Some survive, the toughest motherfuckers, and those are the ones that work out how to beat you next time around. Anything, anything at all you do to kick it out of the null configuration just makes things worse.’

‘There must be some way to shut it down.’

‘Yes, there is. All you need are the project termination codes. Which I don’t have.’

The radiation or the drugs, whatever it was, I felt suddenly tired. I stared at Hand through gritted up eyes. Nothing to say that wouldn’t be a rant along the lines of Tanya Wardani’s tirade against Sutjiadi the night before. Waste of warm air. You can’t talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

Hand cleared his throat. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here before it gets very far advanced.’

‘If Ghede is on our side, don’t you mean?’

He smiled. ‘If you like.’

‘You don’t believe a word of that shit, Hand.’

The smile wiped away. ‘How would you know what I believe?’

‘OPERNS. SUS-L. You know the acronyms. You know the construct-run results. You know this fucking programme hardware and soft. Carrera warned us about nanotech deployment, you didn’t blink. And now suddenly you’re pissed-off and scared. Something doesn’t fit.’

‘That’s unfortunate.’ He started to get up. ‘I’ve told you as much as I’m going to, Kovacs.’

I beat him to his feet and drew one of the interface guns, right-handed. It clung to my palm like something feeding.

‘Sit down.’

He looked at the levelled gun—

‘Don’t be ridiculou—’

—then at my face, and his voice dried up.

‘Sit. Down.’

He lowered himself carefully back to the bed. ‘If you harm me, Kovacs, you’ve lost everything. Your money on Latimer, your passage offworld—’

‘From the sound of it, I don’t look much like collecting at the moment anyway.’

‘I’m backed up, Kovacs. Even if you kill me, it’s a wasted bullet. They’ll re-sleeve me in Landfall and—’

‘Have you ever been shot in the stomach?’

His eyes snapped to mine. He shut up.

‘These are high-impact fragmentation slugs. Close-quarters antipersonnel load. I imagine you saw what they did to Deng’s crew. They go in whole and they come out like monomol shards. I shoot you in the gut and it’ll take you the best part of a day to die. Whatever they do with your stored self, you’ll go through that here and now. I died that way once, and I’m telling you, it’s something you want to avoid.’

‘I think Captain Sutjiadi might have something to say about that.’

‘Sutjiadi will do what I tell him, and so will the others. You didn’t make any friends in that meeting, and they don’t want to die at the hands of your evolving nanobes any more than I do. Now suppose we finish this conversation in a civilised fashion.’

I watched him measure the will in my eyes, in my gathered stance. He’d have some diplomatic psychosense conditioning, some learned skill at gauging these things, but Envoy training has a built-in capacity to deceive that leaves most corporate bioware standing. Envoys project pure from a base of synthetic belief. At that moment, I didn’t even know myself whether I was going to shoot him or not.

He read real intent. Or something else cracked. I saw the moment cross his face. I put up the smart gun. I didn’t know which way it would have gone. You very often don’t. Being an Envoy is like that.

‘This doesn’t go outside the room,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell the others about SUS-L, but the rest we keep at this level. Anything else will be counterproductive.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘That bad?’

‘It would appear,’ he spoke slowly, as if the words tasted bad. ‘That I have overextended myself. We’ve been set up.’

‘By?’

‘You wouldn’t know them. Competitors.’

I seated myself again. ‘Another corporation?’

He shook his head. ‘OPERNS is a Mandrake package. We bought in the SUS-L specialists freelance, but the project is Mandrake’s. Sealed up tight. These are execs inside Mandrake, jockeying for position. Colleagues.’

The last word came out like spit.

‘You got a lot of colleagues like that?’

That raised a grimace. ‘You don’t make friends in Mandrake, Kovacs. Associates will back you as far as it pays them to. Beyond that, you’re dead in the water if you trust anyone. Comes with the territory. I’m afraid I have miscalculated.’

‘So they deploy the OPERN systems in the hope you won’t come back from Dangrek. Isn’t that kind of short-sighted? In view of why we’re here, I mean?’

The Mandrake exec spread his hands. ‘They don’t know why we’re here. The data’s sealed in the Mandrake stack, my access only. It will have cost them every favour they own just to find out I’m down here in the first place.’

‘If they’re looking to take you down here . . .’

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

I saw new reasons why he wouldn’t want to take a bullet out here. I revised my estimate of the face-down. Hand hadn’t cracked, he’d calculated.

‘So how safe is your remote storage?’

‘From outside Mandrake? Pretty much impregnable. From inside?’ He looked at his hands. ‘I don’t know. We left in a hurry. The security codes are relatively old. Given time.’

He shrugged.

‘Always about time, huh?’

‘We could always pull back,’ I offered. ‘Use Carrera’s incoming code to withdraw.’

Hand smiled tightly.

‘Why do you think Carrera gave us that code? Experimental nanotech is locked up under Cartel protocols. In order to deploy it, my enemies would have to have influence at War Council level. That means access to the authorisation codes for the Wedge and anyone else fighting on the Cartel side. Forget Carrera. Carrera’s in their pocket. Even if it wasn’t at the time Carrera gave it out, the incoming code is just a missile tag waiting to go operative now.’ The tight smile again. ‘And I understand the Wedge generally hit what they’re shooting at.’

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Generally, they do.’

‘So.’ Hand got up and walked to the window flap opposite his bed. ‘Now you know it all. Satisfied?’

I thought it through.

‘The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is . . .’

‘That’s right.’ He didn’t look away from the window. ‘A transmission detailing what we’ve found and the serial number of the claim buoy deployed to mark it as Mandrake property. Those are the only things that’ll put me back into the game at a level high enough to trump these infidels.’

I sat there for a while longer, but he seemed to have finished, so I got up to leave. He still didn’t look at me. Watching his face, I felt an unlooked-for twinge of sympathy for him. I knew what miscalculation felt like. At the exit flap, I paused.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Maybe you’d better say some prayers,’ I told him. ‘Might make you feel better.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Wardani worked herself grey.

She attacked the gate’s impassive folded density with a focus that bordered on fury. She sat for hours at a time, sketching glyphs and calculating their likely relation to each other. She speed-loaded technoglyph sequencing into the dull grey instant-access datachips, working the deck like a jazz pianist on tetrameth. She fired it through the assembly of synthesiser equipment around the gate and watched with arms wrapped tightly around herself as the control boards sparked holographic protest at the alien protocols she imposed. She scanned the glyph panelling on the gate through forty-seven separate monitors for the scraps of response that might help her with the next sequence. She faced the lack of coherent animation the glyphs threw back at her with jaw set, and then gathered her notes and tramped back down the beach to the bubblefab to start all over again.

When she was there, I stayed out of the way and watched her hunched figure through the ’fab flap from a vantage point on the loading hatch of the Nagini. Close-focus neurachem reeled in the image and gave me her face intent over the sketchboard or the chiploader deck. When she went to the cave, I stood amidst the chaos of discarded technoglyph sketching on the floor of the bubblefab and watched her on the wall of monitors.

She wore her hair pulled severely back, but strands got out and rioted on her forehead. One usually made it down the side of her face, and left me with a feeling I couldn’t put in place.

I watched the work, and what it did to her.

Sun and Hansen watched their remote-sentry board, in shifts.

Sutjiadi watched the mouth of the cave, whether Wardani was working there or not.

The rest of the crew watched half-scrambled satellite broadcasts. Kempist propaganda channels when they could get them, for the laughs, government programming when they couldn’t. Kemp’s personal appearances drew jeers and mock shootings of the screen, Lapinee recruitment numbers drew applause and chant-alongs. Somewhere along the line, the spectrum of response got blurred into a general irony and Kemp and Lapinee started getting each other’s fanmail. Deprez and Cruickshank drew beads on Lapinee whenever she cropped up, and the whole crew had Kemp’s ideological speeches down, chanting along with full body language and demagogue gestures. Mostly, whatever was on kick-fired much-needed laughter. Even Jiang joined in with the pale flicker of a smile now and then.

Hand watched the ocean, angled south and east.

Occasionally, I tipped my head back to the splatter of starfire across the night sky, and wondered who was watching us.

Two days in, the remotes drew first blood on a nanobe colony.

I was vomiting up my breakfast when the ultravibe battery cut loose. You could feel the thrum in your bones and the pit of your stomach, which didn’t help much.

Three separate pulses. Then nothing.

I wiped my mouth clean, hit the bathroom niche’s disposal stud and went out onto the beach. The sky was nailed down grey to the horizon, only the persistent smouldering of Sauberville to mar it. No other smoke, no rinsed-out splash of fireglow to signify machine damage.

Cruickshank was out in the open, Sunjet unlimbered, staring up into the hills. I crossed to where she stood.

‘You feel that?’

‘Yeah.’ I spat into the sand. My head was still pulsing, either from the heaving or the ultravibe fire. ‘Looks like we’ve engaged.’

She glanced sideways at me. ‘You OK?’

‘Threw up. Don’t look so smug. Couple of days, you’ll be at it yourself.’

‘Thanks.’

The gut-deep thrum again, sustained this time. It slopped through my insides. Collateral discharge, the spreading, non-specific recoil from the directed narrowcast wave the battery was throwing down. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes.

‘That’s the bead,’ said Cruickshank. ‘The first three were tracking shots. Now it’s locked on.’

‘Good.’

The thrum leached out. I bent over and tried to snort one nostril clear of the little clots of vomit that were still lodged at the back of my nasal passages. Cruickshank looked on with interest.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ She looked away.

I blasted the other nostril clear, spat again and searched the horizon. Still nothing on the skyline. Little flecks of blood in the snot and vomit clots at my feet. Sense of something coming apart.

Fuck.

‘Where’s Sutjiadi?’

She pointed towards the Nagini. There was a mobile crank ramp under the assault ship’s nose and Sutjiadi stood on it with Ole Hansen, apparently discussing some aspect of the vessel’s forward battery. A short distance up the beach, Ameli Vongsavath sat on a low dune and watched. Deprez, Sun and Jiang were either still at breakfast in the ship’s galley, or off doing something to kill the waiting.

Cruickshank shaded her eyes and looked at the two men on the ramp.

‘I think our captain’s been looking forward to this,’ she said reflectively. ‘He’s been rubbing up against that big bunch of guns every day since we got here. Look, he’s smiling.’

I trudged across to the ramp, riding out slow waves of nausea. Sutjiadi saw me coming and crouched down on the edge. No trace of the alleged smile.

‘It seems our time has run out.’

‘Not yet. Hand said it’ll take the nanobes a few days to evolve suitable responses to the ultravibe. I’d say we’re about halfway.’

‘Then let’s hope your archaeologue friend is similarly advanced. Have you talked to her recently?’

‘Has anybody?’

He grimaced. Wardani hadn’t been very communicative since the news about the OPERN system broke. At mealtimes, she ate for fuel and left. She shot down attempts at conversation with monosyllable fire.

‘I’d appreciate a status report,’ said Sutjiadi.

‘On it.’

I went up the beach via Cruickshank, trading a Limon handshake she’d shown me as I passed. It was applied reflex, but it gusted a little smile across my face and the sickness in my guts receded a fraction. Something the Envoys taught me. Reflex can touch some odd, deep places.

‘Talk to you?’ asked Ameli Vongsavath when I reached her vantage point.

‘Yeah, I’ll be back down here in a moment. Just want to check on our resident driven woman.’

It didn’t get much of a smile.

I found Wardani slumped in a lounger at one side of the cave, glowering at the gate. Playback sequences flickered on the filigree screens stretch-deployed over her head. The datacoil weaving at her side was cleared, motes of data circling forlornly at the top left corner where she had left them minimised. It was an unusual configuration - most people crush the display motes flat to the projection surface when they’re done - but either way it was the electronic equivalent of sweeping an arm across your desk and dumping the contents all over the floor. On the monitors, I’d watched her do it time and again, the exasperated gesture made somehow elegant by the reversed, upward sweep. It was something I liked watching.

‘I’d rather you didn’t ask the obvious question,’ she said.

‘The nanobes have engaged.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah, felt it. What’s that give us, about three or four days?’

‘Hand said four at the outside. So don’t feel like you’re under any kind of pressure here.’

That got a wan smile. Evidently I was warming up.

‘Getting anywhere?’

‘That’s the obvious question, Kovacs.’

‘Sorry.’ I found a packing case and perched on it. ‘Sutjiadi’s getting twitchy though. He’s looking for parameters.’

‘I guess I’d better stop pissing about and just open this thing, then.’

I mustered a smile of my own. ‘That’d be good, yeah.’

Quiet. The gate sucked my attention.

‘It’s there,’ she muttered. ‘The wavelengths are right, the sound and vision glyphs check out. The maths works, that is, as far as I understand the maths, it works. I’ve backed up from what I know should happen, extrapolated, this is what we did last time, near as I can remember. It should fucking work. I’m missing something. Something I’ve forgotten. Maybe something I had.’ Her face twitched. ‘Battered out of me.’

There was a hysterical snap in her voice as she shut up, an edge cutting back along the line of memories she couldn’t afford. I scrambled after it.

‘If someone’s been here before us, could they have changed the settings in some way?’

She was silent for a while. I waited it out. Finally, she looked up.

‘Thanks.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Uh. For the vote of confidence. But you know, it’s kind of unlikely. Millions to one unlikely. No, I’m pretty sure I’ve just missed something.’

‘But it is possible?’

‘It’s possible, Kovacs. Anything’s possible. But realistically, no. No one human could have done that.’

‘Humans opened it,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah. Kovacs, a dog can open a door if it stands tall enough on its hind legs. But when was the last time you saw a dog take the hinges off a door and rehang it?’

‘Alright.’

‘There’s an order of competence here. Everything we’ve learnt to do with Martian technology - reading the astrogation charts, activating the storm shelters, riding that metro system they found on Nkrumah’s Land - these are all things any ordinary adult Martians could do in their sleep. Basic tech. Like driving a car or living in a house. This.’ She gestured at the hunched spire on the other side of her battery of instruments. ‘This is the pinnacle of their technology. The only one we’ve found in five hundred years of scratching around on more than thirty worlds.’

‘Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong places. Pawing shiny plastic packing while we tread underfoot the delicate circuitry it once protected.’

She shot me a hard look. ‘What are you, a Wycinski convert?’

‘I did some reading in Landfall. Not easy finding copies of his later stuff, but Mandrake has a pretty eclectic set of datastacks. According to what I saw, he was pretty convinced the whole Guild search protocol is fucked.’

‘He was bitter by the time he wrote that. It isn’t easy to be a certified visionary one day and a purged dissident the next.’

‘He predicted the gates, didn’t he?’

‘Pretty much. There were hints in some of the archive material his teams recovered at Bradbury. A couple of references to something called the Step Beyond. The Guild chose to interpret that as a lyrical poet’s take on hypercast technology. Back then we couldn’t tell what we were reading. Epic poetry or weather reports, it all looked the same and the Guild were just happy if we could squeeze some raw meaning out. The Step Beyond as a translation of hypercaster was meaning snatched from the jaws of ignorance. If it referred to some piece of technology no one had ever seen, that was no use to anybody.’

A swelling vibration spanned the cave. Dust filtered down from around the makeshift bracing. Wardani tipped a glance upward.

‘Uh-oh.’

‘Yeah, better keep an eye on that. Hansen and Sun both reckon it’ll stand reverberations a lot closer than the sentries on the inner ring, but then.’ I shrugged. ‘Both of them have made at least one fatal mistake in the past. I’ll get a ramp in here and check the roof isn’t going to fall on you in your moment of triumph.’

‘Thanks.’

I shrugged again. ‘In everyone’s interests, really.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Oh.’ I gestured, suddenly feeling clumsy. ‘Look, you opened this thing before. You can do it again. Just a matter of time.’

‘Which we don’t have.’

‘Tell me,’ I looked, Envoy-rapid, for some way to disrupt the spiralling gloom in her voice. ‘If this really is the pinnacle of Martian technology, how come your team were able to crack it in the first place? I mean . . .?’

I lifted my hands in appeal.

She cracked another weary smile, and I wondered suddenly how hard the radiation poisoning and the chemical counterbalance were hitting her.

‘You still don’t get it, do you Kovacs? These aren’t humans we’re talking about. They didn’t think the way we do. Wycinski called it peeled-back democratic technoaccess. It’s like the storm shelters. Anyone could access them - any Martian, that is - because, well, what’s the point of building technology that some of your species might have trouble accessing?’

‘You’re right. That isn’t human.’

‘It’s one of the reasons Wycinski got into trouble with the Guild in the first place. He wrote a paper on the storm shelters. The science behind the shelters is actually quite complicated, but they’d been built in such a way that it didn’t matter. The control systems were rendered back to a simplicity even we could operate. He called it a clear indication of species-wide unity, and he said it demonstrated that the concept of a Martian imperium tearing itself apart in a colonial war was just so much bullshit.’

‘Just didn’t know when to shut up, huh?’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘So what was he arguing? A war against another race? Somebody we haven’t run up against yet?’

Wardani shrugged. ‘That, or they just pulled out of this region of the galaxy and went somewhere else. He never really went far down either line of reasoning. Wycinski was an iconoclast. He was more concerned with tearing down the idiocies the Guild had already perpetrated than with constructing his own theories.’

‘That’s a surprisingly stupid way to behave for someone so bright.’

‘Or surprisingly brave.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

Wardani shook her head. ‘Whatever. The point is, all the technology we’ve discovered that we understand, we can work.’ She gestured at the banks of equipment ranged around the gate. ‘We have to synthesise the light from a Martian throat gland, and the sonics we think they produced, but if we understand it, we can make it work. You asked how come we were able to crack it last time. It was designed that way. Any Martian needing to get through this gate could open it. And that means, given this equipment and enough time, we can too.’

The flickers of fight sparked beneath the words. She was back up. I nodded slowly, then slid off the packing case.

‘You going?’

‘I’ve got to talk to Ameli. You need anything?’

She looked at me strangely. ‘Nothing else, thanks.’ She straightened up a little in the lounger. ‘I’ve got a couple more sequences to run through here, then I’ll be down to eat.’

‘Good. See you then. Oh,’ I paused on my way out. ‘What shall I say to Sutjiadi? I need to tell him something.’

‘Tell him I’ll have this gate open inside two days.’

‘Really?’

She smiled. ‘No, probably not. But tell him anyway.’

Hand was busy.

The floor of his quarters was traced about with an intricate pattern in poured sand, and scented smoke drifted from black candles set at the four corners of the room. The Mandrake exec was seated cross-legged and in some kind of trance at one end of the sand tracery. His hands held a shallow copper bowl into which one slashed thumb dripped blood. A carved bone token lay in the centre of the bowl, ivory flecked with red where the blood had trickled down.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Hand?’

He surfaced from the trance and fury spasmed across his face.

‘I told Sutjiadi no one was to disturb me.’

‘Yeah, he told me that. Now what the fuck are you doing?’

The moment hung. I read Hand. The body language said he was yawing close to violence, which was fine by me. Dying slowly was making me twitchy and keen to do harm. Any sympathy I’d had for him a couple of days back was fast evaporating.

Maybe he read me too. He made a downward spiral motion with his left hand, and the tension in his face smoothed out. He set the bowl aside and licked the surplus blood off his thumb.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Kovacs.’

‘Let me guess.’ I looked around at the candles. The smell of their incense was dark and acrid. ‘You’re calling up a little supernatural help to get us out of this mess.’

Hand reached back and snuffed the nearest of the candles without getting up. His Mandrake mask was back in place, his voice even. ‘As usual, Kovacs, you approach what you do not understand with all the sensitivity of a chimpanzee troop. Suffice it to say there are rituals that must be honoured if any relationship with the spirit realm is to be fruitful.’

‘I think I can grasp that, just about. You’re talking about a pay-off system. Quid pro quo. A little blood for a handful of favours. Very commercial, Hand, very corporate.’

‘What do you want, Kovacs?’

‘An intelligent conversation. I’ll wait outside.’

I stepped back through the flap, surprised at a slight trembling that had set in in my hands. Probably unhandled feedback from the biocircuits in my palm plates. They were as twitchy as racing dogs at the best of times, intensely hostile to any incursions on their processing integrity, and they probably weren’t handling the radiation any better than the rest of my body.

Hand’s incense sat at the back of my throat like fragments of wet cloth. I coughed it out. My temples pulsed. I grimaced and made chimpanzee noises. Scratched under my arms. Cleared my throat and coughed again. I settled into a chair in the briefing circle and examined one of my hands. Eventually, the trembling stopped.

It took the Mandrake exec about five minutes to clear away his paraphernalia and he emerged looking like a close-to-functional version of the Matthias Hand we were used to seeing around camp. There were blue smears under each eye and his skin had an underlying greyish pallor, but the distance I had seen in the eyes of other men dying of radiation sickness was not there. He had it locked down. There was only the slow seeping knowledge of imminent mortality, and that you had to look for with Envoy eyes.

‘I’m hoping this is very important, Kovacs.’

‘I’m hoping it’s not. Ameli Vongsavath tells me the Nagini’s onboard monitoring system shut itself down last night.’

‘What?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. For about five or six minutes. It isn’t difficult to do - Vongsavath says you can convince the system it’s part of a standard overhaul. So, no alarms.’

‘Oh, Damballah.’ He looked out at the beach. ‘Who else knows?’

‘You do. I do. Ameli Vongsavath does. She told me, I’ve told you. Maybe you can tell Ghede, and he’ll do something about it for you.’

‘Don’t start with me, Kovacs.’

‘It’s time for a management decision, Hand. I figure Vongsavath has to be clean - there was no reason for her to tell me about this otherwise. I know I’m clean, and I’m guessing you are too. Outside of that, I wouldn’t like to say who else we can trust.’

‘Has Vongsavath checked the ship?’

‘She says, as well as she can without take-off. I was thinking more about the equipment in the hold.’

Hand closed his eyes. ‘Yeah. Great.’

He was picking up my speech patterns.

‘From a security perspective, I’d suggest Vongsavath takes the two of us up, ostensibly for a check on our nanosized friends. She can run the system checks while we go through the manifest. Call it late this afternoon - that’s a credible gap since the remotes kicked in.’

‘Alright.’

‘I’d also suggest you start carrying one of these where it can’t be seen.’ I showed him the compact stunner Vongsavath had given me. ‘Cute, isn’t it? Navy standard issue apparently, out of the Nagini’s cockpit emergency box. In case of mutiny. Minimal consequences if you fuck up and shoot the wrong guy.’

He reached for the weapon.

‘Uh-uh. Get your own.’ I dropped the tiny weapon back into my jacket pocket. ‘Talk to Vongsavath. She’s tooled up, too. Three of us ought to be enough to stop anything before it gets started.’

‘Right.’ He closed his eyes again, pressed thumb and forefinger to the inner corners of his eyes. ‘Right.’

‘I know. It feels like someone really doesn’t want us to get through that gate, doesn’t it. Maybe you’re burning incense to the wrong guys.’

Outside, the ultravibe batteries cut loose again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ameli Vongsavath put us five kilometres up, flew about for a while and then kicked on the holding auto. The three of us crowded the cockpit and crouched around the flight display holo like hunter gatherers around a fire, waiting. When none of the Nagini’s systems had catastrophically failed three minutes later, Vongsavath pushed out a breath she seemed to have been holding since we stationed.

‘Probably never was anything to worry about,’ she said without much conviction. ‘Whoever’s been playing around in here isn’t likely to want to die with the rest of us, whatever else they might want to achieve.’

‘That,’ I said gloomily, ‘all depends on the level of your commitment.’

‘You’re thinking Ji—’

I put a finger to my lips. ‘No names. Not yet. Don’t shape your thoughts ahead of time. And besides, you might want to consider that all our saboteur would really need is a little faith in their recovery team. We’d all still be stack-intact if this thing fell out of the sky, wouldn’t we.’

‘Unless the fuel cells were mined, yes.’

‘There you are, then.’ I turned to Hand. ‘Shall we?’

It didn’t take long to find the damage. When Hand cracked the seal on the first high-impact shielded canister in the hold, the fumes that boiled out were enough to drive us both back up the hatch onto the crew deck. I slapped the emergency isolate panel and the hatch dropped and locked with a solid thump. I rolled onto my back on the deck, eyes streaming, hacking a cough that dug claws in the bottom of my lungs.

‘Holy. Fuck.’

Ameli Vongsavath darted into view. ‘Are you guys—’

Hand waved her back, nodding weakly.

‘Corrosion grenade,’ I wheezed, wiping at my eyes. ‘Must have just tossed it in and locked up after. What was in HIS One, Ameli?’

‘Give me a minute.’ The pilot went back into the cockpit to run the manifest. Her voice floated back through. ‘Looks like medical stuff, mostly. Back-up plugins for the autosurgeon, some of the anti-radiation drugs. Both ID&A sets, one of the major trauma mobility suits. Oh, and one of the Mandrake declared ownership buoys.’

I nodded at Hand.

‘Figures.’ I pushed myself into a sitting position against the curve of the hull. ‘Ameli, can you check where the other buoys are stored. And let’s get the hold vented before we open this hatch again. I’m dying fast enough, without that shit.’

There was a drink dispenser on the wall above my head. I reached up, tugged a couple of cans free and tossed one to Hand.

‘Here. Something to wash your alloy oxides down with.’

He caught the can and coughed out a laugh. I grinned back.

‘So.’

‘So.’ He popped the can. ‘Whatever leakage we had back in Landfall seems to have followed us here. Or do you think someone from outside crept into the camp last night and did this?’

I thought about it. ‘It’s stretching credibility. With the nanoware on the prowl, a two-ring sentry system, and lethal-dose radiation blanketing the whole peninsula, they’d have to be some kind of psychotic with a mission.’

‘The Kempists who got into the Tower at Landfall would fit that description. They were carrying stack burnouts, after all. Real death.’

‘Hand, if I was going up against the Mandrake Corporation, I’d probably fit myself with one of those. I’m sure your counterintelligence arm have some really lovely interrogation software.’

He ignored me, following up his train of thought.

‘Sneaking aboard the Nagini last night wouldn’t be a hard reprise for anyone who can crack the Mandrake Tower.’

‘No, but it’s more likely we’ve got leakage in the house.’

‘Alright, let’s assume that. Who? Your crew or mine?’

I tipped my head in the direction of the cockpit hatch and raised my voice.

‘Ameli, you want to kick on the auto and get in here. I’d hate you to think we’re talking about you behind your back.’

There was a very brief pause, and Ameli Vongsavath appeared in the hatchway, looking slightly uncomfortable.

‘Already on,’ she said. ‘I, uh, I was listening anyway.’

‘Good.’ I gestured her forward. ‘Because logic dictates that right now you’re the only person we can really trust.’

‘Thank you.’

‘He said logic dictates.’ Hand’s mood hadn’t improved since I hauled him out of prayers. ‘There are no compliments going down here, Vongsavath. You told Kovacs about the shutdown; that pretty much clears you.’

‘Unless I was just covering myself for when someone opened that canister and discovered my sabotage anyway.’

I closed my eyes. ‘Ameli . . .’

‘Your crew or mine, Kovacs.’ The Mandrake exec was getting impatient. ‘Which is it?’

‘My crew?’ I opened my eyes and stared at the labelling on my can. I’d already run this idea through a couple of times since Vongsavath’s revelation, and I thought I had the logic sorted. ‘Schneider probably has the flyer skills to shut down the onboard monitors. Wardani probably doesn’t. And in either case someone would have had to come up with a better offer than.’ I stopped and glanced towards the cockpit. ‘Than Mandrake has. That’s hard to imagine.’

‘It’s been my experience that enough political belief will short-circuit material benefit as a motivation. Could either of them be Kempists?’

I thought back down the line of my association with Schneider

I’m not going to fucking watch anything like that ever again. I’m out, whatever it takes

and Wardani

Today I saw a hundred thousand people murdered . . . if I go for a walk, I know there are little bits of them blowing around in the wind out there

‘I don’t see it, somehow.’

‘Wardani was in an internment camp.’

‘Hand, a quarter of the fucking population of this planet is in internment camps. It isn’t difficult to get membership.’

Maybe my voice wasn’t as detached as I’d tried for. He backed up.

‘Alright, my crew,’ he glanced apologetically at Vongsavath. ‘They were randomly selected, and they’ve only been downloaded back into new sleeves a matter of days. It’s not likely that the Kempists could have got to them in that time.’

‘Do you trust Semetaire?’

‘I trust him not to give a shit about anything beyond his own percentage. And he’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war.’

‘I suspect Kemp’s smart enough to know Kemp can’t win this war, but it isn’t interfering with his belief in the fight. Short-circuits material benefit, remember?’

Hand rolled his eyes.

‘Alright, who? Who’s your money on?’

‘There is another possibility you’re not considering.’

He looked across at me. ‘Oh, please. Not the half-metre fang stuff. Not the Sutjiadi song.’

I shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. We’ve got two unexplained corpses, stacks excised, and whatever else happened to them, it looks like they were part of an expedition to open the gate. Now we’re trying to open the gate and,’ I jabbed a thumb at the floor, ‘we get this. Separate expeditions, months, maybe a year apart. The only common link is what’s on the other side of the gate.’

Ameli Vongsavath cocked her head. ‘Wardani’s original dig didn’t seem to have any problems, right?’

‘Not that they noticed, no.’ I sat up straighter, trying to box the flow of ideas between my hands. ‘But who knows what kind of timescale this thing reacts on. Open it once, you get noticed. If you’re tall and bat-winged, no problem. If you’re not, it sets off some kind of . . . I don’t know, some kind of slow-burning airborne virus, maybe.’

Hand snorted. ‘Which does what exactly?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it gets inside your head and. Fucks you up. Makes you psychotic. Makes you murder your colleagues, chop their stacks out and bury them under a net. Makes you destroy expeditionary equipment.’ I saw the way they were both looking at me. ‘Alright, I know. I’m just spinning examples here. But think about it. Out there, we’ve got a nanotech system that evolves its own fighting machines. Now we built that. The human race. And the human race is several thousand years behind the Martians at a conservative estimate. Who knows what kind of defensive systems they could have developed and left lying around.’

‘Maybe this is just my commercial training, Kovacs, but I find it hard to believe in a defence mechanism that takes a year to kick in. I mean, I wouldn’t buy shares in it, and I’m a caveman compared to the Martians. Hypertechnology, I think, presupposes hyperefficiency. ’

‘You are a fucking caveman, Hand. For one thing, you see everything, including efficiency, in terms of profit. A system doesn’t have to produce external benefits to be efficient, it just has to work. For a weapons system, that’s doubly true. Take a look out the window at what’s left of Sauberville. Where’s the profit in that?’

Hand shrugged. ‘Ask Kemp. He did it.’

‘Alright then, think about this. Five or six centuries ago, a weapon like the one that levelled Sauberville would have been useless for anything except deterrence. Nuclear warheads scared people back then. Now we throw them around like toys. We know how to clean up after them, we have coping strategies that make their actual use viable. To get deterrent effect, we have to look at genetic or maybe nanoware weapons. That’s us, that’s where we are. So it’s safe to assume that the Martians had an even bigger problem if they ever went to war. What could they possibly use for deterrence?’

‘Something that turns people into homicidal maniacs?’ Hand looked sceptical. ‘After a year? Come on.’

‘But what if you can’t stop it,’ I said softly.

It grew very quiet. I looked at them both in turn and nodded.

‘What if it comes through a hyperlink like that gate, fries the behavioural protocols in any brain it runs into, and eventually infects everything on the other side? It wouldn’t matter how slow it was, if it was going to eat the entire planet’s population in the end.’

‘Eva—’ Hand saw where it was going and shut up.

‘You can’t evacuate, because that just spreads it to wherever you go. You can’t do anything except seal off the planet and watch it die, maybe over a generation or two, but without. Fucking. Remission.’

The quiet came down again like a drenched sheet, draping us with its chilly folds.

‘You think there’s something like that loose on Sanction IV?’ asked Hand finally. ‘A behavioural virus?’

‘Well it would explain the war,’ said Vongsavath brightly, and all three of us barked unlooked-for laughter.

The tension shattered.

Vongsavath dug out a pair of emergency oxygen masks from the cockpit crash kit, and Hand and I went back down to the hold. We cracked the remaining eight canisters and stood well back.

Three were corroded beyond repair. A fourth had partial damage - a faulty grenade had wrecked about a quarter of the contents. We found fragments of casing, identifiable as Nagini armoury stock.

Fuck.

A third of the anti-radiation chemicals. Lost.

Back-up software for half the mission’s automated systems. Trashed.

One functional buoy left.

Back on the cabin deck, we grabbed seats, peeled off the masks and sat in silence, thinking it through. The Dangrek team as a high-impact canister, sealed tight with spec ops skills and Maori combat sleeves.

Corrosion within.

‘So what are you going to tell the rest?’ Ameli Vongsavath wanted to know.

I traded glances with Hand.

‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘Not a fucking thing. We keep this between the three of us. Write it off to an accident.’

‘Accident?’ Vongsavath looked startled.

‘He’s right, Ameli.’ I stared into space, worrying at it. Looking for the splinters of intuition that might give me an answer. ‘There’s no percentage in airing this now. We just have to live with it until we get to the next screen. Say it was powerpack leakage. Mandrake skimping on military surplus past its sell-by date. They ought to believe that.’

Hand did not smile. I couldn’t really blame him.

Corrosion within.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.

‘Are those webs?’ someone asked.

Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.

‘That is fast work,’ said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. ‘But to me it looks defensive.’

‘For the moment,’ Hand agreed.

‘Well, let’s keep it that way.’ Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. ‘We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.’

‘They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.’ Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. ‘They’ll learn and adapt on us again.’

Cruickshank made an angry gesture. ‘Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?’

‘That sounds like sense to me.’ Sutjiadi stood up. ‘Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.’

Sutjiadi got what he wanted.

After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processer and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.

I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we’d found in a locker on the bridge.

‘Very pretty,’ said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass. ‘And very crude.’

‘Well, it’s a war.’

He eyed me curiously. ‘Strange point of view for an Envoy.’

‘Ex-Envoy.’

‘Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety.’

‘When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.’

‘Innenin.’

‘Yeah, Innenin too.’ I looked into the dregs of my drink.

‘Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.’

‘You reckon?’ I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.

‘For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that fuck. War. Over.’

‘That’s simplistic, Deprez.’ I poured refills. ‘He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?’

‘Them too, of course.’ Deprez raised his glass. ‘Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?’

I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. ‘Do I look like an accountant?’

‘All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.’

‘Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that either.’

‘No,’ said the assassin sombrely. ‘That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.’

‘You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

He shook his head.

‘I know what I am,’ he said. ‘But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai - there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.’

I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die either.

Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.

‘Well, that’s that.’

‘Do you think it will work?’

I shrugged. ‘Like Hansen says. For a while.’

‘So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons - the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?’

‘Sharp sticks?’

‘Are we close to opening the gate?’

‘Why ask me? Wardani’s the expert.’

‘You seem. Close to her.’

I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.

‘Are you staying out here?’

I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.

‘No reason to leave yet that I can see.’

He chuckled. ‘You do realise that we are drinking a collector’s item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean.’ He gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be. ‘They aren’t going to be making any more.’

‘Yeah.’ I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck towards the murdered city. I poured another glass full and raised it to the sky. ‘So here’s to them. Let’s drink the fucking bottle.’

We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser’s handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.

At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me:

‘Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?’

I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and ‘tankhead’ was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I’d been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops . . .

‘No, of course not. Were you?’

‘Of course I fucking was not. But the Envoys—’

‘Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned shit that in your saner moments you’d probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that’s pretty much essential.’

‘Not really.’ Deprez wagged a finger. ‘They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn’t even have to know it hadn’t had a real upbringing. You could be something like that for all you know.’

I yawned. ‘Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It’s something you live with every time you get re-sleeved, every time you get DHF’d, and you know how I know they haven’t done that to me?’

‘How?’

‘Because there’s no way they’d programme an upbringing as fucked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some fucking clone warrior that makes me, Luc.’

He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.

‘It brings you to think, though,’ he said, laughter drying up.

‘What does?’

He gestured around. ‘All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it’s all some military construct, man. Maybe it’s a place to shunt us while we’re dead, while they decide where to decant us next.’

I shrugged. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts.’

‘You would be happy like that? In a construct?’

‘Luc, after what I’ve seen in the last two years, I’d be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the damned.’

‘Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality.’

‘We differ over terms.’

‘You consider yourself damned?’

I downed more Sauberville whisky and grimaced past the burn. ‘It was a joke, Luc. I’m being funny.’

‘Ah. You should warn me.’ He leaned forward suddenly. ‘When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?’

‘If it’s not a personal question.’

‘We may die on this beach. Really die.’

‘Not if it’s a construct.’

‘Then what if we are damned, as you say?’

‘I don’t see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you.’

Deprez pulled a face. ‘We’ll talk about something else, then. Are you fucking the archeaologue?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘What?’

‘Sixteen. I was sixteen. That’s closer to eighteen, earth standard. Harlan’s World orbits slower.’

‘Still very young.’

I considered. ‘Nah, it was about time. I’d been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I’d come close a couple of times already.’

‘It was a gang killing?’

‘It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we’d expected. The others ran, I got caught up.’ I looked at my hands. ‘Then I was tougher than he expected.’

‘Did you take his stack?’

‘No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got re-sleeved, but I’d joined up by then. He wasn’t connected enough to fuck with the military.’

‘And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death.’

‘I’m sure I would have got around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly fucked run-up at this stuff ?’

‘Oh no,’ he said lightly. ‘It’s in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historic links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military.’ He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. ‘You might say we were bred for it.’

‘So how does covert ops sit with your historic military family history? They disappointed you didn’t end up with a command? If that’s not a personal question.’

Deprez shrugged. ‘Soldier’s a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains.’

‘And your first?’

‘On Latimer.’ He smiled again, remembering. ‘I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose. During the Soufriere Uprising, I was part of a reconnaissance squad across the swamplands. Walked around a tree and bam!’ He brought fist and cupped hand together. ‘There he was. I shot him before I realised it. It blasted him back ten metres and cut him in two pieces. I saw it happen and in that moment I did not understand what had happened. I did not understand that I had shot this man.’

‘Did you take his stack?’

‘Oh, yes. We had been instructed. Recover all fatalities for interrogation, leave no evidence.’

‘That must have been fun.’

Deprez shook his head.

‘I was sick,’ he admitted. ‘Very sick. The others in my squad laughed at me, but the sergeant helped me do the cutting. He also cleaned me up and told me not to worry about it too much. Later there were others, and I, well, I became accustomed.’

‘And good at it.’

He met my gaze, and the confirmation of that shared experience sparked.

‘After the Soufriere campaign, I was decorated. Recommended for covert duties.’

‘You ever run into the Carrefour Brotherhood?’

‘Carrefour?’ He frowned. ‘They were active in the troubles further south. Bissou and the cape - do you know it?’

I shook my head.

‘Bissou was always their home ground, but who they were fighting for was a mystery. There were Carrefour hougans running guns to the rebels on the cape - I know, I killed one or two myself - but we had some working for us as well. They supplied intelligence, drugs, sometimes religious services. A lot of the rank-and-file soldiers were strong believers, so getting a hougan blessing before battle was a good thing for any commander to do. Have you had dealings with them?’

‘A couple of times in Latimer City. More by reputation than actual contact. But Hand is a hougan.’

‘Indeed.’ Deprez looked abruptly thoughtful. ‘That is very interesting. He does not. Behave like a man of religion.’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘It will make him. Less predictable.’

‘Hoy. Envoy guy.’ The shout came from under the port rail, and in its wake I caught the murmur of motors. ‘You aboard?’

‘Cruickshank?’ I looked up from my musing. ‘That you, Cruickshank? ’

Laughter.

I stumbled upright and went to the rail. Peering down, I made out Schneider, Hansen and Cruickshank, all crammed onto one grav bike and hovering. They were clutching bottles and other party apparatus, and from the erratic way the bike held station, the party had started a while ago back on the beach.

‘You’d better come aboard before you drown,’ I said.

The new crew came with music attached. They dumped the sound system on the deck and the night lit up with Limon Highland salsa. Schneider and Hansen put together a tower pipe and powered it up at base. The smoke fumed off fragrant amidst the hung nets and masting. Cruickshank passed out cigars with the ruin-and-scaffold label of Indigo City.

‘These are banned,’ observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.

‘Spoils of war.’ Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, and hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn’t been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.

‘Alright,’ she said, commandeering the bottle from me. ‘Now we’re running interference.’

I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket, and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.

‘This was a quiet party until you turned up.’

‘Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?’

The cigar smoke bit. ‘So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?’

‘Armoury supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn’t steal anything, we have an arrangement. He’s meeting me in the gun room.’ She shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display. ‘In about an hour from now. So. Were you two old dogs comparing kills?’

I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.

‘No.’

‘That’s good.’ She plumed smoke skyward. ‘I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless assholes. I mean, Samedi’s sake, it’s not like killing people is hard. We’ve all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.’

‘And refining your technique, of course.’

‘You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?’

I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.

‘You’re from Limon, yes?’ Deprez asked.

‘Highlander, born and bred. Why?’

‘You must have had some dealings with Carrefour then.’

Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. ‘Those fuckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of ’28. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn’t work, burning villages.’

Deprez threw me a glance.

I said it. ‘Hand’s ex-Carrefour.’

‘Doesn’t show.’ She blew smoke. ‘Fuck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings ’til it’s time for worship. You know for all the shit they pile on Kemp,’ she hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. ‘At least he won’t have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City, I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.’

‘Well, God,’ said Deprez dryly. ‘You know, that’s a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp’s.’

‘I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.’

I snorted.

‘Hey.’ Schneider pushed his way into the ring. ‘Come on, I heard that too. What was that Quell said? Spit on the tyrant God if the fucker tries to call you to account? Something like that?’

‘Kemp’s no fucking Quellist,’ said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. ‘Right, Kovacs?’

‘It’s questionable. He borrows from it.’ I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my ribcage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider’s direction. ‘And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.’

That caused a minor storm.

‘Oh, come on—’

‘What?’

‘It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi’s sake.’

‘Schneider, she never died.’

‘Now there,’ said Deprez ironically, ‘is an article of faith.’

Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.

‘Alright, she never died that we know of. She just disappeared. But you don’t get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.’

‘Maybe it was a valediction.’

‘Maybe it was bullshit.’ I stood up, unsteadily. ‘You want the quote, I’ll give you the quote.’

‘Yeahhh!!!’

‘Alright!!’

They scooted back to give me room.

I cleared my throat. ‘I have no excuses, she said. This is from the Campaign Diaries, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, fucked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan’s World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler - I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. That’s exactly what she said.’

Applause, like startled birds across the deck.

I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.

‘Give us a poem,’ he said quietly.

‘Yeah,’ jeered Schneider. ‘A war poem.’

Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok and Munharto, gathered round, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.

Where were my excuses?

‘I never learnt her poetry,’ I lied, and walked away along the ship’s rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it was clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.

‘Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.’ It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. ‘No joke if you’re from the H World, huh?’

‘It isn’t that.’

‘No?’

‘Nah. She was a fucking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death singlehanded than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.’

‘Impressive.’

I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself smiling. I shook my head. ‘Oh, Cruickshank, Cruickshank.’

‘What?’

‘You’re going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you’re standing on my side of the interface.’

‘Yeah, right, old man.’

I shook my head again, but couldn’t seem to shake the grin loose. ‘Suit yourself.’

‘Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.’

‘Gosh, almost a whole decade.’

‘I’m twenty-two, Kovacs.’ She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black and starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn’t match the smile. ‘Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That’s out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal’s flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.’

‘Dead at twenty-two.’ It came out harsher than I’d meant.

Cruickshank drew a slow breath. ‘Man, you are in a shitty mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I’m back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I’m a big girl, Kovacs, so how ’bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.’

I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realisation that she was right than anything else.

‘Whatever you say. Big girl.’

‘Yeah, I saw you looking.’ She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out towards the beach. ‘So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?’

Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.

‘I don’t know, Cruickshank. I’m not convinced this is the time and place.’

‘Gate got you spooked, huh?’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

She waved it away. ‘Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?’

‘Well, she did before, by all accounts.’

‘Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.’

‘Well, I guess that’s military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it some time.’

‘Back off, Kovacs.’ There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. ‘We don’t work the camps, man. That’s government levy. Strictly home-grown.’

Riding the updraft. ‘Cruickshank, you don’t know a fucking thing.’

She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.

‘Well, uh, I know what they say about Carrera’s Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy, by all accounts. So maybe you want to make sure you’re clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?’

She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.

‘Sorry.’

‘Skip it.’ But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.

‘No, really. I’m sorry. This place is killing me.’

An unwilling smile curled her lip.

‘I mean it. I’ve been killed before, more times than you’d believe,’ I shook my head. ‘It’s just, it never took this long before.’

‘Yeah. Plus you’re abseiling after the archaeologue, right?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘It is now.’ She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. ‘I don’t blame you. She’s smart, she’s got her head wrapped around stuff that’s just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.’

She looked around.

‘Surprise you, huh?’

‘A little.’

‘Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we’ve got back there, it’s going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Yeah.’ She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. ‘I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.’

She looked at me.

‘Feels weird, you know. It’s like, I died. And now I’ve come back, and I have to face this moment. I don’t know if it should scare me. But it doesn’t. Man, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.’

There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.

She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.

‘See you there, Kovacs,’ she murmured.

I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.

Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?

Extenuating circumstances. I’m dying.

You’re all, dying, Kovacs. All of you.

The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we’d hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.

Chemicals.

That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that fucking wolf splice again. Don’t forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.

No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.

I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—

Fuck off.

I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned and walked rapidly to the main companionway.

‘Hoy, Kovacs?’ It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. ‘Where you going, man?’

‘Call of nature,’ I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half metre at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem and lurched into the narrow space behind.

Illuminum tiles with badly-fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, moulded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.

Do you see, Wedge Wolf ? Do you see how the new harvest begins?

Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.

You are mistaken. I am no charlatan, and Semetaire is only one of a hundred names . . .

Whoever you are, you’re looking for an antipersonnel round in the face.

But you brought me here.

I don’t think so.

I saw a skull, lolling at a rakish angle in the nets. Sardonic amusement grinning from blackened, eaten-back lips.

I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but I am finished there now. And there is work for me here.

Now you’re mistaken. When I want you, I’ll come looking for you.

Kovacs-vacs-vacs-vacs-vacs . . .

I blinked. The datadisplay ripped light across my open eyes. Someone moved behind me.

I straightened up and stared into the bulkhead above the desk. The dull metal threw back blue from the display. Light caught on a thousand tiny dents and abrasions.

The presence behind me shifted—

I drew breath.

—Closer—

And spun, murderous.

‘Shit, Kovacs, you want to give me a heart attack?’

Cruickshank was a step away, hands on her hips. The datadisplay glow picked out the uncertain grin on her face and the unseamed shirt beneath her chameleochrome jacket.

The breath gusted out of me. My adrenalin surge collapsed.

‘Cruickshank, what the fuck are you doing down here?’

‘Kovacs, what the fuck are you doing here? You said a call of nature. What are you planning to do, piss on the datacoil there?’

‘What did you follow me down here for?’ I hissed. ‘You going to hold it for me?’

‘I don’t know. That what you like, Kovacs? You a digital man? That your thing?’

I closed my eyes for a moment. Semetaire was gone, but the thing in my chest was still coiling languidly through me. I opened my eyes again, and she was still there.

‘You going to talk like that, Cruickshank, you’d better be buying.’

She grinned. One hand brushed with apparent casualness at the unseamed opening of her shirt, thumb hooking in and slipping the fabric back to reveal the breast beneath. She looked down at her own recently acquired flesh as if entranced by it. Then she brought her fingers back to brush the nipple, flicking back and forth at it until it had stiffened.

‘I look like I’m only looking, Envoy guy?’ she asked lazily.

She looked up at me and it got pretty frantic after that. We closed and her thigh slid between mine, warm and hard through the soft cloth of the coveralls. I pushed her hand away from her breast and replaced it with my own. The closure became a clinch, both of us looking down at the exposed nipple squeezed between us, and what my fingers were doing to it. I could hear her breath starting to scrape as her own hand unclasped my waistband and slid inside. She cupped the end of my cock and kneaded at it with thumb and palm.

We fell sideways onto the bedshelf in a tangle of clothing and limbs. A salt damp and mustiness rose almost visibly around us on impact. Cruickshank threw out one booted foot and kicked the cabin door closed. It shut with a clang that must have been heard all the way back up to the party on deck. I grinned into Cruickshank’s hair.

‘Poor old Jan.’

‘Huh?’ She turned from what she was doing to my prick for a moment.

‘I think, ahhhh, I think this is going to piss him off. He’s been drifting after you since we left Landfall.’

‘Listen, with legs like these, anyone with a male heterosex gene code is going to be drifting after me. I wouldn’t,’ she started to stroke, paced a pair of seconds apart. ‘Read. Anything. Into it.’

I drew breath. ‘OK, I won’t.’

‘Good. Anyway,’ she lowered one breast towards the head of my prick and began to rub slow circles around the nipple with my glans. ‘He’s probably got his hands full with the archaeologue.’

‘What?’

I tried to sit up. Cruickshank pushed me back down absently, most of her still focused on the rubbing friction of glans on breast.

‘Nah, you just stay there till I’m finished with you. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but seeing as,’ she gestured at what she was doing. ‘Well, I guess you can deal with it. Seen the two of them sloping off together a couple of times now. And Schneider always comes back with this big shit-eating grin, so I figure, you know.’ She shrugged, and went back to the timed strokes. ‘Well, he’s not a. Bad looking. Guy for a. Whiteboy and. Wardani, well. She’d probably. Take whatever. She can get. You liking this, Kovacs?’

I groaned.

‘Thought so. You guys.’ She shook her head. ‘Standard pornconstruct stuff. Never fails.’

‘You come here, Cruickshank.’

‘Ah-ah. No way. Later. I want to see your face when you want to come and I don’t let you.’

She had working against her the alcohol and the pipe, impending radiation poisoning, Semetaire rustling around in the back of my head and now the thought of Tanya Wardani in Schneider’s embrace - still Cruickshank had me there in less than ten minutes with the combination of hard strokes and soft brushstrokes across her breasts. And when she got me there, she pulled me back from the brink three times with pleased, excited sounds in her throat, before finally masturbating me rapidly and violently to a climax that spattered us both with semen.

The release was like something being unplugged in my head. Wardani and Schneider, Semetaire and impending death all went with it, blown out of my skull through my eyes with the force of the orgasm. I went limp in the narrow bed-space and the cabin beyond spun away into distant irrelevance.

When I felt something again, it was the smooth brush of Cruickshank’s thigh as she swung herself astride my chest and seated herself there.

‘Now, Envoy guy,’ she said, reaching down for my head with both hands. ‘Let’s see you pay that off.’

Her fingers laced across the back of my head and she held me to the budding folds of flesh like a nursing mother, rocking gently. Her cunt was hot and wet on my mouth and the juices that pooled and slipped out of her tasted of bitter spice. There was a scent to her like delicately burnt wood and a sound in the back of her throat like a saw blade rubbing back and forth. I could feel the tension welling up in the long muscles of her thighs as her climax built, and towards the end she lifted fractionally from her seat on my chest and began tilting her pelvis back and forth in a blind echo of coitus. The cage of fingers nursing my head between her thighs made tiny flexing motions, as if she was losing her grip on the last handhold over an abyss. The noise in her throat became a tight and urgent panting, sawing towards a hoarse cry.

You don’t lose me that easily, Wedge Wolf

Cruickshank rose on her haunches, muscles locked up rigid, and yelled her orgasm into the damp air of the cabin.

Not that easily

She shuddered and sank back, crushing the air out of me. Her fingers let go and my head dropped back to the clammy sheets.

I am locked in and

‘Now,’ she said, reaching back along my body. ‘Let’s see what we . . . Oh.’

You couldn’t miss the surprise in her voice, but she hid the attendant disappointment well. I was semi-erect in her hand, an unreliable hard-on bleeding back to the muscles my body thought it needed to fight or run from the thing in my head.

Yes. Do you see how the new harvest begins. You can run, but—

Get the FUCK out of my head.

I propped myself up on my elbows, feeling the shutdown settling over my face in tight masking bands. The fire we’d lit in the cabin was guttering out. I tried for a smile and felt Semetaire take it away from me.

‘Sorry about that. I guess. This dying thing’s getting to me sooner than I thought.’

She shrugged. ‘Hey, Kovacs. The words just physical were never truer than right here and now. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.’

I winced.

‘Oh shit, I’m sorry.’ It was the same comically crestfallen expression I’d seen on her face in the construct interview. Somehow, on the Maori sleeve it was funnier still. I chuckled, grabbed at the glimmer of laughter offered. Grabbed and grinned harder.

‘Ahhh,’ she said, feeling the change. ‘Want to try anyway? Won’t take much, I’m all wet inside.’

She slid back and arched over me. In the faint glow from the datacoil, I fixed my gaze on the juncture of her thighs with a kind of desperation and she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.

The heat and pressure and the long, tensed body riding me were the fragments I used to keep going, but it still wasn’t what you’d call great sex. I slipped free a couple of times and my problems became hers as the obvious lack of abandonment braked her excitement back to not much more than methodical technical expertise and a determination to get this done.

Do you see how—

I flailed down the voice in the back of my head and brought some determination of my own to match that of the woman I was joined to. For a while it was work, attention to posture and tight smiles. Then I pushed a thumb into her mouth, let her moisten it and used it to find her clitoris in the crux of her spread legs. She took my other hand and pressed it onto her breast, and not long after she found an orgasm of sorts.

I didn’t, but in the grinning, sweat-soaked kiss we shared after she had come, that didn’t seem to matter so much.

It wasn’t great sex, but it slammed the door on Semetaire for a while. And later, when Cruickshank pulled her clothes back together and went back up on deck, to cheers and applause from the rest of the party, I stayed in the gloom waiting for him, and he still chose not to show.

It was the closest thing to a victory that I ever enjoyed on Sanction IV.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Consciousness hit me in the head like a freak fighter’s claw.

I flinched from the impact and rolled over in the bedshelf, trying to crawl back into sleep, but the movement brought with it a rolling wave of nausea. I stopped the vomit in its tracks with an effort of will and propped myself up on one elbow, blinking. Daylight was boring a blurry hole through the gloom above my head from a porthole I hadn’t noticed the night before. At the other end of the cabin, the datacoil wove its tireless spiral from the emanator on the desk to the shelved systems data in the top left-hand corner. Voices came through the bulkhead behind me.

Check functionality. I heard Virginia Vidaura’s admonitions from the Envoy training modules. It’s not injury you’re concerned with, it’s damage. Pain you can either use or shut down. Wounds matter only if they cause structural impairment. Don’t worry about the blood; it isn’t yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don’t worry about wounds; check your functionality.

My head felt as if someone was sawing it in half from the inside. Waves of feverish sweat spread down through me, apparently from a point on the back of my scalp. The floor of my stomach had climbed and was nestling somewhere at the base of my throat. My lungs hurt in an obscure, misted way. It felt as if I’d been shot with the stunner in my jacket pocket, on a not particularly low beam.

Functionality!

Thanks Virginia.

Hard to tell how much of this was hangover and how much was dying. Hard to care. I worked myself cautiously into a sitting position on the edge of the shelf and noticed for the first time that I’d fallen asleep more or less in my clothes. I searched my pockets, turned up the battlefield medic’s gun and the anti-radiation capsules. I weighed the transparent plastic tubes in one hand and thought about it. The shock of injection was very likely going to make me vomit.

A deeper trawl through my pockets finally turned up a stick of military-issue painkillers. I snapped one loose, held it between finger and thumb and looked at it for a moment, then added a second. Conditioned reflex took the controls as I checked the delivery muzzle of the medic’s gun, cleared the breech and loaded the two crystal-filled capsules nose to tail. I snapped the slide and the gun made a high-pitched scaling whine as the magnetic field charged.

My head twinged. An excruciating hard-under-soft sensation that made me, for some reason, think of the flecks of systems data floating in the corner of the coil at the other end of the room.

The charged light winked redly at me from the gun. Inside the breech, inside the capsules, the military-format crystal shards would be aligned, sharp-edged ends pointing down the barrel like a million poised daggers. I pushed the muzzle against the crook of my elbow and squeezed the trigger.

The relief was instant. A soft red rush through my head, wiping the pain away in smudges of pink and grey. Wedge issue. Nothing but the very best for Carrera’s wolves. I smirked to myself, stoned on the endorphin boost, and groped for the anti-radiation capsules.

Feeling pretty fucking functional now, Virginia.

Dumped out the shredded painkiller caps. Reloaded with anti-rad, snapped the slide.

Look at yourself, Kovacs. A dying, disintegrating set of cells, woven back together with chemical thread.

That didn’t sound like Virginia Vidaura, so it might have been Semetaire, creeping back from last night’s retreat. I pushed the observation to the back of my mind and focused on function.

You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you’ll be taking it off again soon . . .

Yeah, yeah.

Waited out the rising whine. Waited for the red-eyed wink.

Shot.

Pretty fucking functional.

Clothing arranged in something approaching fastened order, I followed the sound of the voices to the galley. Everyone from the party was gathered there, with the notable exception of Schneider, and breakfast was in progress. I got a brief round of applause as I made my appearance. Cruickshank grinned, bumped hips with me and handed me a mug of coffee. By the look of her pupils, I wasn’t the only one who’d been at the mil-issue medicine pack.

‘What time did you guys wind up?’ I asked, seating myself.

Ole Hansen consulted his retinal display. ‘’bout an hour ago. Luc here offered to cook. I went back to the camp for the stuff.’

‘What about Schneider?’

Hansen shrugged and forked food into his mouth. ‘Went with, but then he stayed. Why?’

‘No reason.’

‘Here.’ Luc Deprez slid an omelette-laden plate in front of me. ‘Refuel.’

I tried a couple of mouthfuls, but couldn’t develop any enthusiasm for it. I wasn’t feeling any definable pain, but there was a sickly instability underlying the numbness that I knew had set in at a cellular level. I hadn’t had any real appetite for the last couple of days, and it had been getting increasingly hard to hold food down early in the morning. I cut up the omelette and pushed the pieces around the plate, but in the end I left most of it.

Deprez pretended not to notice, but you could tell he was hurt.

‘Anyone notice if our tiny friends are still burning?’

‘There’s smoke,’ said Hansen. ‘But not much of it. You not going to eat that?’

I shook my head.

‘Give it here.’ He grabbed my plate and scraped it onto his own. ‘You really must have overdone the local hooch last night.’

‘I’m dying, Ole,’ I said irritably.

‘Yeah, maybe it’s that. Or the pipe. My father told me once, never mix alcohol and whiff. Fucks you up.’

A comset chime sounded from the other end of the table. Someone’s discarded induction rig left on broadcast. Hansen grunted, and reached for the set with his free hand. He held it to his ear.

‘Hansen. Yeah.’ He listened. ‘Alright. Five minutes.’ He listened again, and a thin smile appeared on his face. ‘Right, I’ll tell them. Ten minutes. Yeah.’

He tossed the set back among the plates and grimaced.

‘Sutjiadi?’

‘Got it in one. Going to fly a recon over the nanocolonies. Oh yeah.’ His grin came back. ‘And the man says don’t turn off your fucking rigs if you don’t want to log a fucking disciplinary.’

Deprez chuckled. ‘Is that a fucking quote?’

‘No. Fucking paraphrase.’ Hansen tossed his fork across his plate and stood up. ‘He didn’t say disciplinary, he called it a DP9.’

Running a platoon is a tricky job at the best of times. When your crew are all way-past-lethal spec ops prima donnas who’ve been killed at least once, it must be a nightmare.

Sutjiadi wore it well.

He watched without expression as we filed into the briefing room and found seats. The memoryboard on each seat had been set with a foil of edible painkillers, bent and stood on end. Someone whooped above the general murmur when they saw the drugs, then quietened down as Sutjiadi looked in their direction. When he spoke, his voice could have belonged to a restaurant mandroid recommending wine.

‘Anyone here who still has a hangover had better deal with it now. One of the outer-ring sentry systems is down. There’s no indication of how.’

It got the desired reaction. The murmur of conversation damped out. I felt my own endorphin high dip.

‘Cruickshank and Hansen, I want you to take one of the bikes and go check it out. Any sign of activity, any activity at all, you veer off and get straight back here. Otherwise, I want you to recover any wreckage on site and bring it back for analysis. Vongsavath, I want the Nagini powered up and ready to lift at my command. Everybody else, arm yourselves and stay where you can be found. And wear your rigs at all times.’ He turned to Tanya Wardani, who was slumped in a chair at the back of the room, wrapped in her coat and masked with sunlenses. ‘Mistress Wardani. Any chance of an estimated opening time.’

‘Maybe tomorrow.’ She gave no sign that she was even looking at him behind the lenses. ‘With luck.’

Someone snorted. Sutjiadi didn’t bother to track it.

‘I don’t need to remind you, Mistress Wardani, that we are under threat.’

‘No. You don’t.’ She unfolded herself from the chair and drifted for the exit. ‘I’ll be in the cave.’

The meeting broke up in her wake.

Hansen and Cruickshank were gone less than half an hour.

‘Nothing,’ the demolitions specialist told Sutjiadi when they got back. ‘No debris, no scorching, no signs of machine damage. In fact,’ he looked back over his shoulder, back to where they’d searched, ‘no sign the fucking thing was ever there in the first place.’

The tension in the camp notched higher. Most of the spec ops team, true to their individual callings, retreated into moody quiet and semi-obsessive examinations of the weapons they were skilled with. Hansen unpacked the corrosion grenades and studied their fuses. Cruickshank stripped down the mobile artillery systems. Sutjiadi and Vongsavath disappeared into the cockpit of the Nagini, followed after a brief hesitation by Schneider. Luc Deprez sparred seriously with Jiang Jianping down by the waterline, and Hand retreated into his bubblefab, presumably to burn some more incense.

I spent the rest of the morning seated on a rock ledge above the beach with Sun Liping, hoping the residues from the night before would work their way out of my system before the painkillers did. The sky over us had the look of better weather. The previous day’s nailed-down grey had broken apart on reefs of blue arrowing in from the west. Eastward, the smoke from Sauberville bent away with the evacuating cloud cover. Vague awareness of the hangover that waited beyond the curtain of endorphins lent the whole scene an undeservedly mellow tone.

The smoke from the nanocolonies that Hansen had seen was gone altogether. When I mentioned the fact to Sun, she just shrugged. I wasn’t the only one feeling irrationally mellow, it seemed.

‘Any of this worry you at all?’ I asked her.

‘This situation?’ She appeared to think about it. ‘I’ve been in more danger, I think.’

‘Of course you have. You’ve been dead.’

‘Well, yes. But that wasn’t what I meant. The nanosystems are a concern, but even if Matthias Hand’s fears are well founded, I don’t imagine they will evolve anything capable of pulling the Nagini out of the sky.’

I thought about the grasshopper robot guns Hand had mentioned. It was one of many details he had chosen not to pass on to the rest of the team when he briefed them on the OPERN system.

‘Do your family know what you do for a living?’

Sun looked surprised. ‘Yes, of course. My father recommended the military. It was a good way of getting my systems training paid for. They always have money, he told me. Decide what you want to do, and then get them to pay you to do it. Of course, it never occurred to him that there’d be a war here. Who would have thought it, twenty years ago?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And yours?’

‘My what? My father? Don’t know, haven’t seen him since I was eight. Nearly forty years ago, subjective time. More than a century and a half, objective.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. My life got radically better when he left.’

‘Don’t you think he’d be proud of you now?’

I laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He was always a big fan of violence, my old man. Season ticket holder to the freak fights. ’Course, he had no formal training himself, so he always had to make do with defenceless women and children.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Anyway, yeah. He’d be proud of what I’ve done with my life.’

Sun was quiet for a moment.

‘And your mother?’

I looked away, trying to remember. The downside of Envoy total recall is that memories of everything before the conditioning tend to seem blurry and incomplete by comparison. You accelerate away from it all, like lift-off, like launch. It was an effect I’d craved at the time. Now, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember.

‘I think she was pleased when I enlisted,’ I said slowly. ‘When I came home in the uniform, she had a tea ceremony for me. Invited everyone on the block. I guess she was proud of me. And the money must have helped. There were three of us to feed - me and two younger sisters. She did what she could after my father left, but we were always broke. When I finished basic, it must have tripled our income. On Harlan’s World, the Protectorate pays its soldiers pretty well - it has to, to compete with the yakuza and the Quellists.’

‘Does she know you are here?’

I shook my head.

‘I was away too much. In the Envoys, they deploy you everywhere except your home world. There’s less danger of you developing some inconvenient empathy with the people you’re supposed to be killing.’

‘Yes.’ Sun nodded. ‘A standard precaution. It makes sense. But you are no longer an Envoy. Did you not return home?’

I grinned mirthlessly.

‘Yeah, as a career criminal. When you leave the Envoys, there isn’t much else on offer. And by that time my mother was married to another man, a Protectorate recruiting officer. Family reunion seemed. Well, inappropriate.’

Sun said nothing for a while. She seemed to be watching the beach below us, waiting for something.

‘Peaceful here, isn’t it?’ I said, for something to say.

‘At a certain level of perception.’ She nodded. ‘Not, of course, at a cellular level. There is a pitched battle being fought there, and we are losing.’

‘That’s right, cheer me up.’

A smile flitted across her face. ‘Sorry. But it’s hard to think in terms of peace when you have a murdered city on one hand, the pent-up force of a hyperportal on the other, a closing army of nanocreatures somewhere just over the hill and the air awash with lethal-dose radiation.’

‘Well, now that you put it like that . . .’

The smile came back. ‘It’s my training, Kovacs. I spend my time interacting with machines at levels my normal senses can’t perceive. When you do that for a living, you start to see the storm beneath the calm everywhere. Look out there. You see a tideless ocean, sunlight falling on calm water. It’s peaceful, yes. But under the surface of the water, there are millions of creatures engaged in a life-and-death struggle to feed themselves. Look, most of the gull corpses are gone already.’ She grimaced. ‘Remind me not to go swimming. Even the sunlight is a solid fusillade of subatomic particles, blasting apart anything that hasn’t evolved the appropriate levels of protection, which of course every living thing around here has because its distant ancestors died in their millions so that a handful of survivors could develop the necessary mutational traits.’

‘All peace is an illusion, huh? Sounds like something a Renouncer monk would say.’

‘Not an illusion, no. But it is relative, and all of it, all peace, has been paid for somewhere, at some time, by its opposite.’

‘That’s what keeps you in the military, is it?’

‘My contract is what keeps me in the military. I have another ten years to serve, minimum. And if I’m honest,’ she shrugged, ‘I’ll probably stay on after that. The war will be over by then.’

‘Always more wars.’

‘Not on Sanction IV. Once they’ve crushed Kemp, there’ll be a clampdown. Strictly police actions from then on. They’ll never let it get out of hand like this again.’

I thought about Hand’s exultation at the no-holds-barred licensing protocols Mandrake were currently running on, and I wondered.

Aloud, I said, ‘A police action can get you killed just as dead as a war.’

‘I’ve been dead. And now look at me. It wasn’t so bad.’

‘Alright, Sun.’ I felt a wavefront of new weariness wash through me, turning my stomach and hurting my eyes. ‘I give up. You’re one tough motherfucker. You should be telling this stuff to Cruickshank. She’d eat it up.’

‘I do not think Yvette Cruickshank needs any encouragement. She is young enough to be enjoying this for itself.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’

‘And if I appear a tough motherfucker to you, it was not my intention. But I am a career soldier, and it would be foolish to build resentment against that choice. It was a choice. I was not conscripted. ’

‘Yeah, well these days that’s. . . .’ The edge ebbed out of my voice as I saw Schneider drop from the forward hatch of the Nagini and sprint up the beach. ‘Where’s he going?’

Below us, from under the angle of the ledge we were seated on, Tanya Wardani emerged. She was walking roughly seaward, but there was something odd about her gait. Her coat seemed to shimmer blue down one side in granular patches that looked vaguely familiar.

I got to my feet. Racked up the neurachem.

Sun laid a hand on my arm. ‘Is she—’

It was sand. Patches of damp turquoise sand from the inside of the cavern. Sand that must have clung when—

She crumpled.

It was a graceless fall. Her left leg gave out as she put it down and she pivoted round and downwards around the buckling limb. I was already in motion, leaping down from the ledge in a series of neurachem-mapped footholds, each one good only for momentary bracing and then on to the next before I could slip. I landed in the sand about the same time Wardani completed her fall and was at her side a couple of seconds before Schneider.

‘I saw her fall when she came out of the cave,’ he blurted as he reached me.

‘Let’s get her—’

‘I’m fine.’ Wardani turned over and shook off my arm. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked from Schneider to me and back. I saw, abruptly, how haggard she had become. ‘Both of you, I’m fine. Thanks.’

‘So what’s going on?’ I asked her quietly.

‘What’s going on?’ She coughed and spat in the sand, phlegm streaked with blood. ‘I’m dying, just like everyone else in this neighbourhood. That’s what’s going on.’

‘Maybe you’d better not do any more work today,’ said Schneider hesitantly. ‘Maybe you should rest.’

She shot him a quizzical look, then turned her attention to getting up.

‘Oh, yeah.’ She heaved herself upright and grinned. ‘Forgot to say. I opened the gate. Cracked it.’

I saw blood in the grin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Sutjiadi.

Wardani sighed and walked to one of her consoles. She hit a sequence of screen panels and one of the stretch-filigrees eased down until it stood between us and the apparently impenetrable spike of Martian technology in the centre of the cavern. Another screen switch and lamps seated in the corners of the cavern went incandescent with blue.

‘There.’

Through the stretchscreen, everything was bathed in cool violet light. In the new colour scheme, the upper edges of the gate flickered and ran with gobs of brilliance that slashed through the surrounding glow like revolving biohazard cherries.

‘What is that?’ asked Cruickshank at my back.

‘It’s a countdown,’ said Schneider with dismissive familiarity. He’d seen this before. ‘Right, Tanya.’

Wardani smiled weakly and leaned on the console.

‘We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do. A lot of their visual notation seems to refer to bands in the ultraviolet range.’ She cleared her throat. ‘They’d be able to see this unaided. And what it’s saying, more or less, is: stand clear.’

I watched, fascinated. Each blob seemed to ignite at the peak of the spire and then separate and drip rapidly along the leading edges to the base. At intervals along the drip down, the lights fired bursts off themselves into the folding that filled the splits between the edges. It was hard to tell, but if you tracked the trajectory of these offbursts, they seemed to be travelling a long way into the cramped geometry of each crack, a longer distance than they had any right to in three-dimensional space.

‘Some of it becomes visual later,’ said Wardani. ‘The frequency scales down as we get nearer to the event. Not sure why.’

Sutjiadi turned aside. In the splashes of rendered light through the filigree screen, he looked unhappy.

‘How long?’ he asked.

Wardani lifted an arm and pointed along the console to the scrambling digits of a countdown display. ‘About six hours, standard. A little less now.’

‘Samedi’s sake, that is beautiful,’ breathed Cruickshank. She stood at my shoulder and stared entranced at the screened spike and what was happening to it. The light passing over her face seemed to have washed her features of every emotion but wonder.

‘We’d better get that buoy up here, captain.’ Hand was peering into the explosions of radiance with an expression I hadn’t seen since I surprised him at worship. ‘And the launching frame. We’ll need to fire it across.’

Sutjiadi turned his back on the gate. ‘Cruickshank. Cruickshank!’

‘Sir.’ The Limon woman blinked and looked at him, but her eyes kept tugging back towards the screen.

‘Get back down to the Nagini and help Hansen prep the buoy for firing. And tell Vongsavath to get a launch and landing mapped for tonight. See if she can’t break through some of this jamming and transmit to the Wedge at Masson. Tell them we’re coming out.’ He looked across at me. ‘I’d hate to get shot down by friendly fire at this stage.’

I glanced at Hand, curious to see how he’d handle this one.

I needn’t have worried.

‘No transmissions just yet, captain.’ The executive’s voice was a study in absent detachment - you would have sworn he was absorbed in the gate countdown - but under the casual tone there was the unmistakeable tensile strength of an order given. ‘Let’s keep this on a need-to-know basis until we’re actually ready to go home. Just get Vongsavath to map the parabola.’

Sutjiadi wasn’t stupid. He heard the cabling buried in Hand’s voice and shot me another look, questioning.

I shrugged, and weighed in on the side of Hand’s deception. What are Envoys for, after all?

‘Look at it this way, Sutjiadi. If they knew you were on board, they’d probably shoot us down anyway, just to get to you.’

‘Carrera’s Wedge,’ said Hand stiffly, ‘will do no such thing while they are under contract to the Cartel.’

‘Don’t you mean the government?’ jeered Schneider. ‘I thought this war was an internal matter, Hand.’

Hand shot him a weary look.

‘Vongsavath.’ Sutjiadi had chinned his mike to the general channel. ‘You there?’

‘In place.’

‘And the rest of you?’

Four more voices thrummed in the induction mike at my ear. Hansen and Jiang taut with alertness, Deprez laconic and Sun somewhere in between.

‘Map a launch and landing. Here to Landfall. We expect to be out of here in another seven hours.’

A round of cheers rang through the induction mike at my ear.

‘Try to get some idea of what the suborbital traffic’s like along the curve, but maintain transmission silence until we lift. Is that clear?’

‘Silent running,’ said Vongsavath. ‘Got it.’

‘Good.’ Sutjiadi nodded at Cruickshank, and the Limon woman loped out of the cavern. ‘Hansen, Cruickshank’s coming down to help prep the claim buoy. That’s all. The rest of you, stay sharp.’ Sutjiadi unlocked his posture slightly and turned to face the archaeologue. ‘Mistress Wardani, you look ill. Is there anything remaining for you to do here?’

‘I—’ Wardani sagged visibly over the console. ‘No, I’m done. Until you want the damned thing closed again.’

‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ Hand called out from where he stood to one side of the gate, looking up at it with a distinctly proprietorial air. ‘With the buoy established, we can notify the Cartel and bring in a full team. With Wedge support, I imagine we can render this a ceasefire zone’ - he smiled - ‘rather rapidly.’

‘Try telling that to Kemp,’ said Schneider.

‘Oh, we will.’

‘In any case, Mistress Wardani.’ Sutjiadi’s tone was impatient. ‘I suggest you return to the Nagini as well. Ask Cruickshank to jack her field medic programme and look you over.’

‘Well, thanks.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

Wardani shook her head and propped herself upright. ‘I thought one of us should say it.’

She left without a backward glance. Schneider looked at me, and after a moment’s hesitation, went after her.

‘You’ve got a way with civilians, Sutjiadi. Anyone ever tell you that?’

He stared at me impassively. ‘Is there some reason for you to stay?’

‘I like the view.’

He made a noise in his throat and looked back at the gate. You could tell he didn’t like doing it, and with Cruickshank gone, he was letting the feeling leak out. There was a gathered stiffness about his stance as soon as he faced the device, something akin to the tension you see in bad fighters before a bout.

I put up a flat hand in clear view, and after a proper pause I slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Don’t tell me this thing scares you, Sutjiadi. Not the man who faced down Dog Veutin and his whole squad. You were my hero for a while, back there.’

If he thought it was funny, he kept it to himself.

‘Come on, it’s a machine. Like a crane, like a.’ I groped about for appropriate comparisons. ‘Like a machine. That’s all it is. We’ll be building these ourselves in a few centuries. Take out the right sleeve insurance, you might even live to see it.’

‘You’re wrong,’ he said distantly. ‘This isn’t like anything human.’

‘Oh shit, you’re not going to get mystical on me, are you?’ I glanced across to where Hand stood, suddenly feeling unfairly ganged-up on. ‘Of course it isn’t like anything human. Humans didn’t build it, the Martians did. But they’re just another race. Smarter than us maybe, further ahead than us maybe, but that doesn’t make them gods or demons, does it? Does it?’

He turned to face me. ‘I don’t know. Does it?’

‘Sutjiadi, I swear you’re beginning to sound like that moron over there. This is technology you’re looking at.’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a threshold we’re about to step over. And we’re going to regret it. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you feel the. The waiting in it?’

‘No, but I can feel the waiting in me. If this thing creeps you out so much, can we go and do something constructive.’

‘That would be good.’

Hand seemed content to stay and gloat over his new toy, so we left him there and made our way back along the tunnel. Sutjiadi’s jitters must have sparked across to me somehow though, because as the first twist took us out of sight of the activated gate, I had to admit that I felt something on the back of my neck. It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind.

At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within.

I shook the thought loose irritably.

‘You happy now?’ I enquired acidly, as we stepped out into the light.

‘I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t get you, Sutjiadi. Landfall’s built within sniper fire of six major digs. This whole planet is riddled with Martian ruins.’

‘I’m from Latimer, originally. I go where they tell me.’

‘Alright, Latimer. They’re not short on ruins either. Jesus, every fucking world we’ve colonised belonged to them once. We’ve got their charts to thank for being out here in the first place.’

‘Exactly.’ Sutjiadi stopped dead and swung on me with the closest thing I’d seen to true emotion on his face since he’d lost the tussle over blasting the rockfall away from the gate. ‘Exactly. And you want to know what that means?’

I leaned back, surprised by the sudden intensity. ‘Yeah, sure. Tell me.’

‘It means we shouldn’t be out here, Kovacs.’ He was speaking in a low, urgent voice I hadn’t heard him use before. ‘We don’t belong here. We’re not ready. It’s a stupid fucking mistake that we stumbled onto the astrogation charts in the first place. Under our own steam, it would have taken us thousands of years to find these planets and colonise them. We needed that time, Kovacs. We needed to earn our place in interstellar space. Instead we got out here bootstrapping ourselves on a dead civilisation we don’t understand.’

‘I don’t think—’

He trampled the objection down. ‘Look at how long it’s taken the archaeologue to open that gate. Look at all the half-understood scraps we’ve depended on to come this far. We’re pretty sure the Martians saw further into blue than we do.’ He mimicked Wardani savagely. ‘She’s got no idea, and neither does anyone else. We’re guessing. We have no idea what we’re doing, Kovacs. We wander around out here, nailing our little anthropomorphic certainties to the cosmos and whistling in the dark, but the truth is we haven’t the faintest fucking idea what we’re doing. We shouldn’t be out here at all. We do not belong here.’

I pushed out a long breath.

‘Well. Sutjiadi.’ I looked at ground and sky in turn. ‘You’d better start saving for a needlecast to Earth. Place is a shithole, of course, but it’s where we’re from. We sure as hell belong there.’

He smiled a little, rearguard cover for the emotion now receding from his face as the mask of command slid back on.

‘It’s too late for that,’ he said quietly. ‘Much too late for that.’

Down by the Nagini, Hansen and Cruickshank were already stripping down the Mandrake claim buoy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It took Cruickshank and Hansen the best part of an hour to prep the Mandrake claim buoy, mostly because Hand came down out of the cave and insisted on running three full systems checks before he was satisfied with the device’s ability to do the job.

‘Look,’ said Hansen irritably, as they powered up the locational computer for the third time. ‘It snaps onto starfield occlusion, and once it’s patterned the trace, there’s nothing short of a dark body event going to tear it loose. Unless this starship of yours habitually makes itself invisible, there’s no problem.’

‘That isn’t impossible,’ Hand told him. ‘Run the mass detector back-up again. Make sure it fires up on deployment.’

Hansen sighed. At the other end of the two-metre buoy, Cruickshank grinned.

Later, I helped her carry the launch cradle down from the Nagini’s hold and bolt the thing together on its garish yellow tracks. Hansen finished the last of the systems checks, slapped panels shut along the conical body and patted the machine affectionately on one flank.

‘All ready for the Big Deep,’ he said.

With the launch cradle assembled and working, we enlisted Jiang Jianping’s help and lifted the buoy gently into place. Originally designed to be deployed through a torpedo tube, it looked vaguely ridiculous crouched on the tiny tracked cradle, as if it might tip over on its nose at any moment. Hansen ran the tracks back and forth, then round in a couple of circles to check mobility, then snapped the remote off, pocketed it and yawned.

‘Anyone want to see if we can catch a Lapinee spot?’ he asked.

I checked my retinal time display, where I’d synchronised a stopwatch function to the countdown in the cave. A little over four hours to go. Behind the flaring green numerals in the corner of my vision, I saw the buoy’s nose twitch and then pivot forward over the rolled front of the cradle tracks. It bedded in the sand with a solid little thump. I glanced over at Hansen and grinned.

‘Oh for Samedi’s sake,’ said Cruickshank when she saw where we were looking. She stalked over to the cradle. ‘Well don’t just stand there grinning like a bunch of idiots, help me—’

She ripped apart.

I was closest, already turning to answer her call for help. Later, recalling in the sick numbness of the aftermath, I saw/remembered how the impact split her from just above the hip bone, sawed upwards in a careless back-and-forth scribble and tossed the pieces skywards in a fountain of blood. It was spectacular, like some kind of total body gymnast’s trick gone wrong. I saw one arm and a fragment of torso hurled up over my head. A leg spun past me and the trailing edge of the foot caught me a glancing blow across the mouth. I tasted blood. Her head climbed lazily into the sky, rotating, whipping the long hair and a ragged tail of neck and shoulder flesh end over end like party streamers. I felt the patter of more blood, hers this time, falling like rain on my face.

I heard myself scream, as if from a very long distance. Half the word no, torn loose of its meaning.

Beside me, Hansen dived after his discarded Sunjet.

I could see

Yells from the Nagini.

the thing

Someone cut loose with a blaster.

that did it.

Around the launch cradle, the sand seethed with activity. The thick, barbed cable that had ripped Cruickshank open was one of a half dozen, pale grey and shimmering in the light. They seemed to exude a droning sound that itched in my ears.

They laid hold of the cradle and tore at it. Metal creaked. A bolt tore free of its mountings and whirred past me like a bullet.

The blaster discharged again, joined by others in a ragged chorus of crackling. I saw the beams lance through the thing in the sand and leave it unchanged. Hansen trod past me, Sunjet cuddled to his shoulder, still firing. Something clicked into place.

‘Get back!’ I screamed at him. ‘Get the fuck back!’

The Kalashnikovs filled my fists.

Too late.

Hansen must have thought he was up against armouring, or maybe just rapidity of evasive motion. He’d spread his beam to beat the latter and was closing to up the power. The General Systems Sunjet (Snipe) Mark Eleven will cut through tantalum steel like a knife through flesh. At close range, it vaporises.

The cables might have glowed a little in places. Then the sand under his feet erupted and a fresh tentacle whiplashed upward. It shredded his legs to the knee in the time it took me to lower the smart guns halfway to the horizontal. He screamed shrilly, an animal sound, and toppled, still firing. The Sunjet turned sand to glass in long, shallow gouges around him. Short, thick cables rose and fell like flails over his trunk. His screaming jerked to a halt. Blood gouted lumpily, like the froth of lava you see in the caldera of a volcano.

I walked in, firing.

The guns, the interface guns, like rage extended in both hands. Biofeed from the palm plates gave me detail. High impact, fragmentation load, magazines full to capacity. The vision I had, outside my fury, found structure in the writhing thing before me and the Kalashnikovs punched solid fire at it. The biofeed put my aim in place with micrometre precision.

Lengths of cable chopped and jumped, dropping to the sand and flopping there like landed fish.

I emptied both guns.

They spat out their magazines and gaped open, eagerly. I pounded the butts against my chest. The harness loader delivered, the gun butts sucked the fresh clips in with slick magnetic clicks. Heavy again, my hands whipped out, left and right, seeking, sighting.

The killing cables were gone, chopped off. The others surged at me through the sand and died, cut to pieces like vegetables under a chef’s knife.

I emptied again.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

Reloaded.

Emptied.

And beat my chest repeatedly, not hearing as the harness clicked empty at me. The cables around me were down to a fringe of feebly waving stumps. I threw away the emptied guns and seized a random length of steel from the wrecked launch cradle. Up over my head, and down. The nearest crop of stumps shivered apart. Up. Down. Fragments. Splinters. Up. Down.

I raised the bar, and saw Cruickshank’s head looking up at me.

It had fallen face up on the sand, long, tangled hair half obscuring the wide open eyes. Her mouth was open, as if she was going to say something, and there was a pained expression frozen across her features.

The buzzing in my ears had stopped.

I dropped my arms.

The bar.

My gaze, to the feebly twitching lengths of cable around me.

In the sudden, cold flooding return of sanity, Jiang was at my side.

‘Get me a corrosion grenade,’ I said, and my voice was unrecognisable in my own ears.

The Nagini held station, three metres above the beach. Solid-load machine guns were mounted at the opened loading hatches on both sides. Deprez and Jiang crouched behind each weapon, faces painted pale by the backglow from the tiny screens of the remote sensing sights. There had been no time thus far to arm the automated systems.

The hold behind them was piled with hastily recovered items from the bubblefabs. Weaponry, food canisters, clothing; whatever could be swept up and carried at the run under the watchful gaze of the machine-gun cover. The Mandrake claim buoy lay at one end of the hold, curved body shifting slightly back and forth on the metal deck as Ameli Vongsavath made tiny adjustments to the Nagini’s holding buoyancy. At Matthias Hand’s insistence, it had been the first item recovered from the suddenly perilous flat expanse of turquoise sand below us. The others obeyed him numbly.

The buoy was very likely wrecked. The conical casing was scarred and torn open along its length. Monitor panels had been ripped off their hinges and the innards extruded like the shredded ends of entrails, like the remains of—

Stop that.

Two hours remaining. The numerals flared in my eye.

Yvette Cruickshank and Ole Hansen were aboard. The human remains retrieval system, itself a grav-lift robot, had floated delicately back and forth above the gore-splattered sand, vacuumed up what it could find, tasted and tested for DNA, and then regurgitated separately into two of the half dozen tasteful blue body bags sprouting from the tubes at its rear. The separation and deposit process made sounds that reminded me of vomiting. When the retrieval robot was done, each bag was snapped free, laser sealed at the neck and bar-coded. Stone-faced, Sutjiadi carried them one at a time to the corpse locker at the back of the hold and stowed them. Neither bag seemed to contain anything even remotely human shaped.

Neither of the cortical stacks had been recovered. Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalised anything non-organic to build the next generation. No one could find Hansen and Cruickshank’s weapons either.

I stopped staring a hole in the corpse locker hatch and went upstairs.

On the crew deck, in the aft cabin, a sample length of nanobe cable lay sealed in permaplastic under the eye of Sun Liping’s microscope. Sutjiadi and Hand crowded behind her. Tanya Wardani leaned in a corner, arms hugged around herself, face locked. I sat down, well away from all of them.

‘Take a look.’ Sun glanced round at me, and cleared her throat. ‘It’s what you said.’

‘Then I don’t need to look.’

‘You’re saying these are the nanobes?’ asked Sutjiadi, incredulous. ‘Not—’

‘The gate isn’t even fucking open, Sutjiadi.’ I could hear the fraying in my own voice.

Sun peered again into the microscope’s screen. She seemed to have found an obscure form of refuge there.

‘It’s an interlocking configuration,’ she said. ‘But the components don’t actually touch. They must be related to each other purely through field dynamics. It’s like a, I don’t know, a very strong electromagnetic muscle system over a mosaic skeleton. Each nanobe generates a portion of the field and that’s what webs it in place. The Sunjet blast just passes through it. It might vaporise a few individual nanobes in the direct path of the beam, although they do seem to be resistant to very high temperatures, but anyway that’s not enough to damage the overall structure and, sooner or later, other units shift in to replace the dead cells. The whole thing’s organic.’

Hand looked down at me curiously. ‘You knew this?’

I looked at my hands. They were still trembling slightly. Beneath the skin of my palms, the bioplates flexed restlessly.

I made an effort to hold it down.

‘I worked it out. In the firefight.’ I stared back up at him. Peripherally noticed that Wardani was looking at me too. ‘Call it Envoy intuition. The Sunjets don’t work, because we’ve already subjected the colonies to high-temperature plasma fire. They’ve evolved to beat it, and now they’ve got conferred immunity to beam weapons.’

‘And the ultravibe?’ Sutjiadi was talking to Sun.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve passed a test blast across it and nothing happens. The nanobes resonate inside the field, but it doesn’t damage them. Less effect than the Sunjet beam.’

‘Solid ammunition’s the only thing that works,’ said Hand thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, and not for much longer.’ I got up to leave. ‘Give them some time, they’ll evolve past that too. That, and the corrosion grenades. I should have saved them for later.’

‘Where are you going, Kovacs?’

‘If I were you, Hand, I’d get Ameli to lift us a little higher. Once they learn not everything that kills them lives on the ground, they’re likely to start growing longer arms.’

I walked out, trailing the advice like clothing discarded on the way to bed and long sleep. I found my way more or less at random back down to the hold, where it seemed the automated targeting systems on the machine guns had been enabled. Luc Deprez stood on the opposite side of the hatch to his weapon, smoking one of Cruickshank’s Indigo City cigars and staring down at the beach three metres below. At the far end of the deck, Jiang Jianping was seated cross-legged in front of the corpse locker. The air was stiff with the uncomprehending silence that serves males as a function of grief.

I slumped against a bulkhead and squeezed my eyes closed. The countdown flared in the sudden darkness behind my eyelids. One hour, fifty-three minutes. Counting down.

Cruickshank flickered through my head. Grinning, focused on a task, smoking, in the throes of orgasm, shredded into the sky—

Stop that.

I heard the brush of clothing near me and looked up. Jiang was standing in front of me.

‘Kovacs.’ He crouched to my level and started again. ‘Kovacs, I am sorry. She was a fine sol—’

The interface gun flashed out in my right hand and the barrel punched him in the forehead. He sat down backwards with the shock.

‘Shut up Jiang.’ I clamped my mouth shut and drew a breath. ‘You say one more fucking word and I’ll paint Luc with your brains.’

I waited, the gun at the end of my arm feeling as if it weighed a dozen kilos. The bioplate hung onto it for me. Eventually, Jiang got to his feet and left me alone.

One hour fifty. It pulsed in my head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Hand called the meeting formally at one hour and seventeen minutes. Cutting it fine, but then maybe he was letting everybody air their feelings informally first. There’d been shouting from the upper deck pretty much since I left. Down in the hold, I could hear the tone of it but not, without applying the neurachem, the substance. It seemed to have been going on for a long time.

From time to time, I heard people come and go in the hold, but none of them came near me and I couldn’t muster the energy or the interest to look up. The only person not giving me a wide berth, it seemed, was Semetaire.

Did I not tell you there was work for me here?

I closed my eyes.

Where is my antipersonnel round, Wedge Wolf ? Where is your flamboyant fury now, when you need it?

I don’t—

Are you looking for me now?

I don’t do that shit no more.

Laughter, like the gravel of cortical stacks pouring from a skip.

‘Kovacs?’

I looked up. It was Luc Deprez.

‘I think you had better come upstairs,’ he said.

Over our heads, the noise seemed to have quietened down.

‘We are not,’ said Hand quietly, looking around the cabin, ‘I repeat, not leaving here without staking a Mandrake claim on the other side of that gate. Read the terms of your contracts. The phrasing every available avenue of opportunity is paramount and omnipresent. Whatever Captain Sutjiadi orders you to do now, you will be executed and returned to the soul dumps if we leave without exploring those avenues. Am I making myself clear?’

‘No, you’re not,’ shouted Ameli Vongsavath through the connecting hatch from the cockpit. ‘Because the only avenue I can see is carrying a fucked marker buoy up the beach by hand and trying to throw it bodily through the gate on the off-chance it might still work. That doesn’t sound to me like an opportunity for anything except suicide. These things take your stack.’

‘We can scan for the nanobes—’ But angry voices trampled Hand down. He raised his hands over his head in exasperation. Sutjiadi snapped for quiet, and got it.

‘We are soldiers.’ Jiang spoke unexpectedly into the sudden lull. ‘Not Kempist conscripts. This is not a fighting chance.’

He looked around, seeming to have surprised himself as much as anyone else.

‘When you sacrificed yourself on the Danang plain,’ Hand said, ‘you knew you had no fighting chance. You gave up your life. That’s what I’m buying from you now.’

Jiang looked at him with open disdain. ‘I gave my life for the soldiers under my command. Not for commerce.’

‘Oh, Damballah.’ Hand tipped his eyes to the ceiling. ‘What do you think this war is about, you stupid fucking grunt? Who do you think paid for the Danang assault? Get it through your head. You are fighting for me. For the corporates and their puppet fucking government.’

‘Hand.’ I stepped off the hatch ladder and into the centre of the cabin. ‘I think your sales technique’s flagging. Why don’t you give it a rest?’

‘Kovacs, I am not—’

‘Sit down.’ The words tasted like ashes across my tongue, but there must have been something more substantial in them, because he did it.

Faces turned expectantly in my direction.

Not this again.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘We can’t. I want out of here as much as any of you, but we can’t. Not until we’ve placed the buoy.’

I waited out the surf of objections, profoundly disinterested in quelling them. Sutjiadi did it for me. The quiet that followed was thin.

I turned to Hand.

‘Why don’t you tell them who deployed the OPERN system? Tell them why.’

He just looked at me.

‘Alright. I’ll tell them.’ I looked round at all the watching faces, feeling the quiet harden and thicken as they listened. I gestured at Hand. ‘Our sponsor here has a few home-grown enemies back in Landfall who’d quite like him not to come back. The nanobes are their way of trying to ensure he doesn’t. So far that hasn’t worked, but back in Landfall they don’t know that. If we lift out of here, they will know, and I doubt we’ll make the first half of the launch curve before something pointed comes looking for us. Right, Matthias?’

Hand nodded.

‘And the Wedge code?’ asked Sutjiadi. ‘That counts for nothing?’

More gabbled queries boiled over in the wake of his question.

‘What Wedge co—’

‘Is that an incoming ID? Thanks for the—’

‘How come we didn’t—’

‘Shut up, all of you.’ To my amazement, they did. ‘Wedge command transmitted an incoming code for our use in an emergency. You weren’t made aware of it because,’ I felt a smile form on my mouth like a scab, ‘you didn’t need to know. You didn’t matter enough. Well, now you know, and I guess it might seem like a guarantee of safe passage. Hand, you want to explain the fallacy there?’

He looked at the ground for a moment, then back up. There seemed to be something firming in his eyes.

‘Wedge Command are answerable to the Cartel,’ he said with the measure of a lecturer. ‘Whoever deployed the OPERN system nanobes would have needed some form of Cartel sanction. The same channels will provide them with the authorisation codes Isaac Carrera operates under. The Wedge are the most likely candidates to shoot us down.’

Luc Deprez shifted lazily against a bulkhead. ‘You’re Wedge, Kovacs. I don’t believe they will murder one of their own. They’re not known for it.’

I tipped a glance at Sutjiadi. His face tightened.

‘Unfortunately,’ I said. ‘Sutjiadi here is wanted for the murder of a Wedge officer. My association with him makes me a traitor. All Hand’s enemies have to do is provide Carrera with a crew list for the expedition. It’ll short-circuit any influence I have.’

‘You could not bluff ? I understood the Envoys were famous for that.’

I nodded. ‘I might try that. But the odds aren’t good, and there is an easier way.’

That cut across the low babble of dispute.

Deprez inclined his head. ‘And that is?’

‘The only thing that gets us out of here in one piece is deployment of the buoy, or something like it. With a Mandrake flag on the starship, all bets are off and we’re home free. Anything less can be read as a bluff or, even if they believe what we’ve found, Hand’s pals can swoop in here and deploy their own buoy after we’re dead. We have to transmit a claim confirmation to beat that option.’

It was a moment that held so much tension, the air seemed to wobble, rocking like a chair pushed onto its back legs. They were all looking at me. They were all fucking looking at me.

Please, not this again.

‘The gate opens in an hour. We blast the surrounding rock off with the ultravibe, we fly through the gate and we deploy the fucking buoy. Then we go home.’

The tension erupted again. I stood in the chaos of voices and waited, already knowing how the surf would batter itself out. They’d come round. They’d come round because they’d see what Hand and I already knew. They’d see it was the only loophole, the only way back for us all. And anyone who didn’t see it that way—

I felt a tremor of wolf splice go through me, like a snarl.

Anyone who didn’t see it that way, I’d shoot.

For someone whose speciality was machine systems and electronic disruption, Sun turned out to be remarkably proficient with heavy artillery. She test-fired the ultravibe battery at a handful of targets up and down the cliffs, and then had Ameli Vongsavath float the Nagini up to less than fifty metres off the cave entrance. With the forward re-entry screens powered up to fend off the debris, she opened fire on the rockfall.

It made the sound of wire ends scratched across soft plastic, the sound of Autumn Fire beetles feeding on belaweed at low tide, the sound of Tanya Wardani removing the spinal bone from Deng Zhao Jun’s cortical stack in a Landfall fuck hotel. It was all of these chirruping, chittering, screeching sounds, mixed and amped to doomsday proportions.

It was a sound like the world splintering apart.

I watched it on a screen down in the hold, with the two automated machine guns and the corpse locker for company. There wasn’t space for an audience in the cockpit anyway, and I didn’t feel like staying in the crew cabin with the rest of the living. I sat on the deck and stared disconnected at the images, rock changing colour with shocking vividness as it crazed and shattered under pressures of plate-tectonic magnitude, then the rushing collapse of the shards as they hurried downward, turned to dense clouds of powder before they could escape the ultravibe beams probing back and forth in the debris. I could feel a vague discomfort in the pit of my stomach from the backwash. Sun was firing on low intensity and shielding in the weapons pod kept the worst of the ultravibe blast damped down aboard the Nagini. But still the shrill scream of the beam and the pittering screeches of the tortured rock clawed their way in through the two open hatches and screwed into my ears like surgery.

I kept seeing Cruickshank die.

Twenty-three minutes.

The ultravibe shut down.

The gate emerged from the devastation and billowing dust like a tree through a blizzard. Wardani had told me it wouldn’t be harmed by any weapon she knew of, but Sun had still programmed the Nagini’s weapon systems to cease fire as soon as they had visual. Now, as the dust clouds began to drift away, I saw the tangled remnants of the archaeologue’s equipment, torn and flung apart by the final seconds of the ultravibe blast. It was hard to believe the dense integrity of the artefact bulking above the debris.

A tiny feather of awe brushed down my spine, a sudden recollection of what I was looking at. Sutjiadi’s words came back to me.

We do not belong here. We are not ready.

I shrugged it off.

‘Kovacs?’ From the sound of Ameli Vongsavath’s voice over the induction rig, I wasn’t the only one with the elder civilisation jitters.

‘Here.’

‘I’m closing the deck hatches. Stand clear.’

The machine-gun mounts slid smoothly backward into the body of the deck and the hatches lowered, shutting out the light. A moment later, the interior lighting flickered on, cold.

‘Some movement.’ Sun said warningly. She was on the general channel, and I heard the succession of sharp indrawn breaths from the rest of the crew.

There was a slight jolt as Vongsavath shifted the Nagini up a few more metres. I steadied myself against the bulkhead and, despite myself, looked down at the deck under my feet.

‘No, it’s not under us.’ It was as if Sun had been watching me. ‘It’s, I think it’s going for the gate.’

‘Fuck, Hand. How much of this thing is there?’ Deprez asked.

I could almost see the Mandrake exec’s shrug.

‘I’m not aware of any limits on the OPERN system’s growth potential. It may have spread under the whole beach for all I know.’

‘I think that’s unlikely,’ said Sun, with the calm of a lab technician in mid-experiment. ‘The remote sensing would have found something that large. And besides, it has not consumed the other sentry robots, which it would if it were spreading laterally. I suspect it opened a gap in our perimeter and then flowed through in linear—’

‘Look,’ said Jiang. ‘It’s there.’

On the screen over my head, I saw the arms of the thing emerge from the rubble-strewn ground around the gate. Maybe it had already tried to come up under the foundation and failed. The cables were a good two metres from the nearest edge of the plinth when they struck.

‘Here we fucking go,’ said Schneider.

‘No, wait.’ This was Wardani, a soft gleam in her voice that could almost have been pride. ‘Wait and see.’

The cables seemed to be having trouble getting a grip on the material the gate was made of. They lashed down, then slid off as if oiled. I watched the process repeat itself a half dozen times, and then drew a sharp breath as another, longer arm erupted from the sand, flailed upward a half dozen metres and wrapped around the lower slopes of the spire. If the same limb had come up under the Nagini, it could have dragged us out of the sky comfortably.

The new cable flexed and tightened.

And disintegrated.

At first, I thought Sun had disregarded my instructions and opened fire again with the ultravibe. Then recollection caught up. The nanobes were immune to vibe weapons.

The other cables were gone as well.

‘Sun? What the fuck happened?’

‘I am attempting to ascertain exactly that.’ Sun’s machine associations were starting to leak into her speech patterns.

‘It turned it off,’ Wardani said simply.

‘Turned what off ?’ asked Deprez.

And now I could hear the smile in the archaeologue’s voice. ‘The nanobes exist in an electromagnetic envelope. That’s what binds them together. The gate just turned off the field.’

‘Sun?’

‘Mistress Wardani appears to be correct. I can detect no electromagnetic activity anywhere near the artefact. And no motion.’

The faint hiss of static on the induction rig as everyone digested the confirmation. Then Deprez’s voice, thoughtful.

‘And we’re supposed to fly through that thing?’

Considering what had gone before and what was to come on the other side, zero hour at the gate was remarkably undramatic. At two and a half minutes to zero, the dripping blobs of ultraviolet we’d seen through Wardani’s filigree screen became slowly visible as liquid purple lines playing up and down along the outer edges of the spire. In the daylight, the display was no more impressive than a landing beacon by dawn light.

At eighteen seconds, something seemed to happen along the recessed foldings, something like wings being shaken.

At nine seconds a dense black dot appeared without any fuss at the point of the spire. It was shiny, like a single drop of high-grade lubricant, and it appeared to be rolling around on its own axis.

Eight seconds later, it expanded with unhurried smoothness to the base of the spire, and then beyond. The plinth disappeared, and then the sand to a depth of about a metre.

In the globe of darkness, stars glimmered.

PART FOUR

Unexplained Phenomena

Anyone who builds satellites we can’t shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That’s not religion, it’s common sense.

Quellcrist Falconer Metaphysics for Revolutionaries

CHAPTER THIRTY

I don’t like hard space. It fucks with your head.

It’s not anything physical. You can make more mistakes in space than at the bottom of the ocean, or in a toxic atmosphere like Glimmer Five’s. You can get away with far more in a vacuum, and on occasion I have done. Stupidity, forgetfulness and panic will not get you killed with the same implacable certainty as they will in less forgiving environments. But it isn’t that.

The Harlan’s World orbitals sit five hundred kilometres out and will shoot down anything that masses more than a six-seater helicopter as soon as look at it. There have been some notable exceptions to this behaviour, but so far no one has been able to work out what caused them. As a result, Harlanites don’t go up in the air much, and vertigo is as common as pregnancy. The first time I wore a vacuum suit, courtesy of the Protectorate marines and aged eighteen, my entire mind turned to ice and looking down through the infinite emptiness, I could hear myself whimpering deep in the back of my throat. It looked like a very long way to fall.

Envoy conditioning gives you a handle on most kinds of fear, but you’re still aware of what scares you because you feel the weight of the conditioning coming online. I’ve felt that weight every single time. In high orbit over Loyko during the Pilots’ Revolt, deploying with Randall’s vacuum commandos around Adoracion’s outer moon, and once, in the depths of interstellar space, playing a murderous game of tag with members of the Real Estate Crew around the hull of the hijacked colony barge Mivtsemdi, falling endlessly along her trajectory, light years from the nearest sun. The Mivtsemdi firefight was the worst. It still gives me the occasional nightmare.

The Nagini slithered through the gap in three-dimensional space the gate had peeled back, and hung amidst nothing. I let out the same breath we’d all been holding since the assault ship began inching towards the gate, got out of my seat and walked forward to the cockpit, bouncing slightly in the adjusted grav-field. I could already see the starfield on the screen, but I wanted a genuine view through the toughened transparencies of the assault ship’s nose. It helps to see your enemy face to face, to sense the void out there a few centimetres from the end of your nose. It helps you to know where you are to the animal roots of your being.

It’s strictly against the rules of spaceflight to open connecting hatches during entry into hard space, but no one said anything, even when it must have been clear where I was going. I got a strange look from Ameli Vongsavath as I stepped through the hatch, but she didn’t say anything either. Then again, she was the first pilot in the history of the human race to effect an instantaneous transfer from a planetary altitude of six metres to the middle of deep space, so I suspect she had other things on her mind.

I stared forward, past her left shoulder. Stared down, and felt my fingers curl tight on the back of Vongsavath’s seat.

Fear confirmed.

The old shift in the head, like pressure doors locking sections of my brain up under diamond bright illumination. The conditioning.

I breathed.

‘You’re going to stay, you might want to sit down,’ said Vongsavath, busy with a buoyancy monitor that had just started gibbering at the sudden lack of a planet beneath us.

I clambered to the co-pilot’s seat and lowered myself into it, looking for the webbing straps.

‘See anything?’ I asked with elaborate calm.

‘Stars,’ she said shortly.

I waited for a while, getting used to the view, feeling the itch at the outer corners of my eyes as instinct-deep reflexes pulled my peripheral vision backwards, looking for some end to the intense lack of light.

‘So how far out are we?’

Vongsavath punched up figures on the astrogation set.

‘According to this?’ She whistled low. ‘Seven hundred and eighty-odd million klicks. Believe that?’

It put us just inside the orbit of Banharn, the solitary and rather unimpressive gas giant that stood sentinel on the outer edges of the Sanction system. Three hundred million kilometres further in on the ecliptic was a circling sea of rubble, too extensive to be called a belt, that had for some reason never got round to coalescing into planetary masses. A couple of hundred million kilometres the other side of that was Sanction IV. Where we’d been about forty seconds ago.

Impressive.

Alright, a stellar-range needlecast can put you on the other side of so many kilometres you run out of places to put the zeroes in less time than that. But you have to be digitised first, and then you have to be downloaded into a new sleeve at the other end, and all that takes time and technology. It’s a process.

We hadn’t been through a process, or at least nothing humanly recognisable as such. We’d just bumped across a line. Given inclination and a vacuum suit, I could literally have stepped across that line.

Sutjiadi’s sense of not belonging came and touched me again at the nape of the neck. The conditioning awoke and damped it out. The wonder along with the fear.

‘We’ve stopped,’ murmured Vongsavath, to herself more than me. ‘Something soaked up our acceleration. You’d expect some. Holy. God.’

Her voice, already low, sank to a whisper on the last two words and seemed to decelerate the way the Nagini apparently had. I looked up from the figures she’d just maximised on the display, and my first thought, still scrabbling around in a planet-bound context, was that we had cruised into a shadow. By the time I remembered that there were no mountains out here, and not much in the way of sunlight to be obscured anyway, the same chilly shock that Vongsavath must have been feeling hit me.

Over our heads, the stars were sliding away.

They disappeared silently, swallowed with terrifying speed by the vast, occluding bulk of something hanging, it seemed, only metres above the overhead viewports.

‘That’s it,’ I said, and a small cold shiver ran through me as I said it, as if I’d just completed an obscure summoning.

‘Range . . .’ Vongsavath shook her head. ‘It’s nearly five kilometres off. That makes it—’

‘Twenty-seven kilometres across,’ I read out the data myself. ‘Fifty-three long. External structures extending . . .’

I gave up.

‘Big. Very big.’

‘Isn’t it.’ Wardani’s voice came from right behind me. ‘See the crenellation at the edge. Each of those bites is nearly a kilometre deep.’

‘Why don’t I just sell seats in here,’ snapped Vongsavath. ‘Mistress Wardani, will you please return to the cabin and sit down.’

‘Sorry,’ murmured the archaeologue. ‘I was just—’

Sirens. A spaced scream, slashing at the air in the cockpit.

‘Incoming,’ yelled Vongsavath, and kicked the Nagini on end.

It was a manoeuvre that would have hurt in a gravity well, but with only the ship’s own grav field exerting force, it felt more like an experia special effect, an Angel wharf-conjuror’s trick with holoshift.

Vacuum combat fragments:

I saw the missile coming, falling end over end towards the right side viewports.

I heard the battle systems reporting for duty in their cosily enthusiastic machine voices.

Shouts from the cabin behind me.

I started to tense. The conditioning broke in heavily, forced me into impact-ready limpness—

Just a minute.

‘That can’t be right,’ said Vongsavath suddenly.

You don’t see missiles in space. Even the ones we can build move too fast for a human eye to track effectively.

‘No impact threat,’ observed the battle computer, sounding slightly disappointed. ‘No impact threat.’

‘It’s barely moving.’ Vongsavath punched up a new screen, shaking her head. ‘Axial velocity at . . . Ah, that’s just drift, man.’

‘Those are still machined components,’ I said, pointing at a small spike in the red section of the spectrum scan. ‘Circuitry, maybe. It ain’t a rock. Not just a rock, anyway.’

‘It’s not active, though. Totally inert. Let me run the—’

‘Why don’t you just bring us round and back up,’ I made a quick calculation in my head. ‘About a hundred metres. It’ll be practically sitting out there on the windscreen. Kick on the external lights.’

Vongsavath locked onto me with a look that somehow managed to combine disdain with horror. It wasn’t exactly a flight manual recommendation. More importantly, she probably still had the adrenalin chop sloshing about in her system the same as me. It’s apt to make you grumpy.

‘Coming about,’ she said finally.

Outside the viewports, the environment lighting ignited.

In a way, it wasn’t such a great idea. The toughened transparent alloy of the viewports would have been built to vacuum combat spec, which means stopping all but the most energetic micrometeorites without much more than surface pitting. Certainly it wasn’t about to be ruined by bumping into something adrift. But the thing that came bumping up over the nose of the Nagini made an impact anyway.

Behind me, Tanya Wardani shrieked, a short, quickly-locked-up sound.

Scorched and ruptured though it was by the extremes of cold and the absence of pressure outside, the object was still recognisable as a human body, dressed for summer on the Dangrek coast.

‘Holy God,’ whispered Vongsavath, again.

A blackened face peered sightlessly in at us, empty eye sockets masked in trailing strands of exploded, frozen tissue. The mouth below was all scream, as silent now as it would have been when its owner tried to find a voice for the agony of dissolution. Beneath a ludicrously loud summer shirt, the body was swollen by a bulk that I guessed were the ruptured intestines and stomach. One clawed hand bumped knuckles on the viewport. The other arm was jerked back, over the head. The legs were similarly flexed, forward and back. Whoever it was had died flailing at the vacuum.

Died falling.

Behind me, Wardani was sobbing quietly.

Saying a name.

We found the rest of them by suit beacons, floating at the bottom of a three-hundred-metre dimple in the hull structure and clustered around what appeared to be a docking portal. There were four, all wearing cheap pull-on vacuum suits. From the look of it, three had died when their air supply ran out, which according to suit specs would have taken about six to eight hours. The fourth one hadn’t wanted to wait that long. There was a neat five-centimetre hole melted through the suit’s helmet from right to left. The industrial laser cutter that had done the damage was still tethered to the right hand at the wrist.

Vongsavath sent out the manigrab-equipped EVA robot once again. We watched the screens in silence as the little machine collected each corpse in its arms and bore it back to the Nagini with the same gentle deftness of touch it had applied to the blackened and ruptured remains of Tomas Dhasanapongsakul at the gate. This time, with the bodies enfolded in the white wrap of their vacuum suits, it could almost have been footage of a funeral run in reverse. The dead carried back out of the deep, and consigned to the Nagini’s ventral airlock.

Wardani could not cope. She came down to the hold deck with the rest of us while Vongsavath blew the inner hatch on the airlock from the flight deck. She watched Sutjiadi and Luc Deprez bring the vacuum-suited bodies up. But when Deprez broke the seals of the first helmet and lifted it off the features beneath, she uttered a choked sob and spun away to the far corner of the hold. I heard her retching. The acid reek of vomit stung the air.

Schneider went after her.

‘You know this one too?’ I asked redundantly, staring down at the dead face. It was a woman in a mid-forties sleeve, eyes wide and accusatory. She was frozen solid, neck protruding stiffly from the ring of the suit aperture, head lifting rigidly clear of the deck. The heating elements of the suit must have taken a while longer to give out than the air supply, but if this woman was part of the same team that we’d found in the trawl net, she’d been out here for at least a year. They don’t make suits with that kind of survivability.

Schneider answered for the archaeologue. ‘It’s Aribowo. Pharintorn Aribowo. Glyph specialist on the Dangrek dig.’

I nodded at Deprez. He unsealed the other helmets and detached them. The dead stared up at us in a line, heads lifted as if in the midst of some group abdominal workout. Aribowo and three male companions. Only the suicide’s eyes were closed, features composed in an expression of such peace that you wanted to check again for the slick, cauterised hole this man had bored through his own skull.

Looking at him, I wondered what I would have done. Seeing the gate slam shut behind me, knowing at that moment that I was going to die out here in the dark. Knowing, even if a fast rescue ship were dispatched immediately to these exact coordinates, that rescue would come months too late. I wondered if I would have had the courage to wait, hanging in the infinite night, hoping against hope for some miracle to occur.

Or the courage not to.

‘That’s Weng,’ Schneider had come back and was hovering at my shoulder. ‘Can’t remember his other name. He was some kind of glyph theorist too. I don’t know the others.’

I glanced across the deck to where Tanya Wardani was huddled against the hull wall, arms wrapped around herself.

‘Why don’t you leave her alone?’ hissed Schneider.

I shrugged. ‘OK. Luc, you’d better go back down into the lock and get Dhasanapongsakul bagged before he starts to drip. Then the rest of them. I’ll give you a hand. Sun, can we get the buoy overhauled? Sutjiadi, maybe you can help her. I’d like to know if we’re actually going to be able to deploy the fucking thing.’

Sun nodded gravely.

‘Hand, you’d better start thinking of contingencies, because if the buoy’s fucked, we’re going to need an alternative plan of action.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Schneider looked genuinely scared for the first time since I’d met him. ‘We’re staying around here. After what happened to these people, we’re staying?’

‘We don’t know what happened to these people, Schneider.’

‘Isn’t it obvious? The gate isn’t stable, it shut down on them.’

‘That’s bullshit, Jan.’ There was an old strength trickling through the rasp in Wardani’s voice, a tone that made something flare up in my stomach. I looked back at her, and she was on her feet again, wiping her face clean of the tears and vomit specks with the heel of one palm. ‘We opened it last time, and it stood for days. There’s no instability in the sequencing I ran, then or now.’

‘Tanya.’ Schneider looked suddenly betrayed. He spread his hands wide. ‘I mean—’

‘I don’t know what happened here, I don’t know what,’ she squeezed out the words, ‘fucked. Up. Glyph sequences Aribowo used, but it isn’t going to happen to us. I know what I am doing.’

‘With respect, Mistress Wardani,’ Sutjiadi looked around at the assembled faces, gauging support. ‘You’ve admitted that our knowledge of this artefact is incomplete. I fail to see how you can guarantee—’

‘I am a Guild Master.’ Wardani stalked back towards the lined up corpses, eyes flaring. It was as if she was furious with them all for getting killed. ‘This woman was not. Weng Xiaodong. Was not. Tomas Dhasanapongsakul. Was not. These people were Scratchers. Talented, maybe, but that is not enough. I have over seventy years of experience in the field of Martian archaeology, and if I tell you that the gate is stable, then it is stable.’

She glared around her, eyes bright, corpses at her feet. No one seemed disposed to argue the point.

The poisoning from the Sauberville blast was gathering force in my cells. It took longer to deal with the bodies than I’d expected, certainly longer than it ought have taken any ranking officer in Carrera’s Wedge, and when the corpse locker hinged slowly shut afterwards, I felt wrung out.

Deprez, if he felt the same, wasn’t showing it. Maybe the Maori sleeves were holding up according to spec. He wandered across the hold to where Schneider was showing Jiang Jianping some kind of trick with a grav harness. I hesitated for a moment, then turned away and headed for the ladder to the upper deck, hoping to find Tanya Wardani in the forward cabin.

Instead, I found Hand, watching the vast bulk of the Martian starship roll past below us on the cabin’s main screen.

‘Takes some getting used to, huh?’

There was a greedy enthusiasm in the executive’s voice as he gestured at the view. The Nagini’s environment lights provided illumination for a few hundred metres in all directions, but as the structure faded away into the darkness, you were still aware of it, sprawling across the starfield. It seemed to go on forever, curving out at odd angles and sprouting appendages like bubbles about to burst, defying the eye to put limits on the darkness it carved out. You stared and thought you had the edge of it; you saw the faint glimmer of stars beyond. Then the fragments of light faded or jumped and you saw that what you thought was starfield was just an optical trick on the face of more bulking shadow. The colony hulks of the Konrad Harlan fleet were among the largest mobile structures ever built by human science, but they could have served this vessel as lifeboats. Even the Habitats in the New Beijing system didn’t come close. This was a scale we weren’t ready for yet. The Nagini hung over the starship like a gull over one of the bulk freighters that plied the Newpest to Millsport belaweed runs. We were an irrelevance, a tiny uncomprehending visitor along for the ride.

I dropped into the seat opposite Hand and swivelled it so that I faced the screen, feeling shivery in the hands and the spine. Shifting the corpses had been cold work, and when we bagged Dhasanapongsakul the frozen strands of eye tissue branching like coral from his emptied sockets had broken off under the plastic, under the palm of my hand. I felt them give through the bag, I heard the brittle crickling noise they made.

That tiny sound, the little chirrup of death’s particular consequences, had shunted aside most of my earlier awe at the massive dimensions of the Martian vessel.

‘Just a bigger version of a colony barge,’ I said. ‘Theoretically, we could have built that big. It’s just harder to accelerate all that mass.’

‘Obviously not for them.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘So you think that’s what it was? A colony ship?’

I shrugged, striving for a casualness I wasn’t feeling. ‘There are a limited number of reasons for building something this big. It’s either hauling something somewhere, or you live in it. And it’s hard to see why you’d build a habitat this far out. There’s nothing here to study. Nothing to mine or skim.’

‘It’s hard to see why you’d park it here as well, if it is a colony barge.’

Crick-crickle.

I closed my eyes. ‘Why do you care, Hand? When we get back, this thing’s going to disappear into some corporate asteroid dock. None of us’ll ever see it again. Why bother getting attached? You’ll get your percentage, your bonus or whatever it is that powers you up.’

‘You think I’m not curious?’

‘I think you don’t care.’

He said nothing after that, until Sun came up from the hold deck with the bad news. The buoy, it appeared, was irreparably damaged.

‘It signals,’ she said. ‘And with some work, the drives can be reengaged. It needs a new power core, but I believe I can modify one of the bike generators to do the job. But the locational systems are wrecked, and we do not have the tools or material to repair them. Without this, the buoy cannot keep station. Even the backwash from our own drives would probably kick it away into space.’

‘What about deploying after we’ve fired our drives.’ Hand looked from Sun to myself and back. ‘Vongsavath can calculate a trajectory and nudge us forward, then drop the buoy when we’re in. Ah.’

‘Motion,’ I finished for him. ‘The residual motion it picks up from when we toss it is still going to be enough to make it drift away, right Sun?’

‘That is correct.’

‘And if we attach it?’

I grinned mirthlessly. ‘Attach it? Weren’t you there when the nanobes tried to attach themselves to the gate?’

‘We’ll have to look for a way,’ he said doggedly. ‘We are not going home empty-handed. Not when we’ve come this close.’

‘You try welding to that thing out there and we won’t be going home at all, Hand. You know that.’

‘Then,’ suddenly he was shouting at us. ‘There has to be another solution.’

‘There is.’

Tanya Wardani stood in the hatch to the cockpit, where she had retreated while the corpses were dealt with. She was still pale from her vomiting, and her eyes looked bruised, but underlying it there was an almost ethereal calm I hadn’t seen since we brought her out of the camp.

‘Mistress Wardani.’ Hand looked up and down the cabin, as if to check who else had witnessed the loss of cool. He pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. ‘You have something to contribute?’

‘Yes. If Sun Liping can repair the power systems of the buoy, we can certainly place it.’

‘Place it where?’ I asked.

She smiled thinly. ‘Inside.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Inside,’ I nodded at the screen, and the unreeling kilometres of alien structure. ‘That?’

‘Yes. We go in through the docking bay and leave the buoy somewhere secure. There’s no reason to suppose the hull isn’t radio-transparent, at least in places. Most Martian architecture is. We can test-broadcast anyway, until we find a suitable place.’

‘Sun.’ Hand was looking back at the screen, almost dreamily. ‘How long would it take you to effect repairs on the power system?’

‘About eight to ten hours. No more than twelve, certainly.’ Sun turned to the archaeologue. ‘How long will it take you, Mistress Wardani, to open the docking bay?’

‘Oh,’ Wardani gave us all another strange smile. ‘It’s already open.’

I only had one chance to speak to her before we prepared to dock. I met her on her way out of the ship’s toilet facilities, ten minutes after the abrupt and dictatorial briefing Hand had thrown down for everyone. She had her back to me and we bumped awkwardly in the narrow dimensions of the entryway. She turned with a yelp and I saw there was a slight sweat still beading her forehead, presumably from more retching. Her breath smelt bad and stomach-acid odours crept out the door behind her.

She saw the way I was looking at her.

‘What?’

‘Are you alright?’

‘No, Kovacs, I’m dying. How about you?’

‘You sure this is a good idea?’

‘Oh, not you as well! I thought we’d nailed this down with Sutjiadi and Schneider.’

I said nothing, just watched the hectic light in her eyes. She sighed.

‘Look, if it satisfies Hand and gets us home again, I’d say yes, it is a good idea. And it’s a damned sight safer than trying to attach a defective buoy to the hull.’

I shook my head.

‘That’s not it.’

‘No?’

‘No. You want to see the inside of this thing before Mandrake spirit it away to some covert dry dock. You want to own it, even if it’s only for a few hours. Don’t you.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I think, apart from Sutjiadi and Schneider, we all do.’ I knew Cruickshank would have - I could see the shine on her eyes at the thought of it. The awakening enthusiasm she’d had at the rail of the trawler. The same wonder I’d seen on her face when she looked at the activated gate countdown in the UV backwash. Maybe that was why I wasn’t protesting beyond this muttered conversation amidst the curling odour of exhausted vomiting. Maybe this was something I owed.

‘Well, then.’ Wardani shrugged. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘You know what the problem is.’

She made an impatient noise and moved to get past me. I stayed put.

‘You want to get out of my way, Kovacs?’ she hissed. ‘We’re five minutes off landing, and I need to be in the cockpit.’

‘Why didn’t they go in, Tanya?’

‘We’ve been over—’

‘That’s bullshit, Tanya. Ameli’s instruments show a breathable atmosphere. They found a way to open the docking system, or they found it already open. And then they waited out here to die while the air in their suits ran out. Why didn’t they go in?’

‘You were at the briefing. They had no food, they had—’

‘Yeah, I heard you come up with metres and metres of wholecloth rationale, but what I didn’t hear was anything that explains why four archaeologues would rather die in their spacesuits than spend their last hours wandering around the greatest archaeological find in the history of the human race.’

For a moment she hesitated, and I saw something of the woman from the waterfall. Then the feverish light flickered back on in her eyes.

‘Why ask me? Why don’t you just power up one of the ID&A sets, and fucking ask them? They’re stack-intact, aren’t they?’

‘The ID&A sets are fucked, Tanya. Leak-corroded with the buoys. So I’m asking you again. Why didn’t they go in?’

She was silent again, looking away. I thought I saw a tremor at the corner of one eye. Then it was gone, and she looked up at me with the same dry calm I’d seen in the camp.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘And if we can’t ask them, then there’s only one other way to find out that I can think of.’

‘Yeah.’ I propped myself away from her wearily. ‘And that’s what this is about, isn’t it. Finding out. Uncovering history. Carrying the fucking torch of human discovery. You’re not interested in the money, you don’t care who ends up with the property rights, and you certainly don’t mind dying. So why should anybody else, right?’

She flinched, but it was momentary. She locked it down. And then she was turning away, leaving me looking at the pale light from the illuminum tile where she had been pressed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was like delirium.

I remember reading somewhere that when the archaeologues on Mars first got into the buried mausoleum spaces they later categorised as cities, a fair percentage of them went insane. Mental collapse was an occupational hazard of the profession back then. Some of the finest minds of the century were sacrificed in pursuit of the keys to Martian civilisation. Not broken and dragged down to raving insanity the way the archetypal antiheroes of experia horror flicks always end up. Not broken, just blunted. Worn down from the sharp edge of intellectual prowess to a slightly numb, slightly blurred distracted vagueness. They went that way in their dozens. Psychically abraded by the constant contact with the leavings of unhuman minds. The Guild spent them like surgical blades rammed against a spinning grindstone.

‘Well, I suppose if you can fly . . .’ said Luc Deprez, eyeing the architecture ahead without enthusiasm.

His stance telegraphed irritated confusion. I guessed he was having the same problem locking down potential ambush corners that I was. When the combat conditioning goes in that deep, not being able to do what they’ve trained you to itches like quitting nicotine. And spotting ambush in Martian architecture would have to be like trying to catch a Mitcham’s Point slictopus with your bare hands.

From the ponderously overhanging lintel that led out of the docking bay, the internal structure of the ship burst up and around us like nothing I had ever seen. Groping after comparison, my mind came up with an image from my Newpest childhood. One spring out on the Deeps side of Hirata’s Reef, I’d given myself a bad scare when the feed tube on my scrounged and patched scuba suit snagged on an outcrop of coral fifteen metres down. Watching oxygen explode out through the rupture in a riot of silver-bellied corpuscles, I’d wondered fleetingly what the storm of bubbles must look like from the inside.

Now I knew.

These bubbles were frozen in place, tinged mother-of-pearl shades of blue and pink where indistinct low-light sources glowed under their surfaces, but aside from that basic difference in longevity, they were as chaotic as my escaping air supply had been that day. There appeared to be no architectural rhyme or reason to the way they joined and merged into each other. In places the link was a hole only metres across. Elsewhere the curving walls simply broke their sweep as they met an intersecting circumference. At no point in the first space we entered was the ceiling less than twenty metres overhead.

‘The floor’s flat though,’ murmured Sun Liping, kneeling to brush at the sheened surface underfoot. ‘And they had - have - grav generators.’

‘Origin of species.’ Tanya Wardani’s voice boomed slightly in the cathedric emptiness. ‘They evolved in a gravity well, just like us. Zero g isn’t healthy long-term, no matter how much fun it is. And if you have gravity, you need flat surfaces to put things down on. Practicality at work. Same as the docking bay back there. All very well wanting to stretch your wings, but you need straight lines to land a spaceship.’

We all glanced back at the gap we’d come through. Compared to where we stood now, the alien curvatures of the docking station had been practically demure. Long, stepped walls tapered outward like two-metre-fat sleeping serpents stretched out and laid not quite directly on top of each other. The coils wove just barely off a straight axis, as if even within the strictures of the docking station’s purpose, the Martian shipwrights had not quite been able to restrain themselves from an organic flourish. There was no danger involved in bringing a docking vessel down through the increasing levels of atmospheric density held in by some mechanism in the stepped walls, but looking out to the sides, you still felt you were being lowered into the belly of something sleeping.

Delirium.

I could feel it brushing lightly at the upper extremities of my vision, sucking gently at my eyeballs and leaving me with a faintly swollen feeling behind the brow. A little like the cut-rate virtualities you used to get in arcades back when I was a kid, the ones where the construct wouldn’t let your character look up more than a few degrees above the horizontal, even when that was where the next stage of the game was taking you. It was the same feeling here, the promise of a dull ache behind the eyes from constantly trying to see what was up there. An awareness of space overhead that you kept wanting to check on.

The curve on the gleaming surfaces around us put a tilt on it all, a vague sense that you were about to topple over sideways and that, in fact, toppled over and lying down might be the best stance to take in this gratingly alien environment. That this whole ridiculous structure was eggshell thin and ready to crack apart if you did the wrong thing, and that it might easily spill you out into the void.

Delirium.

Better get used to it.

The chamber was not empty. Skeletal arrangements of what looked like scaffolding loomed on the edges of the level floor space. I recalled holoshot images in a download I’d scanned as a child, Martian roosting bars, complete with virtually generated Martians roosting on them. Here, somehow, the emptiness of the bars gave each structure an eerie gauntness that did nothing for the creeping unease on the nape of my neck.

‘They’ve been folded down,’ murmured Wardani, staring upward. She looked puzzled.

At the lower curves of the bubble wall, machines whose functions I couldn’t even guess at stood beneath the - apparently - tidied-away roost bars. Most of them looked spiny and aggressive, but when the archaeologue brushed past one, it did nothing more than mutter to itself and pettishly rearrange some of its spines.

Plastic rattle and swift scaling whine - armament deployed in every pair of hands across the hollow bell of the chamber.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Wardani barely spared us a backward glance. ‘Loosen up, will you. It’s asleep. It’s a machine.’

I put up the Kalashnikovs and shrugged. Across the chamber Deprez caught my eye, and grinned.

‘A machine for what?’ Hand wanted to know.

This time the archaeologue did look round.

‘I don’t know,’ she said tiredly. ‘Give me a couple of days and a fully equipped lab team, maybe I could tell you. Right now, all I can tell you is that it’s dormant.’

Sutjiadi took a couple of steps closer, Sunjet still raised. ‘How can you tell that?’

‘Because if it wasn’t, we’d already be dealing with it on an interactive basis, believe me. Plus, can you see anybody with wingspurs rising a metre above their shoulders putting an active machine that close to a curved wall? I’m telling you, this whole place is powered down and packed up.’

‘Mistress Wardani appears to be correct,’ said Sun, pivoting about with the Nuhanovic survey set on her forearm raised. ‘There is detectable circuitry in the walls, but most of it is inactive.’

‘There must be something running all this.’ Ameli Vongsavath stood with her hands in her pocket and stared up into the draughty heights at the centre of the chamber. ‘We have breathable air. A bit thin, but it’s warm. Come to that, this whole place has to be heated somehow.’

‘Caretaker systems.’ Tanya Wardani seemed to have lost interest in the machines. She wandered back to the group. ‘A lot of the deeper buried cities on Mars and Nkrumah’s Land had them too.’

‘After this long?’ Sutjiadi didn’t sound happy.

Wardani sighed. She jerked a thumb at the docking bay entrance. ‘It’s not witchcraft, captain. You’ve got the same thing running the Nagini for us back there. If we all die, she’ll sit there for a good few centuries waiting for someone to come back.’

‘Yes, and if it’s someone who doesn’t have the codes, she’ll blast them into soup. That doesn’t reassure me, Mistress Wardani.’

‘Well maybe that’s the difference between us and the Martians. A little civilised sophistication.’

‘And longer lasting batteries,’ I said. ‘This has all been here a lot longer than the Nagini’s good for.’

‘What’s the radio-transparency like?’ asked Hand.

Sun did something to the Nuhanovic system she was wearing. The bulkier shoulder-mounted sections of the survey equipment flickered. Symbols evolved in the air over the back of her hand. She shrugged. ‘It’s not very good. I’m barely picking up the Nagini’s navigational beacon, and she’s only on the other side of the wall. Shielding, I suppose. We are in a docking station, and close to the hull. I think we will need to move further in.’

I spotted a couple of alarmed glances flicker back and forth amongst the group. Deprez caught me watching and he smiled a little.

‘So who wants to explore?’ he asked softly.

‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Hand.

I moved out from the instinctive defence huddle we’d all formed, stepped through the gap between two roost bars and reached up to the lip of the opening above and behind. Waves of tiredness and faint nausea shimmered through me as I hauled myself up, but by now I was expecting it and the neurachem locked it down.

The hollow beyond was empty. Not even dust.

‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea,’ I agreed, dropping back. ‘But how many human beings this side of the next millennium are going to get this chance? You need ten hours, right, Sun?’

‘At the most.’

‘And you reckon you can build us a decent map on that thing?’ I gestured at the Nuhanovic set.

‘Very probably. This is the best survey software money can buy.’ She bowed briefly in Hand’s direction. ‘Nuhanovic smart systems. They don’t build it better than this.’

I looked over to Ameli Vongsavath.

‘And the Nagini’s weapon systems are powered up solid.’

The pilot nodded. ‘Parameters I gave, she could stand off a full tactical assault with no help from us.’

‘Well, then I’d say we’ve got a day-pass to the Coral Castle.’ I glanced at Sutjiadi. ‘Those of us that want it, that is.’

Looking around, I saw the idea taking hold. Deprez was already there, face and stance betraying his curiosity, but it was slowly filling up the rest of them too. Everywhere, heads were tilted back to take in the alien architecture, features ironed soft by wonder. Even Sutjiadi couldn’t hold it off completely. The grim watchfulness he’d maintained since we breached the upper levels of the docking chamber’s layered atmosphere field was melting into something less clamped down. The fear of the unknown was ebbing, cancelled out by something stronger and older.

Monkey curiosity. The trait I’d disparaged to Wardani when we arrived on the beach at Sauberville. The scampering, chittering jungle intelligence that would cheerfully scale the brooding figures of ancient stone idols and poke fingers into the staring eyesockets just to see. The bright obsidian desire to know. The thing that’s dragged us out here, all the way from the grasslands of central Africa. The thing that one day’ll probably put us somewhere so far out that we’ll get there ahead of the sunlight from those central African days.

Hand stepped into the centre, poised in executive mode.

‘Let’s achieve some sense of priority here,’ he said carefully. ‘I sympathise with any wish you may all have to see some of this vessel - I would like to see it myself - but our major concern is to find a safe transmission base for the buoy. That we must do before anything else, and I suggest we do it as a single unit.’ He turned to Sutjiadi. ‘After that, we can detail exploratory parties. Captain?’

Sutjiadi nodded, but it was an uncharacteristically vague motion. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t really paying attention at human frequencies any more.

If there’d been any lingering doubts about the Martian vessel’s hulk status, a couple of hours in the frozen bubbles of its architecture was enough to cancel them out. We walked for over a kilometre, winding back and forth through the apparently random connections between chambers. In places the openings were more or less at floor level, but elsewhere they were cut high enough that Wardani or Sun had to power up the grav harnesses they were wearing and float up to peer through. Jiang and Deprez took point together, splitting and edging up to the entrance to each new chamber with quiet, symmetrical lethality.

We found nothing recognisably living.

The machines we came across ignored us, and no one seemed inclined to get close enough to elicit more of a reaction.

Increasingly, as we moved deeper into the body of the ship, we began to find structures that might by a stretch of the imagination be called corridors - long, bulbous spaces with egg-shaped entrances let in at either end. It looked like the same construction technique as the standard bubble chamber, modified to suit.

‘You know what this whole thing is,’ I told Wardani, while we waited for Sun to scout out another overhead opening. ‘It’s like aerogel. Like they built a basic framework and then just,’ - I shook my head. The concept stubbornly resisted chiselling out into words - ‘I don’t know, just blew up a few cubic kilometres of heavy-duty aerogel base all over it, and then waited for it to harden.’

Wardani smiled wanly. ‘Yeah, maybe. Something like that. That would put their plasticity science a little ahead of ours, wouldn’t it. To be able to map and model foam data on this scale.’

‘Maybe not.’ I groped at the opening shape of the idea, feeling at its origami edges. ‘Out here specific structure wouldn’t matter. Whatever came out would do. And then you just fill the space with whatever you need. Drivers, environmental systems, you know, weapons . . .’

‘Weapons?’ She looked at me with something unreadable in her face. ‘Does this have to be a warship?’

‘No, it was an example. But—’

‘Something in here,’ said Sun over the comset. ‘Some kind of tree or—’

What happened next was hard to explain.

I heard the sound coming.

I knew with utter certainty that I was going to hear it fractions of a second before the low chime floated down out of the bubble Sun was exploring. The knowledge was a solid sensation, heard like an echo cast backward against the slow decay of passing time. If it was the Envoy intuition, it was working at a level of efficiency I’d only previously run into in dreams.

‘Songspire,’ said Wardani.

I listened to the echoes fade, inverting the shiver of premonition I’d just felt, and suddenly wanted very much to be back on the other side of the gate, facing the mundane dangers of the nanobe systems and the fallout from murdered Sauberville.

Cherries and mustard. An inexplicable tangle of scents spilling down in the wake of the sound. Jiang raised his Sunjet.

Sutjiadi’s normally immobile features creased.

‘What is that?’

‘Songspire,’ I said, spinning matter-of-factness around my own creeping unease. ‘Kind of Martian houseplant.’

I’d seen one once, for real, on Earth. Dug out of the Martian bedrock it had grown from over the previous several thousand years and plinthed as a rich man’s objet d’art. Still singing when anything touched it, even the breeze, still giving out the cherry-and-mustard aroma. Not dead, not alive, not anything that could be categorised into a box by human science.

‘How is it attached?’ Wardani wanted to know.

‘Growing out of the wall,’ Sun’s voice came back dented with a by now familiar wonder. ‘Like some kind of coral . . .’

Wardani stepped back to give herself launch space and reached for the drives on her own grav harness. The quick whine of power-up stung the air.

‘I’m coming up.’

‘Just a moment, Mistress Wardani.’ Hand glided in to crowd her. ‘Sun, is there a way through up there?’

‘No. Whole bubble’s closed.’

‘Then come back down.’ He raised a hand to forestall Wardani. ‘We do not have time for this. Later, if you wish, you may come back while Sun is repairing the buoy. For now, we must find a safe transmission base before anything else.’

A vaguely mutinous expression broke across the archaeologue’s face, but she was too tired to sustain it. She knocked out the grav drivers again - downwhining machine disappointment - and turned away, something muttered and bitten off drifting back over her shoulder, almost as faint as the cherries and mustard from above. She stalked a line away from the Mandrake exec towards the exit. Jiang hesitated a moment in her path, then let her by.

I sighed.

‘Nice going, Hand. She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a native guide in this.’ I gestured around. ‘Place, and you want to piss her off. They teach you that while you were getting your conflict investment doctorate? Upset the experts if you possibly can?’

‘No,’ he said evenly. ‘But they taught me not to waste time.’

‘Right.’ I went after Wardani and caught up just inside the corridor leading out of the chamber. ‘Hey, hold up. Wardani. Wardani, just chill out, will you. Man’s an asshole, what are you going to do?’

‘Fucking merchant.’

‘Well, yeah. That too. But he is the reason we’re here in the first place. Should never underestimate that mercantile drive.’

‘What are you, a fucking economics philosopher now?’

‘I’m.’ I stopped. ‘Listen.’

‘No, I’m through with—’

‘No, listen.’ I held up a hand and pointed down the corridor. ‘There. Hear that?’

‘I don’t hear . . .’ Her voice trailed off as she caught it. By then, the Carrera’s Wedge neurachem had reeled in the sound for me, so clear there could be no question.

Somewhere down the corridor, something was singing.

Two chambers further on, we found them. A whole bonsai songspire forest, sprouting across the floor and up the lower curve of a corridor neck where it joined the main bubble. The spires seemed to have broken through the primary structure of the vessel from the floor around the join, although there was no sign of damage at their roots. It was as if the hull material had closed around them like healing tissue. The nearest machine was a respectful ten metres off, huddled down the corridor.

The song the spires emitted was closest to the sound of a violin, but played with the infinitely slow drag of individual monofilaments across the bridge and to no melody that I could discern. It was a sound down at the lowest levels of hearing, but each time it swelled, I felt something tugging at the pit of my stomach.

‘The air,’ said Wardani quietly. She had raced me along the bulbous corridors and through the bubble chambers, and now she crouched in front of the spires, out of breath but shiny eyed. ‘There must be convection through here from another level. They only sing on surface contact.’

I shook off an unlooked-for shiver.

‘How old do you reckon they are?’

‘Who knows?’ She got to her feet again. ‘If this was a planetary grav field, I’d say a couple of thousand years at most. But it isn’t.’ She took a step back and shook her head, hand cupping her chin, fingers pressed over her mouth as if to keep in a too-hasty comment. I waited. Finally the hand came away from her face and gestured, hesitant. ‘Look at the branching pattern. They don’t. They don’t usually grow like this. Not this twisted.’

I followed her pointing finger. The tallest of the spires stood about chest high, spindly reddish black stone limbs snaking out of the central trunk in a profusion that did seem more exuberant and intricate than the growth I’d seen on the plinthed specimen back on earth. Surrounding it, other, smaller spires emulated the pattern, except that—

The rest of the party caught up, Deprez and Hand in the van.

‘Where the hell have you. Oh.’

The faint singing from the spires crept up an almost imperceptible increment. Air currents stirred by the movement of bodies across the chamber. I felt a slight dryness in my throat at the sound it made.

‘I’m just looking at these, if that’s OK, Hand.’

‘Mistress Wardani—’

I shot the exec a warning glance.

Deprez came up beside the archaeologue. ‘Are they dangerous?’

‘I don’t know. Ordinarily, no, but—’

The thing that had been scratching for attention at the threshold of my consciousness suddenly emerged.

‘They’re growing towards each other. Look at the branches on the smaller ones. They all reach up and out. The taller ones branch in all directions.’

‘That suggests communication of some sort. An integrated, self relating system.’ Sun walked round the cluster of spires, scanning with the emissions tracer on her arm. ‘Though, hmm.’

‘You won’t find any radiation,’ said Wardani, almost dreamily. ‘They suck it in like sponges. Total absorption of everything except red wave light. According to mineral composition, the surface of these things shouldn’t be red at all. They ought to reflect right across the spectrum.’

‘But they don’t.’ Hand made it sound as if he was thinking of having the spires detained for the transgression. ‘Why is that, Mistress Wardani?’

‘If I knew that, I’d be a Guild President by now. We know less about songspires than practically any other aspect of the Martian biosphere. In fact, we don’t even know if you can rank them in the biosphere.’

‘They grow, don’t they?’

I saw Wardani sneer. ‘So do crystals. That doesn’t make them alive.’

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ said Ameli Vongsavath, skirting the songspires with her Sunjet cocked at a semi-aggressive angle. ‘But this looks to me like an infestation.’

‘Or art,’ murmured Deprez. ‘How would we know?’

Vongsavath shook her head. ‘This is a ship, Luc. You don’t put your corridor art where you’ll trip over it every time you walk through. Look at these things. They’re all over the place.’

‘And if you can fly through?’

‘They’d still get in the way.’

‘Collision Art,’ suggested Schneider with a smirk.

‘Alright, that’s enough.’ Hand waved himself some space between the spires and their new audience. Faint notes awoke as the motion brushed air currents against the red stone branches. The musk in the air thickened. ‘We do not have—’

‘Time for this,’ droned Wardani. ‘We must find a safe transmission base.’

Schneider guffawed. I bit back a grin and avoided looking in Deprez’s direction. I suspected that Hand’s control was crumbling and I wasn’t keen to push him over the edge at this point. I still wasn’t sure what he’d do when he snapped.

‘Sun,’ the Mandrake exec’s voice came out even enough. ‘Check the upper openings.’

The systems specialist nodded and powered up her grav harness. The whine of the drivers cut in and then deepened as her bootsoles unstuck from the floor and she drifted upwards. Jiang and Deprez circled out, Sunjets raised to cover her.

‘No way through here,’ she called back down from the first opening.

I heard the change, and my eyes slanted back to the songspires. Wardani was the only one watching me and she saw my face. Behind Hand’s back, her mouth opened in a silent question. I nodded at the spires and cupped my ear.

Listen.

Wardani moved closer, then shook her head.

Hissing. ‘That’s not poss—’

But it was.

The faint, violin-scraped sound of the song was modulating. Reacting to the constant underpinning drone of the grav drivers. That, or maybe the grav field itself. Modulating and, very faintly, strengthening.

Waking up.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We found Hand’s safe transmission base four songspire clusters and about another hour later. By then we’d started to hook back towards the docking bay, following a tentative map that Sun’s Nuhanovic scanners were building on her arm. The mapping software didn’t like Martian architecture any more than I did, that much was apparent from the long pauses every time Sun loaded in a new set of data. But with a couple of hours’ wandering behind us, and some inspired interfacing from the systems specialist, the programme was able to start making some educated guesses of its own about where we should be looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was dead right.

Climbing out of a massive spiralling tube whose gradient was too steep for human comfort, Sun and I staggered to a halt at the edge of a fifty-metre broad platform that was seemingly exposed to raw space on all sides. A crystal-clear open starfield curved overhead and down around us, interrupted only by the bones of a gaunt central structure reminiscent of a Millsport dockyard crane. The sense of exposure to the outside was so complete I felt my throat lock up momentarily in vacuum combat reflex at the sight. My lungs, still straining from the climb, flapped weakly in my chest.

I broke the reflex.

‘Is that a forcefield?’ I asked Sun, panting.

‘No, it’s solid.’ She frowned over the forearm display. ‘Transparent alloy, about a metre thick. That’s very impressive. No distortion. Total direct visual control. Look, there’s your gate.’

It stood in the starscape over our heads, a curiously oblong satellite of greyish-blue light creeping across the darkness.

‘This has got to be the docking control turret,’ Sun decided, patting her arm and turning slowly. ‘What did I tell you. Nuhanovic smart mapping. They don’t make it any bet—’

Her voice dried up. I looked sideways and saw how her eyes had widened, focused on something further ahead. Following her gaze to the skeletal structure at the centre of the platform, I saw the Martians.

‘You’d better call the others up,’ I said distantly.

They were hung over the platform like the ghosts of eagles tortured to death, wings spread wide, caught up in some kind of webbing that swung eerily in stray air currents. There were only two, one hoisted close to the highest extent of the central structure, the other not much above human head height. Moving warily closer, I saw that the webbing was metallic, strung with instrumentation whose purposes made no more overt sense than the machines we’d passed in the bubble chambers.

I passed another outcrop of songspires, most of them not much over knee height. They barely got a second glance. Behind me, I heard Sun yelling down the spiral to the rest of the party. Her raised voice seemed to violate something in the air. Echoes chased each other around the dome. I reached the lower of the two Martians, and stood beneath the body.

Of course, I’d seen them before. Who hasn’t. You get input with this stuff from kindergarten upwards. The Martians. They’ve replaced the mythological creatures of our own picket-fenced earthbound heritage, the gods and demons we once used for the foundations of our legends. Impossible to overestimate, wrote Gretzky, back when he apparently still had some balls, the sideswiping blow that this discovery dealt our sense of belonging in the universe, and our sense that the universe in some way belonged to us.

The way Wardani laid it out for me, one desert evening on the balcony at Roespinoedji’s warehouse:

Bradbury, 2089 pre-colonial reckoning. The founder-heroes of human antiquity are exposed for the pig-ignorant mall bullies they probably always were, as decoding of the first Martian data systems brings in evidence of a starfaring culture at least as old as the whole human race. The millennial knowledge out of Egypt and China starts to look like a ten-year-old child’s bedroom datastack. The wisdom of the ages shredded at a stroke into the pipe-cooked musings of a bunch of canal-dive barflies. Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Muhammed - what did these guys know? Parochial locals, never even been off the planet. Where were they when the Martians were crossing interstellar space.

Of course - a sour grin out of one corner of Wardani’s mouth - established religion lashed back. The usual strategies. Incorporate the Martians into the scheme of things, scour the scriptures or make up some new ones, reinterpret. Failing that, lacking the grey matter for that much effort, just deny the whole thing as the work of evil forces and firebomb anyone who says otherwise. That ought to work.

But it didn’t work.

For a while it looked as if it might. Upwelling hysteria brought sectarian violence and the recently established university departments of xenology frequently up in flames. Armed escorts for noted archaeologues and a fair few campus firefights between fundamentalists and the public order police. Interesting times for the student body . . .

Out of it all, the new faiths arose. Most of them not that much different to the old faiths by all accounts, and just as dogmatic. But underlying, or maybe floating uneasily atop, came a groundswell of secular belief in something that was a little harder to define than God.

Maybe it was the wings. A cultural archetype so deep - angels, demons, Icarus and countless idiots like him off towers and cliffs until we finally got it right - that humanity clung to it.

Maybe there was just too much at stake. The astrogation charts with their promise of new worlds we could just go to, assured of a terrestroid destination because, well, it says so here.

Whatever it was, you had to call it faith. It wasn’t knowledge; the Guild wasn’t that confident of its translation back then, and you don’t launch hundreds of thousands of stored minds and clone embryos into the depths of interstellar space without something a lot stronger than a theory.

It was faith in the essential workability of the New Knowledge. In place of the terracentric confidence of human science and its ability to Work It All Out someday, a softer trust in the overarching edifice of Martian Knowledge that would, like an indulgent father, let us get out into the ocean and drive the boat for real. We were heading out the door, not as children grown and leaving home for the first time, but as toddlers gripping trustingly with one chubby fist at the talon of Martian civilisation. There was a totally irrational sense of safety and wrapped-up warmth to the whole process. That, as much as Hand’s much vaunted economic liberalisation, was what drove the diaspora.

Three-quarters of a million deaths on Adoracion changed things. That, and a few other geopolitical shortcomings that cropped up with the rise of the Protectorate. Back on Earth, the old faiths slammed down, political and spiritual alike, iron-bound tomes of authority to live by. We have lived loosely, and a price must be paid. In the name of stability and security, things must be run with a firm hand now.

Of that brief flourishing of enthusiasm for all things Martian, very little remains. Wycinski and his pioneering team are centuries gone, hounded out of university posts and funding and in some cases actually murdered. The Guild has drawn into itself, jealously guarding what little intellectual freedom the Protectorate allows it. The Martians are reduced from anything approaching a full understanding to two virtually unrelated precipitates. On the one hand a textbook-dry series of images and notes, as much data as the Protectorate deems socially appropriate. Every child dutifully learns what they looked like, the splayed anatomy of their wings and skeleton, the flight dynamics, the tedious minutiae of mating and young-rearing, the reconstructions in virtual of their plumage and colouring, drawn from the few visual records we’ve managed to access or filled in with Guild guesses. Roost emblems, probable clothing. Colourful, easily digestible stuff. Not much sociology. Too poorly understood, too undefined, too volatile, and besides do people really want to bother themselves with all that . . .

‘Knowledge tossed away,’ she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. ‘Wilful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand.’

At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather. Weird religious offshoots, whispered legend and word of mouth from the digs. Here, something of what the Martians were to us once has remained - here, their impact can be described in murmured tones. Here they can be named as Wycinski once named them; the New Ancients, teaching us the real meaning of that word. Our mysteriously absent winged benefactors, swooping low to brush the nape of our civilisation’s neck with one cold wingtip, to remind us that six or seven thousand years of patchily recorded history isn’t what they call ancient around here.

This Martian was dead.

A long time dead, that much was apparent. The body had mummified in the webbing, wings turned parchment thin, head dried out to a long narrow skull whose beak gaped half open. The eyes were blackened in their backward-slashed sockets, half hidden by the draped membrane of the eyelids. Below the beak, the thing’s skin bulged out in what I guessed must have been the throat gland. Like the wings, it looked paper-thin and translucent.

Under the wings, angular limbs reached across the webbing and delicate-looking talons grasped at instrumentation. I felt a tiny surge of admiration. Whatever this thing had been, it had died at the controls.

‘Don’t touch it,’ snapped Wardani from behind me, and I became aware that I was reaching upward to the lower edge of the webbing frame.

‘Sorry.’

‘You will be, if the skin crumbles. There’s an alkaline secretion in their subcutaneous fat layers that runs out of control when they die. Kept in balance by food oxidation during life, we think, but it’s strong enough to dissolve most of a corpse, given a decent supply of water vapour.’ As she spoke, she was moving around the webbing frame with the automatic caution of what must have been Guild training. Her face was utterly intent, eyes never shifting from the winged mummy above us. ‘When they die like this, it just eats through the fat and dries out to a powder. Very corrosive if you breathe it in, or get it in your eyes.’

‘Right.’ I moved back a couple of steps. ‘Thanks for the advance warning.’

She shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect to find them here.’

‘Ships have crews.’

‘Yeah, Kovacs, and cities have populations. We’ve still only ever found a couple of hundred intact Martian corpses in over four centuries of archaeology on three dozen worlds.’

‘Shit like that in their systems, I’m not surprised.’ Schneider had wandered over and was rubbernecking on the other side of the space below the webbing frame. ‘So what happened to this stuff if they just didn’t eat for a while?’

Wardani shot him an irritated glance. ‘We don’t know. Presumably the process would start up.’

‘That must have hurt,’ I said.

‘Yes, I imagine it would.’ She didn’t really want to talk to either of us. She was entranced.

Schneider failed to take the hint. Or maybe he just needed the babble of voices to cover the huge stillness in the air around us and the gaze of the winged thing above us. ‘How come they’d end up with something like that? I mean,’ he guffawed, ‘it’s not exactly evolutionarily selective, is it? Kills you if you’re hungry.’

I looked up at the desiccated, spreadeagled corpse again, feeling a fresh surge of the respect I’d first felt when I realised the Martians had died at their posts. Something indefinable happened in my head, something that my Envoy senses recognised as the intuitive shimmer at the edge of understanding.

‘No, it’s selective,’ I realised as I spoke. ‘It would have driven them. It would have made them the toughest motherfuckers in the sky.’

I thought I spotted a faint smile crossing Tanya Wardani’s face. ‘You should publish, Kovacs. That kind of intellectual insight.’

Schneider smirked.

‘In fact,’ the archaeologue said, falling into gentle lecture mode while she stared at the mummified Martian, ‘the current evolutionary argument for this trait is that it helped keep crowded roosts hygienic. Vasvik and Lai, couple of years ago. Before that, most of the Guild agreed it would deter skin-feeding parasites and infection. Vasvik and Lai wouldn’t actually dispute that, they’re just jockeying for pole position. And, of course, there is the overarching toughest motherfuckers in the sky hypothesis, which a number of Guild Masters have elaborated, though none quite as elegantly as you, Kovacs.’

I tipped her a bow.

‘Do you think we can get her down?’ Wardani wondered aloud, standing back to get a better look at the cables the webbing frame depended from.

‘Her?’

‘Yeah. It’s a roost guardian. See the spur on the wing. That bone ridge on back of the the skull. Warrior caste. They were all female as far as we know.’ The archaeologue looked up at the cabling again. ‘Think we can get this thing working?’

‘Don’t see why not.’ I raised my voice to carry across the platform ‘Jiang. You see anything like a winch on that side?’

Jiang looked upward, then shook his head.

‘What about you, Luc?’

‘Mistress Wardani!’

‘Speaking of motherfuckers,’ muttered Schneider. Matthias Hand was striding across to join the congregation beneath the spreadeagled corpse.

‘Mistress Wardani, I hope you weren’t thinking of doing anything other than look at this specimen.’

‘Actually,’ the archaeologue told him, ‘we’re looking for a way to winch it down. Got a problem with that?’

‘Yes, Mistress Wardani, I have. This ship, and everything it contains, is the property of the Mandrake Corporation.’

‘Not until the buoy sings, it isn’t. That’s what you told us to get us in here, anyway.’

Hand smiled thinly. ‘Don’t make an issue of this, Mistress Wardani. You’ve been well enough paid.’

‘Oh, paid. I’ve been paid.’ Wardani stared at him. ‘Fuck you, Hand.’

She stormed away across the platform and stood at its edge, looking out.

I stared at the Mandrake exec. ‘Hand, what’s the matter with you? I thought I told you to ease up on her. The architecture getting to you or something?’

I left him with the corpse and walked across to where Wardani stood with her arms wrapped tightly around her body and her head lowered.

‘Not planning to jump, are you?’

She snorted. ‘That piece of shit. He’d have a fucking corporate holofront on the gates of paradise if he ever found them.’

‘Don’t know about that. He’s a pretty serious believer.’

‘Yeah? Funny how it doesn’t get in the way of his commercial life.’

‘Yeah, well. Organised religion, you know.’

She snorted again, but there was a laugh in it this time and her posture unlocked a little.

‘I don’t know why I got so bent out of shape. I don’t have the tools here to deal with organic remnants anyway. Let it stay up there. Who gives a shit?’

I smiled and placed a hand on her shoulder.

‘You do,’ I said gently.

The dome over our heads was as transparent to radio signals as it was to the visual spectrum. Sun ran a series of basic checks with the equipment she had, then we all trooped back to the Nagini and brought the damaged buoy up to the platform, together with three cases of tools Sun deemed likely to be useful. We stopped in every chamber, flagging the route with amber limpet cherries along the way, and painting the floor with illuminum paint, much to Tanya Wardani’s chagrin.

‘It’ll wash off,’ Sun Liping told her in a tone that suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other.

Even with a couple of grav harnesses to ease the lifting, getting the buoy to its designated resting place was a long, hard job, made infuriating by the bubbling chaos of the ship’s architecture. By the time we’d assembled everything on the platform - off to one side, at a discreet distance from the mummified original occupants - I was shattered. The radiation damage raging through my cells was getting beyond the power of the drugs to do anything about it.

I found a section of the central structure that wasn’t directly below a corpse and propped myself against it, looking out at the starscape while my abused body did its best to stabilise my pulse and damp down the sickness in the pit of my guts. Out among the stars, the open gate winked at me as it rose over the platform’s horizon. Further right, the nearest Martian tugged at an upper corner of my vision. I looked up and across to where the corpse peered down at me through shrouded eyes. I raised one finger to my temple in salute.

‘Yeah. Be with you shortly.’

‘I’m sorry?’

I rolled my head sideways and saw Luc Deprez standing a couple of metres away. In his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, he looked almost comfortable.

‘Nothing. Communing.’

‘I see.’ From the expression on his face, it was pretty clear he didn’t. ‘I was wondering. Want to go for a look around?’

I shook my head.

‘Maybe later. Don’t let me stop you, though.’

He frowned, but he left me alone. I saw him leaving with Ameli Vongsavath in tow. Elsewhere on the platform, the rest of the party were gathered in small knots, talking in voices that didn’t carry much. I thought I could hear the songspire cluster making faint counterpoint, but I wasn’t up to focusing the neurachem. I felt an immense weariness come sliding down out of the starfield and the platform seemed to tilt away beneath me. I closed my eyes and drifted off into something that wasn’t exactly sleep, but came equipped with all the disadvantages.

Kovacs . . .

Fucking Semetaire.

Do you miss your fragmented Limon Highlander?

Don’t—

Do you wish she were here in one piece, eh? Or would you like the pieces of her squirming over you unattached?

My face twitched where her foot had smashed my lip as the nanobe cable hurled it past me.

Is there an appeal, hmmm? A segmented houri at your command. A hand here, a hand there. Curved handfuls of flesh. Consumer cut, so to speak. Soft, graspable flesh, Kovacs. Malleable. You could fill your hands with it. Mould it to you.

Semetaire, you’re pushing me—

And unattached to any inconvenient independent will. Throw away the parts you have no use for. The parts that excrete, the parts that think beyond sensual use. The afterlife has many pleasures—

Leave me the fuck alone, Semetaire.

Why should I do that? Alone is cold, a gulf of coldness deeper than you looked upon from the hull of the Mivtsemdi. Why should I abandon you to that when you have been such a friend to me? Sent me so many souls.

Alright. That’s it, motherfucker—

I snapped awake, sweating. Tanya Wardani was crouched a metre away, peering at me. Behind her, the Martian hung in mid-glide, staring blindly down like one of the angels in the Andric cathedral at Newpest.

‘You OK, Kovacs?’

I pressed fingers against my eyes and winced at the ache the pressure caused.

‘Not bad for a dead man, I suppose. You’re not off exploring?’

‘I feel like shit. Maybe later.’

I propped myself up a little straighter. Across the platform, Sun worked steadily on the buoy’s exposed circuit plates. Jiang and Sutjiadi stood nearby, talking in low tones. I coughed. ‘Limited amount of later round here. I doubt it’ll take Sun the whole ten hours. Where’s Schneider?’

‘Went off with Hand. How come you’re not doing the Coral Castle tour yourself ?’

I smiled. ‘You’ve never seen the Coral Castle in your life, Tanya. What are you talking about?’

She seated herself beside me, facing the starscape.

‘Trying out my Harlan’s World argot. Got a problem with that?’

‘Fucking tourists.’

She laughed. I sat and enjoyed the sound until it died, and then we both sat for a while in a companionable quiet broken only by the sound of Sun’s circuit soldering.

‘Nice sky,’ she said finally.

‘Yeah. Answer me an archaeological question?’

‘If you like.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘The Martians?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, it’s a big cosmos. Who—’

‘No, these Martians. The crew of this thing. Why leave something this big floating out here abandoned? It must have cost a planetary budget to build, even for them. It’s functional, as near as we can tell. Heated, maintained atmosphere, working docking system. Why didn’t they take it with them?’

‘Who knows? Maybe they left in a hurry.’

‘Oh, come—’

‘No, I mean it. They pulled out of this whole region of space, or were wiped out, or wiped each other out. They left a lot of stuff. Whole cities of it.’

‘Yeah. Tanya, you can’t take a city away with you. Obviously you leave it. But this is a fucking starship. What could make them leave something like that behind?’

‘They left the orbitals around Harlan’s World.’

‘Those are automated.’

‘Well? So is this, to the extent of the maintenance systems.’

‘Yes, but it was built for use by a crew. You don’t have to be an archaeologue to see that.’

‘Kovacs, why don’t you go down to the Nagini and get some rest. Neither of us is up to exploring this place, and you’re giving me a headache.’

‘I think you’ll find that’s the radiation.’

‘No, I—’

Against my chest, my discarded induction mike burred. I blinked down at it for a moment, then picked it up and fitted it.

‘. . . just ly—. . .—ere,’ said Vongsavath’s voice, excited and laced heavily with static breakup. ‘What-ver . . . was . . . don’t thin—. . . died of starv . . .’

‘Vongsavath, this is Kovacs. Back up a minute. Slow down and start again.’

‘I said,’ the pilot enunciated with heavy emphasis. ‘Th—. . . ’ve found . . . ther body. A hu . . . body. Part . . . gang . . .—cked up at the dock . . .—ation. An—. . . looks li—. . . thing kill—. . . him.’

‘Alright, we’re on our way.’ I struggled to my feet, forcing myself to speak at a pace Vongsavath might have a chance of understanding through the interference. ‘Repeat. We are on our way. Stay put, back to back and don’t move. And shoot any fucking thing you see.’

‘What is it?’ asked Wardani.

‘Trouble.’

I looked around the platform and suddenly Sutjiadi’s words came rolling back over me.

We shouldn’t be out here at all.

Over my head, the Martian gazed blankly down at us. As far removed as any angel, and as much help.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

He was lying in one of the bulbous tunnels, about a kilometre deeper into the body of the vessel, suited up and still largely intact. In the soft blue light from the walls, the features behind the faceplate were clearly shrunken onto the bones of the skull, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have decomposed appreciably.

I knelt beside the corpse and peered at the sealed-in face.

‘Doesn’t look too bad, considering.’

‘Sterile air supply,’ said Deprez. He had his Sunjet cocked on his hip, and his eyes flickered constantly into the swollen roof-space overhead. Ten metres further on and looking slightly less comfortable with her weapon, Ameli Vongsavath prowled back and forth by the opening where the tunnel linked to the next bubble chamber. ‘And anti-bacterials, if it’s a halfway decent suit. Interesting. The tank’s still a third full. Whatever he died of, it wasn’t suffocation.’

‘Any damage to the suit?’

‘If there is, I cannot find it.’

I sat back on my heels. ‘Doesn’t make any sense. This air’s breathable. Why suit up?’

Deprez shrugged. ‘Why die in your suit on the outside of an open atmosphere lock? None of it makes any sense. I’m not trying any more.’

‘Movement,’ snapped Vongsavath.

I cleared the right-hand interface gun and joined her at the opening. The lower lip rose a little over a metre from the floor and curved upward like a wide smile before narrowing gradually up towards the roof on either side and finally closing in a tightly rounded apex. There were two metres of clear cover on each side and space to crouch below the lip. It was a sniper’s dream.

Deprez folded into the cover on the left, Sunjet stowed upright at his side. I crouched beside Vongsavath.

‘Sounded like something falling,’ murmured the pilot. ‘Not this chamber, maybe the next.’

‘Alright.’ I felt the neurachem sliding coldly along my limbs, charging my heart. Good to know that, under the bone-deep weariness of the radiation poisoning, the systems were still online. And after grasping so long at shadows, fighting faceless nanobe colonies, the ghosts of the departed, human and not, the promise of solid combat was almost a pleasure.

Scratch almost. I could feel pleasure tickling up the walls of my stomach at the thought of killing something.

Deprez raised one hand from the projection ramp of his Sunjet.

Listen.

This time I heard it - a stealthy scuffing sound across the chamber. I drew the other interface gun and settled into the cover of the raised lip. The Envoy conditioning squeezed the last of the tension out of my muscles and stowed it in coiled reflexes beneath a surface calm.

Something pale moved in a space on the other side of the next chamber. I breathed in and sighted on it.

Here we go.

‘You there, Ameli?’

Schneider’s voice.

I heard Vongsavath’s breath hiss out about the same time as mine. She climbed to her feet.

‘Schneider? What are you doing? I nearly shot you.’

‘Well, that’s fucking friendly.’ Schneider appeared clearly in the opening and swung his leg over. His Sunjet was slung carelessly across one shoulder. ‘We come rushing to the rescue, and you blow us away for our trouble.’

‘Is it another archaeologue?’ asked Hand, following Schneider through into the chamber. Incongruous in his right fist was a hand blaster. It was the first time, I realised, that I’d seen the executive armed since I’d known him. It didn’t look right on him. It marred his ninetieth-floor boardroom aura. It was inappropriate, a cracked front, jarring the way genuine battle coverage would in a Lapinee recruiting number. Hand was not a man who wielded weapons himself. Or at least not weapons as straightforward and grubby as a particle blaster.

Plus he’s got a stunner tucked away in his pocket.

Recently powered up to combat readiness, the Envoy conditioning twinged uneasily.

‘Come and have a look,’ I suggested, masking my disquiet.

The two new arrivals crossed the open ground to us with a blasé lack of caution that screamed at my combat nerves. Hand leaned his hands on the lip of the tunnel entrance and stared at the corpse. His features, I suddenly saw, were ashen with the radiation sickness. His stance looked braced, as if he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand up. There was a tic at the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been there when we touched down in the docking bay. Next to him, Schneider looked positively glowing with health.

I crushed out the flicker of sympathy. Welcome to the fucking club, Hand. Welcome to ground level on Sanction IV.

‘He’s suited up,’ Hand said.

‘Well spotted.’

‘How did he die?’

‘We don’t know.’ I felt another wave of weariness wash through me. ‘And to be honest I’m not in the mood for an autopsy. Let’s just get this buoy fixed, and get the fuck out of here.’

Hand gave me a strange look. ‘We’ll need to take him back.’

‘Well, you can help me do it, then.’ I walked back to the suited corpse and picked up one leg. ‘Grab a foot.’

‘You’re going to drag him?’

‘We, Hand. We are going to drag him. I don’t think he’ll mind.’

It took the best part of an hour to get the corpse back through the tortuous pipes and swooping chambers of the Martian vessel and aboard the Nagini. Most of that was taken up trying to locate the limpet cherries and illuminum arrows of our original mapping, but the radiation sickness took its toll along the way. At different points in the journey, Hand and I were taken with minor bouts of vomiting and had to give hauling the body over to Schneider and Deprez. Time emptying out for the final victims of Sauberville. I thought even Deprez, in his rad-resistant Maori sleeve, was starting to look ill as we fumbled the bulky suited burden through the last opening before the docking station. Now that I focused in the bluish light, Vongsavath too was starting to exhibit the same grey pallor and bruised eyes.

Do you see? whispered something that might have been Semetaire.

There seemed to be a huge, sickly sense of something waiting in the swollen heights of the ship’s architecture, hovering on parchment-thin wings, and watching.

When we were done, I stood staring into the antiseptic violet glow of the corpse locker after the others had left. The tumbled, spacesuited figures within looked like a gaggle of overly padded null G crashball players, collapsed on top of each other when the field goes down and the house lights come up at the end of the match. The pouches containing the remains of Cruickshank, Hansen and Dhasanapongsakul were almost hidden from view.

Dying. . . .

Not dying yet. . . .

The Envoy conditioning, worrying at something not over, not resolved.

The Ground is for Dead People. I saw Schneider’s illuminum tattoo like a beacon floating behind my eyes. His face, twisted unrecognisable with the pain of his injuries.

Dead people?

‘Kovacs?’ It was Deprez, standing in the hatch behind me. ‘Hand wants us all back on the platform. We’re taking food. You coming?’

‘I’ll catch you up.’

He nodded and dropped back to the floor outside. I heard voices and tried to blank them out.

Dying?

The Ground is

Motes of light circling like a datacoil display

The gate . . .

The gate, seen through the viewports of the Nagini’s cockpit . . .

The cockpit . . .

I shook my head irritably. Envoy intuition is an unreliable system at the best of times, and sinking fast from the weight of radiation poisoning isn’t a great state to be in when you try to deploy it.

Not dying yet.

I gave up on trying to see the pattern and let the vagueness wash over me, seeing where it would take me.

The violet light of the corpse locker, beckoning.

The discarded sleeves within.

Semetaire.

By the time I got back to the platform, dinner was nearly over. Beneath the mummified hovering of the two Martians, the rest of the company were sitting around the stripped-down buoy on inflatable loungers, picking without much enthusiasm at the remains of tab-pull field ration pans. I couldn’t really blame them - the way I was feeling, just the smell of the stuff made my throat close up. I choked a little on it, then hastily raised my hands as the sound brought a ripple of weapon-grabbing from the diners.

‘Hey, it’s me.’

Grumbling and guns discarded again. I made my way into the circle, looking for a seat. It was a lounger each, give or take. Jiang Jianping and Schneider had both seated themselves on the floor, Jiang cross-legged in a clear deck space, Schneider sprawled in front of Tanya Wardani’s lounger with a proprietorial air that made my mouth twitch. I waved an offered pan away and seated myself on the edge of Vongsavath’s lounger, wishing I felt a bit more up to this.

‘What kept you?’ asked Deprez.

‘Been thinking.’

Schneider laughed. ‘Man, that shit’s bad for you. Don’t do it. Here.’ He rolled a can of amphetamine cola across the deck towards me. I stopped it with one boot. ‘Remember what you told me back in the hospital? Don’t fucking think, soldier - didn’t you read your terms of enlistment?’

It raised a couple of half-hearted smiles. I nodded.

‘When’s he get here, Jan?’

‘Huh?’

‘I said,’ I kicked the can back at him. His hand jumped out and snagged it, very fast. ‘When’s he get here?’

What conversation there was dropped out of the air like Konrad Harlan’s one and only attempted gunship raid on Millsport. Particle-blasted down by the rattle of the can and the sudden silence that found it in Schneider’s closed fist.

His right fist. His empty left was a little too slow, whipping out for a weapon fractions of a second after I had the Kalashnikov levelled on him. He saw, and froze up.

‘Don’t,’ I told him.

At my side, I felt Vongsavath, still moving for the stunner in her pocket. I laid my free hand on her arm and shook my head slightly. Put some Envoy persuasion into my voice.

‘No need, Ameli.’

Her arm dropped back to her lap. Peripheral scan told me everyone else was sitting this one out so far. Even Wardani. I eased slightly.

‘When does he get here, Jan?’

‘Kovacs, I don’t know what the fuck—’

‘Yeah, you do. When’s he get here? Or don’t you want both hands any more?’

‘Who?’

‘Carrera. When’s he fucking get here, Jan. Last chance.’

‘I don’t—’ Schneider’s voice shrilled to an abrupt scream as the interface gun blew a hole through his hand and turned the can he was still holding into shredded metal. Blood and amphetamine cola splashed the air, curiously alike in colour. Flecks of it spotted Tanya Wardani’s face and she flinched violently.

It’s not a popularity contest.

‘What’s the matter, Jan?’ I asked gently. ‘That sleeve Carrera gave you not so hot on endorphin response?’

Wardani was on her feet, face unwiped. ‘Kovacs, he’s—’

‘Don’t tell me it’s the same sleeve, Tanya. You fucked him, now and two years ago. You know.’

She shook her head numbly. ‘The tattoo . . .’ she whispered.

‘The tattoo is new. Shiny new, even for illuminum. He got it redone, along with some basic cosmetic surgery as part of the package. Isn’t that right, Jan?’

The only thing that came out of Schneider was an agonised groaning. He held his shattered hand at arm’s length, staring at it in disbelief. Blood dripped on the deck.

All I felt was tired.

‘I figure you sold out to Carrera rather than go into virtual interrogation,’ I said, still scanning peripherally for reactions among the crowd. ‘Don’t blame you really. And if they offered you a fresh combat sleeve, full rad/chem resist specs and custom trimmed, well there aren’t many deals like that kicking about Sanction IV these days. And no telling how much dirty bombing both sides are going to do from now on in. Yeah, I’d have taken a deal like that.’

‘Do you have any evidence of this?’ asked Hand.

‘Apart from the fact he’s the only one of us still not going grey, you mean? Look at him, Hand. He’s held up better than the Maori sleeves, and they’re built for this shit.’

‘I would not call that proof,’ said Deprez thoughtfully. ‘Though it is odd.’

‘He’s fucking lying,’ gritted Schneider through his teeth. ‘If anyone’s running double for Carrera, it’s Kovacs. For Samedi’s sake, he’s a Wedge lieutenant.’

‘Don’t push your luck, Jan.’

Schneider glared back at me, keening his pain. Across the platform, I thought I heard the songspires pick it up.

‘Get me a fucking mediwrap,’ he pleaded. ‘Someone.’

Sun reached for her pack. I shook my head.

‘No. First he tells us how long we’ve got before Carrera comes through the gate. We need to be ready.’

Deprez shrugged. ‘Knowing this, are we not already ready?’

‘Not for the Wedge.’

Wardani crossed wordlessly to where Sun stood and snatched the medipack from its fibregrip holster on the other woman’s chest. ‘Give me that. If you uniformed fucks won’t do it, I will.’

She knelt at Schneider’s side and opened the pack, spilling the entire contents across the floor as she searched for the wraps.

‘The green tabbed envelopes,’ said Sun helplessly. ‘There.’

‘Thank you,’ gritted. She spared me a single glance. ‘What are you going to do now, Kovacs? Cripple me too?’

‘He would have sold us all out, Tanya. He has already.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I know he somehow managed to survive two weeks aboard a restricted access hospital without any legitimate documentation. I know he managed to get into the officers’ wards without a pass.’

Her face contorted. ‘Fuck you, Kovacs. When we were digging at Dangrek, he bluffed us a nine-week municipal power grant from the Sauberville authorities. With no fucking documentation.’

Hand cleared his throat.

‘I would have thought—’

And the ship lit up around us.

It sheeted through the space under the dome, fragments of suddenly erupting light swelling to solid blocks of translucent colour spun around the central structure. Sparkling discharge spat through the air between the colours, lines of power shaken out like storm-torn sails ripped loose of rigging. Trailing fountains of the stuff poured down from the upper levels of expanding rotating light, splashing off the deck and awakening a deeper glow within the translucent surface where they hit. Above, the stars blotted out. At the centre, the mummified corpses of the Martians disappeared, shrouded in the evolving gale of radiance. There was a sound to it all, but less heard than felt through my light-soaked skin, a building thrum and quiver in the air that felt like the adrenalin rush at the start of combat.

Vongsavath touched my arm.

‘Look outside,’ she said urgently. For all she was at my side, it felt as if she was yelling through a howling wind. ‘Look at the gate!’

I tipped my head back and threw the neurachem into seeing through the swirling currents of light to the crystal roof. At first, I couldn’t understand what Vongsavath was talking about. I couldn’t find the gate, and guessed it had to be somewhere on the other side of the ship, completing another orbit. Then I zeroed in on a vague blotch of grey, too dim to be . . .

And then I understood.

The storm of light and power raging around us was not confined to the air under the dome. Space around the Martian vessel was also seething to life. The stars had faded to dimly-seen gleamings through a curtain of something that stood hazed and shivering, kilometres beyond the orbit of the gate.

‘It’s a screen,’ said Vongsavath with certainty. ‘We’re under attack.’

Over our heads, the storm was settling. Motes of shadow swam in the light now, here scattering to corners like shoals of startled silverfry seen in negative, elsewhere exploding in slow tumbling motion to take up station on a hundred different levels around the re-emerging corpses of the two Martians. Sequenced splinters of flashing colour flickered at the corners of attenuated fields in shades of pearl and grey. The overall thrumming subsided and the ship began to talk to itself in more defined syllables. Fluting notes echoed across the platform, interspersed with organ deep pulses of sound.

‘This is—’ My mind spun back to the narrow trawler cabin, the softly awake spiral of the datacoil, the motes of data swept to the top corner. ‘This is a datasystem?’

‘Well spotted.’ Tanya Wardani stalked under the trailing skirts of radiance and pointed up to the pattern of shadow and light gathered around the two corpses. There was a peculiar exultation on her face. ‘A little more extensive than your average desktop holo, isn’t it. I imagine those two have the primary con. Shame they’re not in any state to use it, but then I also imagine the ship is capable of looking after itself.’

‘That depends on what’s coming,’ said Vongsavath grimly. ‘Check out the upper screens. The grey background.’

I followed her arm. High up, near the curve of the dome a pearl surface ten metres across displayed a milky version of the starscape now dimmed by the shield outside.

Something moved there, shark-slim and angular against the stars.

‘What the fuck is that?’ asked Deprez.

‘Can’t you guess?’ Wardani was almost shivering with the strength of whatever was slopping around inside her. She stood centre stage to us all. ‘Look up. Listen to the ship. She’s telling you what it is.’

The Martian datasystem was still talking, in no language anyone was equipped to understand, but with an urgency that required no translator. The splintered lights - technoglyph numerals jolted through me, almost as knowledge; it’s a countdown - flashed over like digit counters tracking a missile. Querulous shrieks fluted up and down an unhuman scale.

‘Incoming,’ said Vongsavath, hypnotised. ‘We’re getting ready to engage with something out there. Automated battle systems.’

The Nagini—

I whipped around.

‘Schneider,’ I bellowed.

But Schneider was gone.

‘Deprez,’ I yelled it back over my shoulder, already on my way across the platform. ‘Jiang. He’s going for the Nagini.’

The ninja was with me by the time I reached the downward spiral pipe, Deprez a couple of steps behind. Both men hefted Sunjets, stocks folded back for easy handling. At the bottom of the pipe I thought I heard the clatter of someone falling, and a shriek of pain. I felt a brief snarl of wolf go through me.

Prey!

We ran, slithering and stumbling on the steep downward incline until we hit bottom and the empty, cherry-flashed expanse of the first chamber. There was blood smeared on the floor where Schneider had fallen. I knelt beside it and felt my lips draw back from my teeth. I got up and looked at my two companions.

‘He won’t be moving that fast. Don’t kill him if you can avoid it. We still need to know about Carrera.’

‘Kovacs!!’

It was Hand’s voice from up the pipe, bawling with repressed fury. Deprez dropped me a taut grin. I shook my head and sprinted for the exit to the next chamber.

Hunt!

It isn’t easy running when every cell in your body is trying to shut down and die, but the wolf gene splice and whatever else the Wedge biotechs had thrown into the cocktail rose through the midst of the nausea and snarled down the weariness. The Envoy conditioning rode it upward.

Check functionality.

Thanks, Virginia.

Around us the ship quivered and shook to wakefulness. We ran through corridors that pulsed with sequenced rings of the purple light I’d seen splash off the edge of the gate when it opened. In one chamber, one of the spine-backed machines moved to intercept us, facings awake with technoglyph display and chittering softly. I fetched up short, interface guns leaping to my hands, Deprez and Jiang flanking me. The impasse held for a long moment and then the machine slouched aside, muttering.

We exchanged glances. Beyond the tortured panting in my chest and the thudding in my temples, I found my mouth had bent itself into a smile.

‘Come on.’

A dozen chambers and corridors further on, Schneider proved smarter than I’d expected. As Jiang and I burst into the open of a bubble, Sunjet fire spat and crackled from the far exit. I felt the sting of a near miss across my cheek and then the ninja at my elbow had floored me with a sideways flung arm. The next blast lashed where I had been. Jiang hit, rolled and joined me on the floor, face up, looking at a smouldering cuff with mild distaste.

Deprez slammed to a halt in the shadow of the entrance we’d come through, eye bent to the sighting system of his weapon. The barrage of covering fire he laid down boiled up and down the edges of Schneider’s ambush point and - I narrowed my eyes - did absolutely no damage to the material of the exitway. Jiang rolled under the strafing beam and got a narrower angle on the corridor beyond. He fired once, squinted into the glare and shook his head.

‘Gone,’ he said, climbing to his feet and offering me his hand.

‘I, uh, I, thanks.’ I got upright. ‘Thanks for the push.’

He nodded curtly, and loped off across the chamber. Deprez clapped me on the shoulder and followed. I shook my head clear and went after them. At the exitway I pressed my hand against the edge where Deprez had fired. It wasn’t even warm.

The induction rig speaker fizzled against my throat. Hand’s voice came through in static-chewed incoherence. Jiang froze ahead of us, head cocked.

‘. . . vacs, an . . . me—. . . ow.—peat, re . . . ow . . .’

‘Say. Again?’ Jiang, spacing his words.

‘—saiiii . . .—port no . . .—’

Jiang looked back at me. I made a chopping gesture and knocked my own rig loose. Finger stab forward. The ninja unlocked his posture and moved on, fluid as a Total Body dancer. Somewhat less graceful, we went after him.

What lead Schneider had on us had lengthened. We were moving more slowly now, edging up to entrances and exits in approved covert assault fashion. Twice we picked up movement ahead of us and had to creep forward, only to find another wakened machine ambling about the empty chambers chuntering to itself. One of them followed us for a while like a stray dog in search of a master.

Two chambers out from the docking bay, we heard the Nagini’s drives powering up. The covert assault caution shattered. I broke into a staggering sprint. Jiang passed me, then Deprez. Trying to keep up, I doubled over, cramping and retching, halfway across the last chamber. Deprez and the ninja were twenty metres ahead of me when they ducked around the entrance to the bay. I wiped a thin string of bile away from my mouth and straightened up.

A shrilling, ramming, detonating scream, like brakes applied fleetingly to the whole expanding universe.

The Nagini’s ultravibe battery firing in a confined space.

I dropped the Sunjet, had both hands halfway to my ears and the pulse stopped as abruptly as it had started. Deprez staggered back into view, painted bloody from head to foot, Sunjet gone. Behind him, the whine of the Nagini’s drives deepened to a roar as Schneider powered her up and out. A bang of disrupted air at the atmosphere baffles, barrelling back down the funnel of the docking bay and buffeting my face like a warm wind. Then nothing. Aching silence, tautened with the high-pitched hum of abused hearing trying to deal with the sudden absence of noise.

In the whining quiet, I groped after my Sunjet and made it to where Deprez was slumped on the floor, back to the curving wall. He was staring numbly at his hands and the gore that coated them. His face was streaked red and black with the same stuff. Under the blood, his chameleochrome battledress was already turning to match.

I made a sound and he looked up.

‘Jiang?’

‘This.’ He lifted his hands towards me, and his features twisted momentarily, like the face of a baby not sure if it’s going to cry. The words came one at a time, as if he was having to stop and glue them together. ‘Is. Jiang. This is.’ His fists knotted up. ‘Fuck.’

At my throat, the induction rig fizzled impotently. Across the chamber, a machine moved and sniggered at us.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A Man Down is not a Man Dead. Leave No Stack Behind.

Most tight spec ops units like to sing that particular song; the Envoy Corps certainly did. But in the face of modern weaponry it’s getting harder and harder to sing it with a straight face. The ultravibe cannon had splashed Jiang Jianping evenly across ten square metres of docking bay deck and containing wall. None of the shredded and shattered tissue was any more solid than the stuff dripping off Luc Deprez. We walked back and forth through it for a while, scraping streaks in it with our boots, crouching to check tiny black clots of gore, but we found nothing.

After ten minutes, Deprez said it for us both.

‘We are wasting our time, I think.’

‘Yeah.’ I lifted my head as something belled through the hull beneath our feet. ‘I think Vongsavath was right. We’re taking fire.’

‘We go back?’

I remembered the induction rig and hooked it back on. Whoever had been yelling at us previously had given up; there was nothing on the channel but interference and a weird sobbing that might have been a carrier wave.

‘This is Kovacs. Repeat, this is Kovacs. Status please.’

There was a long pause, then Sutjiadi’s voice crashed in the mike.

‘—pened?—e . . .—aw . . . launch. Schnei—. . .—ay?’

‘You’re breaking up, Markus. Status please. Are we under attack?’

There was a burst of distortion and what sounded like two or three voices trying to break in over Sutjiadi. I waited.

Finally, it was Tanya Wardani that came through, almost clear.

‘. . .—ack here, . . .—acs . . .—afe. We . . .—ny, . . .—ger.— peat, no . . . da . . .—ger.’

The hull sang out again, like a struck temple gong. I looked dubiously down at the deck beneath my feet.

‘Safe, did you say?’

‘—essss . . .—o dang—. . .—ack immedi—. . .—afe.—peat, safe.’

I looked at Deprez and shrugged.

‘Must be a new definition of the word.’

‘Then we go back?’

I looked around, up at the stacked snake-body tiers of the docking bay, then back at his gore-painted face. Decided.

‘Looks that way.’ I shrugged again. ‘It’s Wardani’s turf. She hasn’t been wrong yet.’

Back on the platform, the Martian datasystems had settled to a brilliant constellation of purpose, while the humans stood beneath it all and gaped like worshippers getting an unexpected miracle.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

An array of screens and displays was stitched across the space around the central structure. Some were obvious analogues of any dreadnought’s battle systems, some defied comparison with anything I’d ever seen. Modern combat gives you a familiarity with compound datadisplay, an ability to glean the detail you need from a dozen different screens and readouts at speed and without conscious thought. Envoy Corps conditioning refines the skill even further, but in the massive radiant geometries of the Martian datasystem, I could feel myself floundering. Here and there, I spotted comprehensible input, images that I could relate back to what I knew was happening in the space around us, but even amongst these elements there were chunks missing where the screens gave out frequencies for unhuman eyes. Elsewhere, I couldn’t have told if the displays were complete, defective or totally fried.

Of the identifiable dataware, I spotted real-time visual telemetry, multi-coloured spectrograph sketches, trajectory mappers and battle dynamic analytical models, blast yield monitors and graphic magazine inventory, something that might have been grav gradient notation . . .

Centre screen in every second display, the attacker came on.

Skating down the curve of solar gravity at a rakish side-on angle, she was a slim, surgical-looking fusion of rods and elliptical curves that screamed warship. Hard on the heels of the thought, the proof dumped itself in my lap. On a screen that did not show real space, weaponry winked at us across the emptiness. Outside the dome, the shields our host had thrown up shimmered and fluoresced. The ship’s hull shuddered underfoot.

Meaning . . .

I felt my mind dilate as I got it.

‘Don’t know what those are,’ said Sun conversationally, as I arrived at her side. She seemed entranced by what she was watching. ‘Faster-than-light weaponry at any rate; she’s got to be nearly an astronomical unit out and we’re getting hit instantaneously every time. They don’t seem to do much damage, though.’

Vongsavath nodded. ‘Prelim systems scramblers, I’d guess. To fuck up the defence net. Maybe it’s some kind of grav disruptor, I’ve heard Mitoma are doing research into—’ She broke off. ‘Look, here comes the next torpedo spread. Man, that’s a lot of hardware for a single launch.’

She was right. The space ahead of the attacking vessel had filled up with tiny golden traces so dense they could have been interference across the surface of the screen. Secondary displays yanked in detail and I saw how the swarm wove intricate mutual distract-and-protect evasion across millions of kilometres of space.

‘These are FTL too, I think.’ Sun shook her head. ‘The screens deal with it somehow, gives a representation. I think this has all already happened.’

The vessel I was standing on thrummed distantly, separate vibrations coming in from a dozen different angles. Outside, the shields shimmered again, and I got the vague sense of a shoal of something dark slipping out in the microsecond pulses of lowered energy.

‘Counterlaunch,’ said Vongsavath with something like satisfaction in her voice. ‘Same thing again.’

It was too fast to watch. Like trying to keep track of laser fire. On the screens, the new swarm flashed violet, threading through the approaching sleet of gold and detonating in blots of light that inked out as soon as they erupted. Every flash took specks of gold with it until the sky between the two vessels emptied out.

‘Beautiful,’ breathed Vongsavath. ‘Fucking beautiful.’

I woke up.

‘Tanya, I heard the word “safe.”’ I gestured up at the battle raging in rainbow representation over our heads. ‘You call this safe?’

The archaeologue said nothing. She was staring at Luc Deprez’s bloodied face and clothing.

‘Relax, Kovacs.’ Vongsavath pointed out one of the trajectory mappers. ‘It’s a cometary, see. Wardani read the same thing off the glyphs. Just going to swing past and trade damage, then on and out again.’

‘A cometary?’

The pilot spread her hands. ‘Post-engagement graveyard orbit, automated battle systems. It’s a closed loop. Been going on for thousands of years, looks like.’

‘What happened to Jan?’ Wardani’s voice was stretched taut.

‘He left without us.’ A thought struck me. ‘He made the gate, right? You saw that?’

‘Yeah, like a prick up a cunt,’ said Vongsavath with unexpected venom. ‘Man could fly when he needed to. That was my fucking ship.’

‘He was afraid,’ said the archaeologue numbly.

Luc Deprez stared at her out of his blood-masked face. ‘We were all afraid, Mistress Wardani. It is not an excuse.’

‘You fool.’ She looked around at us. ‘All of you, you fucking. Fools. He wasn’t afraid of this. This fucking. Light show. He was afraid of him.’

The jerked nod was for me. Her eyes nailed mine.

‘Where’s Jiang?’ asked Sun suddenly. In the storm of alien technology around us, it had taken that long to notice the quiet ninja’s absence.

‘Luc’s wearing most of him,’ I said brutally. ‘The rest is lying back on the docking bay floor, courtesy of the Nagini’s ultravibe. I guess Jan must have been afraid of him as well, huh Tanya?’

Wardani’s gaze flinched aside.

‘And his stack?’ Nothing showed on Sutjiadi’s face, but I didn’t have to see it. The wolf splice custom was trying to give me the same sinus-aching ride back behind the bridge of my nose.

Pack member down.

I locked it down with Envoy displacement trickery. Shook my head.

‘Ultravibe, Markus. He got the full blast.’

‘Schneider—’ Vongsavath broke off and had to start again. ‘I will—’

‘Forget about Schneider,’ I told her. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Get in the queue.’

‘No, he’s dead, Ameli. Really dead.’ And as their eyes fixed on me, as Tanya Wardani looked back disbelieving. ‘I mined the Nagini’s fuel cells. Set to blow on acceleration under planetary gravity. He vaporised the minute he crashed the gate. Be lucky if there’s tinsel left.’

Over our heads, another wave of gold and violet missiles found each other in the machine dance and, flickering, wiped each other out.

‘You blew up the Nagini?’ It was hard to tell what Vongsavath was feeling, her voice was so choked. ‘You blew up my ship?’

‘If the wreckage is so dispersed,’ said Deprez thoughtfully, ‘Carrera may assume we were all killed in the explosion.’

‘If Carrera is actually out there, that is.’ Hand was looking at me the way he’d looked at the songspires. ‘If this isn’t all an Envoy ploy.’

‘Oh, what’s the matter, Hand? Did Schneider try to cut some kind of deal with you when you went walkabout?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kovacs.’

Maybe he didn’t. I was abruptly too weary to care one way or the other.

‘Carrera will come out here whatever happens,’ I told them. ‘He’s thorough that way, and he’ll want to see the ship. He’ll have some way of standing down the nanobe system. But he won’t come yet. Not with little pieces of the Nagini littering the landscape, and emissions pick-up from the other side of the gate that reads like a full-scale naval engagement. That’s going to back him up a little. It gives us some time.’

‘Time to do what?’ asked Sutjiadi.

The moment hung, and the Envoy crept out to play in it. Across splayed peripheral vision, I watched their faces and their stance, measured the possible allegiances, the possible betrayals. Locked down the emotions, peeled away the useful nuances they could give me, and dumped the remainder. Tied the wolf pack loyalty off, smothered whatever feeling still swam murkily in the space between Tanya Wardani and myself. Descended into the structured cold of Envoy mission time. Decided, and played my last card.

‘Before I mined the Nagini, I stripped the spacesuits off the corpses we recovered, and stashed them in a recess in the first chamber outside the docking bay. Leaving aside the one with the blasted helmet, that’s four viable suits. They’re standard issue pullons. The airpacks will replenish from unpressured atmosphere environments like this one. Set the valves, they just suck it up. We leave in two waves. Someone from the first wave comes back with spare suits.’

‘All this,’ jeered Wardani, ‘with Carrera waiting on the other side of the gate to snap us up. I don’t think so.’

‘I’m not suggesting we do it now,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m just suggesting we go back and recover the suits while there’s time.’

‘And when Carrera comes aboard? What do you suggest we do then?’ The hatred welling up in Wardani’s face was one of the uglier things I’d seen recently. ‘Hide from him?’

‘Yes.’ I watched for reactions. ‘Exactly that. I suggest we hide. We move deeper into the ship and we wait. Whatever team Carrera deploys will have enough hardware to find traces of us in the docking bay and other places. But they won’t find anything that can’t be explained by our presence here before we all boarded the Nagini and blew ourselves to tinsel. The logical thing to do is assume that we all died. He’ll do a sweep, he’ll deploy a claim buoy, just the way we planned to, and then he’ll leave. He doesn’t have the personnel or the time to occupy a hulk over fifty klicks long.’

‘No,’ said Sutjiadi, ‘But he’ll leave a caretaker squad.’

I made an impatient gesture. ‘Then we’ll kill them.’

‘And I have no doubt there’ll be a second detachment waiting on the other side of the gate,’ Deprez said sombrely.

‘So what? Jesus, Luc. You used to do this for a living, didn’t you?’

The assassin gave me an apologetic smile. ‘Yes, Takeshi. But we are all of us sick. And this is the Wedge you are talking about. As many as twenty men here, perhaps the same again on the other side of the gate.’

‘I don’t think we really—’ A sudden tremor jagged across the deck, enough to make Hand and Tanya Wardani stumble slightly. The rest of us rode it out with combat-conditioned ease, but still . . .

A moan in the fibres of the hull. The songspires across the platform seemed to gust sympathy at a level on the edge of hearing.

A vague unease coiled through me. Something was wrong.

I looked up at the screens and watched the attacking systems wiped out once again by the defence net. It all seemed to be taking place that little bit closer in this time.

‘You did all decide, while I was gone, that we were safe here, right?’

‘We did the maths, Kovacs.’ Vongsavath nodded inclusively at Sun and Wardani. The systems officer inclined her head. Wardani just stared holes in me. ‘Looks like our friend out there hooks up with us about once every twelve hundred years. And given the dating on most of the ruins on Sanction IV, that means this engagement has been fought about a hundred times already with no result.’

But still the feeling. Envoy senses, cranked up to snapping, and feeling something not right, something so far wrong, in fact, I could almost smell the scorching.

. . . sobbing carrier wave . . .

. . . songspires . . .

. . . time slowing down . . .

I stared at the screens.

We need to get out of here.

‘Kovacs?’

‘We need to—’

I felt the words moth their way out between dry lips, as if someone else was using the sleeve against my will, and then they stopped.

From the attacker, came the real attack at last.

It burst from the leading surfaces of the vessel like something alive. An amorphous, turbulent dark-body blob of something spat out at us like congealed hatred. On secondary screens you could see how it tore up the fabric of space around it and left a wake of outraged reality behind. It didn’t take much to guess what we were looking at.

Hyperspace weaponry.

Experia fantasy stuff. And the sick wet dream of every naval commander in the Protectorate.

The ship, the Martian ship - and only now I grasped with instinctive Envoy-intuited knowledge that the other was not Martian, looked nothing like - pulsed in a way that sent nausea rolling through my guts and set every tooth in my head instantly on edge. I staggered and went down on one knee.

Something vomited into the space ahead of the attack. Something boiled and flexed and split wide open with a vaguely sensed detonation. I felt a recoil tremor go throbbing through the hull around me, a disquiet that went deeper than simple real-space vibration.

On the screen, the dark-body projectile shattered apart, flinging out oddly sticky-looking particles of itself. I saw the outside shield fluoresce, shudder and go out like a blown candle flame.

The ship screamed.

There was no other way to describe it. It was a rolling, modulating cry that seemed to emanate from the air around us. It was a sound so massive, it made the shriek of the Nagini’s ultravibe battery seem almost tolerable. But where the ultravibe blast had rammed and battered at my hearing, this sound sliced and passed through as effortlessly as a laser scalpel. I knew, even as I made the movement, that clapping hands over my ears would have no effect.

I did it anyway.

The scream rose, held and finally rolled away across the platform, replaced by a less agonising pastiche of fluting alert sounds from the datasystems and a splinter-thin fading echo from—

I whipped around.

—from the songspires.

This time there could be no doubt. Softly, like wind sawing over a worn stone edge, the songspires had collected the ship’s scream and were playing it back to each other in skewed cadences that could almost have been music.

It was the carrier wave.

Overhead, something seemed to whisper response. Looking up, I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the dome.

Outside, the shields came back on.

‘Fuck,’ said Hand, getting to his feet. ‘What was th—’

‘Shut up.’ I stared across at the place I thought I’d seen the shadow but the loss of the starscape background had drowned it in pearlish light. A little to the left, one of the Martian corpses gazed down at me from amidst the radiance of the datasystem. The sobbing of the songspires murmured on, tugging at something in the pit of my stomach.

And then, again, the gut-deep, sickening pulse and the thrum through the deck underfoot.

‘We’re returning fire,’ said Sun.

On screen, another dark-body mass, hawked out of some battery deep in the belly of the Martian vessel, spat at the closing attacker. This time the recoil went on longer.

‘This is incredible,’ said Hand. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Believe it,’ I told him tonelessly. The sense of impending disaster had not gone with the decaying echo of the last attack. If anything, it was stronger. I tried to summon the Envoy intuition through layers of weariness and dizzying nausea.

‘Incoming,’ called Vongsavath. ‘Block your ears.’

This time, the alien ship’s missile got a lot closer before the Martian defence net caught and shredded it. The shockwaves from the blast drove us all to the ground. It felt as if the whole ship had been twisted around us like a wrung-out cloth. Sun threw up. The outside shield went down and stayed down.

Braced for the ship to scream again, I heard instead a long, low keening that scraped talons along the tendons of my arms and around my ribcage. The songspires trapped it and fed it back, higher now, no longer a fading echo but a field emanation in its own right.

I heard someone hiss behind me, and turned to see Wardani, staring up in disbelief. I followed her gaze and saw the same shadow flitting clearly across the upper regions of the data display.

‘What . . .’ It was Hand, voice fading out as another patch of darkness flapped across from the left and seemed to dance briefly with the first.

By then I knew, and oddly my first thought was that Hand, of all people, ought not to have been surprised, that he ought to have got it first.

The first shadow dipped and swooped around the corpse of the Martian.

I looked for Wardani, found her eyes and the numb disbelief there.

‘No,’ she whispered, little more than mouthing the word. ‘It can’t be.’

But it was.

They came from all sides of the dome, at first in ones and twos, sliding up the crystalline curve and peeling off into sudden full three-dimensional existence, shaken loose with each convulsive distortion that their ship suffered as the battle raged outside. They peeled off and swooped down to floor level, then soared up again and settled to circling the central structure. They didn’t seem to be aware of us in any way that mattered, but none of them touched us. Overhead, their passage had no effect on the datadisplay system other than a slight rippling as they banked, and some of them seemed even to pass occasionally through the substance of the dome and out into hard space. More came funnelling up through the tube that had first led us to the platform, packing into a flying space that was already becoming crowded.

The sound they made was the same keening the ship had begun earlier, the same dirge that the songspires now gave out from the floor, the same carrier wave I’d picked up on the comset. Traces of the cherry-and-mustard odour wafted through the air, but tinged now with something else, something scorched and old.

Hyperspatial distortion broke and burst in the space outside, the shields came back on, tinged a new, violet colour and the ship’s hull was awash with recoil as its batteries launched repeatedly at the other vessel. I was beyond caring. All feeling of physical discomfort was gone, frozen away to a single tightness in my chest and a growing pressure behind my eyes. The platform seemed to have expanded massively around me and the rest of the company were now too far out across the vast flattened space to be relevant.

I was abruptly aware that I was weeping myself, a dry sobbing in the small spaces of my sinuses.

‘Kovacs!’

I turned, feeling as if I was thigh-deep in a torrent of icy water, and saw Hand, jacket pocket flapped back, raising his stunner.

The distance, I later reckoned, was less than five metres but it seemed to take forever to cross it. I waded forward, blocked the weapon arm at a pressure point and smashed an elbow strike into his face. He howled and went down, stunner skittering away across the platform. I dropped after him, looking through blurred vision for his throat. One weak arm fended me off. He was screaming something.

My right hand stiffened into the killing blade. Neurachem worked to focus my eyes through blurring.

‘—all die, you fucking—’

I drew back for the blow. He was sobbing now.

Blurring.

Water in my eyes.

I wiped a hand across them, blinked and saw his face. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. The sobbing barely made words.

‘What?’ My hand loosened and I belted him hard across the face. ‘What did you say?’

He gulped. Drew breath.

‘Shoot me. Shoot us all. Use the stunner. Kovacs. This is what killed the others.’

And I realised my own face was soaked in tears, my eyes filled with them. I could feel the weeping in my swollen throat, the same ache that the songspires had reflected back, not from the ship, I knew suddenly, but from her millennia-departed crew. The knife running through me was the grief of the Martians, an alien pain stored here in ways that made no sense outside of folktales around a campfire out on Mitcham’s Point, a frozen, unhuman hurt in my chest and the pit of my stomach that would not be dismissed, and a not-quite-tuned note in my ears that I knew when it got here would crack me open like a raw egg.

Vaguely, I felt the rip and warp of another dark-body near-miss. The flocking shadows above my head swirled and shrieked, beating upwards against the dome.

‘Do it, Kovacs!’

I staggered upright. Found my own stunner, and fired it into Hand. Looked for the others.

Deprez, with his hands at his temples, swaying like a tree in a gale. Sun, apparently sinking to her knees. Sutjiadi between the two of them, unclear in the shimmering perspectives of my own tears. Wardani, Vongsavath . . .

Too far, too far off in the density of light and keening pain.

The Envoy conditioning scrabbled after perspective, shut down the flood of emotion that the weeping around me had unlocked. Distance closed. My senses reeled back in.

The wailing of the gathered shadows intensified as I overrode my own psychic defences and dimmer switches. I was breathing it in like Guerlain Twenty, corroding some containment system inside that lay beyond analytical physiology. I felt the damage come on, swelling to bursting point.

I threw up the stunner and started firing.

Deprez. Down.

Sutjiadi, spinning as the assassin fell at his side, disbelief on his face.

Down.

Beyond him, Sun Liping kneeling, eyes clamped tightly shut, sidearm lifting to her own face. Systems analysis. Last resort. She’d worked it out, just didn’t have a stunner. Didn’t know anyone else did either.

I staggered forward, yelling at her. Inaudible in the storm of grief. The blaster snugged under her chin. I snapped off a shot with the stunner, missed. Got closer.

The blaster detonated. It ripped up through her chin on narrow beam and flashed a sword of pale flame out the top of her head before the blowback circuit cut in and killed the beam. She toppled sideways, steam curling from her mouth and eyes.

Something clicked in my throat. A tiny increment of loss welling up and dripping into the ocean of grief the songspires were singing me. My mouth opened, maybe to scream some of the pain out, but there was too much to pass. It locked soundless in my throat.

Vongsavath stumbled into me from the side. I spun and grabbed her. Her face was wide-eyed with shock, drenched in tears. I tried to push her away, to give her some distance on the stunblast, but she clung to me, moaning deep in her throat.

The bolt convulsed her and she dropped on top of Sun’s corpse.

Wardani stood on the other side of both of them, staring at me.

Another dark-body blast. The winged shadows above us screamed and wept and I felt something tearing inside me

‘No,’ said Wardani.

‘Cometary,’ I shouted at her across the shrieking. ‘It has to pass, we just—’

Then something really did tear, somewhere, and I dropped to the deck, curled around the pain, gaping like a gaffed bottleback with the immensity of it.

Sun - dead by her own hand for the second fucking time.

Jiang - smeared pulp on the docking bay floor. Stack gone.

Cruickshank, ripped apart, stack gone. Hansen ditto. The count unreeled, speed review across time, thrashing like a snake in its death throes.

The stink of the camp I’d pulled Wardani out of, children starving under robot guns and the governance of a burnt-out wirehead excuse for a human being.

The hospital ship, limping interim space between killing fields.

The platoon, pack members torn apart around me by smart shrapnel.

Two years of slaughter on Sanction IV.

Before that, the Corps.

Innenin, Jimmy de Soto and the others, minds gnawed hollow by the Rawling virus.

Before that, other worlds. Other pain, most of it not mine. Death and Envoy deceit.

Before that, Harlan’s World and the gradual emotional maiming of childhood in the Newpest slums. The life-saving leap into the cheerful brutality of the Protectorate Marines. Days of enforcement.

Strung-out lives, lived in the sludge of human misery. Pain suppressed, packed down, stored for an inventory that never came.

Overhead the Martians circled and screamed their grief. I could feel my own scream building, welling up inside, and knew it was going to rip me apart coming out.

And then discharge.

And then the dark.

I tumbled into it, thankful, hoping that the ghosts of the unavenged dead might pass me in the darkness unseeing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It’s cold down by the shoreline, and there’s a storm coming in. Black flecks of fallout mingle with flurries of dirty snow, and the wind lifts splatters of spray off the rumpled sea. Reluctant waves dump themselves on sand turned muddy green beneath the glowering sky. I hunch my shoulders inside my jacket, hands jammed into pockets, face closed like a fist against the weather.

Further up the curve of the beach, a fire casts orange-red light at the sky. A solitary figure sits on the landward side of the flames, huddled in a blanket. Though I don’t want to, I start in that direction. Whatever else, the fire looks warm, and there’s nowhere else to go.

The gate is closed.

That sounds wrong, something I know, for some reason, isn’t true.

Still. . . .

As I get closer, my disquiet grows. The huddled figure doesn’t move or acknowledge my approach. Before I was worried that it might be someone hostile, but now that misgiving shrivels up to make space for the fear that this is someone I know, and that they’re dead—

Like everyone else I know.

Behind the figure at the fire, I see there’s a structure rising from the sand, a huge skeletal cross with something bound loosely to it. The driving wind and the needle-thin sleet it carries won’t let me look up far enough to see clearly what the object is.

The wind is keening now, like something I once heard and was afraid of.

I reach the fire and feel the blast of warmth across my face. I take my hands from my pockets and hold them out.

The figure stirs. I try not to notice. I don’t want this.

‘Ah - the penitent.’

Semetaire. The sardonic tone has gone; maybe he thinks he doesn’t need it any more. Instead there’s something approaching compassion. The magnanimous warmth of someone who’s won a game whose outcome they never had that much doubt about.

‘I’m sorry?’

He laughs. ‘Very droll. Why don’t you kneel at the fire, it’s warmer that way.’

‘I’m not that cold,’ I say, shivering, and risk a look at his face. His eyes glitter in the firelight. He knows.

‘It’s taken you a long time to get here, Wedge Wolf,’ he says kindly. ‘We can wait a little longer.’

I stare through my splayed fingers at the flames. ‘What do you want from me, Semetaire?’

‘Oh, come now. What do I want? You know what I want.’ He shrugs off the blanket and rises gracefully to his feet. He is taller than I remember, elegantly menacing in his ragged black coat. He fits the top hat on his head at a rakish angle. ‘I want the same as all the others.’

‘And what’s that?’ I nod up at the thing crucified behind him.

‘That?’ For the first time, he seems off balance. A little embarrassed, maybe. ‘That’s, well. Let’s say that’s an alternative. An alternative for you, that is, but I really don’t think you want to—’

I look up at the looming structure, and suddenly it’s easier to see through the wind and sleet and fallout.

It’s me.

Pinned in place with swathes of netting, dead grey flesh pressing into the spaces between the cord, body sagging away from the rigid structure of the scaffold, head sunk forward on the neck. The gulls have been at my face. The eyesockets are empty and the cheeks tattered. Bone shows through in patches across my forehead.

It must, I think distantly, be cold up there.

‘I did warn you.’ A trace of the old mockery is creeping back into his voice. He’s getting impatient. ‘It’s an alternative, but I think you’ll agree it’s a lot more comfortable down here by the fire. And there is this.’

He opens one gnarled hand and shows me the cortical stack, fresh blood and tissue still clinging to it in specks. I slap a hand to the back of my neck and find a ragged hole there, a gaping space at the base of my skull into which my fingers slip with horrifying ease. Through on the other side of the damage, I can feel the slick, spongy weight of my own cerebral tissue.

‘See,’ he says, almost regretfully.

I pull my fingers loose again. ‘Where did you get that, Semetaire?’

‘Oh, these are not hard to come by. Especially on Sanction IV.’

‘You got Cruickshank’s?’ I ask him, with a sudden surge of hope.

He hesitates fractionally. ‘But of course. They all come to me, sooner or later.’ He nods to himself. ‘Sooner or later.’

The repetition sounds forced. Like he’s trying to convince. I feel the hope die down again, guttering out.

‘Later then,’ I tell him, holding my hands out to the fire one more time. The wind buffets at my back.

‘What are you talking about?’ The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.

‘I’m going now. There’s nothing for me here.’

‘Go?’ His voice turns abruptly ugly. He holds up the stack between thumb and forefinger, red glinting in the firelight. ‘You’re not going anywhere, my wolf-pack puppy. You’re staying here with me. We’ve got some accounts to process.’

This time, I’m the one that laughs.

‘Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.’

‘You. Will.’ One hand reaching crooked across the fire for me. ‘Stay.’

And the Kalashnikov is in my hand, the gun heavy with a full clip of antipersonnel rounds. Well, wouldn’t you know it.

‘Got to go,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell Hand you said hello.’

He looms, grasping, eyes gleaming.

I level the gun.

‘You were warned, Semetaire.’

I shoot into the space below the hatbrim. Three shots, tight-spaced.

It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three metres beyond the fire. I wait for a moment to see if he’ll get up, but he’s gone. The flames dampen down visibly with his departure.

I look up and see that the cruciform structure is empty, whatever that means. I remember the dead face it held up before and squat by the fire, warming myself until it gutters down to embers.

In the glowing ash, I spot the cortical stack, burnt clean and metallic shiny amidst the last charred fragments of wood, I reach in amongst the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.

It scorches a little, but that’s OK.

I stow it and the Kalashnikov, thrust my rapidly chilling hands back into the pockets of my jacket and straighten up, looking around.

It’s cold, but somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

PART FIVE

Divided Loyalties

Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. FACE THE FACTS. THEN act.

Quellcrist Falconer Speech before the Assault on Millsport

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Night sky starscape, piercingly clear.

I looked at it dully for a while, watching a peculiarly fragmented red glow creep up over it from the left edge of my vision, then retreat again.

This ought to mean something to you, Tak.

Like some kind of code, webbed into the way the glow shattered across the rim of my vision, something designed in the way it levered itself up and then sank down again by fractions.

Like glyphs. Like numerals.

And then it did mean something to me, and I felt a cold wave of sweat break across my entire body as I realised where I was.

The red glow was a head-up display, printing out across the bowl of the spacesuit faceplate I was lying trapped beneath.

This is no fucking night sky, Tak.

I was outside.

And then the weight of recall, of personality and past came crashing in on me, like a micrometeorite punching through the thin seal of transparency that was keeping my life in.

I flailed my arms and found I couldn’t move from the wrists up. My fingers groped around a rigid framework under my back, the faint thrum of a motor system. I reached around, twisting my head.

‘Hey, he’s coming out of it.’

It was a familiar voice, even through the thin metallic straining of the suit’s comsystem. Someone else chuckled tinnily.

‘Are you fucking surprised, man?’

Proximity sense gave me movement at my right side. Above me, I saw another helmet lean in, faceplate darkened to an impenetrable black.

‘Hey, lieutenant.’ Another voice I knew. ‘You just won me fifty bucks UN. I told these fucking suitfarts you’d pull through faster than anyone else.’

‘Tony?’ I managed faintly.

‘Hey, no cerebral damage either. Key another one in for 391 platoon, guys. We are fucking immortal.’

They brought us back from the Martian dreadnought like a vacuum commando funeral procession. Seven bodies on powered stretchers, four assault bugs and a twenty-five strong honour guard in full hard space combat rig. Carrera had been taking no chances when he finally deployed to the other side of the gate.

Tony Loemanako took us back through in immaculate style, as if Martian gate-beachheads were something he’d been doing all his professional life. He sent two bugs through first, followed with the stretchers and infantry, commandos peeling off in matched pairs on left and right, and closed it out with the last two bugs retreating through backwards. Suit, stretcher and bug drives all powered up to full grav-lift hover the second they hit Sanction IV ’s gravity field and when they grounded a couple of seconds after that, it was unified, on a single raise-and-clench command from Loemanako’s suited fist.

Carrera’s Wedge.

Propped up on the stretcher to the extent that the webbing allowed, I watched the whole thing and tried to damp down the sense of pride and belonging the wolf gene splice wanted me to feel.

‘Welcome to base camp, lieutenant,’ said Loemanako, dropping his fist to knock gently on my suit’s breastplate. ‘You’re going to be fine now. Everything’s going to be fine.’

His voice lifted in the comsystem. ‘Alright, people, let’s move. Mitchell and Kwok, stay suited and keep two of the bugs at standby. The rest of you, hit the shower - we’re done swimming for now. Tan, Sabyrov and Munharto, I want you back here in fifteen, wear what you like but tooled up to keep Kwok and Mitchell company. Everyone else, stand down. Chandra control, could we get some medical attention down here today, please.’

Laughter, rattling through the comset. There was a general loosening of stance around me, visible even through the bulk of vacuum combat gear and the non-reflective black polalloy suits beneath. Weapons went away, folded down, disconnected or simply sheathed. The bug riders climbed off their mounts with the precision of mechanical dolls and followed the general flow of suited bodies away down the beach. Waiting for them at water’s edge, the Wedge battlewagon Angin Chandra’s Virtue bulked on assault landing claws like some prehistoric cross between crocodile and turtle. Her heavily armoured chameleochrome hull shone turquoise to match the beach in the pale afternoon sunlight.

It was good to see her again.

The beach, now I came to look at it, was a mess. In every direction as far as my limited vision could make out, the sand was torn up and furrowed around the shallow crater of fused glass the Nagini had made when she blew. The blast had taken the bubblefabs with it, leaving nothing but scorchmarks and a sparse few fragments of metal that professional pride told me could not possibly be part of the assault ship itself. The Nagini had airburst, and the explosion would have consumed every molecule of her structure instantaneously. If the ground was for dead people, Schneider had certainly won clear of the crowd. Most of him was probably still up in the stratosphere, dissipating.

What you’re good at, Tak.

The blast seemed to have sunk the trawler too. Twisting my head, I could just make out the stern and heat-mangled superstructure jutting above the water. Memory flickered brightly through my head - Luc Deprez and a bottle of cheap whisky, junk politics and government-banned cigars, Cruickshank leaning over me in—

Don’t do this, Tak.

The Wedge had put up a few items of their own to replace the vaporised camp. Six large oval bubblefabs stood a few metres off the crater on the left, and down by the snout of the battlewagon, I picked out the sealed square cabin and the bulk pressure tanks of the polalloy shower unit. The returning vacuum commandos shucked their heavier items of weaponry on adjacent tent-canopied racks and filed in through the rinse hatch.

From the ’Chandra came a file of Wedge uniforms with the white shoulder flash of the medical unit. They gathered around the stretchers, powered them up and shunted us off towards one of the bubblefabs. Loemanako touched me on the arm as my stretcher lifted.

‘See you later, lieutenant. I’ll drop by once they got you shelled. Got to go and rinse now.’

‘Yeah, thanks Tony.’

‘Good to see you again, sir.’

In the bubblefab, the medics got us unstrapped and then unsuited, working with brisk, clinical efficiency. By virtue of being conscious, I was a little easier to unpack than the others, but there wasn’t much in it. I’d been without the anti-rad dosing for too long and just bending or lifting each limb took major efforts of will. When they finally got me out of the suit and onto a bed, it was as much as I could do to answer the questions the medic put to me as he ran a series of standard post-combat checks on my sleeve. I managed to keep my eyes jacked half open while he did it, and watched past his shoulder as they ran the same tests on the others. Sun, who was pretty obviously beyond immediate repair, they dumped unceremoniously in a corner.

‘So will I live, doc?’ I mumbled at one point.

‘Not in this sleeve.’ Prepping an anti-rad cocktail hypospray as he talked. ‘But I can keep you going for a while longer, I think. Save you having to talk to the old man in virtual.’

‘What does he want, a debriefing?’

‘I guess.’

‘Well you’d better jack me up with something so I don’t fall asleep on him. Got any ’meth?’

‘I’m not convinced that’s a good idea right now, lieutenant.’

That merited a laugh, dredged up dry from somewhere. ‘Yeah, you’re right. That stuff’ll ruin my health.’

In the end I had to pull rank on him to get the tetrameth, but he jacked me. I was more or less functional when Carrera walked in.

‘Lieutenant Kovacs.’

‘Isaac.’

The grin broke across his scarred face like sunrise on crags. He shook his head. ‘You motherfucker, Kovacs. Do you know how many men I’ve had deployed across this hemisphere looking for you?’

‘Probably no more than you can spare.’ I propped myself up a little more on the bed. ‘Were you getting worried?’

‘I think you stretched the terms of your commission worse than a squad bitch’s asshole, lieutenant. AWOL two months on a datastack posting. Gone after something that might be worth this whole fucking war. Back later. That’s a little vague.’

‘Accurate, though.’

‘Is it?’ He seated himself on the edge of the bed, chameleochrome coveralls shifting to match the quilt pattern. The recent scar tissue across forehead and cheek tugged as he frowned. ‘Is it a warship?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Deployable?’

I considered. ‘Dependent on the archaeologue support you’ve got to hand, I’d say yes, probably.’

‘And how’s your current archaeologue support?’

I glanced across the open space of the bubblefab to where Tanya Wardani lay curled up under a sheet-thin insulating quilt. Like the rest of the Nagini gang survivors, she’d been lightly sedated. The medic who did it had said she was stable, but not likely to live much longer than me.

‘Wasted.’ I started coughing, couldn’t easily stop. Carrera waited it out. Handed me a wipe when I finished. I gestured weakly as I cleaned my mouth. ‘Just like the rest of us. How’s yours?’

‘We have no archaeologue aboard currently, unless you count Sandor Mitchell.’

‘I don’t. That’s a man with a hobby, not an archaeologue. How come you didn’t come Scratcher-equipped, Isaac?’ Schneider must have told you what you were buying into. I weighed it up, split-second, and decided not to give up that particular piece of information yet. I didn’t know what value it held, if any, but when you’re down to your last harpoon clip, you don’t go firing at fins. ‘You must have had some idea what you were buying into here.’

He shook his head.

‘Corporate backers, Takeshi. Tower-dweller scum. You get no more air from people like that than you absolutely need to get aboard. All I knew until today was that Hand was into something big, and if the Wedge brought back a piece of it, it’d be made worth our while.’

‘Yeah, but they gave you the codes to the nanobe system. Something more valuable than that? On Sanction IV ? Come on Isaac, you must have guessed what it was.’

He shrugged. ‘They named figures, that’s all. That’s how the Wedge works, you know that. Which reminds me. That’s Hand over by the door, right? The slim one.’

I nodded. Carrera wandered over and looked intently at the sleeping exec.

‘Yeah. Missing some weight off the pix I’ve got on stack.’ He paced the makeshift ward, glancing left and right at the other beds and the corpse in the corner. Through the ’meth rush and the weariness, I felt an old caution go itching along my nerves. ‘’Course, that’s not surprising, the rad count around here. I’m surprised any of you are still up and walking around.’

‘We’re not,’ I pointed out.

‘Right.’ His smile was pained. ‘Jesus, Takeshi. Why didn’t you hold back a couple of days? Could have halved your dosage. I’ve got everybody on standard anti-rad, we’ll all walk out of here with no worse than headaches.’

‘Not my call.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it was. Who’s the inactive?’

‘Sun Liping.’ It hurt more to look at her than I’d expected. Wolf pack allegiances are a slippery thing, it seems. ‘Systems officer.’

He grunted. ‘The others?’

‘Ameli Vongsavath, pilot officer.’ I pointed them out with a cocked finger and thumb. ‘Tanya Wardani, archaeologue, Jiang Jianping, Luc Deprez, both stealth ops.’

‘I see.’ Carrera frowned again and nodded in Vongsavath’s direction. ‘So if that’s your pilot, who was flying the assault launch when she blew?’

‘Guy called Schneider. He’s the one put me onto this whole gig in the first place. Fucking civilian pilot. He got rattled when the fireworks started out there. Took the ship, trashed Hansen, the guy we left on picket, with the ultravibe and then just blew hatches, left us to—’

‘He went alone?’

‘Yeah, unless you want to count the riders in the corpse locker. We lost two bodies to the nanobes before we went through. And we found another six on the other side. Oh, yeah and two more drowned in the trawler nets. Archaeologue team from back before the war, looks like.’

He wasn’t listening, just waiting until I stopped.

‘Yvette Cruickshank, Markus Sutjiadi. Those were the members of your team the nanobe system took out?’

‘Yeah.’ I tried for mild surprise. ‘You got a crew list? Jesus, these tower-dwellers of yours cut some mean corporate security.’

He shook his head. ‘Not really. These tower-dwellers are from the same tower as your friend over there. Rivals for promotion, in fact. Like I said, scum.’ There was a curious lack of venom in his voice as he said it, an absent tone that seemed to my Envoy antennae to carry with it a tinge of relief. ‘I don’t suppose you recovered stacks for any of the nanobe victims?’

‘No, why?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I didn’t really think you would. My clients tell me the system goes after any built components. Cannibalises them.’

‘Yeah, that’s what we guessed too.’ I spread my hands. ‘Isaac, even if we had recovered stacks, they’d have been vaporised with just about everything else aboard the Nagini.’

‘Yes, it was a remarkably complete explosion. Know anything about that, Takeshi?’

I summoned a grin. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think Lock Mit fast assault launches don’t vaporise in mid-air for no reason. And I think you seem less than outraged about this guy Schneider running out on you.’

‘Well, he is dead.’ Carrera folded his arms and looked at me. I sighed. ‘Yeah, OK. I mined the drives. I never trusted Schneider further than a clingfilm condom anyway.’

‘With cause, it appears. And lucky for you we came along, given the results.’ He got up, brushed his hands together. Something unpleasant definitely seemed to have slid off his screen. ‘You’d better get some rest, Takeshi. I’ll want a full debriefing tomorrow morning.’

‘Sure.’ I shrugged. ‘Not much more to tell, anyway.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? That’s not what my scanners say. We registered more energy discharged on the other side of that gate in the last seven hours than the sum generating cost of every hypercast to and from Sanction IV since it was settled. Myself, I’d say there’s a reasonable chunk of story left to tell.’

‘Oh, that.’ I gestured dismissively. ‘Well, you know, galactic ancients’ automated naval engagement. No big deal.’

‘Right.’

He was on his way out when something seemed to strike him.

‘Takeshi.’

I felt my senses tilt like mission time.

‘Yeah?’ Striving to stay casual.

‘Just out of curiosity. How did you plan to get back? After you blew the assault launch? You know, with the nanobes operative, the background rad count. No transport, except maybe that piece-of-shit trawler. What were you going to do, walk out? You’re barely two steps ahead of inactive, all of you. What the hell kind of strategy was blowing your only available ride out?’

I tried to think back. The whole situation, the upward-sucking vertigo of the Martian ship’s empty corridors and chambers, the mummified gaze of the corpses and the battle with weapons of unimaginable power raging outside - all of it seemed to have receded an immense distance into the past. I suppose I could have yanked it all back in with Envoy focus, but there was something dark and cold in the way, advising against it. I shook my head.

‘I don’t know, Isaac. I had suits stashed. Maybe swim out and hang around at the edge of the gate broadcasting a mayday squawk across to you guys.’

‘And if the gate wasn’t radio-transparent?’

‘It’s starlight-transparent. And scanner-transparent, apparently.’

‘That doesn’t mean a coherent—’

‘Then I’d have tossed through a fucking remote beacon and hoped it survived the nanobes long enough for you to get a fix. Jesus, Isaac. I’m an Envoy. We make this stuff up on the fly. Worse-case scenario, we had a close-to-working claim buoy. Sun could have fixed it, set it to transmit and then we could all have blasted our brains out and waited until someone came out to take a look. Wouldn’t have mattered much - none of us have got more than a week left in these sleeves anyway. And whoever came out to check the claim signal would have had to re-sleeve us - we’d be the resident experts, even if we were dead.’

He smiled at that. We both did.

‘Still not what I’d call leaktight strategic planning, Takeshi.’

‘Isaac, you just don’t get it.’ A little seriousness dripped back into my voice, erasing my smile. ‘I’m an Envoy. The strategic plan was to kill anyone who tried to backstab me. Surviving afterwards, well that’s a bonus if you can do it, but if you can’t.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m an Envoy.’

His own smile slipped slightly.

‘Get some rest, Takeshi,’ he said gently.

I watched him walk out, then settled to watching Sutjiadi’s motionless form. Hoping the tetrameth would keep me up until he came round and found out what he had to do to avoid formal execution at the hands of a Wedge punishment squad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Tetrameth is one of my favourite drugs. It doesn’t ride as savagely as some military stimulants, meaning you won’t lose track of useful environmental facts like no, you can’t fly without a grav harness or punching this will smash every bone in your hand. At the same time, it does allow you access to cellular-level reserves that no unconditioned human will ever know they possess. The high burns clean and long, with no worse side-effects than a slight gleam on surfaces that shouldn’t reflect light quite that well and a vague trembling around the edges of items you’ve assigned some personal significance to. You can hallucinate mildly, if you really want to, but it takes concentration. Or an overdose, of course.

The comedown is no worse than most poisons.

I was starting to feel slightly manic by the time the others woke up, chemical warning lights flashing at the tail-end of the ride, and perhaps I shook Sutjiadi over-vigorously when he didn’t respond as fast as I’d have liked.

‘Jiang, hey Jiang. Open your fucking eyes. Guess where we are.’

He blinked up at me, face curiously child-like.

‘Whuhh—’

‘Back on the beach, man. Wedge came and pulled us off the ship. Carrera’s Wedge, my old outfit.’ The enthusiasm was peeling a little wide of my known persona among my former comrades-in-arms, but not so wide that it couldn’t be put down to tetrameth, radiation sickness and exposure to alien strangeness. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure that the bubblefab was being monitored. ‘Fucking rescued us, Jiang. The Wedge.’

‘The Wedge? That’s.’ Behind the Maori sleeve’s eyes, I saw him scrambling to pick up the situational splinters. ‘Nice. Carrera’s Wedge. Didn’t think they did rescue-drops.’

I sat back again, on the edge of the bed and put together a grin.

‘They came looking for me.’ For all the pretence, there was a shivery warmth underlying that statement. From the point of view of Loemanako and the rest of 391 platoon at least, it was probably closing on true. ‘You believe that?’

‘If you say so.’ Sutjiadi propped himself up. ‘Who else made it out?’

‘All of us except Sun.’ I gestured. ‘And she’s retrievable.’

His face twitched. Memory, working its way across his brain like a buried shrapnel fragment. ‘Back there. Did you. See?’

‘Yeah, I saw.’

‘They were ghosts,’ he said, biting down on the words.

‘Jiang, for a combat ninja you spook way too easy. Who knows what we saw. For all we know, it was some kind of playback.’

‘That sounds like a pretty good working definition of the word ghost to me.’ Ameli Vongsavath was sitting up opposite Sutjiadi’s bed. ‘Kovacs, did I hear you say the Wedge came out for us?’

I nodded, drilling a look across the space between us. ‘What I was telling Jiang here. Seems I still have full membership privileges.’

She got it. Barely a flicker as she scooped up the hint and ran with it.

‘Good for you.’ Looking around at the stirring figures in the other beds. ‘So who do I get the pleasure of telling we’re not dead?’

‘Take your pick.’

After that, it was easy. Wardani took Sutjiadi’s new identity on board with camp-ingrained, expressionless dexterity - a paper twist of contraband, silently palmed. Hand, whose exec conditioning had probably been a little less traumatic but also more expensively tailored, matched her impassivity without blinking. And Luc Deprez, well, he was a deep-cover military assassin, he used to breathe this stuff for a living.

Layered across it all, like signal interference, was the recollection of our last conscious moments aboard the Martian warship. There was a quiet, shared damage between us that no one was ready to examine closely yet. Instead, we settled for final memories half and hesitantly spoken, jumpy, bravado-spiced talk poured out into a depth of unease to echo the darkness on the other side of the gate. And, I hoped, enough emotional tinsel to shroud Sutjiadi’s transformation into Jiang from any scanning eyes and ears.

‘At least,’ I said at one point, ‘we know why they left the fucking thing drifting out there now. I mean, it beats radiation and biohazard contamination out into the street. Those at least you can clean up. Can you imagine trying to run a dreadnought at battle stations when every time there’s a near-miss the old crew pop up and start clanking their chains.’

‘I,’ said Deprez emphatically, ‘Do not. Believe. In ghosts.’

‘That didn’t seem to bother them.’

‘Do you think,’ Vongsavath, picking her way through the thought as if it were snag coral at low tide, ‘all Martians leave. Left. Something behind when they die. Something like that?’

Wardani shook her head. ‘If they do, we haven’t seen it before. And we’ve dug up a lot of Martian ruins in the last five hundred years.’

‘I felt,’ Sutjiadi swallowed. ‘They were. Screaming, all of them. It was a mass trauma. The death of the whole crew, maybe. Maybe you’ve just never come across that before. That much death. When we were back in Landfall, you said the Martians were a civilisation far in advance of ours. Maybe they just didn’t die violently, in large numbers, any more. Maybe they evolved past that.’

I grunted. ‘Neat trick, if you can manage it.’

‘And we apparently can’t,’ said Wardani.

‘Maybe we would have, if that kind of thing was left floating around every time we committed mass murder.’

‘Kovacs, that’s absurd.’ Hand was getting out of bed, possessed suddenly of a peculiar, bad-tempered energy. ‘All of you. You’ve been listening to too much of this woman’s effete, antihuman intellectualism. The Martians were no better evolved than us. You know what I saw out there? I saw two warships that must have cost billions to build, locked into a futile cycle of repetitions, of a battle that solved nothing a hundred thousand years ago, and still solves nothing today. What improvement is that on what we have here on Sanction IV? They were just as good at killing each other as we are.’

‘Bravo, Hand.’ Vongsavath clapped a handful of slow, sardonic applause. ‘You should have been a political officer. Just one problem with your muscular humanism there - that second ship wasn’t Martian. Right Mistress Wardani? Totally different config.’

All eyes fixed on the archaeologue, who sat with her head bowed. Finally, she looked up, met my gaze and nodded reluctantly.

‘It did not look like any Martian technology I have ever seen or heard of.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘On the evidence I saw. It would appear the Martians were at war with someone else.’

The unease rose from the floor again, winding among us like cold smoke, chilling the conversation to a halt. A tiny premonition of the wake-up call humanity was about to get.

We do not belong out here.

A few centuries we’ve been let out to play on these three dozen worlds the Martians left us but the playground has been empty of adults all that time, and with no supervision there’s just no telling who’s going to come creeping over the fence or what they’ll do to us. Light is fading from the afternoon sky, retreating across distant rooftops, and in the empty streets below it’s suddenly a cold and shadowy neighbourhood.

‘This is nonsense,’ said Hand. ‘The Martian domain went down in a colonial revolt, everyone agrees on that. Mistress Wardani, the Guild teaches that.’

‘Yeah, Hand.’ The scorn in Wardani’s voice was withering. ‘And why do you think they teach that? Who allocates Guild funding, you blinkered fuckwit? Who decides what our children will grow up believing?’

‘There is evidence—’

‘Don’t fucking talk to me about evidence.’ The archaeologue’s wasted face lit with fury. For a moment I thought she was going to physically assault the executive. ‘You ignorant motherfucker. What do you know about the Guild? I do this for a living, Hand. Do you want me to tell you how much evidence has been suppressed because it didn’t suit the Protectorate worldview? How many researchers were branded antihuman and ruined, how many projects butchered, all because they wouldn’t ratify the official line? How much shit the appointed Guild Chancellors spurt every time the Protectorate sees fit to give them a funding handjob?’

Hand seemed taken aback by the sudden eruption of rage from this haggard, dying woman. He fumbled. ‘Statistically, the chances of two starfaring civilisations evolving so close to—’

But it was like walking into the teeth of a gale. Wardani had her own emotional ’meth shot now. Her voice was a lash.

‘Are you mentally defective? Or weren’t you paying attention when we opened the gate? That’s instant matter transmission across interplanetary distance, technology that they left lying around. You think a civilisation like that is going to be limited to a few hundred cubic light years of space? The weaponry we saw in action out there was faster than light. Those ships could both have come from the other side of the fucking galaxy. How would we know?’

The quality of light shifted as someone opened the bubblefab flap. Glancing away from Wardani’s face for a moment, I saw Tony Loemanako stood in the entrance to the bubblefab, wearing noncom-flashed chameleochrome and trying not to grin.

I raised a hand. ‘Hello, Tony. Welcome to the hallowed chambers of academic debate. Feel free to ask if you don’t follow any of the technical terms.’

Loemanako gave up trying to hide the grin. ‘I got a kid back on Latimer wants to be an archaeologue. Says he doesn’t want a profession of violence like his old man.’

‘That’s just a stage, Tony. He’ll get over it.’

‘Hope so.’ Loemanako shifted stiffly, and I saw that under the chameleochrome coveralls, he wore a mobility suit. ‘Commander wants to see you right away.’

‘Just me?’

‘No, he said bring anyone who’s awake. I think it’s important.’

Outside the bubblefab, evening had closed the sky down to a luminous grey in the west and thickening darkness in the east. Under it all, Carrera’s camp was a model of ordered activity in the glow of tripod-mounted Angier lamps.

Envoy habit mapped it for me, cold detail floating over and above a tingling warm sense of hearthfire and company against the encroaching night.

Up by the gate, the sentries sat astride their bugs, leaning back and forth and gesturing. The wind carried down shreds of laughter I recognised as Kwok’s, but distance rendered the rest inaudible. Their faceplates were hinged up, but otherwise they were swim-prepped and still armed to the teeth. The other soldiers Loemanako had detailed to back them up stood around a mobile ultravibe cannon in similar casual alertness. Further down the beach, another knot of Wedge uniforms busied themselves with what looked like the components for a blast shield generator. Others moved back and forth from the Angin Chandra’s Virtue to the polalloy cabin and the other bubblefabs, carrying crates that could have been anything. Behind and above the scene, lights gleamed from the bridge of the ’Chandra and at the loading level, where onboard cranes swung more equipment out of the battlewagon’s belly and down onto the lamplit sand.

‘So how come the mob suit?’ I asked Loemanako, as he led us down towards the unloading area.

He shrugged. ‘Cable batteries at Rayong. Our tinsel systems went down at a bad time. Got my left leg, hipbone, ribs. Some of the left arm.’

‘Shit. You have all the luck, Tony.’

‘Ah, it’s not so bad. Just taking a fuck of a long time to heal right. Doc says the cables were coated with some kind of carcinogenic, and it’s fucking up the rapid regrowth.’ He grimaced. ‘Been like this for three weeks now. Real drag.’

‘Well, thanks for coming out to us. Especially in that state.’

‘No worries. Easier getting about in vac than here anyway. Once you’re wearing the mob suit, polalloy’s just another layer.’

‘I guess.’

Carrera was waiting below the ’Chandra’s loading hatch, dressed in the same field coveralls he’d worn earlier and talking to a small, similarly-attired group of ranking officers. A couple of noncoms were busy with mounted equipment up on the edge of the hatch. About halfway between the ’Chandra and the blast shield detail, a ragged-looking individual in a stained uniform perched on a powered-down loadlifter, staring at us out of bleary eyes. When I stared back, he laughed and shook his head convulsively. One hand lifted to rub viciously at the back of his neck and his mouth gaped open as if someone had just drenched him with a bucket of cold water. His face twitched in tiny spasms that I recognised. Wirehead tremors.

Maybe he saw the grimace pass across my face.

‘Oh, yeah, look that way,’ he snarled. ‘You’re not so smart, not so fucking smart. Got you for antihumanism, got you all filed away, heard you all and your counter-Cartel sentiments, how do you like—’

‘Shut up, Lamont.’ There wasn’t much volume in Loemanako’s voice, but the wirehead jerked as if he’d just been jacked in. His eyes slipped around in their sockets alarmingly, and he cowered. At my side, Loemanako sneered.

‘Political officer,’ he said, and toed some sand in the shivering wreck of a human’s direction. ‘All the fucking same. All mouth.’

‘You seem to have this one leashed.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Loemanako grinned. ‘You’d be amazed how quickly these political guys lose interest in their job once they’ve been socketed up and plugged in a few times. We haven’t had a Correct Thought lecture all month, and the personal files, well, I’ve read ’em and our own mothers couldn’t have written nicer things about us. Amazing how all that political dogma just sort of fades away. Isn’t that right, Lamont?’

The political officer cringed away from Loemanako. Tears leaked into his eyes.

‘Works better than the beatings used to,’ said the noncom, looking at Lamont dispassionately. ‘You know, with Phibun and, what was that other shit-mouthed little turd called?’

‘Portillo,’ I said absently.

‘Yeah, him. See you could never be sure if he was really beaten or if he’d come back at you when he’d licked his wounds a bit. We don’t have that problem any more. Think it’s the shame that does it. Once you’ve cut the socket and shown them how to hook up, they do it to themselves. And then, when you take it away . . . Works like magic. I’ve seen old Lamont here break his nails trying to get the interface cables out of a locked kitpack.’

‘Why don’t you leave him alone?’ said Tanya Wardani unevenly. ‘Can’t you see he’s already broken?’

Loemanako shot her a curious glance.

‘Civilian?’ he asked me.

I nodded. ‘Pretty much. She’s, uh, on secondment.’

‘Well, that can work sometimes.’

Carrera seemed to have finished his briefing as we approached and the surrounding officers were beginning to disperse. He nodded acknowledgement at Loemanako.

‘Thank you, sergeant. Did I see Lamont giving you some grief up there?’

The noncom grinned wolfishly. ‘Nothing he didn’t regret, sir. Think maybe it’s time he was deprived again, though.’

‘I’ll give that some thought, sergeant.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Meanwhile.’ Carrera shifted his focus. ‘Lieutenant Kovacs, there are a few—’

‘Just a moment, commander.’ It was Hand’s voice, remarkably poised and polished, given the state he must be in.

Carrera paused.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sure you’re aware of who I am, commander. As I am aware of the intrigues in Landfall that have led to your being here. You may not, however, be aware of the extent to which you have been deceived by those who sent you.’

Carrera met my gaze and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.

‘No, you’re mistaken,’ said the Wedge commander politely. ‘I am quite well informed of the extent to which your Mandrake colleagues have been economical with the truth. To be honest, I expected no less.’

I heard the silence as Hand’s exec training stumbled. It was almost worth a grin.

‘In any case,’ Carrera went on, ‘the issue of objective truth doesn’t much concern me here. I have been paid.’

‘Less than you could have been.’ Hand rallied with admirable speed. ‘My business here is authorised at Cartel level.’

‘Not any more. Your grubby little friends have sold you out, Hand.’

‘Then that was their error, commander. There seems no reason for you to share in it. Believe me, I have no desire for retribution to fall where it is not deserved.’

Carrera smiled faintly. ‘Are you threatening me?’

‘There is no need to view things in such—’

‘I asked if you were threatening me,’ The Wedge commander’s tone was mild. ‘I’d appreciate a straight yes or no.’

Hand sighed. ‘Let us just say that there are forces I may invoke which my colleagues have not considered, or at least not assessed correctly.’

‘Oh, yes. I forgot, you are a believer.’ Carrera seemed fascinated by the man in front of him. ‘A hougan. You believe that. Spiritual powers? Can be hired in much the same way as soldiers.’

Beside me, Loemanako sniggered.

Hand sighed again. ‘Commander, what I believe is that we are both civilised men and—’

The blaster tore through him.

Carrera must have set it for diffuse beam - you don’t usually get as much damage as that from the little ones and the thing in the Wedge commander’s hand was an ultra compact. A hint of bulk inside the closed fist, a fish-tailed snap-out projector between his second and third knuckle, spare heat, the Envoy in me noticed, still dissipating from the discharge end in visible waves.

No recoil, no visible flash, and no punch backwards where it hit. The crackle snarled past my ears and Hand stood there blinking with a smoking hole in his guts. Then he must have caught the stench of his own seared intestines and, looking down, he made a high-pitched hooting noise that was as much panic as pain.

The ultra compacts take a while to recharge, but I didn’t need peripheral vision to tell me jumping Carrera would be a mistake. Noncoms on the loading deck above, Loemanako beside me and the little knot of Wedge officers hadn’t dispersed at all - they’d just fanned out and given us room to walk into the set-up.

Neat. Very neat.

Hand staggered, still wailing, and sat down hard on his backside in the sand. Some brutal part of me wanted to laugh at him. His hands pawed the air close to the gaping wound.

I know that feeling, some other part of me recalled, surprised into brief compassion. It hurts, but you don’t know if you dare touch it.

‘Mistaken again,’ said Carrera to the ripped open exec at his feet. His tone hadn’t shifted since the shooting. ‘I am not a civilised man, Hand, I’m a soldier. A professional savage, and I’m on hire to men just like you. I wouldn’t like to say what that makes you. Except out of fashion back at the Mandrake Tower, that is.’

The noise Hand was making shaped towards a conventional scream. Carrera turned to look at me.

‘Oh, you can relax, Kovacs. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted to do that before now.’

I manufactured a shrug. ‘Once or twice. I probably would have got around to it.’

‘Well, now you don’t have to.’

On the ground, Hand twisted and propped himself. Something that might have been words emerged from his agony. At the edge of my vision, a couple of figures moved towards him: peripheral scan, still squeezed to aching point by the adrenalin surge, identified Sutjiadi and - well, well - Tanya Wardani.

Carrera waved them back.

‘No, there’s no need for that.’

Hand was definitely speaking now, a ruptured hissing of syllables that weren’t any language I knew or, except once, had heard. His left hand was raised towards Carrera, fingers splayed. I crouched to his level, oddly moved by the contorted strength on his face.

‘What’s this?’ The Wedge commmander leaned closer. ‘What’s he saying?’

I sat back on my heels. ‘I think you’re being cursed.’

‘Oh. Well, I suppose that’s not unreasonable under the circumstances. Still.’ Carrera swung a long, heavy kick into the exec’s side. Hand’s incantation shredded apart in a scream and he rolled into a foetal ball. ‘No reason why we have to listen to it either. Sergeant.’

Loemanako stepped forward. ‘Sir.’

‘Your knife please.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Give Carrera credit - I’d never seen him ask any man in his command to carry out work he wouldn’t do himself. He took the vibroknife from Loemanako, activated it and kicked Hand again, stamping him onto his belly in the sand. The exec’s screams blurred into coughing and whooping sucked breath. Carrera knelt across his back and started cutting.

Hand’s muffled shrieking scaled abruptly up as he felt the blade enter his flesh, and then stopped dead as Carrera sliced his spinal column through.

‘Better,’ muttered the Wedge commander.

He made the second incision at the base of the skull, a lot more elegantly than I had back in the Landfall promoter’s office, and dug out the section of severed spine. Then he powered off the knife, wiped it carefully on Hand’s clothing and got up. He handed knife and spinal segment to Loemanako with a nod.

‘Thank you, sergeant. Get that to Hammad, tell him not to lose it. We just earnt ourselves a bonus.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Loemanako looked at the faces around us. ‘And, uh . . . ?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Carrera raised one hand. His face seemed suddenly tired. ‘That.’

His hand fell like something discarded.

From the loading deck above I heard the discharge, a muffled crump followed by a chitinous rustling. I looked up and saw what looked like a swarm of crippled nanocopters tumbling down through the air.

I made the intuitive leap to what was going to happen with a curious detachment, a lack of combat reflex that must have had its roots in the mingled radiation sickness and tetrameth comedown. I just had time to look at Sutjiadi. He caught my eye and his mouth twitched. He knew as well as I did. As well as if there’d been a scarlet decal pulsing across the screen of our vision.

Game—

Then it was raining spiders.

Not really, but it looked that way. They’d fired the crowd control mortar almost straight up, a low-power crimped load for limited dispersal. The grey fist-sized inhibitors fell in a circle not much wider than twenty metres. The ones at the nearest edge glanced off the curving side of the battlewagon’s hull before they hit the sand, skidding and flailing for purchase with a minute intensity that I later recalled almost with amusement. The others bedded directly in puffs of turquoise sand and scuttled up out of the tiny craters they’d made like the tiny jewelled crabs in Tanya Wardani’s tropical paradise virtuality.

They fell in thousands.

Game—

They dropped on our heads and shoulders, soft as children’s cradle toys, and clung.

They scuttled towards us across the sand and scrambled up our legs.

They endured batting and shaking and clambered on undeterred.

The ones Sutjiadi and the others tore loose and flung away landed in a whirl of limbs and scuttled back unharmed.

They crouched knowledgeably above nerve points and plunged filament-thin tendril fangs through clothing and skin.

Game—

They bit in.

—Over.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

There was no less reason for adrenalin to be pumping through my system than anyone else’s, but the slow seep of radioactive damage had shrivelled my sleeve’s capacity to deliver combat chemicals. The inhibitors reacted accordingly. I felt the nerve snap go through me, but it was a mild numbness, a fizzing that only dropped me to one knee.

The Maori sleeves were readier for a fight and so they took it harder. Deprez and Sutjiadi staggered and crashed into the sand as if shot with stunners. Vongsavath managed to control her fall, and rolled to the ground on her side, eyes wide.

Tanya Wardani just stood there looking dazed.

‘Thank you gentlemen.’ It was Carrera, calling up to the noncoms manning the mortar. ‘Exemplary grouping.’

Neural inhib remotes. State-of-the-art public order tech. Only cleared colonial embargo a couple of years ago. In my capacity as a local military adviser, I’d had the shiny new system demonstrated to me on crowds in Indigo City. I’d just never been on the receiving end before now.

Chill, an enthusiastic young public order corporal had told me with a grin. That’s all you need to do. ’Course, that’s extra funny in a riot situation. This shit lands on you, you’re just going to get more ’dreened up, means they just go on biting you, maybe even stop your heart in the end. Have to be fucking Zen-rigged to break the spiral, and you know what, we’re short on Zen riot activists this season.

I held the Envoy calm like a crystal, wiped my mind of consequence and got up. The spiders clung and flexed a little as I moved, but they didn’t bite again.

‘Shit, lieutenant, you’re coated. They must like you.’

Loemanako stood grinning at me from within a circle of clear sand, while surplus inhibitor units crawled around on the outer edge of the field his clean tag must be throwing down. A little to his right, Carrera moved in a similar pool of immunity. I glanced around and saw the other Wedge officers, untouched and watching.

Neat. Very fucking neat.

Behind them, political officer Lamont capered and pointed at us, jabbering.

Oh well. Who could blame him?

‘Yes, I think we’d better get you brushed off,’ said Carrera. ‘I’m sorry for the shock, Lieutenant Kovacs, but there was no other comfortable way to detain this criminal.’

He was pointing at Sutjiadi.

Actually, Carrera, you could have just sedated everybody in the ward ’fab. But that wouldn’t have been dramatic enough, and where transgressors against the Wedge are concerned, the men do like their stylised drama, don’t they?

I felt a brief chill run along my spine, chasing the thought.

And tamped it down quick, before it could become the fear or anger that would wake up the coat of spiders I wore.

I went for weary-laconic.

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Isaac?’

‘This man,’ Carrera’s voice was pitched to carry. ‘May have misrepresented himself to you as Jiang Jianping. His real name is Markus Sutjiadi, and he is wanted for crimes against Wedge personnel.’

‘Yeah.’ Loemanako lost his grin. ‘Fucker wasted Lieutenant Veutin, and his platoon sergeant.’

‘Veutin?’ I looked back at Carrera. ‘Thought he was down around Bootkinaree.’

‘Yes, he was.’ The Wedge commander was staring down at Sutjiadi’s crumpled form. For a moment I thought he was going to shoot him there and then with the blaster. ‘Until this piece of shit cut insubordinate and finished up feeding Veutin his own Sunjet. Killed Veutin really dead. Stack gone. Sergeant Bradwell went the same way when she tried to stop it. And two more of my men got their sleeves carved apart before someone locked this motherfucker down.’

‘No one gets away with that,’ said Loemanako sombrely. ‘Right, lieutenant? No local yokel takes down Wedge personnel and walks away from it. Shithead’s for the anatomiser.’

‘Is this true?’ I asked Carrera, for appearances’ sake.

He met my gaze and nodded. ‘Eye-witnesses. It’s open and shut.’

Sutjiadi stirred at his feet like something stamped on.

They cleaned the spiders off me with a deactivator broom, and then dumped them into a storage canister. Carrera handed me a tag and the approaching tide of unoccupied inhibitors fell back as I snapped it on.

‘About that debriefing,’ he said, and gestured me aboard the ’Chandra.

Behind me, my colleagues were led back to the bubblefab, stumbling as feeble adrenalin jags of resistance set off new ripples of bites from their new neural jailers. In the post-performance space we’d all left, the noncoms who’d fired the mortar went around with untamped canisters, gathering up the still crawling units that hadn’t managed to find a home.

Sutjiadi caught my eye again as he was leaving. Imperceptibly, he shook his head.

He needn’t have worried. I was barely up to climbing the entry ramp into the battlewagon’s belly, let alone taking on Carrera in empty-handed combat. I clung to the remaining fragments of the tetrameth lift and followed the Wedge commander along tight, equipment-racked corridors, up a hand-rung-lined gravchute and into the confines of what appeared to be his personal quarters.

‘Sit down, lieutenant. If you can find the space.’

The cabin was cramped but meticulously tidy. A powered-down grav bed rested on the floor in one corner, under a desk that hinged out from the bulkhead. The work surface held a compact datacoil, a neat stack of bookchips and a pot-bellied statue that looked like Hun Home art. A second table occupied the other end of the narrow space, studded with projector gear. Two holos floated near the ceiling at angles that allowed viewing from the bed. One showed a spectacular image of Adoracion from high orbit, sunrise just breaking across the green and orange rim. The other was a family group, Carrera and a handsome olive-skinned woman, arms possessively encompassing the shoulders of three variously aged children. The Wedge commander looked happy, but the sleeve in the holo was older than the one he was wearing now.

I found a spartan metal desk chair beside the projector table. Carrera watched me sit down and then leaned against the desk, arms folded.

‘Been home recently?’ I asked, nodding at the orbital holo.

His gaze stayed on my face. ‘It’s been a while. Kovacs, you knew damn well that Sutjiadi was wanted by the Wedge, didn’t you?’

‘I still don’t know he is Sutjiadi. Hand sold him to me as Jiang. What makes you so sure?’

He almost smiled. ‘Nice try. My tower-dweller friends gave me gene codes for the combat sleeves. That plus the sleeving data from the Mandrake stack. They were quite keen for me to know that Hand had a war criminal working for him. Added incentive, I imagine they saw it as. Grist to the deal.’

‘War criminal.’ I looked elaborately around the cabin. ‘That’s an interesting choice of terminology. For someone who oversaw the Decatur Pacification, I mean.’

‘Sutjiadi murdered one of my officers. An officer he was supposed to be taking orders from. Under any combat convention I know of, that’s a crime.’

‘An officer? Veutin?’ I couldn’t quite work out why I was arguing, unless it was out of a general sense of inertia. ‘Come on, would you take orders from Dog Veutin?’

‘Happily, I don’t have to. But his platoon did, and they were fanatically loyal, all of them. Veutin was a good soldier.’

‘They called him Dog for a reason, Isaac.’

‘We are not engaged in a pop—’

‘—ularity contest.’ I sketched a smile of my own. ‘That line’s getting a little old. Veutin was a fucking asshole, and you know it. If this Sutjiadi torched him, he probably had a good reason.’

‘Reasons do not make you right, Lieutenant Kovacs.’ There was a sudden softness in Carrera’s tone that said I’d overstepped the line. ‘Every graft-wrapped pimp on Plaza de los Caidos has a reason for every whore’s face they carve up, but that doesn’t make it right. Joshua Kemp has reasons for what he does and from his point of view they might even be good ones. That doesn’t make him right.’

‘You want to watch what you’re saying, Isaac. That sort of relativism could get you arrested.’

‘I doubt it. You’ve seen Lamont.’

‘Yeah.’

Silence ebbed and flowed around us.

‘So,’ I said finally. ‘You’re going to put Sutjiadi under the anatomiser.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

I just looked at him.

‘We are the Wedge, lieutenant. You know what that means.’ There was the slightest tug of urgency in his tone now. I don’t know who he was trying to convince. ‘You were sworn in, just like everyone else. You know the codes. We stand for unity in the face of chaos, and everyone has to know that. Those we deal with have to know that we are not to be fucked with. We need that fear, if we’re going to operate effectively. And my soldiers have to know that that fear is an absolute. That it will be enforced. Without that, we fall apart.’

I closed my eyes. ‘Whatever.’

‘I’m not requiring you to watch it.’

‘I doubt there’ll be enough seats.’

Behind my closed eyelids, I heard him move. When I looked, he was leaning over me, hands braced on the edges of the projector table, face harsh with anger.

‘You’re going to shut up now, Kovacs. You’re going to stand down that attitude.’ If he was looking for resistance, he couldn’t have seen any in my face. He backed off a half metre, straightened up. ‘I won’t let you piss away your commission like this. You’re a capable officer, lieutenant. You inspire loyalty in the men you lead, and you understand combat.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You can laugh, but I know you. It’s a fact.’

‘It’s the biotech, Isaac. Wolf gene pack dynamics, serotonin shutout and Envoy psychosis to pilot the whole fucking shambles. A dog could do what I’ve done for the Wedge. Dog fucking Veutin, for example.’

‘Yes.’ A shrug as he settled himself on the edge of the desk again. ‘You and Veutin are, were, very similar in profile. I have the psychosurgeon assessments on file here, if you don’t believe me. Same Kemmerich gradient, same IQ, same lack of generalisable empathy range. To the untutored eye, you could be the same man.’

‘Yeah, except he’s dead. Even to the untutored eye, that’s got to stand out.’

‘Well, maybe not quite the same lack of empathy, then. The Envoys gave you enough diplomatic training not to underestimate men like Sutjiadi. You would have handled him better.’

‘So Sutjiadi’s crime was he got underestimated? Seems as good a reason as any to torture a man to death, I suppose.’

He stopped and stared at me. ‘Lieutenant Kovacs, I don’t think I’m making myself clear. Sutjiadi’s execution is not under discussion here. He murdered my soldiers, and at dawn tomorrow I will exact the penalty for that crime. I may not like it—’

‘How gratifyingly humane of you.’

He ignored me. ‘—but it needs to be done, and I will do it. And you, if you know what’s good for you, will ratify it.’

‘Or else?’ It wasn’t as defiant as I’d have liked, and I spoilt it at the end with a coughing fit that racked me over in the narrow chair and brought up blood-streaked phlegm. Carrera handed me a wipe.

‘You were saying?’

‘I said, if I won’t ratify the ghoul show, what happens to me?’

‘Then I’ll inform the men that you knowingly attempted to protect Sutjiadi from Wedge justice.’

I looked around for somewhere to toss the soiled wipe. ‘Is that an accusation?’

‘Under the table. No, there. Next to your leg. Kovacs, it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. I think you probably did, but I don’t really care one way or the other. I have to have order, and justice must be seen to be done. Fit in with that, and you can have your rank back, plus a new command. If you step out of line, you’ll be next on the slab.’

‘Loemanako and Kwok won’t like that.’

‘No, they won’t. But they are Wedge soldiers, and they will do as they are told for the good of the Wedge.’

‘So much for inspiring loyalty.’

‘Loyalty is a currency like any other. What you have earned, you can spend. And shielding a known murderer of Wedge personnel is more than you can afford. More than any of us can afford.’ He leaned off the desk edge. Beneath the coveralls, Envoy scan read his stance at endgame. It was the way he always stood in the final round of sparring sessions that had gone down to the wire. The way I’d seen him stand when the government troops broke around us at Shalai Gap and Kemp’s airborne infantry swept down out of the storm-front sky like hail. There was no fallback from here. ‘I do not want to lose you, Kovacs, and I do not want to distress the soldiers who have followed you. But in the end, the Wedge is more than any one man within it. We cannot afford internal dissent.’

Outnumbered and outgunned and left for dead at Shalai, Carrera held position in the bombed-out streets and buildings for two hours, until the storm swept in and covered everything. Then he led a stalk-and-slaughter counteroffensive through the howling wind and street-level shreds of cloud until the airwaves crackled stiff with panicked airborne commanders ordering withdrawal. When the storm lifted, Shalai Gap was littered with the Kempist dead and the Wedge had taken less than two dozen casualties.

He leaned close again, no longer angry. His eyes searched my face.

‘Am I - finally - making myself clear, lieutenant? A sacrifice is required. We may not like it, you and I, but that is the price of Wedge membership.’

I nodded.

‘Then you are ready to move past this?’

‘I’m dying, Isaac. About all I’m ready for right now is some sleep.’

‘I understand. I won’t keep you much longer. Now.’ He gestured through the datacoil and it awoke in swirls. I sighed and groped after fresh focus. ‘The penetration squad took an extrapolated line back from the Nagini’s angle of re-entry and fetched up pretty damn close to the same docking bay you breached. Loemanako says there were no apparent shut-out controls. So how did you get in?’

‘Was already open.’ I couldn’t be bothered to construct lies, guessed in any case that he’d interrogate the others soon enough. ‘For all we know, there are no shut-out controls.’

‘On a warship?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Isaac, the whole ship mounts a spatial shield that stands at least two kilometres out from the hull. What the fuck would they need with individual docking station shut out?’

‘You saw that?’

‘Yeah. Very much in action.’

‘Hmm.’ He made a couple of minor adjustments in the coil. ‘The sniffer units found human traces a good three or four kilometres into the interior. But they found you in an observation bubble not much more than a kilometre and a half from your entry point.’

‘Well, that couldn’t have been hard. We painted the way with big fucking illuminum arrows.’

He gave me a hard look. ‘Did you go walkabout in there?’

‘Not me, no.’ I shook my head, then regretted it as the little cabin pulsed unpleasantly in and out of focus around me. I waited it out. ‘Some of them did. I never found out how far they went.’

‘Doesn’t sound very organised.’

‘It wasn’t,’ I said irritably. ‘I don’t know, Isaac. Try and incubate a sense of wonder, huh? Might help when you get over there.’

‘So it, ah, appears.’ He hesitated, and it took me a moment to realise he was embarrassed. ‘You, ah, you saw. Ghosts. Over there?’

I shrugged, suppressing an urge to cackle uncontrollably. ‘We saw something. I’m still not sure what it was. Been listening in to your guests, Isaac?’

He smiled and made an apologetic gesture. ‘Lamont’s habits, rubbing off on me. And since he’s lost the taste for snooping, seems a shame to let the equipment go to waste.’ He prodded again at the datacoil. ‘The medical report says you all showed symptoms of a heavy stunblast, except you and Sun, obviously.’

‘Yeah, Sun shot herself. We . . .’ Abruptly, it seemed impossible to explain. Like trying to shoulder a massive weight unaided. The last moments in the Martian starship, wrapped in the brilliant pain and radiance of whatever her crew had left behind them. The certainty that this alien grief was going to crack us open. How did you convey that to the man who had led you behind raging gunfire to victory at Shalai Gap and a dozen other engagements? How did you get across the ice-aching diamond-bright reality of those moments?

Reality? The doubt jolted rudely.

Was it? Come to that, come to the gun barrel-and-grime reality that Isaac Carrera lived, was it real any more? Had it ever been? How much of what I remembered was hard fact?

No, look. I’ve got Envoy recall—

But had it been that bad? I looked into the datacoil, trying wearily to muster rational thought. Hand had called it, and I bought in with something not much short of panic. Hand, the hougan. Hand, the religious maniac. When else had I ever trusted him as far as I could throw him?

Why had I trusted him then?

Sun. I grabbed at the fact. Sun knew. She saw it coming and she blew her own brains out rather than face it.

Carrera was looking at me strangely.

‘Yes?’

You and Sun . . .

‘Wait a minute.’ It dawned on me. ‘You said except Sun and me?’

‘Yes. The others all show the standard electroneural trauma. Heavy blast, as I said.’

‘But not me.’

‘Well, no.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You weren’t touched. Why, do you remember someone shooting you?’

When we were done, he flattened the datacoil display with one callused hand and walked me back through the empty corridors of the battlewagon and then across the night-time murmur of the camp. We didn’t talk much. He’d backed up in the face of my confusion, and let the debriefing slide. Probably he couldn’t believe he was seeing one of his pet Envoys in this state.

I was having a hard time believing it myself.

She shot you. You dropped the stunner and she shot you, then herself. She must have.

Otherwise . . .

I shivered.

On a clear patch of sand to the rear of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, they were erecting the scaffold for Sutjiadi’s execution. The primary support struts were already in place, sunk deep into the sand and poised to receive the tilted, runnelled butcher’s platform. Under the illumination from three Angier lamps and the environ floods from the battlewagon’s rear drop hatch, the structure was a claw of bleached bone rising from the beach. The disassembled segments of the anatomiser lay close by, like sections of a wasp someone had chopped to death.

‘The war’s shifting,’ said Carrera conversationally. ‘Kemp’s a spent force on this continent. We haven’t had an air strike in weeks. He’s using the iceberg fleet to evacuate his forces across the Wacharin straits.’

‘Can’t he hold the coast there?’ I asked the question on automatic, the ghost of attention from a hundred deployment briefings past.

Carrera shook his head. ‘Not a chance. That’s a flood plain a hundred klicks back south and east. Nowhere to dig in, and he doesn’t have the hardware to build wet bunkers. That means no long-term jamming, no net-supported weapon systems. Give me six more months and I’ll have amphibious armour harrying him off the whole coastal strip. Another year and we’ll be parking the ’Chandra over Indigo City.’

‘And then what?’

‘Sorry?’

‘And then what? When you’ve taken Indigo City, when Kemp’s bombed and mined and particle-blasted every worthwhile asset there is and escaped into the mountains with the real diehards, then what?’

‘Well.’ Carrera puffed out his cheeks. He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. ‘The usual. Holding strategy across both continents, limited police actions and scapegoating until everyone calms down. But by that time . . .’

‘By that time we’ll be gone, right?’ I shoved my hands into my pockets. ‘Off this fucking mudball and somewhere where they know a losing game when they see one. Give me that much good news at least.’

He looked across at me and winked. ‘Hun Home’s looking good. Internal power struggle, lots of palace intrigue. Just your speed.’

‘Thanks.’

At the bubblefab flap, low voices filtered out into the night air. Carrera cocked his head and listened.

‘Come in and join the party,’ I said morosely, pushing through ahead of him. ‘Save you going back to Lamont’s toys.’

The three remaining members of the Mandrake expedition were gathered in seats around a low table at the end of the ward. Carrera’s security had broomed off the bulk of the inhib units and left each prisoner at detention-standard, a single inhibitor squatting like a tumour at the nape of the neck. It made everyone look peculiarly hunched, as if caught in mid-conspiracy.

They looked round as we entered the ward, reacting across a spectrum. Deprez was the least expressive; barely a muscle moved in his face. Vongsavath caught my eye and raised her brows. Wardani looked past me to where Carrera stood and spat on the quick-wipe floor.

‘That’s for me, I assume,’ said the Wedge commander easily.

‘Share it,’ suggested the archaeologue. ‘You seem close enough.’

Carrera smiled. ‘I’d advise against cranking up your hate too far, Mistress Wardani. Your little friend back there is apt to bite.’

She shook her head, wordless. One hand rose in reflex, halfway to the inhib unit, then dropped away. Maybe she’d already tried removing it. It’s not a mistake you make twice.

Carrera walked to the splatter of saliva, bent and scooped it up with one finger. He examined it closely, brought it to his nose and grimaced.

‘You don’t have long, Mistress Wardani. In your place I think I’d be a little more civil to the person who’s going to advise on whether you’re re-sleeved or not.’

‘I doubt that’ll be your decision.’

‘Well.’ The Wedge commander wiped his finger on the nearest bedsheet. ‘I did say “advise”. But then, this presupposes that you make it back to Landfall in some re-sleevable capacity. Which you might not.’

Wardani turned to me, blocking Carrera off in the process. A subtle snub that made the diplomatic strand in my conditioning want to applaud.

‘Is your catamite here threatening me?’

I shook my head. ‘Making a point, I think.’

‘Too subtle for me.’ She cast a disdainful glance back at the Wedge commander. ‘Perhaps you’d better just shoot me in the stomach. That seems to work well. Your preferred method of civilian pacification, presumably.’

‘Ah, yes. Hand.’ Carrera hooked a chair from the collection around the table. He turned it back forward and straddled it. ‘Was he a friend of yours?’

Wardani looked at him.

‘I didn’t think so. Not your sort at all.’

‘That has nothing to—’

‘Did you know he was responsible for the bombing of Sauberville? ’

Another wordless pause. This time the archaeologue’s face sagged with shock, and suddenly I saw how very far the radiation had eaten into her.

Carrera saw it too.

‘Yes, Mistress Wardani. Someone had to clear a path for your little quest, and Matthias Hand arranged for it to be our mutual friend Joshua Kemp. Oh, nothing direct of course. Military misinformation, carefully modelled and then equally carefully leaked along the right data channels. But enough to convince our resident revolutionary hero in Indigo City that Sauberville would look better as a grease stain. And that thirty-seven of my men didn’t need their eyes any more.’ He flipped a glance at me. ‘You must have guessed, right?’

I shrugged. ‘Seemed likely. A little too convenient otherwise.’

Wardani’s eyes snapped sideways to mine, disbelieving.

‘You see, Mistress Wardani.’ Carrera got up as if his whole body ached. ‘I’m sure you’d like to believe I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’m just a man doing a job. Men like Matthias Hand create the wars I make my living fighting. Keep that in mind next time you feel the need to insult me.’

The archaeologue said nothing, but I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face. Carrera turned to go, then stopped.

‘Oh, and Mistress Wardani, one more thing. Catamite.’ He looked at the floor, as if pondering the word. ‘I have what many would consider a rather limited range of sexual preferences, and anal penetration doesn’t feature among them. But I see from your camp records that the same cannot be said for you.’

She made a noise. Behind it, I almost heard the creak and shift of the recovery scaffolding Envoy artifice had built inside her. The sound of damage done. I found myself, inexplicably, on my feet.

‘Isaac, you—’

‘You?’ He was grinning like a skull as he faced me. ‘You, you pup. Had better sit down.’

It was nearly a command, nearly froze me in my tracks. Envoy bile rose sneering and beat it aside.

‘Kovacs—’ Wardani’s voice, like a cable snapping.

I met Carrera halfway, one crooked hand rising for his throat, a muddled kick emerging from the rest of my sickness-tangled stance. The big Wedge body swayed in to meet me and he blocked both attacks with brutal ease. The kick slipped away left, taking me off balance and he locked out my striking arm at the elbow, then smashed it.

It made a crunching noise in the back of my head, an empty whisky tumbler crushed underfoot in some dimly lit bar. The agony swarmed my brain, wrenched out a single short scream and then subsided under neurachem pain management. Wedge combat custom - seemed the sleeve was still good for that much. Carrera had not released his hold, and I dangled from the grip he had on my forearm like a powered-down child’s doll. I flexed my undamaged arm experimentally, and he laughed. Then he twisted hard on the shattered elbow joint, so pain rose back up like a black cloud behind my eyes, and dropped me. A casual kick to the stomach left me foetal, and not interested in anything much above ankle height.

‘I’ll send the medics,’ I heard him say somewhere above me. ‘And Mistress Wardani, I suggest you shut your mouth, or I will have some of my less sensitive men come and fill it for you. That and maybe give you a forcible reminder of what the word catamite means. Don’t test me, woman.’

There was a rustle of clothing, and then he crouched at my side. One hand gripped my jaw and turned my face upward.

‘You’re going to have to get that sentimental shit out of your system if you want to work for me, Kovacs. Oh, and just in case you don’t.’ He held up a curled-up inhib spider in his hand. ‘Temporary measure, purely. Just until we’re done with Sutjiadi. We’ll all feel a lot safer this way.’

He tipped his opened palm sideways, and the inhib unit rolled off into space. To my endorphin-dulled senses, it seemed to take a long time. I got to watch with something approaching fascination as the spider unrolled its legs in mid-air and fell flailing to the floor less than a metre from my head. There it gathered itself, spun about once or twice and then scuttled towards me. It clambered up over my face, then down around to my spine. A tiny spike of ice reached down into the bone, and I felt the cable-like limbs tighten around the back of my neck.

Oh well.

‘Be seeing you, Kovacs. Have a think about it.’ Carrera got up and apparently left. For a while, I lay there checking the seals on the cosy blanket of numbness my sleeve’s systems had wrapped me in. Then there were hands on my body, helping me into a sitting position I had no real interest in attaining.

‘Kovacs.’ It was Deprez, peering into my face. ‘You OK, man?’

I coughed weakly. ‘Yeah, great.’

He propped me against the edge of the table. Wardani moved into view above and behind him. ‘Kovacs?’

‘Uhhhhhh, sorry about that, Tanya.’ I risked a searching glance at the level of control on her face. ‘Should have warned you not to push him. He’s not like Hand. He won’t take that shit.’

‘Kovacs.’ There were muscles twitching her face that might have been the first crumbling of the jerry-built recovery edifice. Or not. ‘What are they going to do to Sutjiadi?’

A little pool of quiet welled up in the wake of the question.

‘Ritual execution,’ said Vongsavath. ‘Right?’

I nodded.

‘What does that mean?’ There was an unnerving calm in Wardani’s voice. I thought I might rewrite my assumptions about her state of recovery. ‘Ritual execution. What are they going to do?’

I closed my eyes, summoned images from the last two years. The recollection seemed to bring a dull seeping ache up from my shattered elbow joint. When I’d had enough, I looked at her face again.

‘It’s like an autosurgeon,’ I said slowly. ‘Reprogrammed. It scans the body, maps the nervous system. Measures resilience. Then, they run a rendering programme.’

Wardani’s eyes widened a little. ‘Rendering?’

‘It takes him apart. Flays the skin, flenses the flesh, cracks the bones.’ I drew on memory. ‘Disembowels him, cooks his eyes in their sockets, shatters his teeth and probes the nerves.’

She made a half-formed gesture against the words she was hearing.

‘It keeps him alive while it does it. If he looks like going into shock, it stops. Gives him stimulants if necessary. Gives him whatever’s necessary, apart from painkillers, obviously.’

Now it felt as if there was a fifth presence among us, crouched at my side, grinning and squeezing the shards of broken bone in my arm. I sat in my own biotech-damped pain, remembering what had happened to Sutjiadi’s predecessors while the Wedge gathered to watch like the faithful at some arcane altar to the war.

‘How long does this last?’ asked Deprez.

‘It depends. Most of the day.’ The words dragged out of me. ‘It has to be over by nightfall. Part of the ritual. If no one stops it earlier, the machine sections and removes the skull at last light. That usually does it.’ I wanted to stop talking, but it seemed no one else wanted to stop me. ‘Officers and noncoms have the option to call a coup de grâce vote from the ranks, but you won’t get that until late afternoon, even from the ones that want it over. They can’t afford to come across softer than the rank and file. And even late, even then, I’ve seen the vote go against them.’

‘Sutjiadi killed a Wedge platoon commander,’ said Vongsavath. ‘I think there will be no mercy vote.’

‘He’s weak,’ Wardani said hopefully. ‘With the radiation poisoning—’

‘No.’ I flexed my right arm and a spike of pain ran up to my shoulder, even under the neurachem. ‘The Maori sleeves are contam combat-designed. Very high endurance.’

‘But the neurache—’

I shook my head. ‘Forget it. The machine will adjust for that, kill the pain management systems first, rip them out.’

‘Then he’ll die.’

‘No, he won’t,’ I shouted. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

No one said much after that.

A pair of medics arrived, one the man who had treated me earlier, the second a hard-faced woman I didn’t know. They checked my arm with elaborately non-committal competence. The presence of the inhib unit crouched on my nape and what it said about my status both went carefully unremarked. They used an ultravibe microset to break up the bone fragments around the shattered elbow joint, then set regrowth bios in deep, long monofilament feed lines topped off at skin level with the green marker tags and the chip that told my bone cells what to do and, more to the point, how fucking rapidly to get it done. No slacking here. Never mind what you did back in the natural world, you’re part of a military custom operation now, soldier.

‘Couple of days,’ said the one I knew, peeling a rapid-dump endorphin dermal off the crook of my arm. ‘We’ve cleared up the ragged edges, so flexing it shouldn’t do any serious damage to the surrounding tissue. But it will hurt like fuck, and it slows down the healing process so try to avoid it. I’ll grip-pad you so you remember.’

A couple of days. In a couple of days, I’d be lucky if this sleeve was still breathing. Recollection of the doctor aboard the orbital hospital flashed through my head. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The absurdity of it bubbled through me and escaped as a sudden, unlooked-for grin.

‘Hey, thanks. Don’t want to slow down the healing process, do we?’

He smiled back weakly, then hurriedly turned his gaze to what he was doing. The grip-pad went on tight from bicep to lower forearm, warm and comforting, and constricting.

‘You part of the anatomiser crew?’ I asked him.

He gave me a haunted look. ‘No. That’s scan-related, I don’t do it.’

‘We’re done here, Martin,’ said the woman abruptly. ‘Time to go.’

‘Yeah.’ But he moved slowly, unwillingly as he folded up the battlefield kitpack. I watched the contents disappearing, taped-over surgical tools and the strips of brightly coloured dermals in their tug-down sleeves

‘Hey, Martin.’ I nodded at the pack. ‘You going to leave me a few of those pinks. I was planning to sleep late, you know.’

‘Uh—’

The female medic cleared her throat. ‘Martin, we aren’t—’

‘Oh, shut the fuck up, will you.’ He turned on her with fury boiling up out of nowhere. Envoy instinct kicked me in the head. Behind his back, I reached for the pack. ‘You don’t rank me, Zeyneb. I’ll dispense what I fucking like and you—’

‘’s OK,’ I said quietly. ‘I got them anyway.’

Both medics fixed on me. I held up the trailing strip of endorphin dermals I’d grabbed free in my left hand. I smiled thinly.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t take them all at once.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said the female medic. ‘Sir.’

‘Zeyneb, I told you to shut up.’ Martin gathered up the kitpack in a hurry, tightening it in his arms, cradling it. ‘You, uh, they’re fast-acting. No more than three at any one time. That will keep you under, whatever you h—’ He swallowed. ‘Whatever is going on around you.’

‘Thanks.’

They gathered the rest of their equipment and left. Zeyneb looked back at me from the bubblefab flap and her mouth twisted. Her voice was too low for me to catch what she said. Martin raised his arm in a cuffing gesture, and they both ducked out. I watched them go, then looked down at the strip of dermals in my clenched fist.

‘That’s your solution?’ asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. ‘Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?’

‘Do you have a better idea?’

She turned away.

‘Then get down off that fucking prayer tower and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.’

‘We could—’

‘We could what? We’re inhibited, we’re most of us a couple of days off death from catastrophic cell damage, and I don’t know about you, but my arm hurts. Oh, yeah, and this whole place is wired for sight and sound to the political officer’s cabin, which, I imagine, Carrera has ready access to when he wants it.’ I felt a slight twinge from the thing on the nape of my neck, and realised my own anger was getting the better of my weariness. I locked it down. ‘I’ve done all the fighting I’m going to do, Tanya. Tomorrow we get to spend the day listening to Sutjiadi die. You deal with that any way you want. Me, I’m going to sleep through it.’

There was a searing satisfaction in throwing the words out at her, like twisting shrapnel out of a wound in your own flesh. But somewhere underneath it, I kept seeing the camp commandant, shut down in his chair, current running, the pupil of his remaining human eye bumping idly against the upper lid.

If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again. I heard the words again, whispering out of him like dying breath. So I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.

I wondered what kind of discomfort I’d need at this stage of the game. What kind of chair I’d need to be strapped into.

Somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

And I wondered why the hand at the end of my injured arm was not empty.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Sutjiadi started screaming shortly after it got light.

Outraged fury for the first few seconds, almost reassuring in its humanity, but it didn’t last. In less than a minute, every human element boiled away to the white bone of animal agony. In that form it came searing up the beach from the butcher’s slab, shriek after peeling shriek filling the air like something solid, hunting listeners. We had been waiting for it since before the dawn but it still hit like a shockwave, a visible flinch through each of us where we sat hunched on beds no one had even tried to sleep in. It came for us all, and touched us with a sickening intimacy. It laid clammy hands over my face and a clamped grip on my ribcage, stopping breath, spiked the hairs on my neck and sent a single twitch through one eye. At my nape, the inhib unit tasted my nervous system and stirred interestedly.

Lock it down.

Behind the shrieking ran another sound I knew. The low growl of an aroused audience. The Wedge, seeing justice done.

Cross-legged on the bed, I opened my fists. The dermal strips fell to the quilt.

Something flickered.

I saw the dead visage of the Martian, printed across my vision so clear it might have been a retinal display. this chair—

—wakes me.

—spinning motes of shadow and light—

—dirge of alien grief—

I could feel—

—a Martian visage, in amongst the swirl of brilliant pain, not dead—

—great unhuman eyes that met mine with something that—

I shuddered away from it.

The human scream ran on, ripping along nerves, digging into marrow. Wardani buried her face in her hands.

I shouldn’t be feeling this bad, a detached part of me argued. This isn’t the first time I’ve—

Unhuman eyes. Unhuman screams.

Vongsavath began to weep.

I felt it rising in me, gathering in spirals the way the Martians had done. The inhib unit tensed.

No, not yet.

Envoy control, cold and methodical unpicking of human response just when I needed it. I welcomed it like a lover on Wardani’s sunset beach - I think I was grinning as it came on.

Outside on the slab, Sutjiadi screamed pleading denial, the words wrenched out of him like something drawn with pliers.

I reached down to the grip-pad on my arm and tugged it slowly towards my wrist. Twinges ran through the bone beneath as the movement snagged the regrowth biotags.

Sutjiadi screamed, ragged glass over tendon and gristle in my head. The inhibitor—

Cold. Cold.

The grip-pad reached my wrist and dangled loose. I reached for the first of the biotags.

Someone might be watching this from Lamont’s cabin, but I doubted it. Too much else on the menu right now. And besides, who watches detainees with inhibitor systems crouched on their spines? What’s the point? Trust the machine and get on with something more rewarding.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I gripped the tag and applied evenly mounting pressure.

You’re not doing this, I reminded myself. You’re just sitting here listening to a man die, and you’ve done enough of that in the past couple of years for it not to bother you. No big deal. The Envoy systems, fooling every adrenal gland in my body and plastering me with a layer of cool detachment. I believed what I told myself at a level deeper than thought. On my neck, the inhibitor twitched and snugged itself down again.

A tiny tearing and the regrowth bio filament came out.

Too short.

Fu—

Cold.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I selected another tag and tugged it gently side to side. Beneath the surface of the skin, I felt the monofilament slice tissue down to the bone in a direct line and knew it was also too short.

I looked up and caught Deprez looking at me. His lips framed a question. I gave him a distracted little smile and tried another tag.

Sutjiadi screamed.

The fourth tag was the one - I felt it slicing flesh in a long curve through and around my elbow. The single endorphin dermal I’d shot earlier kept the pain to a minor inconvenience, but the tension still ran through me like wires. I took a fresh grip on the Envoy lie that absolutely nothing was happening here, and pulled hard.

The filament came up like a kelp cable out of damp beach sand, ripping a furrow through the flesh of my forearm. Blood spritzed my face.

Sutjiadi screamed. Searing, sawing up and down a scale of despair and disbelief at what the machine was doing to him, at what he could feel happening to the sinewed fibres of his body.

‘Kovacs what the fuck are you—’ Wardani shut up as I cut her a look and jabbed a finger at my neck. I wrapped the filament carefully around my left palm, knotted it behind the tag. Then, not giving myself time to think about it, I splayed my hand and drew the noose smoothly and rapidly tight.

Nothing is happening here.

The monofilament sliced into my palm, went down through the pad of tissue as if through water and came up against the interface bioplate. Vague pain. Blood welled from the invisible cut in a thin line, then blotched across the whole palm. I heard Wardani’s breath draw short, and then she yelped as her inhibitor bit.

Not here my nerves told the inhib unit on my own neck. Nothing happening here.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I unknotted the filament and drew it clear, then flexed my damaged palm. The lips of the wound across the palm split and gaped. I stuffed thumb into the split and—

NOTHING is happening here. Nothing at all.

—twisted until the flesh tore.

It hurt, endorphin or no fucking endorphin, but I had what I wanted. Below the mangled mass of meat and fatty tissue, the interface plate showed a clear white surface, beaded with blood and finely scarred with biotech circuitry. I worked the lips of the wound further apart until there was a clear patch of plate exposed. Then I reached back with no more conscious intent than you’d get from a back-cracking yawn, and jammed the gashed hand onto the inhibitor.

And closed my fist.

For just a moment, I thought my luck had run out. Luck that had seen me through removing the monofilament without major vascular damage, that had let me get to the interface plate without severing any useful tendons. Luck that had no one watching Lamont’s screens. Luck like that had to run dry at some point and as the inhib unit shifted under my blood-slippery grip I felt the whole teetering structure of Envoy control start to come down.

Fuck

The interface plate - user locked, hostile to any uncoded circuitry in direct contact - bucked in my ripped palm and something shorted out behind my head.

The inhibitor died with a short electronic squeal.

I grunted, then let the pain come up through gritted teeth as I reached back with my damaged arm and began to unflex the thing’s grip on my neck. Reaction was setting in now, a muted trembling racing up my limbs and a spreading numbness in my wounds.

‘Vongsavath,’ I said as I worked the inhibitor loose. ‘I want you to go out there, find Tony Loemanako.’

‘Who?’

‘The noncom who came to collect us last night.’ There was no longer any need to suppress emotion, but I found the Envoy systems were doing it anyway. Even while Sutjiadi’s colossal agony scraped and raked along my nerve endings, I seemed to have discovered an inhuman depth of patience to balance against it. ‘His name is Loemanako. You’ll probably find him down by the execution slab. Tell him I need to talk to him. No, wait. Better just tell him I said I need him. Those words exactly. No reasons, just that. I need him right now. That should bring him.’

Vongsavath looked to the closed flap of the bubblefab. It barely muffled Sutjiadi’s uncontrolled shrieking.

‘Out there,’ she said.

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ I finally got the inhib unit off. ‘I’d go myself, but it’d be harder to sell, that way. And you’re still wearing one of these.’

I examined the carapace of the inhibitor. There was no outward sign of the damage the interface plate’s counterintrusion systems had done, but the unit was inert, tentacles spasmed stiff and clawed.

The pilot officer got up unsteadily. ‘Alright. I’m going.’

‘And Vongsavath.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Take it easy out there.’ I held up the murdered inhibitor. ‘Try not to get excited about anything.’

It appeared I was smiling again. Vongsavath stared at me for a moment, then fled. Sutjiadi’s screams blistered through in her wake for a moment, and then the flap fell back again.

I turned my attention to the drugs in front of me.

Loemanako came at speed. He ducked through the flap ahead of Vongsavath - another momentary lift in Sutjiadi’s agony - and strode down the the centre aisle of the bubblefab to where I lay curled up on the end bed, shivering.

‘Sorry about the noise,’ he said, leaning over me. One hand touched my shoulder gently. ‘Lieutenant, are you—’

I struck upward, into the exposed throat.

Five rapid-dump dermals of tetrameth from the strip my right hand had stolen the previous night, laid directly across major blood vessels. If I’d been wearing an unconditioned sleeve, I’d be cramped up and dying now. If I’d had less conditioning of my own, I’d be cramped up and dying now.

I hadn’t dared dose myself with less.

The blow ripped open Loemanako’s windpipe, and tore it across. Blood gushed, warm over the back of my hand. He staggered backwards, face working, eyes child-like with disbelieving hurt. I came off the bed after him—

—something in the wolf splice weeps in me at the betrayal—

—and finished it.

He toppled and lay still.

I stood over the corpse, thrumming inside with the pulse of the tetrameth. My feet shifted unsteadily under me. Muscle tremors skipped down one side of my face.

Outside, Sutjiadi’s screams modulated upward into something new and worse.

‘Get the mobility suit off him,’ I said harshly.

No response. I glanced around and realised I was talking to myself. Deprez and Wardani were both slumped against their beds, stunned. Vongsavath was struggling to rise, but could not coordinate her limbs. Too much excitement - the inhibitors had tasted it in their blood and bitten accordingly.

‘Fuck.’

I moved between them, clenching my mutilated hand around the spider units and tearing them loose as they spasmed. Against the shift and slide of the tetrameth, it was almost impossible to be more gentle. Deprez and Wardani both grunted with shock as their inhibitors died. Vongsavath’s went harder, sparking sharply and scorching my opened palm. The pilot vomited bile, and thrashed. I knelt beside her and got fingers into her throat, pinning her tongue until the spasm passed.

‘You O—’

Sutjiadi shrieked across it.

‘—K?’

She nodded weakly.

‘Then help me get this mob suit off. We don’t have a lot of time ’til he’s missed.’

Loemanako was armed with an interface pistol of his own, a standard blaster and the vibroknife he’d loaned to Carrera the night before. I cut his clothes off and went to work on the mob suit beneath. It was combat spec - it powered down and peeled at battlefield speed. Fifteen seconds and Vongsavath’s shaky assistance were enough to shut off the dorsal and limb drives and unzip the frame. Loemanako’s corpse lay throat open, limbs spread, outlined in an array of upward-jutting flex-alloy fibre spines that reminded me fleetingly of bottleback corpses butchered and half-filleted for barbecue meat on Hirata beach.

‘Help me roll him out of—’

Behind me, someone retched. I glanced back and saw Deprez propping himself upright. He blinked a couple of times and managed to focus on me.

‘Kovacs. Did you—’ His gaze fell on Loemanako. ‘That’s good. Now, do you want to share your plans for a change?’

I gave Loemanako’s corpse a final shove and rolled it clear of the unwrapped mob suit. ‘Plan’s simple, Luc. I’m going to kill Sutjiadi and everyone else out there. While that’s going on, I need you to get inside the ’Chandra and check for crew or conscientous objectors to the entertainment. Probably be a few of each. Here, take this.’ I kicked the blaster across to him. ‘Think you’ll need anything else?’

He shook his head muzzily. ‘You spare the knife? And drugs. Where are those fucking tetrameth.’

‘My bed. Under the quilt.’ I lay on the suit without bothering to undress and began to pull the support struts closed across my chest and stomach. Not ideal, but I didn’t have the time. Ought to be OK - Loemanako was bigger framed than my sleeve, and the servoamp uptake pads are supposed to work through clothing at a push. ‘We’ll go together - I figure it’s worth the risk of a run to the polalloy shed before we start.’

‘I’m coming,’ said Vongsavath grimly.

‘No, you’re fucking not.’ I closed the last of the body struts and started on the arms. ‘I need you in one piece; you’re the only person can fly the battlewagon. Don’t argue, it’s the only way any of us get out of here. Your job is to stay here and stay alive. Get the legs.’

Sutjiadi’s screams had damped down to semi-conscious moans. I felt a scribble of alarm run up my spine. If the machine saw fit to back off and leave its victim to recover for any length of time, those in the back rows of the audience might start to drift away for an interval cigarette. I hit the drives while Vongsavath was still fastening the last of the ankle joint struts and felt more than heard the servos murmur to life. I flexed my arms - jag of unwatched pain in the broken elbow, twinges in the ruined hand - and felt the power.

Hospital mob suits are designed and programmed to approximate normal human strength and motion while cushioning areas of trauma and ensuring that no part of the body is strained beyond its convalescent limits. In most cases the parameters are hardwired in to stop stupid little fucks from overriding what’s good for them.

Military custom doesn’t work like that.

I tensed my body and the suit got me to my feet. I thought a kick to groin height and the suit lashed out with speed and strength to dent steel. A left-handed back fist long strike. The suit put it there like neurachem. I crouched and flexed, and knew the servos would put me five metres into the air on demand. I reached out with machined precision and picked up Loemanako’s interface gun right handed. Digits scrambled along the display as it recognised the Wedge codes in my undamaged palm. Red gleam of the load light, and I knew through the prickling in my palm what the magazine carried. The vacuum commando’s standby. Jacketed slugs, short-fused plasma core. Demolition load.

Outside, the machine somehow licked Sutjiadi back up into screaming. Hoarse now, his voice was shredding. A deeper groundswell rose behind the shrieks. Audience cheers.

‘Get the knife,’ I told Deprez.

CHAPTER FORTY

Outside, it was a beautiful day.

The sun was warm on my skin and glinting off the hull of the battlewagon. There was a slight breeze coming in off the sea, scuffing whitecaps. Sutjiadi screamed his agony at a careless blue sky.

Glancing down to the shoreline, I saw they’d erected metal-framed banks of seats around the anatomiser. Only the top of the machine showed above the heads of the spectators. Neurachem reeled in a tighter view - a sense of heads and shoulders tensed in fascination at what was happening on the slab, and then suddenly a glimpse of something flapping, membrane-thin and blood-streaked, torn loose from Sutjiadi’s body by pincers and caught by the breeze. A fresh shriek floated up in its wake. I turned away.

You patched and evacuated Jimmy de Soto while he screamed and tried to claw out his own eyes. You can do this.

Functionality!

‘Polalloy shed,’ I muttered to Deprez and we moved down the beach to the far end of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, as rapidly as seemed safe without tripping some Wedge veteran’s combat-amped peripheral vision. There’s an art to it they teach you in covert ops - breath shallow, move smoothly. Minimise anything that might trigger the enemy’s proximity senses. Half a minute of itching exposure was all it took, and then we were shielded from the seat banks by the swell of the ’Chandra’s hull.

On the far side of the shed, we came across a young Wedge uniform, braced on the structure and vomiting his guts up in the sand. He looked up out of a sweat-beaded face as we rounded the corner, features twisted in misery.

Deprez killed him with the knife.

I kicked open the door with mob suit strength and swung inside, eyes flexed out to total scan in the sudden gloom.

Lockers stood tidily against one wall. A corner table held an assortment of helmet frames. Wall racks offered boot bases and breathing apparatus. The hatch to the showers was open. A Wedge noncom looked round from a datacoil at another desk, face haggard and angry.

‘I’ve already fucking told Artola I’m not—’ She spotted the mob suit and peered, getting up. ‘Loemanako? What are you—’

The knife skipped through the air like a dark bird off my shoulder. It buried itself in the noncom’s neck, just above the collar bone and she jerked in shock, came a wavering step towards me, still peering, and then collapsed.

Deprez stepped past me, knelt to check his handiwork and then withdrew the knife. There was a clean economy of motion in his movements that belied the state of his radiation-blasted cells.

He stood up and caught me looking at him.

‘Something?’

I nodded at the corpse he’d just made. ‘Not bad for a dying man, Luc.’

He shrugged. ‘Tetrameth. Maori sleeve. I have been worse equipped.’

I dumped the interface gun on the table, picked up a pair of helmet frames and tossed one to him. ‘You done this before?’

‘No. I’m not a spaceman.’

‘OK. Put this on. Hold the struts, don’t smudge the faceplate.’ I gathered boot bases and breathing sets at tetrameth speed. ‘The air intake fits through here, like this. The pack straps over your chest.’

‘We don’t nee—’

‘I know, but it’s quicker this way. And it means you can keep the faceplate down. Might save your life. Now stamp down on the boot bases, they’ll stick in place. I’ve got to power this thing up.’

The shower systems were set into the wall next to the hatch. I got one unit running, then nodded at Deprez to follow me, and went through into the shower section. The hatch cycled closed behind us, and I caught the thick solvent odour of the polalloy pouring in the confined space. The operational unit’s lamps flashed orange in the low light surroundings, glinting off the dozens of twisting threads of polalloy where they ran down from the shower heads and spread like oil on the angled floor of the cubicle.

I stepped in.

It’s an eerie feeling the first time you do it, like being buried alive in mud. The polalloy lands on you in a thin coating that quickly builds to a sliding sludge. It masses on the dome of cross-netting at the top of the helmet frame, then topples and pours down around your head, stinging your throat and nostrils even through your locked breathing. Molecular repulsion keeps it off the surface of the faceplate, but the rest of the helmet is sheathed in twenty seconds. The rest of your body, right down to the boot bases, takes about half as long again. You try to keep it away from open wounds or raw flesh; it stings before it dries. fffffffuuuuck

It’s airtight, watertight, utterly sealed, and it’ll stop a high-velocity slug like battlewagon armour. At a distance, it even reflects Sunjet fire.

I stepped down and felt through the polalloy for the breathing set controls. Thumbed the vent control. Air hissed under my jaw, filling the suit and popping it loose around my body. I killed the air and chinned the faceplate control. The plate hinged silently up.

‘Now you. Don’t forget to hold your breath.’

Somewhere outside, Sutjiadi was still screaming. The tetrameth scratched at me. I almost yanked Deprez out of the shower, punched the air supply and watched as his suit popped.

‘OK, that’s it.’ I dialled down to intake standard. ‘Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit’s malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern.’

The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Try to stay alive, Luc.’

I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night - five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok’s hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she’d never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn’t identify.

Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

They spotted me at twenty metres - I wasn’t hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.

‘Lieutenant?’

I shot her first. A single shot, in through the opened faceplate. The detonating plasma core blew the helmet apart as I ran forward.

—aching throatful of wolf loyalty, rubbed raw—

The second suit was moving when I got to him, a single leap in the mob suit and a mid-air kick that slammed him back against the carapace of the bug. He bounced off, one hand reaching to slap his faceplate closed. I grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired down into his yelling mouth.

Something hammered me in the chest, threw me on my back in the sand. I saw an unsuited figure stalking towards me, hand gun flung out. The interface gun dragged my arm up a handsbreadth and I shot his legs out from under him. Finally, a scream to compete with Sutjiadi, and time running out. I chinned my faceplate closed and flexed my legs. The mob suit threw me to my feet again. A Sunjet blast lashed the sand where I had been. I tracked round and snapped off a shot. The Sunjet wielder spun about with the impact and red glinting fragments of spine exploded out of his back as the shell detonated.

The last one tried to close with me, blocking my gun arm upward and stamping down at my knee. Against an unarmoured man, it was a good move, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The edge of his foot bounced off the mob suit and he staggered. I twisted and snapped out a roundhouse kick with all the balanced force the suit would give me.

It broke his back.

Something banged off the front of the bug. I looked down the beach and saw figures spilling from the makeshift amphitheatre, weapons levelling. I snapped a shot off in reflex, then got a grip on my ’meth-scrambled thought processes and straddled the bug.

The systems awoke at a slap to the ignition pad - lights and dataflow in the hooded and heavily armoured instrument panels. I powered up, lifted a quarter-turn about to face the advancing Wedge, selected weaponry and—

—howl, howl, HOWL—

some kind of snarling grin made it to my face as the launchers cut loose.

Explosives aren’t good for much in vacuum combat. No shockwave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.

The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub shells into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-sized razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.

It was the weapon that ripped 391 platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok’s eyes, Eddie Munharto’s limbs, and my shoulder.

Two months? Why does it feel like another lifetime?

The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turned from men and women into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those further off just died in sudden pieces.

The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air, and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field.

There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.

I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.

Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.

‘What—’ he pleaded.

The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some hell I hadn’t heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half levelled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the shoreline beside Sutjiadi’s impromptu funeral pyre, and picked out motion at the water’s edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured - he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug’s screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.

‘Who?’ he kept saying. ‘Who?’

He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.

‘Lieutenant Kovacs?’ His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. ‘Who did this?’

‘We did,’ I told him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.

I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.

Movement from the ’Chandra.

I whipped about on the bug and saw a polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry rank and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug’s screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit’s gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was massive.

The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.

‘Carrera,’ he managed hoarsely. ‘Forward hatch.’

I was already moving, already knowing bone-deep I was too late.

The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three metres from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.

Fuck you, Isaac, fuck you for a diehard motherfucker.

I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. The locker room was as I’d left it. The female noncom’s corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.

I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.

Fuck.

Well, it figures. I shut down the shower system absently. What did you expect, that he’d be easy to kill?

I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.

Deprez died while I was gone.

When I got back to him, he’d given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood - at close range, a Sunjet cauterises totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had got him point blank.

Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were knelt in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in passing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.

‘Tanya.’

She heard it in my voice. ‘What now?’

‘It’s a lot easier to shut the gate than to open it, right?’

‘Right.’ She stopped and looked up at me, searching my face. ‘There’s a shutdown procedure that doesn’t require encoding, yes. How did you know?’

I shrugged, inwardly wondering myself. Envoy intuition doesn’t usually work this way. ‘Makes sense, I guess. Always harder to pick the locks than slam the door afterwards.’

Her voice lowered. ‘Yes.’

‘This shutdown. How long will it take?’

‘I, fuck, Kovacs. I don’t know. A couple of hours. Why?’

‘Carrera isn’t dead.’

She coughed up a fractured laugh. ‘What?’

‘You see that big fucking hole in Luc.’ The tetrameth thrummed in me like current, feeding a rising anger. ‘Carrera made it. Then he got out the forward escape hatch, painted himself in polalloy and is by now on the other side of the fucking gate. That clear enough for you?’

‘Then why don’t you leave him there?’

‘Because if I do,’ I forced my own voice down a couple of notches, tried to get a grip on the ’meth surge. ‘If I do, he’ll swim up while you’re trying to close the gate and he’ll kill you. And the rest of us. In fact, depending on what hardware Loemanako left aboard the ship, he may be right back with a tactical nuclear warhead. Very shortly.’

‘Then why don’t we just get the fuck out of here right now?’ asked Vongsavath. She gestured at the Angin Chandra’s Virtue. ‘In this thing, I can put us on the other side of the globe in a couple of minutes. Fuck it, I could probably get us out of the whole system in a couple of months.’

I glanced across at Tanya Wardani and waited. It took a few moments, but finally she shook her head.

‘No. We have to close the gate.’

Vongsavath threw up her hands. ‘What the fuck for? Who care—’

‘Stow it, Ameli.’ I flexed the suit upright again. ‘Tell the truth, I don’t think you could get through the Wedge security blocks in much less than a day anyway. Even with my help. I’m afraid we’re going to have to do this the hard way.’

And I will have a chance to kill the man who murdered Luc Deprez.

I wasn’t sure if that was the ’meth talking, or just the memory of a shared bottle of whisky on the deck of a trawler now blasted and sunk. It didn’t seem to matter that much.

Vongsavath sighed and heaved herself to her feet.

‘You going on the bug?’ she asked. ‘Or do you want an impeller frame?’

‘We’ll need both.’

‘Yeah?’ she looked suddenly interested. ‘How come? Do you want me—’

‘The bugs mount a nuclear howitzer. Twenty kiloton yield. I’m going to fire that motherfucker across and see if we can’t fry Carrera with it. Most likely, we won’t. He’ll be backed off somewhere, probably expecting it. But it will chase him away for long enough to send the bug through. While that draws any long-range fire he can manage, I’ll tumble in with the impeller rig. After that,’ I shrugged. ‘It’s a fair fight.’

‘And I suppose I’m not—’

‘Got it in one. How does it feel to be indispensable?’

‘Around here?’ She looked up and down the corpse-strewn beach. ‘It feels out of place.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

‘You can’t do this,’ said Wardani quietly.

I finished angling the nose of the bug upward towards the centre of the gate-space, and turned to face her. The grav field murmured to itself.

‘Tanya, we’ve seen this thing withstand weapons that . . .’ I searched for adequate words. ‘That I for one don’t understand. You really think a little tickle with a tactical nuke is going to cause any damage?’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean you. Look at you.’

I looked down at controls on the firing board. ‘I’m good for a couple more days.’

‘Yeah - in a hospital bed. Do you really think you stand a chance going up against Carrera, the state you’re in? The only thing holding you up right now is that suit.’

‘Rubbish. You’re forgetting the tetrameth.’

‘Yeah, a lethal dose from what I saw. How long can you stay on top of that?’

‘Long enough.’ I skipped her look and stared past her down the beach. ‘What the hell is keeping Vongsavath?’

‘Kovacs.’ She waited until I looked at her. ‘Try the nuke. Leave it at that. I’ll get the gate closed.’

‘Tanya, why didn’t you shoot me with the stunner?’

Silence.

‘Tanya?’

‘Alright,’ she said violently. ‘Piss your fucking life away out there. See if I care.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked you.’

‘I,’ she dropped her gaze. ‘I panicked.’

‘That, Tanya, is bullshit. I’ve seen you do a lot of things in the last couple of months, but panic hasn’t been any of them. I don’t think you know the meaning of the word.’

‘Oh, yeah? You think you know me that well?’

‘Well enough.’

She snorted. ‘Fucking soldiers. Show me a soldier, I’ll show you a fucked-in-the-head romantic. You know nothing about me, Kovacs. You’ve fucked me, and that in a virtuality. You think that gives you insight? You think that gives you the right to judge people?’

‘People like Schneider, you mean?’ I shrugged. ‘He would have sold us all out to Carrera, Tanya. You know that, don’t you. He would have sat through Sutjiadi and let it happen.’

‘Oh, you’re feeling proud of yourself, is that it?’ She gestured down at the crater where Sutjiadi had died and the brightly reddened spillage of corpses and spread gore stretching up towards us. ‘Think you’ve achieved something here, do you?’

‘You wanted me to die? Revenge for Schneider?’

‘No!’

‘It’s not a problem, Tanya.’ I shrugged again. ‘The only thing I can’t work out is why I didn’t die. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comment on that? As the resident Martian expert, I mean.’

‘I don’t know. I, I panicked. Like I said. I got the stunner as soon as you dropped it. I put myself out.’

‘Yeah, I know. Carrera said you were in neuroshock. He just wanted to know why I wasn’t. That, and why I woke up so fast.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, not looking at me, ‘you don’t have whatever is inside the rest of us.’

‘Hoy, Kovacs.’

We both shifted to look down the beach again.

‘Kovacs. Look what I found.’

It was Vongsavath, riding the other bug at crawling pace. In front of her stumbled a solitary figure. I narrowed my eyes and reeled in a closer look.

‘I don’t fucking believe it.’

‘Who is it?’

I rustled up a dry chuckle. ‘Survivor type. Look.’

Lamont looked grim, but not noticeably worse than the last time we’d met. His ragged-clad frame was splattered with blood, but none of it seemed to be his. His eyes were clenched into slits and his trembling seemed to have damped down. He recognised me and his face lit up. He capered forward, then stopped and looked back at the bug that was herding him up the beach. Vongsavath snapped something at him and he started forward again until he stood a couple of metres away from me, jigging peculiarly from one foot to another.

‘Knew it!’ He cackled out loud. ‘Knew you’d do it. Got files on you, I knew you would. I heard you. Heard you, but I didn’t say.’

‘Found him in the armoury crawlspace,’ said Vongsavath, bringing the bug to a halt and dismounting. ‘Sorry. Took a while to scare him out.’

‘Heard you, saw you,’ said Lamont to himself, rubbing ferociously at the back of his neck. ‘Got files on you. Ko-ko-ko-ko-kovacs. Knew you’d do it.’

‘Did you,’ I said sombrely.

‘Heard you, saw you, but I didn’t say.’

‘Yeah, well that was your mistake. A good political officer always relays his suspicions to higher authority. It’s in the directives.’ I picked up the interface gun from the bug console and shot Lamont through the chest. It was an impatient shot and it sheared through him too high to kill immediately. The shell exploded in the sand five metres behind him. He flopped on the ground, blood gouting from the entry wound, then from somewhere he found the strength to get to his knees. He grinned up at me.

‘Knew you’d do it,’ he said hoarsely, and keeled slowly over on his side. Blood soaked out of him and into the sand.

‘Did you get the impeller?’ I asked Vongsavath.

I sent Wardani and Vongsavath to wait behind the nearest rock bluff while I fired the nuke. They weren’t shielded and I didn’t want to waste the time it would take to get them into polalloy. And even at a distance, even in the freezing vacuum on the other side of the gate, the nuclear shells the bug mounted would throw back enough hard radiation to cook an unshielded human very dead.

Of course, previous experience suggested the gate would handle the proximity of dangerous radiation in much the same way it had dealt with the proximity of nanobes - it wouldn’t permit it. But you could be wrong about these things. And anyway, there was no telling what a Martian would consider a tolerable dose.

Then why are you sitting here, Tak?

Suit’ll soak it up.

But it was a little more than that. Sat astride the bug, Sunjet flat across my thighs, interface pistol tucked into a belt pouch, face on to the bubble of starscape the gate had carved into the world before me, I could feel a long, dragging inertia of purpose setting in. It was a fatalism running deeper than the tetrameth, a conviction that there wasn’t that much more to do and whatever result was waiting out there in the cold would just have to do.

Must be the dying, Tak. Bound to get to you in the end. Even with the ’meth, at a cellular level, any sleeve is going to—

Or maybe you’re just scared of diving through there and finding yourself back on the Mivtsemdi all over again.

Shall we just get on with it?

The howitzer shell spat from the bug carapace slow enough to be visible, breached the gate-space with a faint sucking sound and trailed off into the starscape. Seconds later the view was drenched white with the blast. My faceplate darkened automatically. I waited, seated on the bug, until the light faded. If anything outside visual spectrum radiation made it back through, the contam alert on the suit helmet didn’t think it worth mentioning.

Nice to be right, huh?

Not that it matters much now anyway.

I chinned up the faceplate and whistled. The second bug lifted from behind the rock bluff and ploughed a short furrow through the sand. Vongsavath set it down with casual perfection, aligned with mine. Wardani climbed off from behind her with aching slowness.

‘Two hours, you said, Tanya.’

She ignored me. She hadn’t spoken since I shot Lamont.

‘Well.’ I checked the security tether on the Sunjet one more time. ‘Whatever you’ve got to do, start doing it now.’

‘What if you’re not back in time?’ objected Vongsavath.

I grinned. ‘Don’t be stupid. If I can’t waste Carrera and get back here in two hours, I’m not coming back. You know that.’

Then I knocked the faceplate shut and put the bug into drive.

Through the gate. Look - easy as falling.

My stomach climbed into my throat as the weightlessness swarmed aboard. Vertigo kicked in behind it.

Here we fucking go again.

Carrera made his play.

Minute blotch of pink in the faceplate as a drive kicked in somewhere above me. Envoy reflex fielded it the moment it happened and my hands yanked the bug about to face the attack. Weapons systems flickered. A pair of interceptor drones spat out of the launch pods. They looped in to avoid any direct defences the approaching missile had, then darted across my field of vision from opposite sides and detonated. I thought one of them had begun to spin off course, tinselled out, when they blew. Silent white light flared and the faceplate blotted out my view.

By then, I was too busy to watch.

I kicked back from the body of the bug, nailing down a sudden surge of terror as I let go of its solidity and fell upward into the dark. My left hand clawed after the impeller control arm. I froze it.

Not yet.

The bug tumbled away below me, drive still lit. I shut out thoughts of the infinite emptiness I was adrift in, focused instead on the dimly sensed mass of the ship above me. In the sparse light from the stars, the polalloy combat suit and the impeller rack on my back would be next to invisible. No impeller thrust meant no trace on anything but the most sensitive of mass-sensing sets, and I was willing to bet that Carrera didn’t have one of those to hand. As long as the impellers stayed dead, the only visible target out here was the bug’s drive. I lay crouched upright in the weightless quiet, tugged the Sunjet to me on its tether line and cuddled the stock into my shoulder. Breathed. Tried not to wait too hard for Carrera’s next move.

Come on you motherfucker.

Ah-ah. You’re expecting, Tak.

We will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.

Thanks, Virginia.

Properly equipped, a vacuum commando doesn’t have to do most of this shit. A whole rack of detection systems load into the helmet frames of a combat suit, coordinated by a nasty little personal battlecomputer that doesn’t suffer from any of the freezing awe humans are prone to in hard space. You have to roll with it, but as with most warfare these days, the machine does most of the work.

I hadn’t had time to find and install the Wedge’s battletech, but I was tolerably sure Carrera hadn’t either. That left him with whatever Wedge-coded hardware Loemanako’s team had left aboard the ship, and possibly a Sunjet of his own. And for a Wedge commando, it goes against the grain to leave hardware lying around unwatched - there wouldn’t be much.

You hope.

The rest was down to one-on-one at levels of crudity that stretched all the way back to orbital champions like Armstrong and Gagarin. And that, the tetrameth rush was telling me, had to work in my favour. I let the Envoy senses slide out over my anxiety, over the pounding of the tetrameth, and I stopped waiting for anything to happen.

There.

Pink flare off the darkened edge of the looming hull.

I pivoted my weight as smoothly as the mob suit would allow, lined myself up on the launch point and kicked the impellers up into overdrive. Somewhere below me, white light unfolded and doused the lower half of my vision. Carrera’s missile homing in on the bug.

I cut the impellers. Fell silently upward towards the ship. Under the faceplate, I felt a grimace of satisfaction creep across my face. The impeller trace would have been lost in the blast from the exploding bug, and now Carrera had nothing again. He might be expecting something like this, but he couldn’t see me, and by the time he could . . .

Sunjet flame awoke on the hull. Scattered beam. I quailed for a moment inside my suit, then the grin stitched itself back as I saw. Carrera was firing wide, too far back along an angle between the death of the bug and where I really was now. My fingers tightened around the Sunjet.

Not yet. Not—

Another Sunjet blast, no closer. I watched the beam light up and die, light up and die, getting my own weapon lined up for the next one. The range had to be less than a kilometre now. A few more seconds and a beam on minimal dispersal should punch right through the polalloy Carrera was wearing and whatever organic matter was also in the way. A lucky shot would take off his head or melt through heart or lungs. Less lucky would do damage he’d have to deal with, and while he was doing that I’d get close.

I could feel my lips peeling back from my teeth as I thought it.

Space erupted in light around me.

For a moment so brief it only registered at Envoy speeds, I thought the crew of the ship had come back again, outraged at the nuclear blast so close to their funeral barge, and the irritating pinprick firefighting in its wake.

Flare. You stupid fuck, he’s lit you up.

I snapped on the impellers and whirled away sideways. Sunjet fire chased me from a rampart on the hull over my head. On one spin, I managed to get off returning fire. Three sputtering seconds, but Carrera’s beam shut off. I fled for the roof, got some piece of hull architecture between me and Carrera’s position, then reversed the impeller drive and braked to slow drift. Blood hammered in my temples.

Did I get him?

Proximity to the hull forced recoding of my surroundings. The alien sculpted architecture of the vessel overhead was suddenly the surface of a planetoid and I was head down five metres over it. The flare burnt steadily a hundred metres out, casting twisted shadows past the chunk of hull architecture I was floating behind. Weird detail scarred the surfaces around me, curls and scrapings of structure like scrawlings in bas relief, glyphs on a monumental scale.

Did I—

‘Nice evasion, Kovacs.’ Carrera’s voice spoke into my ear as if he was sitting in the helmet beside me. ‘Not bad for a non-swimmer.’

I checked the head up displays. The suit radio was set for receive only. I nudged sideways in the helmet space and the transmit symbol glowed on. A cautious body flex put me parallel to the hull. Meanwhile . . .

Keep him talking.

‘Who told you I was a non-swimmer?’

‘Oh, yes, I was forgetting. That fiasco with Randall. But a couple of outings like that hardly make you a VacCom veteran.’ He was playing for avuncular amusement, but there wasn’t much hiding the raw ugliness of the rage underneath it. ‘Which fact explains why it’s going to be very easy for me to kill you. That is what I’m going to do, Kovacs. I’m going to smash in your faceplate and watch your face boil out.’

‘Better get on with it, then.’ I scanned the solidified bubbling of hull in front of me, looking for a sniper vantage point. ‘Because I don’t plan to be here much longer.’

‘Only came back for the view, huh. Or did you leave some holoporn with sentimental value lying around the docking bay?’

‘Just keeping you out of the way while Wardani closes the gate, that’s all.’

A short pause, in which I could hear him breathing. I shortened the tether line on the Sunjet until it floated close beside my right arm, then touched the trim controls on the impeller arm and risked a half-second impulse. The straps tugged as the racked motors on my back lifted me delicately up and forward.

‘What’s the matter, Isaac? You sulking?’

He made a noise in his throat. ‘You’re a piece of shit, Kovacs. You’ve sold out your comrades like a tower dweller. Murdered them for credit.’

‘I thought that’s what we were about, Isaac. Murder for credit.’

‘Don’t give me your fucking Quellisms, Kovacs. Not with a hundred Wedge personnel dead and blown apart back there. Not with the blood of Tony Loemanako and Kwok Yuen Yee on your hands. You are the murderer. They were soldiers.’

A tiny stinging in my throat and eyes at the names.

Lock it down.

‘They slaughtered sort of easily for soldiers.’

‘Fuck you, Kovacs.’

‘Whatever.’ I reached out for the approaching curve of the hull architecture where a small bubble formed a rounded spur on one side of the main structure. Behind my outstretched arms, the rest of my body shifted into a dead stop posture. A momentary sense of panic sweated through me at the sudden thought that the hull might be contact-mined in some way—

Oh well. Can’t think of everything.

—and then my gloved hands came to rest on the curving surface and I stopped moving. The Sunjet bumped gently off my shoulder. I risked a rapid glance through the gull-winged space where the two bubble forms intersected. Ducked back. Envoy recall built me a picture and mapped it against memory.

It was the docking bay, centred at the bottom of the same three-hundred-metre dimple and set about with bubbled hillocks that were themselves distorted by other smaller swellings rising haphazardly from their flanks. Loemanako’s squad must have left a locater beacon, because there was no other way Carrera could have found the place this fast on a hull nearly thirty klicks across and sixty long. I looked at the suit receiver display again, but the only channel showing was the one Carrera’s slightly hoarse breathing came through on. No big surprise; he would have killed the broadcast as soon as he got set up. No point in telegraphing his ambush point to anyone else.

So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.

I eased myself painstakingly back to a viewing position and started scanning the globular landscape below me a degree at a time. All I needed was a single careless move. Just one.

From Isaac Carrera, decorated VacCom commander, survivor of half a thousand vacuum combat engagements and victor in most. A careless move. Sure, Tak. Coming right up.

‘You know, I wonder, Kovacs.’ His voice was calm again. He’d cranked his anger back under control. Under the circumstances, the last thing I needed. ‘What kind of deal did Hand offer you?’

Scan, search. Keep him talking.

‘More than you’re paying me, Isaac.’

‘I think you’re forgetting our rather excellent healthcare cover.’

‘Nope. Just trying to avoid needing it again.’

Scan, search.

‘Was it so bad, fighting for the Wedge? You were guaranteed re-sleeving at all times, and it’s not as if a man of your training was ever likely to suffer real death.’

‘Three of my team would have to disagree with you, there, Isaac. If they weren’t already really fucking dead, that is.’

A slight hesitation. ‘Your team?’

I grimaced. ‘Jiang Jianping got turned into soup by an ultravibe blast, the nanobes took Hansen and Cruicksha—’

‘Your tea—’

‘I heard what you fucking said the first time, Isaac.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry. I merely wonder—’

‘Training’s got fucking nothing to do with it, and you know it. You can go sell that fucking song to Lapinee. Machines and luck, that’s what kills you or keeps you alive on Sanction IV.’

Scan, search, find that motherfucker.

And calm down.

‘Sanction IV and any other conflict,’ Carrera said quietly. ‘You of all people should know that. It’s the nature of the game. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have dealt yourself in. The Wedge isn’t a conscript army.’

‘Isaac, the whole fucking planet has been conscripted into this war. No one’s got any choice any more. You’re going to be involved, you might as well have the big guns. That’s a Quellism for you, in case you wondered.’

He grunted. ‘Sounds like common sense to me. Didn’t that bitch ever say anything original?’

There. My ’methed-out nerves jumped with it. Right there.

The slim edge of something built by human technology, stark angular outline caught by flarelight among the curves at the base of a bubble outcrop. One side of an impeller set frame. I settled the Sunjet into place and lined up on the target. Drawled response.

‘She wasn’t a philosopher, Isaac. She was a soldier.’

‘She was a terrorist.’

‘We quibble over terms.’

I triggered the Sunjet. Fire lanced across the concave arena and splashed off the outline. Something exploded visibly off the hull, in fragments. I felt a smile tug at the corners of my mouth.

Breathing.

It was the only thing that warned me. The papery whisper of breath at the bottom of the suit receiver. The suppressed sound of effort.

Fu—

Something invisible shattered and shed light over my head. Something no more visible spanged off my faceplate, leaving a tiny glowing V of chipped glass. I felt other tiny impacts off my suit.

Grenade!

Instinct had me already spinning to the right. Later, I realised why. It was the quickest route between Carrera’s position and mine, working round the rim of hull architecture that ringed the docking bay. A single third of the circle, and Carrera had crept round it while he talked to me. Shed of the impellers that had decoyed me and would in any case telltale his movement, he’d dragged and shoved himself from handhold to boot purchase point, all the way round. He’d used anger to disguise the stress in his voice as he worked, held down his breathing elsewhere, and at some point he judged close enough, he’d lain still and waited for me to give myself away with the Sunjet. And with the experience of decades in vacuum combat, he’d hit me with the one weapon that wouldn’t show up.

Exemplary, really.

He came at me across fifty metres of space like a flying version of Semetaire on the beach, arms reaching. The Sunjet sprouted recognisably from his right fist, a Philips squeeze launcher from his left. Though there was no way to detect it, I knew the second electromag-accelerated grenade was already in flight between us.

I jammed the impellers to life and backflipped. The hull vanished from view, then hinged back in from the top as I spiralled away. The grenade, deflected by the wash from the impeller drives as I flipped, exploded and sewed space with shrapnel. I felt shards of the stuff bang through one leg and foot, sudden numbing impacts and then traceries of pain through the flesh like biofilaments slicing. My ears popped painfully as suit pressure dropped. The polalloy socked inward at a dozen other points, but it held.

I tumbled up and over the bubble outcrop, a sprawling target in the flarelight, hull and bearings spinning around me. The pain in my ears eased as the polalloy congealed across the damage. No time to look for Carrera. I trimmed the impeller thrust, then dived once more for the globular landscape stretching below me. Sunjet fire flashed around me.

I hit the hull a glancing blow, used the impact to change trajectories and saw another Sunjet blast scythe past on the left. I caught a glimpse of Carrera as he adhered briefly to a rounded surface back up the slope of the dimple. I already knew the next move. From there, he’d push off with a single well-controlled kick and ride the simple linear velocity down towards me, firing as he came. At some point he’d get close enough to punch molten holes through the suit that the polalloy could not congeal over.

I bounced off another bubble. More idiot tumbling. More near-miss Sunjet fire. I trimmed the impellers again, tried for a line that would take me into the shadow of the outcrop, and cut off the thrust. My hands groped after something to hold and caught on one of the bas relief scroll effects I’d spotted earlier. I killed my motion and twisted round to look for Carrera.

No sign. I was out of line of sight.

I turned back and crept gratefully further around the bubble outcrop. Another curl of bas relief offered itself and I reached down—

Oh, shit.

I was holding the wing of a Martian.

Shock held me unstirring for a second. Time enough for me to think this was some kind of carving in the hull surface, time enough to know at some deep level that it wasn’t.

The Martian had died screaming. The wings were flung back, sunk into the hull surface for most of their width, protruding only at the curled extremities and where their muscled webbing rose up under the arched spine of the creature. The head was twisted in agony, beak gaping open, eyes glaring like comet-tailed orbs of washed jet. One clawed limb lifted talons above the hull surface. The whole corpse was sheathed in the material of the hull it had flailed against, drowning there.

I shifted my gaze and looked out across the surface ahead of me, the scattered scrawl of raised detail, and knew finally what I was looking at. The hull around the docking-bay dimple - all of it, the whole bubbling expanse - was a mass grave, a spider’s web trap for thousands upon thousands of Martians who had all died entombed in whatever substances had run and foamed and burst here when -

When what?

The shape of the catastrophe was outside anything I could envisage. I could not imagine the weapons that would do this, the circumstances of this conflict between two civilisations as far ahead of humanity’s scavenger-built little empire as we were from the gulls whose bodies had clogged the water around Sauberville. I could not see how it could happen. I could only see the results. I could only see the dead.

Nothing ever changes. A hundred and fifty light years from home and the same shit just keeps going down.

Got to be some kind of universal fucking constant.

The grenade bounced off another hull-drowned Martian ten metres away, careened up and exploded. I rolled away from the blast. A brief pummelling over my back and one searing penetration under my shoulder. Pressure drop like a knife through my eardrums. I screamed.

Fuck this.

I fired the impellers and burst out of the cover of the bubble outcrop, not knowing what I was going to do until I did it. Carrera’s gliding figure showed up less than fifty metres off. I saw Sunjet fire, turned on my back and dived directly at the docking-bay mouth. Carrera’s voice trailed me, almost amused.

‘Where do you think you’re going, Kovacs?’

Something exploded at my back and the impeller thrust cut out. Scorching heat across my back. Carrera and his fucking VacCom skills. But with the residual velocity, and well, maybe a little spirit realm luck cadged off the vengeful ghost of Hand - he shot you after all, Matt, you did curse the fucker - just to grease the palm of whatever fate . . .

I ploughed through the atmosphere baffles of the docking bay at a slewed angle, found gravity beneath me and battered into one of the stacked fat-snake containing walls, bounced off with the sudden shock of weight from the grav field and crashed to the deck, trailing wings of smoke and flame from the wrecked impeller frame.

For a long moment, I lay still in the cavernous quiet of the bay.

Then, from somewhere, I heard a curious bubbling sound in my helmet. It took me several seconds to realise I was laughing.

Get up, Takeshi.

Oh, come on . . .

He can kill you just as dead in here, Tak. Get UP.

I reached out and tried to prop myself up. Wrong arm - the broken elbow joint bent soggily inside the mob suit. Pain ran up and down the abused muscles and tendons. I rolled away, gasping and tried with the other arm. Better. The mob suit wheezed a little, something definitely awry in the works here, but it got me up. Now get rid of the wreckage on my back. The emergency release still worked, sort of. I hauled myself clear, the Sunjet caught in the frame and would not tug loose on the tether line. I yanked at it for a senseless moment, then unseamed the tether instead and bent to free the weapon from the other side.

‘Alri . . . vacs.’ Carrera’s voice, trampled out by the interference from the interior structure. ‘If . . . tha . . . ay . . . ant it.’

He was coming in after me.

The Sunjet stuck.

Leave it!

And fight him with a pistol? In polalloy?

Weapons are an extension screamed an exasperated Virginia Vidaura, in my head - you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them. Leave it!

’kay, Virginia. I sniggered a little. Whatever you say.

I lurched away towards the lintel-braced exit from the bay, drawing the interface pistol from its pouch. Wedge equipment was crated and stacked across the bay. The locater beacon, dumped unceremoniously, still powered at standby, the way Carrera had presumably left it. A nearby crate cracked open, sections of a disassembled Philips launcher protruding. Haste written into the details of the scene, but it was a soldierly haste. Controlled speed. Combat competence, a man at his trade. Carrera was in his element.

Get the fuck out of here, Tak.

Into the next chamber. Martian machines stirred, bristled and then sloped sullenly away from me, muttering to themselves. I limped past them, following the painted arrows, no, don’t fucking follow the arrows. I ducked left at the next opportunity and plunged along a corridor the expedition had not taken before. A machine snuffled after me a few paces, then went back.

I thought I heard the sound of motion behind and above me. A jerked glance up into the shadowed space overhead. Ludicrous.

Get a grip, Tak. It’s the ’meth. You did too much and now you’re hallucinating.

More chambers, intersecting curves one into another and always the space above. I stopped myself rigidly from looking up. The pain from the grenade shards in my leg and shoulder was beginning to seep up through the chemical armour of the tetrameth, waking echoes in my ruined left hand and the shattered joint in my right elbow. The furious energy I’d felt earlier had decayed to a jumpy sense of speed and vibrating riffs of inexplicable amusement that threatened to emerge as giggling.

In that state, I backed through into a tight, closed chamber, turned about and came face to face with my last Martian.

This time, the mummified wing membranes were folded down around the skeletal frame, and the whole thing was crouched on a low roost bar. The long skull drooped forward over the chest, hiding the light gland. The eyes were closed.

It lifted its beak and looked up at me.

No. It fucking didn’t.

I shook my head, crept closer to the corpse and stared at it. From somewhere, an impulse arose to caress the long bone ridge on the back of the skull.

‘I’ll just sit here for a while,’ I promised, stifling another giggle. ‘Quietly. Just a couple of hours, that’s all I need.’

I lowered myself to the floor on my uninjured arm, leaned against the sloping wall behind us, clutching the interface gun like a charm. My body was a warm twisting together of limp ropes inside the cage of the mob suit, a faintly quivering assemblage of soft tissue with no more will to animate its exoskeleton. My gaze slipped up into the gloomy space at the top of the chamber and for a while I thought I saw pale wings beating there, trying to escape the imprisoning curve. At some point, though, I spotted the fact that they were in my head, because I could feel their paper-thin texture brushing around the inner surface of my skull, scraping minutely but painfully at the insides of my eyeballs and obscuring my vision by degrees, pale to dark, pale to dark, pale to dark, to dark, to dark—

And a thin, rising whine like grief.

‘Wake up, Kovacs.’

The voice was gentle, and there was something nudging at my hand. My eyes seemed to be gummed shut. I lifted one arm and my hand bumped off the smooth curve of the faceplate.

‘Wake up.’ Less gentle now. A tiny jag of adrenalin went eeling along my nerves at the change in tone. I blinked hard and focused. The Martian was still there - no shit, Tak - but my view of the corpse was blocked by the figure in the polalloy suit that stood a safe three or four metres out of reach, Sunjet carried at a wary angle.

The nudging at my hand recommenced. I tipped the helmet and looked down. One of the Martian machines was stroking at my glove with an array of delicate-looking receptors. I shoved it away, and it backed up chittering a couple of places, then came sniffing back undeterred.

Carrera laughed. It rang too loud in the helmet receiver. I felt as if the fluttering wings had somehow hollowed out my head so that my whole skull wasn’t much less delicate than the mummified remains I was sharing the chamber with.

‘That’s right. Fucking thing led me to you, can you believe that? Really helpful little beastie.’

At that point, I laughed too. It seemed the only thing appropriate to the moment. The Wedge commander joined in. He held up the interface gun in his left hand, and laughed louder.

‘Were you going to kill me with this?’

‘Doubt it.’

We both stopped laughing. His faceplate hinged up and he looked down at me out of a face gone slightly haggard around the eyes. I guessed even the short time he’d spent tracking me through the Martian architecture hadn’t been a lot of fun.

I flexed my palm, once, on the off-chance that Loemanako’s gun might not have been personally coded, that any Wedge palm plate might be able to call it. Carrera caught the move and shook his head. He tossed the weapon into my lap.

‘Unloaded anyway. Hold on to it if you like - some men go better that way, holding a gun tight. Seems to help at the end. Substitute for something, I guess. Mother’s hand. Your dick. You want to stand up to die?’

‘No,’ I said softly.

‘Open your helmet?’

‘What for?’

‘Just giving you the option.’

‘Isaac—’ I cleared my throat of what felt like a web of rusted wire. Words scraped through. It seemed suddenly very important to say them. ‘Isaac, I’m sorry.’

You will be

It flared through me like tears up behind my eyes. Like the wolf-weeping loss that Loemanako’s and Kwok’s deaths had brought up through my throat.

‘Good,’ he said simply. ‘But a little late.’

‘Have you seen what’s behind you, Isaac?’

‘Yeah. Impressive, but very dead. No ghosts that I’ve seen.’ He waited. ‘Do you have anything else to say?’

I shook my head. He raised the Sunjet.

‘This is for my murdered men,’ he said.

‘Look at the fucking thing,’ I screamed, every increment of Envoy intonation pushed into it and for just a fraction of a second his head shifted. I came up off the floor, flexing in the mob suit, hurling the interface gun into the space below his hinged-up faceplate and diving at him low.

Miserly shavings of luck, a tetrameth crash and my fading grip on Envoy combat poise. It was all I had left and I took it all across the space between us, teeth bared. When the Sunjet crackled, it hit where I’d been. Maybe it was the shouted distractor, shifting his focus, maybe the gun hurtling towards his face, maybe just this same tired general sense that it was all over.

He staggered backwards as I hit him, and I trapped the Sunjet between our bodies. He slid into a combat judo block that would have thrown an unarmoured man off his hip. I hung on with the stolen strength of Loemanako’s suit. Another two stumbling backsteps and we both smashed into the mummified Martian corpse together. The frame tipped and collapsed. We tumbled over it like clowns, staggering to get up as we slipped. The corpse disintegrated. Powder burst of pale orange in the air around us.

I’m sorry.

You will be, if the skin crumbles.

Faceplate up, panting, Carrera must have sucked in a lungful of the stuff. More settled on his eyes and the exposed skin of his face.

The first yell as he felt it eating in.

Then the screams.

He staggered away from me, Sunjet clattering to the deck, hands up and scrubbing at his face. Probably it only ground the stuff harder into the tissue it was dissolving. A deep-throated shrieking poured out of him and a pale red froth began to foam through between his fingers and over his hands. Then, the powder must have eaten through some part of his vocal cords, because the screams collapsed into a sound like a faltering drainage system.

He hit the floor making that sound, gripping at his face as if he could somehow hold it in place and bubbling up thick gouts of blood and tissue from his corroded lungs. By the time I got to the Sunjet and came back to stand over him with it, he was drowning in his own blood. Beneath the polalloy, his body quivered as it went into shock.

I’m sorry.

I placed the barrel of the weapon on the hands that masked his melting face, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

When I finished telling it, Roespinoedji clasped his hands together in a gesture that made him look almost like the child he wasn’t.

‘That’s wonderful,’ he breathed. ‘The stuff of epics.’

‘Stop that,’ I told him.

‘No, but really. We’re such a young culture here. Barely a century of planetary history. We need this sort of thing.’

‘Well,’ I shrugged and reached for the bottle on the table. Shelved pain twinged in the broken elbow joint. ‘You can have the rights. Go sell it to the Lapinee group. Maybe they’ll make a construct opera out of the fucking thing.’

‘You may laugh.’ There was a bright entrepreneurial gleam kindling in Roespinoedji’s eyes. ‘But there’s a market for this homegrown stuff. Practically everything we’ve got here is imported from Latimer, and how long can you live on someone else’s dreams?’

I poured my glass half full of whisky again. ‘Kemp manages.’

‘Oh, that’s politics, Takeshi. Not the same thing. Mishmashed neoQuellist sentiment and old time Commin, Commu—’ he snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, you’re from Harlan’s World. What’s that stuff called?’

‘Communitarianism.’

‘Yes, that.’ He shook his head sagely. ‘That stuff isn’t going to stand the test of time like a good heroic tale. Planned production, social equality like some sort of bloody grade school construct. Who’d bite into that, for Samedi’s sake? Where’s the savour? Where’s the blood and adrenalin?’

I sipped the whisky and stared out across the warehouse roofs of Dig 27 to where the dighead’s angular limbs stood steeped in the glow of sunset. Recent rumour, half-jammed and scrambled as it unreeled on illicitly-tuned screens said the war was heating up in the equatorial west. Some counterblow of Kemp’s that the Cartel hadn’t allowed for.

Pity they didn’t have Carrera around any more, to do their thinking for them.

I shivered a little as the whisky went down. It bit well enough, but in a polite, smoothly educated way. This wasn’t the Sauberville blend I’d killed with Luc Deprez, a subjective lifetime ago, last week. Somehow I couldn’t imagine someone like Roespinoedji giving that one house room.

‘Plenty of blood out there at the moment,’ I observed.

‘Yes, now there is. But that’s the revolution. Think about afterwards. Suppose Kemp won this ridiculous war and implemented this voting thing. What do you think would happen next? I’ll tell you.’

‘Thought you would.’

‘In less than a year he’d be signing the same contracts with the Cartel for the same wealth-making dynamic, and if he didn’t, his own people would, uh, vote him out of Indigo City and then do it for him.’

‘He doesn’t strike me as the sort to go quietly.’

‘Yes, that’s the problem with voting,’ said Roespinoedji judiciously. ‘Apparently. Did you ever actually meet him?’

‘Kemp? Yeah, a few times.’

‘And what was he like?’

He was like Isaac. He was like Hand. He was like all of them. Same intensity, same goddamned fucking conviction that he was right. Just a different dream of what he was right about.

‘Tall,’ I said. ‘He was tall.’

‘Ah. Well, yes, he would be.’

I turned to look at the boy beside me. ‘Doesn’t it worry you, Djoko? What’s going to happen if the Kempists fight their way through this far?’

He grinned. ‘I doubt their political assessors are any different to the Cartel’s. Everyone has appetites. And besides. With what you’ve given me, I think I have bargain capital enough to go up against old Top Hat himself and buy back my much-mortgaged soul.’ His look sharpened. ‘Allowing that we have dismantled all your dead hand datalaunch security, that is.’

‘Relax. I told you, I only ever set up the five. Just enough so that Mandrake could find a few if it sniffed around, so it’d know they were really out there. It was all we had time for.’

‘Hmm.’ Roespinoedji rolled whisky around in the base of his glass. The judicious tone in the young voice was incongruous. ‘Personally, I think you were crazy to take the risk with so few. What if Mandrake had flushed them all out?’

I shrugged. ‘What if ? Hand could never risk assuming he’d found all of them, too much at stake. It was safer to let the money go. Essence of any good bluff.’

‘Yes. Well, you’re the Envoy.’ He prodded at the slim hand-sized slab of Wedge technology where it lay on the table between us. ‘And you’re quite sure Mandrake has no way to recognise this broadcast?’

‘Trust me.’ Just the words brought a grin to my lips. ‘State-of-the-art military cloaking system. Without that little box there, transmission’s indistinguishable from star static. For Mandrake, for anyone. You are the proud and undisputed owner of one Martian starship. Strictly limited edition.’

Roespinoedji stowed the remote and held up his hands. ‘Alright. Enough. We’ve got an agreement. Don’t beat me over the head with it. A good salesman knows when to stop selling.’

‘You’d just better not be fucking with me,’ I said amiably.

‘I’m a man of my word, Takeshi. Day after tomorrow at the latest. The best that money can buy,’ he sniffed. ‘In Landfall, at any rate.’

‘And a technician to fit it properly. A real technician, not some cut-rate virtually qualified geek.’

‘That’s a strange attitude for someone planning to spend the next decade in a virtuality. I have a virtual degree myself, you know. Business administration. Three dozen virtually experienced case histories. Much better than trying to do it in the real world.’

‘Figure of speech. A good technician. Don’t go cutting corners on me.’

‘Well, if you don’t trust me,’ he said huffily, ‘why don’t you ask your young pilot friend to do it for you?’

‘She’ll be watching. And she knows enough to spot a fuck-up.’

‘I’m sure she does. She seems very competent.’

I felt my mouth curve at the understatement. Unfamiliar controls, a Wedge-coded lockout that kept trying to come back online with every manoeuvre and terminal radiation poisoning. Ameli Vongsavath rode it all out without much more than the odd gritted curse, and took the battlewagon from Dangrek to Dig 27 in a little over fifteen minutes.

‘Yes. She is.’

‘You know,’ Roespinoedji chuckled. ‘Last night, I thought my time was finally up when I saw the Wedge flashes on that monster. Never occurred to me a Wedge transport could be hijacked.’

I shivered again. ‘Yeah. Wasn’t easy.’

We sat at the little table for a while, watching the sunlight slide down the support struts of the dighead. In the street running alongside Roespinoedji’s warehouse, there were children playing some kind of game that involved a lot of running and shouting. Their laughter drifted up to the roof patio like woodsmoke from someone else’s beach barbecue.

‘Did you give it a name?’ Roespinoedji wondered finally. ‘This starship.’

‘No, there wasn’t really that kind of time.’

‘So it seems. Well, now that there is. Any ideas?’

I shrugged.

‘The Wardani ?’

‘Ah.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘And would she like that?’

I picked up my glass and drained it.

‘How the fuck would I know?’

She’d barely spoken to me since I crawled back through the gate. Killing Lamont seemed to have put me over some kind of final line for her. Either that or watching me stalk mechanically up and down in the mob suit, inflicting real death on the hundred-odd Wedge corpses that still littered the beach. She shut the gate down with a face that held less expression than a Syntheta sleeve knock-off, followed Vongsavath and myself into the belly of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue like a mandroid, and when we got to Roespinoedji’s place, she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out.

I didn’t feel much like pushing the point. Too tired for the conversation we needed to have, not wholly convinced we even needed to have it any more and in any case, I told myself, until Roespinoedji was sold, I had other things to worry about.

Roespinoedji was sold.

The next morning, I was woken late by the sound of the tech-crew contractors arriving from Landfall in a badly landed aircruiser. Mildly hungover with the whisky and Roespinoedji’s powerful black market anti-rad/painkiller cocktails, I got up and went down to meet them. Young, slick and probably very good at what they did, they both irritated me on sight. We went through some introductory skirmishing under Roespinoedji’s indulgent eye, but I was clearly losing my ability to instil fear. Their demeanour never made it out of what’s with the sick dude in the suit. In the end I gave up and led them out to the battlewagon where Vongsavath was already waiting, arms folded, at the entry hatch and looking grimly possessive. The techs dropped their swagger as soon as they saw her.

‘It’s cool,’ she said to me when I tried to follow them inside. ‘Why don’t you go talk to Tanya? I think she’s got some stuff she needs to say.’

‘To me?’

The pilot shrugged impatiently. ‘To someone, and it looks like you’re elected. She won’t talk to me.’

‘Is she still in her room?’

‘She went out.’ Vongsavath waved an arm vaguely at the clutter of buildings that constituted Dig 27’s town centre. ‘Go. I’ll watch these guys.’

I found her half an hour later, standing in a street on the upper levels of the town and staring at the facade in front of her. There was a small piece of Martian architecture trapped there, perfectly preserved blued facets now cemented in on either side to form part of a containing wall and an arch. Someone had painted over the glyph-brushed surface in thick illuminum paint: FILTRATION RECLAIM. Beyond the arch, the unpaved ground was littered with dismembered machinery gathered approximately into lines across the arid earth like some unlikely sprouting crop. A couple of coveralled figures were rooting around aimlessly, up and down the rows.

She looked round as I approached. Gaunt-faced, gnawed at with some anger she couldn’t let go of.

‘You following me?’

‘Not intentionally,’ I lied. ‘Sleep well?’

She shook her head. ‘I can still hear Sutjiadi.’

‘Yeah.’

When the silence had stretched too much, I nodded at the arch. ‘You going in here?’

‘Are you fucking—? No. I only stopped to . . .’ and she gestured helplessly at the paint-daubed Martian alloy.

I peered at the glyphs. ‘Instructions for a faster-than-light drive, right?’

She almost smiled.

‘No.’ She reached out to run her fingers along the form of one of the glyphs. ‘It’s a schooling screed. Sort of cross between a poem and a set of safety instructions for fledglings. Parts of it are equations, probably for lift and drag. It’s sort of a grafitti as well. It says.’ She stopped, shook her head again. ‘There’s no way to say what it says. But it, ah, it promises. Well, enlightenment, a sense of eternity, from dreaming the use of your wings before you can actually fly. And take a good shit before you go up in a populated area.’

‘You’re winding me up. It doesn’t say that.’

‘It does. All tied to the same equation sequence too.’ She turned away. ‘They were good at integrating things. Not much compartmentalisation in the Martian psyche, from what we can tell.’

The demonstration of knowledge seemed to have exhausted her. Her head drooped.

‘I was going to the dighead,’ she said. ‘That café Roespinoedji showed us last time. I don’t think my stomach will hold anything down, but—’

‘Sure. I’ll walk with you.’

She looked at the mob suit, now rather obvious under the clothes the Dig 27 entrepreneur had lent me.

‘Maybe I should get one of those.’

‘Barely worth it for the time we’ve got left.’

We plodded up the slope.

‘You sure this is going to come off ?’ she asked.

‘What? Selling the biggest archaeological coup of the past five hundred years to Roespinoedji for the price of a virtuality box and a black market launch slot? What do you think?’

‘I think he’s a fucking merchant, and you can’t trust him any further than Hand.’

‘Tanya,’ I said gently. ‘It wasn’t Hand that sold us out to the Wedge. Roespinoedji’s getting the deal of the millennium, and he knows it. He’s solid on this one, believe me.’

‘Well. You’re the Envoy.’

The café was pretty much as I remembered it, a forlorn-looking herd of moulded chairs and tables gathered in the shade cast by the massive stanchions and struts of the dighead frame. A holomenu fluoresced weakly overhead, and a muted Lapinee playlist seeped into the air from speakers hung on the structure. Martian artefacts stood about the place in no particular pattern that I could discern. We were the only customers.

A terminally bored waiter sloped out of hiding somewhere and stood at our table, looking resentful. I glanced up at the menu then back at Wardani. She shook her head.

‘Just water,’ she said. ‘And cigarettes, if you’ve got them.’

‘Site Sevens or Will to Victory?’

She grimaced. ‘Site Sevens.’

The waiter looked at me, obviously hoping I wasn’t going to spoil his day and order some food.

‘Got coffee?’

He nodded.

‘Bring me some. Black, with whisky in it.’

He trudged away. I raised an eyebrow at Wardani behind his back.

‘Leave him alone. Can’t be much fun working here.’

‘Could be worse. He could be a conscript. Besides,’ I gestured around me at the artefacts, ‘look at the decor. What more could you want?’

A wan smile.

‘Takeshi.’ She hunched forward over the table. ‘When you get the virtual gear installed. I, uh, I’m not going with you.’

I nodded. Been expecting this.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What are you apologising to me for?’

‘You, uh. You’ve done a lot for me in the last couple of months. You got me out of the camp—’

‘We pulled you out of the camp because we needed you. Remember.’

‘I was angry when I said that. Not with you, but—’

‘Yeah, with me. Me, Schneider, the whole fucking world in a uniform.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t blame you. And you were right. We got you out because we needed you. You don’t owe me anything.’

She studied her hands where they lay in her lap.

‘You helped put me back together again, Takeshi. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but that Envoy recovery shit works. I’m getting better. Slowly, but it’s off that base.’

‘That’s good.’ I hesitated, then made myself say it. ‘Fact remains, I did it because I needed you. Part of the rescue package; there was no point in getting you out of the camp if we left half your soul behind.’

Her mouth twitched. ‘Soul?’

‘Sorry, figure of speech. Too much time hanging around Hand. Look, I’ve got no problem with you bailing out. I’m kind of curious to know why, is all.’

The waiter toiled back into view at that point, and we quietened. He laid out the drinks and the cigarettes. Tanya Wardani slit the pack and offered me one across the table. I shook my head.

‘I’m quitting. Those things’ll kill you.’

She laughed almost silently and fed herself one from the pack. Smoke curled up as she touched the ignition patch. The waiter left. I sipped at my whisky coffee and was pleasantly surprised. Wardani plumed smoke up into the dighead frame space.

‘Why am I staying?’

‘Why are you staying?’

She looked at the table top. ‘I can’t leave now, Takeshi. Sooner or later, what we found out there is going to get into the public domain. They’ll open the gate again. Or take an IP cruiser out there. Or both.’

‘Yeah, sooner or later. But right now there’s a war in the way.’

‘I can wait.’

‘Why not wait on Latimer? It’s a lot safer there.’

‘I can’t. You said yourself, transit time in the ’Chandra has got to be eleven years, minimum. That’s full acceleration, without any course correction Ameli might have to do. Who knows what’s going to have happened back here in the next eleven years?’

‘The war might have ended, for one thing.’

‘The war might be over next year, Takeshi. Then Roespinoedji’s going to move on his investment, and when that happens, I want to be here.’

‘Ten minutes ago you couldn’t trust him any more than Hand. Now you want to work for him?’

‘We, uh,’ she looked at her hands again. ‘We talked about it this morning. He’s willing to hide me until things have calmed down. Get me a new sleeve.’ She smiled a little sheepishly. ‘Guild Masters are thin on the ground since the war kicked in. I guess I’m part of his investment.’

‘Guess so.’ Even while the words were coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t work out why I was trying so hard to talk her out of this. ‘You know that won’t help much if the Wedge come looking for you, don’t you.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘It could ha—’ I sighed. ‘No, not really. Carrera’s probably backed up somewhere in a sneak station, but it’ll be a while before they realise that he’s dead. While longer before they sort the authorisation to sleeve the back-up copy. And even if he does get out to Dangrek, there’s nobody left to tell him what happened there.’

She shivered and looked away.

‘It had to be done, Tanya. We had to cover our traces. You of all people should know that.’

‘What?’ Her eyes flicked back in my direction.

‘I said. You of all people should know that.’ I kept her gaze. ‘It’s what you did last time around. Isn’t it.’

She looked away again, convulsively. Smoke curled up off her cigarette and was snatched away by the breeze. I leaned into the silence between us.

‘It doesn’t much matter now. You don’t have the skills to sink us between here and Latimer, and once we’re there you’ll never see me again. Would. Never have seen me again. And now you’re not coming with us. But like I said, I’m curious.’

She moved her arm as if it wasn’t connected to her, drew on the cigarette, exhaled mechanically. Her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.

‘How long have you known?’

‘Known?’ I thought about it. ‘Honestly, I think I’ve known from the day we pulled you out of the camp. Nothing I could lock down, but I knew there was a problem. Someone tried to bust you out before we came. The camp commandant let that slip, in between fits of drooling.’

‘Sounds unusually animated, for him.’ She drew more smoke, hissed it out between her teeth.

‘Yeah, well. Then of course there were your friends down on the rec deck at Mandrake. Now that one I really should have spotted on the launch pad. I mean, it’s only the oldest whore’s trick in the book. Lead the mark up a darkened alley by his dick, and hand him over to your pimp.’

She flinched. I forced a grin.

‘Sorry. Figure of speech. I just feel kind of stupid. Tell me, was that gun-to-your-head stuff just tinsel, or were they serious?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘They were revolutionary guard cadres. Kemp’s hard men. They took out Deng when he came sniffing around after them. Really dead, stack torched and body sold off for spares. They told me that while we were waiting for you. Maybe to scare me, I don’t know. They probably would have shot me sooner than let me go again.’

‘Yeah, they convinced the fuck out of me as well. But you still called them in, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said it to herself, as if discovering the truth for the first time. ‘I did.’

‘Care to tell me why?’

She made a tiny motion, something that might have been her head shaking, or just a shiver.

‘OK. Want to tell me how?’

She got herself back together, looked at me. ‘Coded signal. I set it up while you and Jan were out casing Mandrake. Told them to wait on my signal, then placed a call from my room in the tower when I was sure we were definitely going to Dangrek.’ A smile crossed her face, but her voice could have been a machine’s. ‘I ordered underwear. From a catalogue. Locational code in the numbers. Basic stuff.’

I nodded. ‘Were you always a Kempist?’

She shifted impatiently. ‘I’m not from here, Kovacs. I don’t have any political, I don’t have any right to a political stance here.’ She shot me an angry look. ‘But for Christ’s sake, Kovacs. It’s their fucking planet, isn’t it?’

‘That sounds pretty much like a political stance to me.’

‘Yeah, must be really nice not to have any beliefs.’ She smoked some more, and I saw that her hand was trembling slightly. ‘I envy you your smug sanctimonious fucking detachment.’

‘Well, it’s not hard to come by, Tanya.’ I tried to curb the defensiveness in my voice. ‘Try working local military adviser to Joshua Kemp while Indigo City comes apart in civil riots around you. Remember those cuddly little inhib systems Carrera unloaded on us? First time I saw those in use on Sanction IV ? Kemp’s guardsmen were using them on protesting artefact merchants in Indigo City, a year before the war kicked in. Maxed up, continuous discharge. No mercy for the exploitative classes. You get pretty detached after the first few street cleanups.’

‘So you changed sides.’ It was the same scorn I’d heard in her voice that night in the bar, the night she drove Schneider away.

‘Well, not immediately. I thought about assassinating Kemp for a while, but it didn’t seem worth it. Some family member would have stepped in, some fucking cadre. And by then, the war was looking pretty inevitable anyway. And like Quell says, these things need to run their hormonal course.’

‘Is that how you survive it?’ she whispered.

‘Tanya. I have been trying to leave ever since.’

‘I,’ she shuddered. ‘I’ve watched you, Kovacs. I watched you in Landfall, in that firefight at the promoter’s offices, in the Mandrake Tower, the beach at Dangrek with your own men. I, I envied you what you have. How you live with yourself.’

I took brief refuge in my whisky coffee. She didn’t seem to notice.

‘I can’t.’ A helpless, fending gesture. ‘I can’t get them out of my head. Dhasanapongsakul, Aribowo, the rest of them. Most of them, I didn’t even see die, but they. Keep.’ She swallowed hard. ‘How did you know?’

‘You want to give me a cigarette now?’

She handed over the pack, wordlessly. I busied myself with lighting and inhaling, to no noticeable benefit. My system was so bombed on damage and Roespinoedji’s drugs, I would have been amazed if there had been. It was the thin comfort of habit, not much more.

‘Envoy intuition doesn’t work like that,’ I said slowly. ‘Like I said, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t want to take it on board. You uh, you make a good impression, Tanya Wardani. At some level, I didn’t want to believe it was you. Even when you sabotaged the hold—’

She started. ‘Vongsavath said—’

‘Yeah, I know. She still thinks it was Schneider. I haven’t told her any different. I was pretty much convinced it was Schneider myself after he ran out on us. Like I said, I didn’t want to think it might be you. When the Schneider angle showed up, I went after it like a heatseeker. There was a moment in the docking bay when I worked him out. You know what I felt? I was relieved. I had my solution and I didn’t have to think about who else might be involved any more. So much for detachment, huh.’

She said nothing.

‘But there were a whole stack of reasons why Schneider couldn’t be the whole story. And the Envoy conditioning just went on racking them up ’til there was too much to ignore any more.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as this.’ I reached into a pocket and shook out a portable datastack. The membrane settled on the table and motes of light evolved in the projected datacoil. ‘Clean that space off for me.’

She looked at me curiously, then leaned forward and lobbed the display motes up to the top left-hand corner of the coil. The gesture echoed back in my head, the hours of watching her work in the screens of her own monitors. I nodded and smiled.

‘Interesting habit. Most of us flatten down to the surface. More final, more satisfying I guess. But you’re different. You tidy upward.’

‘Wycinski. It’s his.’

‘That where you picked it up?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Probably.’

‘You’re not Wycinski, are you?’

It startled a short laugh out of her. ‘No, I’m not. I worked with him at Bradbury, and on Nkrumah’s Land, but I’m half his age. Why would you think something like that?’

‘Nothing. Just crossed my mind. You know, that cybersex virtuality. There was a lot of male tendency in what you did to yourself. Just wondered, you know. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a man?’

She smiled at me. ‘Wrong, Takeshi. Wrong way round. Who’d know better how to live up to male fantasy than a woman.’

For just a moment, something warm sparked between us, already fading as it came into being. Her smile washed away.

‘So you were saying?’

I pointed at the datacoil. ‘That’s the pattern you leave after shutdown. That’s the pattern you left in the cabin datacoil on board the trawler. Presumably after you slammed the gate on Dhasanapongsakul and his colleagues, after you took out the two on the trawler and dumped them in the nets. I saw it the morning after the party. Didn’t notice at the time, but like I said that’s Envoys for you. Just go on acquiring little scraps of data until it means something.’

She was staring intently at the datacoil, but I still spotted the tremor go through her when I said Dhasanapongsakul’s name.

‘There were other scraps, once I started to look. The corrosion grenades in the hold. Sure, it took Schneider to shut down the onboard monitors on the Nagini, but you were fucking him. Old flame, in fact. I don’t suppose you had any harder time talking him into it than you did in getting me down to the rec deck at Mandrake. It didn’t fit at first, because you were pushing so hard to get the claim buoy aboard. Why go to the trouble of trying to put the buoys out of commission in the first place, then work so hard to get the remaining one placed.’

She nodded jerkily. Most of her was still dealing with Dhasanapongsakul. I was talking into a vacuum.

‘Didn’t make sense, that is, until I thought about what else had been put out of commission. Not the buoys. The ID&A sets. You trashed them all. Because that way no one was going to be able to put Dhasanapongsakul and the rest into virtual and find out what had happened to them. Of course, eventually we’d get them back to Landfall and find out. But then. You didn’t plan for us to make it back, did you?’

That got her back to me. A haggard stare across wreathed smoke.

‘You know when I worked most of this out?’ I sucked in my own smoke hard. ‘On the swim back to the gate. See, I was pretty much convinced it’d be closed by the time I got there. Wasn’t quite sure why I thought that at first, but it sort of fell into place. They’d gone through the gate, and the gate had closed on them. Why would that happen, and how did poor old Dhasanapongsakul end up on the wrong side wearing a T-shirt. Then I remembered the waterfall.’

She blinked.

‘The waterfall?’

‘Yeah, any normal human being, post-coital, would have shoved me in the back into that pool and then laughed. We both would have. Instead, you started crying.’ I examined the end of my cigarette as if it interested me. ‘You stood at the gate with Dhasanapongsakul, and you pushed him through. And then you slammed it shut. It doesn’t take two hours to shut that gate, does it, Tanya?’

‘No,’ she whispered.

‘Were you already thinking you might have to do the same thing to me? Then, at the waterfall?’

‘I.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t know.’

‘How did you kill the two on the trawler?’

‘Stunner. Then the nets. They drowned before they woke up. I.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I pulled them up again later, I was going to, I don’t know, bury them somewhere. Maybe even wait a few days and drag them to the gate, try to open it so I could dump them through as well. I panicked. I couldn’t stand to be there, wondering if Aribowo and Weng might find some way to open the gate again before their air ran out.’

She looked at me defiantly.

‘I didn’t really believe that. I’m an archaeologue, I know how . . .’ She was silent for a few moments. ‘I couldn’t even have opened it again myself in time to save them. It was just. The gate. What it meant. Sitting there on the trawler, knowing they were just the other side of that. Thing, suffocating. Millions of kilometres away in the sky above my head and still right there in the cavern. So close. Like something huge, waiting for me.’

I nodded. Back on the beach at Dangrek, I’d told Wardani and Vongsavath about the corpses I’d found sealed in the substance of the Martian vessel while Carrera and I hunted each other across the hull. But I never told either of them about my last half hour inside the ship, the things I’d seen and heard as I stumbled back out to the echoing desolation of the docking bay with Carrera’s impeller frame on my shoulders, the things I’d felt swimming beside me all the way back to the gate. After a while, my vision had narrowed down to that faint blur of light orbiting out in the blackness, and I didn’t want to look round for fear of what I might see, what might be hunched there, offering me its taloned hand. I just dived for the light, scarcely able to believe it was still there, terrified that at any moment it would slam shut and leave me locked out in the dark.

Tetrameth hallucination, I told myself later, and that was just going to have to do.

‘So why didn’t you take the trawler?’

She shook her head again and stubbed out her cigarette.

‘I panicked. I was cutting the stacks out of the two in the nets, and I just.’ She shivered. ‘It was like something was staring at me. I dumped them back in the water, threw the stacks out to sea as far as I could. Then I just ran away. Didn’t even try to blow the cavern or cover my tracks. Walked all the way into Sauberville.’ Her voice changed in some way I couldn’t define. ‘I got a ride with this guy in a ground car the last couple of klicks. Young guy with a couple of kids he was bringing back from a grav-gliding trip. I guess they’re all dead now.’

‘Yes.’

‘I. Sauberville wasn’t far enough. I ran south. I was in the Bootkinaree hinterlands when the Protectorate signed the accords. Cartel forces picked me up from a refugee column. Dumped me in the camp with the rest of them. At the time, it seemed almost like justice.’

She fumbled out a fresh cigarette and fitted it in her mouth. Her gaze slanted my way.

‘That make you laugh?’

‘No.’ I drained my coffee. ‘Point of interest, though. What were you doing around Bootkinaree? Why not head back for Indigo City? You being a Kempist sympathiser and all.’

She grimaced. ‘I don’t think the Kempists would have been pleased to see me, Takeshi. I’d just killed their entire expedition. Would have been a little hard to explain.’

‘Kempists?’

‘Yeah.’ There was a gritted amusement in her tone now. ‘Who’d you think bankrolled that trip? Vacuum gear, drilling and construction equipment, the analogue units and the dataprocessing system for the gate. Come on, Takeshi. We were on the edge of a war. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Who’d you think went in and wiped the gate from the Landfall archive?’

‘Like I said,’ I muttered. ‘I didn’t want to think about it. So it was a Kempist gig. So why’d you waste them?’

‘I don’t know,’ she gestured. ‘It seemed like. I don’t know, Kovacs.’

‘Fair enough.’ I crushed out my cigarette, resisted the temptation to take another, then took it anyway. I watched her and waited.

‘It.’ She stopped. Shook her head. Started again, enunciating with exasperated care. ‘I thought I was on their side. It made sense. We all agreed. In Kemp’s hands the ship would be a bargaining chip the Cartel couldn’t ignore. It could win the war for us. Bloodlessly.’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘Then we found out it was a warship. Aribowo found a weapons battery up near the prow. Pretty unmistakeable. Then another one. I, uh.’ She stopped and sipped some water. Cleared her throat again. ‘They changed. Almost overnight, they all changed. Even Aribowo. She used to be so . . . It was like possession. Like they’d been taken over by one of those sentiences you see in experia horror flicks. Like something had come through the gate and . . .’

Another grimace.

‘I guess I never knew them all that well after all. The two on the trawler, they were cadres. I didn’t know them at all. But they all went the same way. All talking about what could be done. The necessity of it, the revolutionary need. Vaporise Landfall from orbit. Power up whatever drives the ship had, they were speculating FTL now, talking about taking the war to Latimer. Doing the same thing there. Planetary bombardment. Latimer City, Portausaint, Soufriere. All gone, like Sauberville, until the Protectorate capitulated.’

‘Could they have done that?’

‘Maybe. The systems on Nkrumah’s Land are pretty simple, once you get to grips with the basics. If the ship was anything like.’ She shrugged. ‘Which it wasn’t. But we didn’t know that then. They thought they could. That was what mattered. They didn’t want a bargaining chip. They wanted a war machine. And I’d given it to them. They were cheering the death of millions as if it was a good joke. Getting drunk at night talking it up. Singing fucking revolutionary songs. Justifying it with rhetoric. All the shit you hear dripping off the government channels, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees. Cant, political theory, all to shore up the use of a planetary massacre machine. And I’d given it to them. Without me, I don’t think they could have got the gate open again. They were just Scratchers. They needed me. They couldn’t get anyone else, the Guild Masters were all already on their way back to Latimer in cryocap liners, way ahead of the game, or holed up in Landfall waiting for their Guild-paid hypercasts to come through. Weng and Aribowo came looking for me in Indigo City. They begged me to help them. And I did.’ There was something like a plea in her face as she turned to look at me. ‘I gave it to them.’

‘But you took it away again,’ I said gently.

Her hand groped across the table. I took it in mine, and held it for a while.

‘Were you planning to do the same to us?’ I asked, when she seemed to have calmed. She tried to withdraw her hand, but I held onto it.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said urgently. ‘These things are done, all you have to do now is live with them. That’s how you do it, Tanya. Just admit it if it’s true. To yourself, if not to me.’

A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye in the rigid face opposite me.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I was just surviving.’

‘Good enough,’ I told her.

We sat and held hands in silence until the waiter, on some aberrational whim, came to see if we wanted anything else.

Later, on our way back down through the streets of Dig 27, we passed the same junk salvage yard, and the same Martian artefact trapped in cement in the wall. An image erupted in my mind, the frozen agony of the Martians, sunk and sealed in the bubblestuff of their ship’s hull. Thousands of them, extending to the dark horizon of the vessel’s asteroidal bulk, a drowned nation of angels, beating their wings in a last insane attempt to escape whatever catastrophe had overwhelmed the ship in the throes of the engagement.

I looked sideways at Tanya Wardani, and knew with a flash like an empathin rush that she was tuned in to the same image.

‘I hope he doesn’t come here,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry?’

‘Wycinski. When the news breaks, he’ll. He’ll want to be here to see what we’ve found. I think it might destroy him.’

‘Will they let him come?’

She shrugged. ‘Hard to really keep him out if he wants it badly enough. He’s been pensioned off into sinecure research at Bradbury for the last century, but he still has a few silent friends in the Guild. There’s enough residual awe for that. Enough guilt as well, the way he was treated. Someone’ll turn the favour for him, blag him a hypercast at least as far as Latimer. After that, well he’s still independently wealthy enough to make the rest of the running himself.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’ll kill him. His precious Martians, fighting and dying in cohorts just like humans. Mass graves and planetary wealth condensed into war machines. It tears down everything he wanted to believe about them.’

‘Well, predator stock . . .’

‘I know. Predators have to be smarter, predators come to dominate, predators evolve civilisation and move out into the stars. That same old fucking song.’

‘Same old fucking universe,’ I pointed out gently.

‘It’s just . . .’

‘At least they weren’t fighting amongst themselves any more. You said yourself, the other ship wasn’t Martian.’

‘Yeah, I don’t know. It certainly didn’t look it. But is that any better? Unify your race so you can go beat the shit out of someone else’s. Couldn’t they get past that?’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

She wasn’t listening. She stared blindly away at the cemented artefact. ‘They must have known they were going to die. It would have been instinctive, trying to fly away. Like running from a bomb blast. Like putting your hands out to stop a bullet.’

‘And then the hull what, melted?’

She shook her head again, slowly. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about this. The weapons we saw, they seemed to be doing something more basic than that. Changing the,’ she gestured, ‘I don’t know, the wavelength of matter? Something hyperdimensional? Something outside 3-D space. That’s what it felt like. I think the hull disappeared, I think they were standing in space, still alive because the ship was still there in some sense, but knowing it was about to flip out of existence. I think that’s when they tried to fly.’

I shivered a little, remembering.

‘It must have been a heavier attack than the one we saw,’ she went on. ‘What we saw didn’t come close.’

I grunted. ‘Yeah, well, the automated systems have had a hundred thousand years to work on it. Stands to reason they’d have it down to a fine art by now. Did you hear what Hand said, just before it got bad?’

‘No.’

‘He said this is what killed the others. The one we found in the corridors, but he meant the others too. Weng, Aribowo, the rest of the team. That’s why they stayed out there until their air burned out. It happened to them too, didn’t it.’

She stopped in the street to look at me.

‘Look, if it did . . .’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. That’s what I thought.’

‘We calculated that cometary. The glyph counters and our own instruments, just to be sure. Every twelve hundred standard years, give or take. If this happened to Aribowo’s crew as well, it means.’

‘It means another near-miss intersection, with another warship. A year to eighteen months back, and who knows what kind of orbit that might be locked into.’

‘Statistically,’ she breathed.

‘Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?’

‘Astronomical.’

‘And that’s being conservative. It’s the next best thing to impossible.’

‘Unless.’

I nodded again, and smiled because I could see the strength pouring back into her like current as she thought it through.

‘That’s right. Unless there’s so much junk flying around out there that this is a very common occurrence. Unless, in other words, you’re looking at the locked-in remains of an entire naval engagement on a system-wide scale.’

‘We would have seen it,’ she said uncertainly. ‘By now, we would have spotted some of them.’

‘Doubtful. There’s a lot of space out there, and even a fifty-klick hulk is pretty small by asteroidal standards. And anyway, we haven’t been looking. Ever since we got here, we’ve had our noses buried in the dirt, grubbing up quick dig/quick sale archaeological trash. Return on investment. That’s the name of the game in Landfall. We’ve forgotten how to look any other way.’

She laughed, or something very like it.

‘You’re not Wycinski, are you, Kovacs? Because you talk just like him sometimes.’

I built another smile. ‘No. I’m not Wycinski, either.’

The phone Roespinoedji had lent me thrummed in my pocket. I dug it out, wincing at the way my elbow joint grated on itself.

‘Yeah?’

‘Vongsavath. These guys are all done. We can be out of here by tonight, you want it that way.’

I looked at Wardani and sighed. ‘Yeah. I want it that way. Be down there with you in a couple of minutes.’

I pocketed the phone and started down the street again. Wardani followed.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘That stuff about looking out? Not grubbing in the dirt? Where did that come from all of a sudden, Mr I’m-Not-Wycinski?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s the Harlan’s World thing. It’s the one place in the Protectorate where you tend to look outward when you think about the Martians. Oh, we’ve got our own dig sites and remains. But the one thing about the Martians you don’t forget is the orbitals. They’re up there every day of your life, round and round, like angels with swords and twitchy fingers. Part of the night sky. This stuff, everything we’ve found here, it doesn’t really surprise me. It’s about time.’

‘Yes.’

The energy I’d seen coming back to her was there in her tone, and I knew then that she’d be alright. There’d been a point when I thought that she wasn’t staying for this, that anchoring herself here and waiting out the war was some obscure form of ongoing punishment she was visiting upon herself. But the bright edge of enthusiasm in her voice was enough.

She’d be alright.

It felt like the end of a long journey. A trip together that had started with the close contact of the Envoy techniques for psychic repair in a stolen shuttle on the other side of the world.

It felt like a scab coming off.

‘One thing,’ I said as we reached the street that wound down in dusty hairpins to the Dig 27’s shabby little landing field. Below us lay the dust coloured swirling of the Wedge battlewagon’s camouflage cloaking field. We stopped again to look down at it.

‘Yeah?’

‘What do you want me to do with your share of the money?’

She snorted a laugh, a real one this time.

‘Needlecast it to me. Eleven years, right? Give me something to look forward to.’

‘Right.’

Below on the landing field, Ameli Vongsavath emerged abruptly from the cloaking field and stood looking up at us with one hand shading her eyes. I lifted an arm and waved, then started down towards the battlewagon and the long ride out.

EPILOGUE

The Angin Chandra’s Virtue blasts her way up off the plane of the ecliptic and out into deep space. She’s already moving faster than most humans can clearly visualise, but even that’s pretty slow by interstellar standards. At full acceleration, she’ll still only ever get up to a fraction of the near-light speeds the colony barges managed coming the other way a century ago. She’s not a deep space vessel, she’s not built for it. But her guidance systems are Nuhanovic, and she’ll get where she’s going in her own time.

Here in the virtuality, you tend to lose track of external context. Roespinoedji’s contractors have done us proud. There’s a shoreline in wind-and wave-gnawed limestone, slumped down to the water’s edge like the layers of melted wax at the base of a candle. The terraces are sunblasted a white so intense it hurts to look at without lenses, and the sea is dappled to brilliance. You can step off the limestone, straight into five metres of crystal-clear water and a cool that strips the sweat off your skin like old clothes. There are multicoloured fish down there, in amongst the coral formations that rise off the bed of pale sand like baroque fortification.

The house is roomy and ancient, set back in the hills and built like a castle someone has sliced the top off. The resulting flat roof space is railed in on three sides and set with mosaic patios. At the back, you can walk straight off it into the hills. Inside, there’s enough space for all of us to be alone if we want to be, and furnishings that encourage gatherings in the kitchen and dining area. The house systems pipe in music a lot of the time, unobtrusive Spanish guitar from Adoracion and Latimer City pop. There are books on most of the walls.

During the day, the temperatures crank up to something that makes you want to get in the water by a couple of hours after breakfast. In the evenings, it cools off enough that you pull on thin jerseys or jackets if you’re going to sit out on the roof and watch the stars, which we all do. It isn’t any night sky you’d see from the pilot deck of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue right now - one of the contractors told me they’ve drawn the format from some archived Earth original. No one really cares.

As afterlives go, it’s not a bad one. Maybe not up to the standards someone like Hand would expect - not nearly restricted enough entry for one thing - but then this one was designed by mere mortals. And it beats whatever the dead crew of the Tanya Wardani are locked into. If the ’Chandra’s deserted decks and corridors give it the feel of a ghost ship, the way Ameli Vongsavath says they do, then it’s an infinitely more comfortable form of haunting than the Martians left us on the other side of the gate. If I am a ghost, stored and creeping electron-swift in the tiny circuitry in the walls of the battlewagon, then I have no complaints.

But there are still times when I look around the big wooden table in the evenings, past the emptied bottles and pipes, and I wish the others had made it. Cruickshank, I miss especially. Deprez and Sun and Vongsavath are good company, but none of them has quite the same abrasive cheeriness the Limon Highlander used to swing about her like a conversational mace. And of course none of them are interested in having sex with me the way she would have been.

Sutjiadi didn’t make it either. His stack was the only one I didn’t turn into slag on the beach at Dangrek. We tried downloading it before we left Dig 27, and he came out shrieking insane. We stood around him in a cool marbled courtyard format, and he didn’t know us. He screamed and gibbered and drooled, and shrank away from anyone who tried to reach out to him. In the end, we turned him off, and then wiped the format as well, because in all of our minds the courtyard was contaminated for good.

Sun has muttered something about psychosurgery. I remember the Wedge demolitions sergeant they re-sleeved once too often, and I wonder. But whatever psychosurgery there is on Latimer, Sutjiadi will get. I’m buying.

Sutjiadi.

Cruickshank.

Hansen.

Jiang.

Some would say we got off lightly.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting out under the night sky with Luc Deprez and a shared bottle of whisky, I almost agree.

Periodically, Vongsavath disappears. A primly-dressed construct modelled after a Hun Home Settlement Years bureaucrat comes to collect her in an antique, soft top airjeep. He fusses with her collision safety harness, to the amusement of everyone watching, and then they wheel about and drone off into the hills behind the house. She’s rarely gone more than half an hour.

Of course in real time, that’s a couple of days. Roespinoedji’s contractors slowed the onboard virtuality down for us, about as far as it would go. It must have been some kind of a first for them - most clients want virtual time running at tens or hundreds of times reality standard. But then most people don’t have a decade and more with nothing better to do than sit around. We’re living out the eleven year transit in here at about a hundred times the speed it’s really passing. Weeks on the ’Chandra’s shadow-crewed bridge pass in hours for us. We’ll be back in the Latimer system by the end of the month.

It really would have been easier to just sleep through it, but Carrera was no worse a judge of human nature than any of the other carrion birds gathered about the paralysed body of Sanction IV. Like all vessels with potential to escape the war, the battlewagon is grudgingly equipped with a single emergency cryocap for the pilot. It isn’t even a very good one - most of Vongsavath’s time away is taken up with the de- and refrosting time required by the overcomplex cryosystems. That Hun Home bureaucrat is an elaborate joke on Sun Liping’s part, suggested and then written into the format when Vongsavath returned one evening spitting curses at the inefficiency of the cryocap’s processor.

Vongsavath exaggerates, of course, the way you do about minor annoyances when life is so close to perfect in its major aspects. Most of the time she’s not gone long enough for her coffee to get cold, and the systems checks she performs on the pilot deck have so far proved one hundred per cent superfluous. Nuhanovic guidance systems. Like Sun once said, in the hull of the Martian ship, they don’t build the stuff any better than this.

I mentioned that comment to her a couple of days ago as we lay floating on our backs in the long aquamarine swells out beyond the headland, eyes slitted against the sun overhead. She could barely remember saying it. Everything that happened on Sanction IV is already starting to seem like a lifetime ago. In the afterlife, you lose track of time, it seems, or maybe you just no longer have the need or desire to keep track. Any one of us could find out from the virtuality datahead how long we’ve been gone, when exactly we’ll arrive, but it seems none of us want to. We prefer to keep it vague. Back on Sanction IV, we know, years have already passed, but exactly how many seems - and probably is - irrelevant. The war may already be over, the peace already being fought over. Or it may not. It’s hard to make it matter more than that. The living do not touch us here.

For the most part, anyway.

Occasionally, though, I wonder what Tanya Wardani might be doing by now. I wonder if she is already out on the edges of the Sanction system somewhere, turning the face of some new sleeve tired and intent as she pores over the glyph locks on a Martian dreadnought. I wonder how many other deadwired hulks there are spinning around out there, whirling up to trade fire with their ancient enemies and then falling away injured into the night again, machines creeping out to soothe and repair and make ready for the next time. I wonder what else we’re going to come across in those unexpectedly crowded skies, once we start looking. And then, occasionally, I wonder what they were all doing there in the first place. I wonder what they were fighting for in the space around that nondescript little star and I wonder if in the end they thought it was worth it.

Even more occasionally, I turn my mind to what I have to do when we do get to Latimer, but the detail seems unreal. The Quellists will want a report. They’ll want to know why I couldn’t twist Kemp closer to their designs for the whole Latimer sector, why I changed sides at the critical moment, and worst of all, why I left things no better aligned than they were when they needlecast me in. It’s probably not what they had in mind when they hired me.

I’ll make something up.

I don’t have a sleeve right now, but that’s a minor inconvenience. I’ve got a half-share in twenty million UN dollars banked in Latimer City, a small gang of hardened spec ops friends, one of whom boasts blood connection to one of the more illustrious military families on Latimer. A psychosurgeon to find for Sutjiadi. A bad-tempered determination to visit the Limon Highlands and give Yvette Cruickshank’s family the news of her death. Beyond that, a vague idea that I might go back to the silver-grassed ruins of Innenin and listen intently for some echo of what I found on the Tanya Wardani.

These are my priorities when I get back from the dead. Anyone who has a problem with them can line right up.

In some ways, I’m looking forward to the end of the month.

This afterlife shit is overrated.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Once again, thanks to my family and friends for putting up with me during the making of Broken Angels. It can’t have been easy. Thanks once again also to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for her patience, and to Simon Spanton and his crew, notably the very passionate Nicola Sinclair, for making Altered Carbon fly like a golden eagle on sulphate.

This is a work of science fiction, but many of the books that influenced it are not. In particular, I’d like to express my deepest respect for two writers from my non-fiction inspiration bank; my thanks go to Robin Morgan for The Demon Lover, which is probably the most coherent, complete and constructive critique of political violence I have ever read, and to John Pilger for Heroes, Distant Voices and Hidden Agendas, which together provide an untiring and brutally honest indictment of the inhumanities perpetrated around the globe by those who claim to be our leaders. These writers did not invent their subject matter as I did, because they did not need to. They have seen and experienced it for themselves at first hand, and we should be listening to them.

Woken Furies

RICHARD MORGAN

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE - This Is Who You Are

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

PART TWO - This Is Someone Else

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PART THREE - That Was A While Ago

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

PART FOUR - This Is All That Matters

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

PART FIVE - This Is The Storm To Come

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgements

This book is for my wife
Virginia Cottinelli
who knows of impediment

Fury (n):

Ia intense, disordered and often destructive rage...

2 wild, disordered force or activity

3a any of the three avenging deities who in Greek mythology punished crimes

3b an angry or vengeful woman

The New English Penguin Dictionary 2001

PROLOGUE

The place they woke me in would have been carefully prepared. The same for the reception chamber where they laid out the deal. The Harlan family don’t do anything by halves and, as anyone who’s been Received can tell you, they like to make a good impression. Gold-flecked black decor to match the family crests on the walls, ambient subsonics to engender a tear-jerking sense that you’re in the presence of nobility. Some Martian artefact in a corner, quietly implying the transition of global custody from our long-vanished unhuman benefactors to the firmly modern hand of the First Families oligarchy. The inevitable holosculpture of old Konrad Harlan himself in triumphal ‘planetary discoverer’ mode. One hand raised high, the other shading his face against the glare of an alien sun. Stuff like that.

So here comes Takeshi Kovacs, surfacing from a sunken bath full of tank gel, sleeved into who knows what new flesh, spluttering into the soft pastel light and helped upright by demure court attendants in cutaway swimming costumes. Towels of immense fluffiness to clean off the worst of the gel and a robe of similar material for the short walk to the next room. A shower, a mirror - better get used to that face, soldier - a new set of clothes to go with the new sleeve, and then on to the audience chamber for an interview with a member of the Family. A woman, of course. There was no way they’d use a man, knowing what they did about my background. Abandoned by an alcoholic father at age ten, raised alongside two younger sisters, a lifetime of sporadically psychotic reaction when presented with patriarchal authority figures. No, it was a woman. Some urbane executive aunt, a secret-service caretaker for the Harlan family’s less public affairs. An understated beauty in a custom-grown clone sleeve, probably in its early forties, standard reckoning.

‘Welcome back to Harlan’s World, Kovacs-san. Are you comfortable? ’

‘Yeah. You?’

Smug insolence. Envoy training conditions you to absorb and process environmental detail at speeds normal humans can only dream about. Looking around, the Envoy Takeshi Kovacs knows in split seconds, has known since the sunken bath awakening, that he’s in demand.

‘I? You may call me Aiura.’ The language is Amanglic, not Japanese, but the beautifully constructed misunderstanding of the question, the elegant evasion of offence without resorting to outrage, traces a clean line back to the First Families’ cultural roots. The woman gestures, equally elegantly. ‘Though who I am isn’t very important in this matter. I think it’s clear to you who I represent.’

‘Yes, it’s clear.’ Perhaps it’s subsonics, perhaps just the woman’s sober response to my levity that dampens the arrogance in my tone. Envoys soak up what’s around them, and to some extent that’s a contaminative process. You often find yourself taking to observed behaviour instinctively, especially if your Envoy intuition grasps that behaviour as advantageous in the current surroundings. ‘So I’m on secondment.’

Aiura coughs, delicately.

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

‘Solo deployment?’ Not unusual in itself, but not much fun either. Being part of an Envoy team gives you a sense of confidence you can’t get from working with ordinary human beings.

‘Yes. That is to say, you will be the only Envoy involved. More conventional resources are at your disposal in great number.’

‘That sounds good.’

‘Let us hope so.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

Another delicate throat-clearing. ‘In due course. May I ask, once again, if the sleeve is comfortable?’

‘It seems very.’ Sudden realisation. Very smooth, response at impressive levels even for someone used to Corps combat custom. A beautiful body, on the inside at least. ‘Is this something new from Nakamura?’

‘No.’ Does the woman’s gaze slant upward and left? She’s a security exec, she’s probably wired with retinal datadisplay. ‘Harkany Neuro-systems, grown under offworld licence for Khumalo-Cape.’

Envoys aren’t supposed to suffer from surprise. Any frowning I did would have to be on the inside. ‘Khumalo? Never heard of them.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Suffice it to say we have equipped you with the very best biotech available. I doubt I need to enumerate the sleeve’s capacities to someone of your background. Should you wish detail, there is a basic manual accessible through the datadisplay in your left field of vision.’ A faint smile, maybe the hint of weariness. ‘Harkany were not culturing specifically for Envoy use, and there has not been time to arrange anything customised.’

‘You’ve got a crisis on your hands?’

‘Very astute, Kovacs-san. Yes, the situation might fairly be described as critical. We would like you to go to work immediately.’

‘Well, that’s what they pay me for.’

‘Yes.’ Would she broach the matter of exactly who was paying at this point? Probably not. ‘As you’ve no doubt already guessed this will be a covert deployment. Very different from Sharya. Though you did have some experience of dealing with terrorists towards the end of that campaign, I believe.’

‘Yeah.’ After we smashed their IP fleet, jammed their data transmission systems, blew apart their economy and generally killed their capacity for global defiance, there were still a few diehards who didn’t get the Protectorate message. So we hunted them down. Infiltrate, befriend, subvert, betray. Murder in back alleys. ‘I did that for a while.’

‘Good. This work is not dissimilar.’

‘You’ve got terrorist problems? Are the Quellists acting up again?’

She makes a dismissive gesture. No one takes Quellism seriously any more. Not for a couple of centuries now. The few genuine Quellists still around on the World have traded in their revolutionary principles for high-yield crime. Same risks, better paid. They’re no threat to this woman, or the oligarchy she represents. It’s the first hint that things are not as they seem.

‘This is more in the nature of a manhunt, Kovacs-san. An individual, not a political issue.’

‘And you’re calling in Envoy support.’ Even through the mask of control, this has to rate a raised eyebrow. My voice has probably gone up a little as well. ‘Must be a remarkable individual.’

‘Yes. He is. An ex-Envoy, in fact. Kovacs-san, before we proceed any further, I think something needs to be made clear to you, a matter that—’

‘Something certainly needs to be made clear to my commanding officer. Because to me this sounds suspiciously like you’re wasting Envoy Corps time. We don’t do this kind of work.’

‘—may come as something of a shock to you. You, ah, no doubt believe that you have been re-sleeved shortly after the Sharya campaign. Perhaps even only a few days after your needlecast out.’

A shrug. Envoy cool. ‘Days or months - it doesn’t make much difference to m—’

‘Two centuries.’

‘What?’

‘As I said. You have been in storage for a little under two hundred years. In real terms—’

Envoy cool goes out the window, rapidly. ‘What the fuck happened to—’

‘Please, Kovacs-san. Hear me out.’ A sharp note of command. And then, as the conditioning shuts me down again, pared back to listen and learn, more quietly: ‘Later I will give you as much detail as you like. For now, let it suffice that you are no longer part of the Envoy Corps as such. You can consider yourself privately retained by the Harlan family.’

Marooned centuries from the last moments of living experience you recall. Sleeved out of time. A lifetime away from everyone and everything you knew. Like some fucking criminal. Well, Envoy assimilation technique will by now have some of this locked down, but still—

‘How did you—’

‘Your digitised personality file was acquired for the family some time ago. As I said, I can give you more detail later. You need not concern yourself too much with this. The contract I am here to offer you is lucrative and, we feel, ultimately rewarding. What’s important is for you to understand the extent to which your Envoy skills will be put to the test. This is not the Harlan’s World you know.’

‘I can deal with that.’ Impatiently. ‘It’s what I do.’

‘Good. Now, you will of course want to know—’

‘Yeah.’ Shut down the shock, like a tourniquet on a bleeding limb. Drag up competence and a drawled lack of concern once more. Grab on to the obvious, the salient point in all of this. ‘Just who the fuck is this ex-Envoy you so badly want me to catch?’

Maybe it went something like that.

Then again, maybe not. I’m inferring from suspicion and fragmented knowledge after the event. Building it up from what I can guess, using Envoy intuition to fill in the gaps. But I could be completely wrong.

I wouldn’t know.

I wasn’t there.

And I never saw his face when they told him where I was. Told him that I was, and what he’d have to do about it.

PART ONE

This Is Who You Are

‘Make it personal . . .’

Quellcrist Falconer
Things I Should Have Learnt By Now Vol II

CHAPTER ONE

Damage.

The wound stung like fuck, but it wasn’t as bad as some I’d had. The blaster bolt came in blind across my ribs, already weakened by the door plating it had to chew through to get to me. Priests, up against the slammed door and looking for a quick gut-shot. Fucking amateur night. They’d probably caught almost as much pain themselves from the point-blank blowback off the plating. Behind the door, I was already twisting aside. What was left of the charge ploughed a long, shallow gash across my ribcage and went out, smouldering in the folds of my coat. Sudden ice down that side of my body and the abrupt stench of fried skin-sensor components. That curious bone-splinter fizzing that’s almost a taste, where the bolt had ripped through the biolube casing on the floating ribs.

Eighteen minutes later, by the softly glowing display chipped into my upper left field of vision, the same fizzing was still with me as I hurried down the lamp-lit street, trying to ignore the wound. Stealthy seep of fluids beneath my coat. Not much blood. Sleeving synthetic has its advantages.

‘Looking for a good time, sam?’

‘Already had one,’ I told him, veering away from the doorway. He blinked wave-tattooed eyelids in a dismissive flutter that said your loss and leaned his tightly-muscled frame languidly back into the gloom. I crossed the street and took the corner, tacking between a couple more whores, one a woman, the other of indeterminate gender. The woman was an augment, forked dragon tongue flickering out around her overly prehensile lips, maybe tasting my wound on the night air. Her eyes danced a similar passage over me, then slid away. On the other side, the cross-gender pro shifted its stance slightly and gave me a quizzical look but said nothing. Neither were interested. The streets were rain-slick and deserted, and they’d had longer to see me coming than the doorway operator. I’d cleaned up since leaving the citadel, but something about me must have telegraphed the lack of business opportunity.

At my back, I heard them talking about me in Stripjap. I heard the word for broke.

They could afford to be choosy. In the wake of the Mecsek Initiative, business was booming. Tekitomura was packed that winter, thronging with salvage brokers and the deCom crews that drew them the way a trawler wake draws ripwings. Making New Hok safe for a New Century, the ads went. From the newly built hoverloader dock down at the Kompcho end of town it was less than a thousand kilometres, straight line distance, to the shores of New Hokkaido, and the loaders were running day and night. Outside of an airdrop, there is no faster way to get across the Andrassy Sea. And on Harlan’s World, you don’t go up in the air if you can possibly avoid it. Any crew toting heavy equipment - and they all were - was going to New Hok on a hoverloader out of Tekitomura. Those that lived would be coming back the same way.

Boom town. Bright new hope and brawling enthusiasm as the Mecsek money poured in. I limped down thoroughfares littered with the detritus of spent human merriment. In my pocket, the freshly excised cortical stacks clicked together like dice.

There was a fight going on at the intersection of Pencheva Street and Muko Prospect. The pipe houses on Muko had just turned out and their synapse-fried patrons had met late-shift dock workers coming up through the decayed quiet of the warehouse quarter. More than enough reason for violence. Now a dozen badly co-ordinated figures stumbled back and forth in the street, flailing and clawing inexpertly at each other while a gathered crowd shouted encouragement. One body already lay inert on the fused-glass paving, and someone else was dragging their body, a limb’s length at a time, out of the fray, bleeding. Blue sparks shorted off a set of overcharged power knuckles, elsewhere light glimmered on a blade. But everyone still standing seemed to be having a good time and there were no police as yet.

Yeah, part of me jeered. Probably all too busy up the hill right now.

I skirted the action as best I could, shielding my injured side. Beneath the coat, my hands closed on the smooth curve of the last hallucinogen grenade and the slightly sticky hilt of the Tebbit knife.

Never get into a fight if you can kill quickly and be gone.

Virginia Vidaura - Envoy Corps trainer, later career criminal and sometime political activist. Something of a role model for me, though it was several decades since I’d last seen her. On a dozen different worlds, she crept into my mind unbidden, and I owed that ghost in my head my own life a dozen times over. This time I didn’t need her or the knife. I got past the fight without eye contact, made the corner of Pencheva and melted into the shadows that lay across the alley mouths on the seaward side of the street. The timechip in my eye said I was late.

Pick it up, Kovacs. According to my contact in Millsport, Plex wasn’t all that reliable at the best of times, and I hadn’t paid him enough to wait long.

Five hundred metres down and then left into the tight fractal whorls of Belacotton Kohei Section, named centuries ago for the habitual content and the original owner/operator family whose warehouse frontages walled the curving maze of alleys. With the Unsettlement and the subsequent loss of New Hokkaido as any kind of market, the local belaweed trade pretty much collapsed and families like Kohei went rapidly bankrupt. Now the grime-filmed upper-level windows of their facades peered sadly across at each other over gape-mouthed loading bay entrances whose shutters were all jammed somewhere uncommitted between open and closed.

There was talk of regeneration of course, of reopening units like these and retooling them as deCom labs, training centres and hardware storage facilities. Mostly, it was still just talk - the enthusiasm had kindled on the wharf-line units facing the hoverloader ramps further west, but so far it hadn’t spread further in any direction than you could trust a wirehead with your phone. This far off the wharf and this far east, the chitter of Mecsek finance was still pretty inaudible.

The joys of trickledown.

Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six showed a faint glow in one upper window and the long restless tongues of shadows in the light that seeped from under the half cranked loading-bay shutter gave the building the look of a one-eyed, drooling maniac. I slid to the wall and dialled up the synthetic sleeve’s auditory circuits for what they were worth, which wasn’t much. Voices leaked out into the street, fitful as the shadows at my feet.

‘—telling you, I’m not going to hang around for that.’

It was a Millsport accent, the drawling metropolitan twang of Harlan’s World Amanglic dragged up to an irritated jag. Plex’s voice, muttering below sense-making range, made soft provincial counterpoint. He seemed to be asking a question.

‘How the fuck would I know that? Believe what you want.’ Plex’s companion was moving about, handling things. His voice faded back in the echoes of the loading bay. I caught the words kaikyo, matter, a chopped laugh. Then again, coming closer to the shutter ‘—matters is what the family believes, and they’ll believe what the technology tells them. Technology leaves a trail, my friend.’ A sharp coughing and indrawn breath that sounded like recreational chemicals going down. ‘This guy is fucking late.’

I frowned. Kaikyo has a lot of meanings, but they all depend on how old you are. Geographically, it’s a strait or a channel. That’s early Settlement-Years use, or just hyper-educated, kanji-scribbling, First Families pretension. This guy didn’t sound First Family, but there was no reason he couldn’t have been around back when Konrad Harlan and his well-connected pals were turning Glimmer VI into their own personal backyard. Plenty of dh personalities still on stack from that far back, just waiting to be downloaded into a working sleeve. Come to that, you wouldn’t need to re-sleeve more than a half dozen times, end to end, to live through the whole of Harlan’s World’s human history anyway. It’s still not much over four centuries, earth standard, since the colony barges made planetfall.

Envoy intuition twisted about in my head. It felt wrong. I’d met men and women with centuries of continuous life behind them and they didn’t talk like this guy. This wasn’t the wisdom of ages, drawling out into the Tekitomura night over pipe fumes.

On the street, scavenged into the argot of Stripjap a couple of hundred years later, kaikyo means a contact who can shift stolen goods. A covert flow manager. In some parts of the Millsport Archipelago, it’s still common usage. Elsewhere, the meaning is shifting to describe above-board financial consultants.

Yeah, and further south it means a holy man possessed by spirits, or a sewage outlet. Enough of this detective shit. You heard the man - you’re late.

I got the heel of one hand under the edge of the shutter and hauled upward, locking up the tidal rip of pain from my wound as well as the synthetic sleeve’s nervous system would let me. The shutter ratcheted noisily to the roof. Light fell out into the street and all over me.

‘Evening.’

‘Jesus!’ The Millsport accent jerked back a full step. He’d only been a couple of metres away from the shutter when it went up.

‘Tak.’

‘Hello Plex.’ My eyes stayed on the newcomer. ‘Who’s the tan?’

By then I already knew. Pale, tailored good looks straight out of some low-end experia flic, somewhere between Micky Nozawa and Ryu Bartok. Well-proportioned fighter’s sleeve, bulk in the shoulders and chest, length in the limbs. Stacked hair, the way they’re doing it on the bioware catwalks these days, that upward static-twisted thing that’s meant to look like they just pulled the sleeve out of a clone tank. A suit bagged and draped to suggest hidden weaponry, a stance that said he had none he was ready to use. Combat arts crouch that was more bark than readiness to bite. He still had the discharged micro-pipe in one curled palm, and his pupils were spiked wide open. Concession to an ancient tradition put illuminum tattooed curlicues across one corner of his forehead.

Millsport yakuza apprentice. Street thug.

‘You don’t call me tani,’ he hissed. ‘You are the outsider here, Kovacs. You are the intruder.’

I left him at the periphery of my vision and looked towards Plex, who was over by the workbenches, fiddling with a knot of webbing straps and trying on a smile that didn’t want to be on his dissipated aristo face.

‘Look, Tak—’

‘This was strictly a private party, Plex. I didn’t ask you to subcontract the entertainment.’

The yakuza twitched forward, barely restrained. He made a grating noise deep in his throat. Plex looked panicked.

‘Wait, I . . .’ He put down the webbing with an obvious effort. ‘Tak, he’s here about something else.’

‘He’s here on my time,’ I said mildly.

‘Listen, Kovacs. You fucking—’

‘No.’ I looked back at him as I said it, hoping he could read the bright energy in my tone for what it was. ‘You know who I am, you’ll stay out of my way. I’m here to see Plex, not you. Now get out.’

I don’t know what stopped him, Envoy rep, late-breaking news from the citadel - because they’ll be all over it by now, you made such a fucking mess up there - or just a cooler head than the cheap-suited punk persona suggested. He stood braced in the door of his own rage for a moment, then stood down and displaced it, all poured into a glance at the nails of his right hand and a grin.

‘Sure. You just go ahead and transact with Plex here. I’ll wait outside. Shouldn’t take long.’

He even took the first step towards the street. I looked back at Plex.

‘What the fuck’s he talking about?’

Plex winced.

‘We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak. We can’t—’

‘Oh no.’ But looking around the room I could already see the swirled patterns in the dust where someone had been using a grav-lifter. ‘No, no, you told me—’

‘I-I know, Tak, but—’

‘I paid you.’

‘I’ll give you the money—’

‘I don’t want the fucking money, Plex.’ I stared at him, fighting down the urge to rip his throat out. Without Plex, there was no upload. Without the upload—‘I want my fucking body back.’

‘It’s cool, it’s cool. You’ll get it back. It’s just right now—’

‘It’s just right now, Kovacs, we’re using the facilities.’ The yakuza drifted back into my line of sight, still grinning. ‘Because to tell the truth, they were pretty much ours in the first place. But then Plex here probably didn’t tell you that, did he?’

I shuttled a glance between them. Plex looked embarrassed.

You gotta feel sorry for the guy. Isa, my Millsport contact broker, all of fifteen years old, razored violet hair and brutally obvious archaic datarat plugs, working on world-weary reflective while she laid out the deal and the cost. Look at history, man. It fucked him over but good.

History, it was true, didn’t seem to have done Plex any favours. Born three centuries sooner with the name Kohei, he’d have been a spoilt stupid younger son with no particular need to do more than exercise his obvious intelligence in some gentleman’s pursuit like astrophysics or archaeologue science. As it was, the Kohei family had left its post-Unsettlement generations nothing but the keys to ten streets of empty warehouses and a decayed aristo charm that, in Plex’s own self-deprecating words, made it easier than you’d think to get laid when broke. Pipe-blasted, he told me the whole shabby story on less than three days’ acquaintance. He seemed to need to tell someone, and Envoys are good listeners. You listen, you file under local colour, you soak it up. Later, the recalled detail maybe saves your life.

Driven by the terror of a single lifespan and no re-sleeve, Plex’s newly impoverished ancestors learnt to work for a living, but most of them weren’t very good at it. Debt piled up, the vultures moved in. By the time Plex came along, his family were in so deep with the yakuza that low-grade criminality was just a fact of life. He’d probably grown up around aggressively slouched suits like this one. Probably learnt that embarrassed, give-up-the-ground smile at his father’s knee.

The last thing he wanted to do was upset his patrons.

The last thing I wanted to do was ride a hoverloader back to Millsport in this sleeve.

‘Plex, I’m booked out of here on the Saffron Queen. That’s four hours away. Going to refund me my ticket?’

‘We’ll flicker it, Tak.’ His voice was pleading. ‘There’s another ’loader out to EmPee tomorrow evening. I’ve got stuff, I mean Yukio’s guys—’

‘—use my fucking name, man,’ yelped the yakuza.

‘They can flicker you to the evening ride, no one’s ever going to know.’ The pleading gaze turned on Yukio. ‘Right? You’ll do that, right?’

I added a stare of my own. ‘Right? Seeing as how you’re fucking up my exit plans currently?’

‘You already fucked up your exit, Kovacs.’ The yakuza was frowning, head-shaking. Playing at sempai with mannerisms and a clip-on solemnity he’d probably copied directly from his own sempai not too far back in his apprenticeship. ‘Do you know how much heat you’ve got out there looking for you right now? The cops have put in sniffer squads all over uptown, and my guess is they’ll be all over the ’loader dock inside an hour. The whole TPD is out to play. Not to mention our bearded stormtrooper friends from the citadel. Fuck, man, you think you could have left a little more blood up there.’

‘I asked you a question. I didn’t ask for a critique. You going to flicker me to the next departure or not?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He waved it away. ‘Consider it fucking done. What you don’t appreciate, Kovacs, is that some people have got serious business to transact. You come up here and stir up local law enforcement with your mindless violence, they’re liable to get all enthusiastic and go busting people we need.’

‘Need for what?’

‘None of your fucking business.’ The sempai impression skidded off and he was pure Millsport street again. ‘You just keep your fucking head down for the next five or six hours and try not to kill anyone else.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then we’ll call you.’

I shook my head. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’

‘Better than.’ His voice climbed. ‘Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, Kovacs?’

I measured the distance, the time it would take me to get to him. The pain it would cost. I ladled out the words that would push him. ‘Who am I talking to? I’m talking to a whiff-wired chimpira, a fucking street punk up here from Millsport and off the leash from his sempai, and it’s getting old, Yukio. Give me your fucking phone - I want to talk to someone with authority.’

The rage detonated. Eyes flaring wide, hand reaching for whatever he had inside the suit jacket. Way too late.

I hit him.

Across the space between us, unfolding attacks from my uninjured side. Sideways into throat and knee. He went down choking. I grabbed an arm, twisted it and laid the Tebbit knife across his palm, held so he could see.

‘That’s a bioware blade,’ I told him tightly. ‘Adoracion Haemorrhagic Fever. I cut you with this and every blood vessel in your body ruptures inside three minutes. Is that what you want?’

He heaved against my grip, whooped after breath. I pressed down with the blade, and saw the panic in his eyes.

‘It isn’t a good way to die, Yukio. Phone.’

He pawed at his jacket and the phone tipped out, skittered on the evercrete. I leaned close enough to be sure it wasn’t a weapon, then toed it back towards his free hand. He fumbled it up, breath still coming in hoarse jags through his rapidly bruising throat.

‘Good. Now punch up someone who can help, then give it to me.’

He thumbed the display a couple of times and offered the phone to me, face pleading the way Plex’s had a couple of minutes earlier. I fixed him with my eyes for a long moment, trading on the notorious immobility of cheap synth features, then let go of his locked-out arm, took the phone and stepped back out of reach. He rolled over away from me, still clutching his throat. I put the phone to my ear.

‘Who is this?’ asked an urbane male voice in Japanese.

‘My name is Kovacs.’ I followed the language shift automatically. ‘Your chimpira Yukio and I are having a conflict of interest that I thought you might like to resolve.’

A frigid silence.

‘That’s some time tonight I’d like you to resolve it,’ I said gently.

There was a hiss of indrawn breath at the other end of the line. ‘Kovacs-san, you are making a mistake.’

‘Really?’

‘It would be unwise to involve us in your affairs.’

‘I’m not the one doing the involving. Currently I’m standing in a warehouse looking at an empty space where some equipment of mine used to be. I have it on pretty good authority the reason it’s gone is that you took it.’

More silence. Conversations with the yakuza are invariably punctuated with long pauses, during which you’re supposed to reflect and listen carefully to what’s not being said.

I wasn’t in the mood for it. My wound ached.

‘I’m told you’ll be finished in about six hours. I can live with that. But I want your word that at the end of that time the equipment will be back here and in working order, ready for me to use. I want your word.’

‘Hirayasu Yukio is the person to—’

‘Yukio is a chimp. Let us deal honestly with each other in this. Yukio’s only job here is to make sure I don’t slaughter our mutual service provider. Which, incidentally, is something he’s not doing well. I was already short on patience when I arrived, and I don’t expect to replenish my stock any time soon. I’m not interested in Yukio. I want your word.’

‘And if I do not give it?’

‘Then a couple of your front offices are going to end up looking like the inside of the citadel tonight. You can have my word on that.’

Quiet. Then: ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists.’

‘Oh please. What are you, making speeches? I thought I was dealing at executive level. Am I going to have to do some damage here?’

Another kind of silence. The voice on the other end of the line seemed to have thought of something else.

‘Is Hirayasu Yukio harmed?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ I looked down coldly at the yakuza. He’d mastered breathing again and was beginning to sit up. Beads of sweat gleamed at the borders of his tattoo. ‘But all that can change. It’s in your hands.’

‘Very well.’ Barely a handful of seconds before the response. By yakuza standards, it was unseemly haste. ‘My name is Tanaseda. You have my word, Kovacs-san, that the equipment you require will be in place and available to you at the time you specify. In addition, you will be paid for your trouble.’

‘Thank you. That—’

‘I have not finished. You further have my word that if you commit any acts of violence against my personnel, I shall issue a global writ for your capture and subsequent execution. I am talking about a very unpleasant real death. Is that understood?’

‘It seems fair. But I think you’d better tell the chimp to behave himself. He seems to have delusions of competence.’

‘Let me speak to him.’

Yukio Hirayasu was sitting by now, hunched over on the evercrete, wheezing breathily. I hissed at him and tossed him the phone. He caught it awkwardly, one-handed, still massaging his throat with the other.

‘Your sempai wants a word.’

He glared up at me out of tear-smeared, hating eyes, but he put the phone to his ear. Compressed Japanese syllables trickled out of it, like someone riffing on a ruptured gas cylinder. He stiffened and his head lowered. His answers ran bitten off and monosyllabic. The word yes featured a lot. One thing you’ve got to hand to the yakuza - they do discipline in the ranks like no one else.

The one-sided conversation ended and Yukio held the phone out to me, not meeting my eye. I took it.

‘This matter is resolved,’ said Tanaseda in my ear. ‘Please arrange to be elsewhere for the remainder of the night. You may return six hours from now when the equipment and your compensation will both be waiting for you. We will not speak again. This. Confusion. Has been most regrettable.’

He didn’t sound that upset.

‘You recommend a good place for breakfast?’ I asked.

Silence. A polite static backdrop. I weighed the phone in my palm for a moment, then tossed it back to Yukio.

‘So.’ I looked from the yakuza to Plex and back. ‘Either of you recommend a good place for breakfast?’

CHAPTER TWO

Before Leonid Mecsek unleashed his beneficence on the struggling economies of the Saffron Archipelago, Tekitomura scraped a seasonal living out of big game bottleback charters for rich sportsmen across from Millsport or the Ohrid Isles, and the harvest of webjellies for their internal oils. Bioluminescence made these latter easiest to catch at night, but the sweeper crews that did it tended not to stay out for more than a couple of hours at a time. Longer and the webjellies’ gossamer fine stinging aerials got plastered so thick over clothing and onboard surfaces that you could lose serious productivity to toxin inhalation and skin burns. All night long, the sweepers came in so that crew and decks could be hosed clean with cheap biosolvent. Behind the Angier lamp-glare of the hosing station, a short parade of bars and eating houses stayed open until dawn.

Plex, spilling apologies like a leaky bucket, walked me down through the warehouse district to the wharf and into an un-windowed place called Tokyo Crow. It wasn’t very different from a low-end Millsport skipper’s bar - mural sketches of Ebisu and Elmo on the stained walls, interspersed with the standard votive plaques inscribed in Kanji or Amanglic Roman: calm seas, please, and full nets. Monitors up behind the mirrorwood bar, giving out local weather coverage, orbital behaviour patterns and global breaking news. The inevitable holoporn on a broad projection base at the end of the room. Sweeper crewmembers lined the bar and knotted around the tables, faces blurred weary. It was a thin crowd, mostly male, mostly unhappy.

‘I’ll get these,’ said Plex hurriedly, as we entered.

‘Too fucking right, you will.’

He gave me a sheepish look. ‘Um. Yeah. What do you want, then?’

‘Whatever passes for whisky around here. Cask strength. Something I’ll be able to taste through the flavour circuits in this fucking sleeve.’

He sloped off to the bar and I found a corner table out of habit. Views to the door and across the clientele. I lowered myself into a seat, wincing at the movement in my blaster-raked ribs.

What a fucking mess.

Not really. I touched the stacks through the fabric of my coat pocket. I got what I came for.

Any special reason you couldn’t just cut their throats while they slept?

They needed to know. They needed to see it coming.

Plex came back from the bar, bearing glasses and a tray of tired-looking sushi. He seemed unaccountably pleased with himself.

‘Look, Tak. You don’t need to worry about those sniffer squads. In a synth sleeve—’

I looked at him. ‘Yes. I know.’

‘And, well, you know. It’s only six hours.’

‘And all of tomorrow until the ’loader ships out.’ I hooked my glass. ‘I really think you’d better just shut up, Plex.’

He did. After a couple of brooding minutes, I discovered I didn’t want that either. I was jumpy in my synthetic skin, twitching like a meth comedown, uncomfortable with who I physically was. I needed distraction.

‘You know Yukio long?’

He looked up, sulkily. ‘I thought you wanted—’

‘Yeah. Sorry. I got shot tonight, and it hasn’t put me in a great mood. I was just—’

‘You were shot?’

‘Plex.’ I leaned intently across the table. ‘Do you want to keep your fucking voice down.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

‘I mean.’ I gestured helplessly. ‘How the fuck do you stay in business, man? You’re supposed to be a criminal, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It wasn’t my choice,’ he said stiffly.

‘No? How’s that work, then? They got some kind of conscription for it up here?’

‘Very funny. I suppose you chose the military, did you? At seventeen fucking standard years old?’

I shrugged. ‘I made a choice, yeah. Military or the gangs. I put on a uniform. It paid better than the criminal stuff I was already doing.’

‘Well, I was never in a gang.’ He knocked back a chunk of his drink. ‘The yakuza made sure of that. Too much danger of corrupting their investment. I went to the right tutors, spent time in the right social circles, learnt to walk the walk, talk the talk, and then they plucked me like a fucking cherry.’

His gaze beached on the scarred wood of the table top.

‘I remember my father,’ he said bitterly. ‘The day I got access to the family datastacks. Right after my coming-of-age party, the next morning. I was still hungover, still fried and Tanaseda and Kadar and Hirayasu in his office like fucking vampires. He cried that day.’

‘That Hirayasu?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s the son. Yukio. You want to know how long I’ve known Yukio? We grew up together. Fell asleep together in the same Kanji classes, got wrecked on the same take, dated the same girls. He left for Millsport about the time I started my dh/biotech practicals, came back a year later wearing that fucking stupid suit.’ He looked up. ‘You think I like living out my father’s debts?’

It didn’t seem to need an answer. And I didn’t want to listen to any more of this stuff. I sipped some more of the cask-strength whisky, wondering what the bite would be like in a sleeve with real taste buds. I gestured with the glass. ‘So how come they needed your de- and re-gear tonight? Got to be more than one digital human shunting-set in town, surely.’

He shrugged. ‘Some kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.’

‘Organised crime, huh.’

There was a resentful envy in the way he stared at me. ‘You don’t have any family, do you?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ That was a little harsh, but he didn’t need to know the close truth. Feed him something else. ‘I’ve been away.’

‘In the store?’

I shook my head. ‘Offworld.’

‘Offworld? Where’d you go?’ The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, barely held back by the ghost of breeding. The Glimmer system has no habitable planets apart from Harlan’s World. Tentative terraforming down the plane of the ecliptic on Glimmer V won’t yield useful results for another century. Offworld for a Harlanite means a stellar-range needlecast, shrugging off your physical self and re-sleeving somewhere light years distant under an alien sun. It’s all very romantic and in the public consciousness known needlecast riders are accorded a celebrity status somewhat akin to pilots back on earth during the days of intra-system spaceflight.

The fact that, unlike pilots, these latter-day celebrities don’t actually have to do anything to travel the hypercaster, the fact that in many cases they have no actual skills or stature other than their hypercast fame itself, doesn’t seem to impede their triumphant conquest of the public imagination. Old Earth is the real jackpot destination, of course, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go, so long as you come back. It’s a favourite boost technique for fading experia stars and out-of-favour Millsport courtesans. If you can just somehow scrape up the cost of the ’cast, you’re more or less guaranteed years of well-paid coverage in the skullwalk magazines.

That, of course, doesn’t apply to Envoys. We just used to go silently, crush the odd planetary uprising, topple the odd regime, and then plug in something UN-compliant that worked. Slaughter and suppression across the stars, for the greater good - naturally - of a unified Protectorate.

I don’t do that any more.

‘Did you go to Earth?’

‘Among other places.’ I smiled at a memory that was getting on for a century out of date. ‘Earth’s a shit-hole, Plex. Static fucking society, hyper-rich immortal overclass, cowed masses.’

He shrugged and poked morosely at the sushi with his chopsticks. ‘Sounds just like this place.’

‘Yeah.’ I sipped some more whisky. There were a lot of subtle differences between Harlan’s World and what I’d seen on Earth, but I couldn’t be bothered to lay them out right now. ‘Now you come to mention it.’

‘So what are you. Oh fuck!’

For a moment I thought he was just fumbling the bottleback sushi. Shaky feedback on the holed synth sleeve, or maybe just shaky close-to-dawn weariness on me. It took me whole seconds to look up, track his gaze to the bar and the door, make sense of what was there.

The woman seemed unremarkable at first glance - slim and competent-looking, in grey coveralls and a nondescript padded jacket, unexpectedly long hair, face pale to washed-out. A little too sharp-edged for sweeper crew, maybe. Then you noticed the way she stood, booted feet set slightly apart, hands pressed flat to the mirrorwood bar, face tipped forward, body preternaturally immobile. Then your eyes went back to that hair and—

Framed in the doorway not five metres off her flank, a group of senior caste New Revelation priests stood frigidly surveying the clientele. They must have spotted the woman about the same time I spotted them.

‘Oh, shit fuck!’

‘Plex, shut up.’ I murmured it through closed teeth and stilled lips. ‘They don’t know my face.’

‘But she’s—’

‘Just. Wait.’

The spiritual well-being gang advanced into the room. Nine of them, all told. Cartoon patriarch beards and close shaven skulls, grim-faced and intent. Three officiators, the colours of the evangelical elect draped blackly across their dull ochre robes and the bioware scopes worn like an ancient pirate patch across one eye. They were locked in on the woman at the bar, bending her way like gulls on a downdraft. Across the room, her uncovered hair must have been a beacon of provocation.

Whether they were out combing the streets for me was immaterial. I’d gone masked into the citadel, synth-sleeved. I had no signature.

But rampant across the Saffron Archipelago, dripping down onto the northern reaches of the next landmass like venom from a ruptured web-jelly and now, they told me, taking root in odd little pockets as far south as Millsport itself, the Knights of the New Revelation brandished their freshly regenerated gynophobia with an enthusiasm of which their Earth-bound Islamo-Christian ancestors would have been proud. A woman alone in a bar was bad enough, a woman uncovered far worse, but this—

‘Plex,’ I said quietly. ‘On second thoughts, I think you’d maybe better get out of here.’

‘Tak, listen—’

I dialled the hallucinogen grenade up to maximum delay, fused it and let it roll gently away under the table. Plex heard it go and he made a tiny yelping noise.

‘Go on,’ I said.

The lead officiator reached the bar. He stood half a metre away from the woman, maybe waiting for her to cringe.

She ignored him. Ignored, for that matter, everything further off than the bar surface under her hands and, it dawned on me, the face she could see reflected there.

I eased unhurriedly to my feet.

‘Tak, it isn’t worth it, man. You don’t know wha—’

‘I said go, Plex.’ Drifting into it now, into the gathering fury like an abandoned skiff on the edge of the maelstrom. ‘You don’t want to play this screen.’

The officiator got tired of being ignored.

‘Woman,’ he barked. ‘You will cover yourself.’

‘Why,’ she enunciated back with bitten clarity, ‘don’t you go and fuck yourself with something sharp.’

There was an almost comical pause. The nearest barflies jerked around on a collective look that gaped did she really say—

Somewhere, someone guffawed.

The blow was already swinging in. A gnarled, loose-fingered backhander that by rights should have catapulted the woman off the bar and onto the floor in a little heap. Instead—

The locked-up immobility dissolved. Faster than anything I’d seen since combat on Sanction IV. Something in me was expecting it, and I still missed the exact moves. She seemed to flicker like something from a badly edited virtuality, sideways and gone. I closed on the little group, combat rage funnelling my synthetic vision down to targets. Peripherally, I saw her reach back and fasten on the officiator’s wrist. I heard the crack as the elbow went. He shrilled and flapped. She levered hard and he went down.

A weapon flashed out. Thunder and greasy lightning in the gloom at the bar rail. Blood and brains exploded across the room. Superheated globs of the stuff splattered my face and burned.

Mistake.

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.

I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Sarah.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. He staggered away from me, screaming, insides tumbling out.

Sara—

‘It’s him!’

Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.

‘It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!’

With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.

Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean - Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.

Best to play it safe.

The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.

Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-GRENADE. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar. Her face looked bruised.

I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.

‘Can you stand?’

A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.

‘Out. Try not to breathe.’

Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando. Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.

‘A light,’ he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. ‘A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.’

He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.

‘The angel.’

I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. ‘Take another look, officiator.’

‘The an—’ And then something must have got through the hallucinogens. His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. ‘No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.’

‘Now you’ve got it.’

The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.

I slashed his face open and left.

Deep enough.

Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.

The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.

Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.

The paving . . .

Move. Breathe. Get out of here.

A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid towards me, jewelled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss/clank of autograpples firing home into their shoreside sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.

Get a grip, Tak. It’s just the chemicals.

Across the wharf, under a stilled robot crane, stray light glinted off her hair as she turned. I checked once more over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but the entrance to the bar was firmly closed. Faint noises leaked through at the lower limits of my cheap synth hearing. Could have been laughter, weeping, pretty much anything. H-grenades are harmless enough long-term, but while they last you do tend to lose interest in rational thought or action. I doubted anyone’d work out where the door was for the next half hour, let alone how to get through it.

The sweeper bumped up to the wharf, cranked tight by the autograpple cables. Figures leapt ashore, trading banter. I crossed unnoticed to the shadow of the crane. Her face floated ghost-like in the gloom. Pale, wolfish beauty. The hair that framed it seemed to crackle with half-seen energies.

‘Pretty handy with that knife.’

I shrugged. ‘Practice.’

She looked me over. ‘Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom? ’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘Well, you sure—’ Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. ‘Shit, they got you.’

I shook my head. ‘Different party. Happened a while back.’

‘Yeah? Looks to me like you could use a medic. I’ve got some friends could—’

‘It isn’t worth it. I’m getting out of this in a couple of hours.’

Brows cranked. ‘Re-sleeve? Well, okay, you got better friends than mine. Making it pretty hard for me to pay off my giri here.’

‘Skip it. On the house.’

‘On the house?’ She did something with her eyes that I liked. ‘What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?’

‘I don’t think I’ve seen that one.’

‘No? Comeback flic, ’bout ten years back.’

‘Missed it. I’ve been away.’

Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party. Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.

‘They’re putting out a call,’ she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. ‘I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.’

‘It wasn’t shaping up for much anyway.’

She took a couple more steps away, then stopped. Under the vague caterwauling from the bar and the noise of the hosing station, I thought I could hear something massive powering up, tiny insistent whine behind the fabric of the night, sense of shifting potential, like carnival monsters getting into place behind a stage curtain. Light and shadow through the stanchions overhead made a splintered white mask of her face. One eye gleamed silver.

‘You got a place to crash, Micky-san? You said a couple of hours. What do you plan to do until then?’

I spread my hands. Became aware of the knife, and stowed it.

‘No plans.’

‘No plans, huh?’ There was no breeze coming in off the sea, but I thought her hair stirred a little. She nodded. ‘No place either, right?’

I shrugged again, fighting the rolling unreality of the H-grenade comedown, maybe something else besides. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘So. Your plans are play tag with the TPD and the Beards for the rest of the night, try to see the sun come out in one piece. That it?’

‘Hey, you should be writing experia. You put it like that, it sounds almost attractive.’

‘Yeah. Fucking romantics. Listen, you want a place to crash until your high-grade friends are ready for you, that I can do. You want to play Micky Nozawa in the streets of Tekitomura, well.’ She tilted her head again. ‘I’ll ’trode the flic when they make it.’

I grinned.

‘Is it far?’

Her eyes shuttled left. ‘This way.’

From the bar, the cries of the deranged, a single voice shouting murder and holy retribution.

We slipped away among the cranes and shadows.

CHAPTER THREE

Kompcho was all light, ramp after sloping evercrete ramp aswarm with Angier lamp activity around the slumped and tethered forms of the hoverloaders. The vessels sprawled in their collapsed skirts at the end of the autograpples, like hooked elephant rays dragged ashore. Loading hatches gleamed open on their flaring flanks and illuminum painted vehicles manoeuvred back and forth on the ramps, offering up forklift arms laden with hardware. There was a constant backdrop of machine noise and shouting that drowned out individual voices. It was as if someone had taken the tiny glowing cluster of the hosing station four kilometres east and cultured it for massive, viral growth. Kompcho ate up the night in all directions with glare and sound.

We threaded our way through the tangle of machines and people, across the quay space behind the loader ramps. Discount hardware retailers piled high with aisles of merchandise shone neon pale at the base of the reclaimed wharf frontages, interspersed with the more visceral gleaming of bars, whorehouses and implant clinics. Every door was open, providing step-up access in most cases as wide as the frontage itself. Knots of customers spilled in and out. A machine ahead of me cut a tight circle, backing up with a load of Pilsudski ground profile smart bombs, alert blaring Watch it, Watch it, Watch it. Someone stepped sideways past me, grinning out of a face half metal.

She took me in through one of the implant parlours, past eight workchairs where lean-muscled men and women sat with gritted teeth, seeing themselves get augmented in the long mirror opposite and the banks of close-up monitors above. Probably not pain as such, but it can’t be much fun watching the flesh you wear sliced and peeled and shoved aside to make room for whatever new internal toy your sponsors have told you all the deCom crews are wearing this season.

She stopped by one chair and looked in the mirror at the shaven-headed giant it barely held. They were doing something to the bones in the right shoulder - a peeled-back flap of neck and collar hung down on a blood-soaked towel in front. Carbon black neck tendons flexed restlessly in the gore within.

‘Hey, Orr.’

‘Hey! Sylvie!’ The giant’s teeth appeared to be ungritted, eyes a little vacant with endorphins. He raised a languid hand on the side that was still intact and knocked fists with the woman. ‘You doing?’

‘Out for a prowl. You sure this is going to heal by the morning?’

Orr jerked a thumb. ‘Or I do the same to this scalpelhead before we leave. Without chemicals.’

The implant operative smiled a tight little smile and went on with what he was doing. He’d heard it all before. The giant’s eyes switched to me in the mirror. If he noticed the blood on me, it didn’t seem to bother him. Then again, he was hardly spotless himself.

‘Who’s the synth?’

‘Friend,’ said Sylvie. ‘Talk to you upstairs.’

‘Be up in ten.’ He glanced at the operative. ‘Right?’

‘Half an hour,’ said the operative, still working. ‘The tissue bond needs setting time.’

‘Shit.’ The giant fired a glance at the ceiling. ‘Whatever happened to Urushiflash. That stuff bonds in seconds.’

Still working. A tubular needle made tiny sucking sounds. ‘You asked for the standard tariff, sam. Military-issue biochem isn’t available at that rate.’

‘Well, for fuck’s sake what’s it going to cost me to upgrade to deluxe then?’

‘About fifty per cent more.’

Sylvie laughed. ‘Forget it, Orr. You’re almost done. You won’t even get to enjoy the ’dorphs.’

‘Fuck that, Sylvie. I’m bored rigid here.’ The giant spittled his thumb and held it out. ‘Swipe me up, you.’

The implant operative looked up, shrugged minutely and set down his tools on the operating palette.

‘Ana,’ he called. ‘Get the Urushiflash.’

While the attendant busied herself in a footlocker with the new biochemicals, the operative took a DNA reader from amidst the clutter on the mirror shelf and rubbed the upsoak end across Orr’s thumb. The machine’s hooded display lit and shifted. The operative looked back at Orr.

‘This transaction will put you in the red,’ he said quietly.

Orr glared. ‘Never fucking mind. I’m shipping out tomorrow, I’m good for it and you know it.’

The operative hesitated. ‘It is because you are shipping out tomorrow,’ he began, ‘that—’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Read the sponsor screen, will you. Fujiwara Havel. Making New Hok safe for a New Century. We’re not some goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. I don’t come back, the enka payment covers it. You know that.’

‘It isn’t—’

The exposed tendons in Orr’s neck tensed and lifted. ‘The fuck are you, my accountant?’ He levered himself up in the chair and stared into the operative’s face. ‘Just put it through, will you. And get me some of those milissue endorphins while you’re about it. I’ll take them later.’

We stayed long enough to see the implant operative cave in, then Sylvie nudged me away towards the back.

‘We’ll be upstairs,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ The giant was grinning. ‘See you in ten.’

Upstairs was a spartan set of rooms wrapped around a kitchen/ lounge combination with windows out onto the wharf. The soundproofing was good. Sylvie shrugged off her jacket and slung it over the back of a lounger. She looked back at me as she moved to the kitchen space.

‘Make yourself at home. Bathroom in the back over there if you need to clean up.’

I took the hint, rinsed the worst of the gore off my hands and face in a tiny mirrored basin niche and came back out to the main room. She was over at the kitchen worksurface, searching cabinets.

‘Are you really with Fujiwara Havel?’

‘No.’ She found a bottle and cracked it open, pinched up two glasses in her other hand. ‘We’re a goddamn bootstrap leverage outfit. And then some. Orr just has a datarat tunnel into FH’s clearance codes. Drink?’

‘What is it?’

She looked at the bottle. ‘Don’t know. Whisky.’

I held out my hand for one of the glasses. ‘Tunnel like that’s got to cost in the first place.’

She shook her head. ‘Fringe benefits of deCom. We’re all wired better for crime than a fucking Envoy. Got electronic intrusion gear up the ass.’ She handed me the glass and poured for both of us. The neck of the bottle made a single tiny clink in the quiet of the room each time it touched down. ‘Orr’s been out on the town for the last thirty-six hours, whoring and shooting chemicals on nothing but credit and enka payment promises. Same thing every time we ship out. Views it as an art form, I reckon. Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ It was a very rough whisky. ‘Uhh. You been crewing with him long?’

She gave me an odd look. ‘Long enough. Why?’

‘Sorry, force of habit. I used to get paid to soak up local information.’ I raised the glass again. ‘Here’s to a safe return, then.’

‘That’s considered bad luck.’ She didn’t lift her own glass. ‘You really have been away, haven’t you.’

‘For a while.’

‘Mind talking about it?’

‘Not if we sit down.’

The furniture was cheap, not even automould. I lowered myself carefully into a lounger. The wound in my side seemed to be healing, to the extent that synth flesh ever did.

‘So.’ She seated herself opposite me and pushed her hair away from her face. A couple of the thicker strands flexed and crackled faintly at the intrusion. ‘How long you been gone?’

‘About thirty years, give or take.’

‘Pre-beard, huh?’

Sudden bitterness. ‘Before this heavy stuff, yeah. But I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of other places. Sharya. Latimer. Parts of Adoracion.’

‘Oh. Catch those names.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s where I’ve been.’

Behind Sylvie, an interior door unfolded crankily and a slight, cocky-looking woman wandered yawning into the room, wrapped in a lightweight black polalloy skinsuit half unseamed. She put her head on one side as she spotted me and came to lean on the back of Sylvie’s lounger, scrutinising me with unapologetic curiosity. There were kanji characters shaved into her stubble length hair.

‘Got company?’

‘Glad to see you got those viewfinder upgrades at last.’

‘Shut up.’ She flicked idly at the other woman’s hair with hard-lacquered fingernails, grinning when the tresses crackled and shifted away from the touch.

‘Who is this? Bit late for shore-leave romances, isn’t it?’

‘This is Micky. Micky, meet Jadwiga.’ The slight woman winced at the full name, mouthed the single syllable Jad. ‘And Jad. We are not fucking. He’s just crashing here.’

Jadwiga nodded and turned away, instantly disinterested. From the back, the kanji on her skull read just don’t fucking miss. ‘We got any shiver left?’

‘Think you and Las dropped it all last night.’

‘All of it?’

‘Jesus, Jad. It wasn’t my party. Try the box on the window.’

Jadwiga walked spring-heeled dancer’s steps across to the window and upended the box in question. A tiny vial fell out into her hand. She held it up to the light and shook it so the pale red liquid at the bottom quivered back and forth.

‘Well,’ she said meditatively. ‘Enough for a couple of blinks. Ordinarily I’d offer it round, but—’

‘But instead you’re going to hog the whole lot yourself,’ predicted Sylvie. ‘That old Newpest hospitality thing. Just gets me right there every time.’

‘Oh look who’s talking, bitch,’ said Jadwiga without heat. ‘How often, outside of mission time, you ever agree to hook us up to that mane of yours?’

‘It isn’t the sa—’

‘No, it’s better. You know for a Renouncer kid, you’re pretty fucking stingy with your capacity. Kiyoka says—’

‘Kiyoka doesn’t—’

‘Guys, guys.’ I gestured for attention, broke the tightening cable of confrontation that was cranking Jadwiga back across the room towards Sylvie a couple of flexed steps at a time. ‘It’s okay. I’m not up for any recreational chemicals right now.’

Jad brightened. ‘See,’ she told Sylvie.

‘Although if I could beg some of Orr’s endorphins when he gets up here, I’d be grateful.’

Sylvie nodded, not looking away from her standing companion. She was clearly still miffed, either over the breach of host etiquette or the mention of her Renouncer background. I couldn’t work out which.

‘Orr’s got endorphins?’ Jadwiga wanted to know loudly.

‘Yes,’ said Sylvie. ‘He’s downstairs. Getting cut.’

Jad sneered. ‘Fucking fashion victim. He’s never going to learn.’ She slipped a hand inside her unseamed suit and produced an eye-hypo. Fingers programmed by obvious habit screwed the mechanism onto the end of the vial, then she tipped her head back and with the same automatic deftness spread the eyelids of one eye and fired the hypo into it. Her tight-cabled stance slackened, and the drug’s signature shudder dropped through her from the shoulders.

Shiver is pretty innocuous stuff - it’s about six-tenths betathanatine analogue, cut with a couple of take extracts that make everyday household objects dreamily fascinating and perfectly innocent conversational gambits sniggeringly hilarious. Fun if everyone in the room is dropping it, irritating for anyone left out. Mostly, it just slows you down, which I imagine was what Jad, in common with most deComs, was after.

‘You’re from Newpest,’ I asked her.

‘Mm-mm.’

‘What’s it like these days?’

‘Oh. Beautiful.’ A badly controlled smirk. ‘Best-looking swamp town in the southern hemisphere. Well worth a visit.’

Sylvie sat forward. ‘You from there, Micky?’

‘Yeah. Long time ago.’

The apartment door chimed and then unfolded to reveal Orr, still stripped to the waist, right shoulder and neck liberally smeared with orange tissue weld. He grinned as he saw Jadwiga.

‘So you’re up, are you?’ Advancing into the room, dumping a fistful of clothing into the lounger beside Sylvie, who wrinkled her nose.

Jad shook her head and waved the empty vial at the giant. ‘Down. Definitely down. Chilled to flatline.’

‘Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a drug problem, Jad?’

The slight woman dribbled sniggering, as poorly suppressed as the earlier smirk. Orr’s grin broadened. He mimed junkie trembling, a twitching, idiot face. Jadwiga erupted into laughter. It was infectious. I saw the smile on Sylvie’s face and caught myself chuckling.

‘So where’s Kiyoka?’ asked Orr.

Jad nodded back at the room she’d come out of. ‘Sleep.’

‘And Lazlo’s still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?’

Sylvie looked up. ‘What’s that?’

Orr blinked. ‘You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko.’ He pouted and squeezed his pectorals hard towards each other with the palms of both hands, then winced and stopped as the pressure touched his recent surgery. ‘Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.’

‘She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament,’ grinned Jadwiga. ‘No consumer interest. Now I—’

‘Any of you guys hear about the citadel?’ I asked casually.

Orr grunted. ‘Yeah, caught the newscast downstairs. Some psycho offed half the head Beards in Tekitomura by the sound of it. They say there are stacks missing. Guy just carved them out of the spines like he’d been doing it all his life, apparently.’

I saw Sylvie’s gaze track down and across to the pocket of my coat, then up to meet my eyes.

‘Pretty savage stuff,’ said Jad.

‘Yeah, but pretty pointless.’ Orr acquired the bottle from where it stood on the kitchen bar worksurface. ‘Those guys can’t re-sleeve anyway. It’s an article of faith for them.’

‘Fucking freaks.’ Jadwiga shrugged and lost interest. ‘Sylvie says you scored some ’dorphs downstairs.’

‘Yes, I did.’ The giant poured himself a glass of whisky with exaggerated care. ‘Thanks.’

‘Ahhh, Orr. Come on.’

Later, with the lights powered down and the atmosphere in the apartment mellowed almost to comatose proportions, Sylvie shoved Jadwiga’s slumped form out of the way on the lounger and leaned across to where I sat enjoying the lack of pain in my side. Orr had long ago slipped away to another room.

‘You did that?’ she asked quietly. ‘That stuff up at the citadel?’

I nodded.

‘Any particular reason?’

‘Yeah.’

A small silence.

‘So,’ she said finally. ‘It wasn’t quite the Micky Nozawa rescue it looked like, huh? You were already cranked up.’

I smiled, slightly stoned on the endorphin. ‘Call it serendipity.’

‘Alright. Micky Serendipity, that’s got a ring to it.’ She frowned owlishly into the depths of her glass, which, like the bottle, had been empty for a while. ‘Got to say, Micky, I like you. Can’t put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.’

‘I like you too.’

She wagged a finger, maybe the one she couldn’t quite put on my likeable qualities. ‘This is not. Sex. You know?’

‘I know. Have you seen the size of the hole in my ribs?’ I shook my head muzzily. ‘Of course you have. Spectrochem vision chip, right?’

She nodded complacently.

‘You really from a Renouncer family?’

A sour grimace. ‘Yeah. From being the operative word.’

‘They’re not proud of you?’ I gestured at her hair. ‘I’d have thought that qualifies as a pretty solid step on the road to Upload. Logically—’

‘Yeah, logically. This is a religion you’re talking about. Renouncers make no more fucking sense than the Beards when it comes down to it.’

‘So they’re not in favour?’

‘Opinion,’ she said with mock delicacy, ‘is divided on the matter. The aspirant hardliners don’t like it, they don’t like anything that roots construct systems firmly to physical being. The preparant wing of the faith just want to play nice with everyone. They say any virtuality interface is, as you say, a step on the road. They don’t expect Upload to come in their lifetime anyway, we’re all just handmaidens to the process.’

‘So which are your folks?’

Sylvie shifted her body on the lounger again, frowned and gave Jadwiga another shove to make space.

‘Used to be moderate preps, that’s the faith I grew up in. The last couple of decades though, with the Beards and the whole anti-stack thing, a lot of moderates are turning into hardline asps. My mother probably went that way, she was always the seriously pious one.’ She shrugged. ‘No idea really. Haven’t been home in years.’

‘Like that, huh?’

‘Yeah, like that. There’s no fucking point. All they’d do is try and marry me off to some eligible local.’ She snorted with laughter. ‘As if that’s going to happen while I’m carrying this stuff.’

I propped myself up a little, groggy with the drugs. ‘What stuff?’

‘This.’ She tugged at a handful of hair. ‘This fucking stuff.’

It crackled quietly around her grasp, tried to writhe away like thousands of tiny snakes. Under the crinkled black and silver mass of it, the thicker cords moved stealthily, like muscles under skin.

DeCom command datatech.

I’d seen a few like her before - a prototype variant back on Latimer, where the core of the new Martian machine interface industry was boiling into R&D overdrive. A couple more used as minesweepers in the Hun Home system. It never takes long for the military to bastardise cutting-edge technology for their own use. Makes sense. As often as not, they’re the ones paying for the R&D anyway.

‘That’s not unattractive,’ I said carefully.

‘Oh, sure.’ She raked through the tresses and separated out the central cord until it hung clear of the rest, an ebony snake gripped in her fist. ‘That’s attractive, right? Because, after all, any red-blooded male’s just going to love a twice-prick-length member flopping around in bed at head height, right? Fucking competition anxiety and creeping homophobia, all in one.’

I gestured. ‘Well, women—’

‘Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m straight.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah.’ She let the cord fall and shook her head so the rest of the silvered mane rearranged itself as it had been. ‘Oh.’

A century ago they were harder to spot. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal. Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different to the next human sleeve - a bit sick around the gills maybe when they’d been in the field for too long, but that’s the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say.

The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that. For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians’ interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot. They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than-light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporisation of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels’ motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.

Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan’s World’s very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you’d call smart. Now here were the archaeologue systems specialists suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half million years old.

Some form of upgrade was in order. Definitely.

Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whisky glass.

‘Why’d you sign up?’ I asked her, to fill the quiet.

She shrugged. ‘Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.’

‘And it isn’t?’

A wry grin. ‘No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.’

‘The Initiative can’t last forever.’

‘No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant house-cleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.’

‘Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.’

‘Well, spot the fucking offworlder.’ She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. ‘Might not be big by your standards - I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Round here it’s a little different.’

I smiled. ‘I’m from here, Sylvie.’

‘Oh, yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.’

In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.

You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theatre of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

Well, wouldn’t you?

‘I’m going to bed,’ slurred Sylvie. ‘Busy day tomorrow.’

I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale grey.

‘Sylvie, it is tomorrow.’

‘Yeah.’ She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated. ‘ ’loader doesn’t lift ’til lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.’

‘Thanks.’

She gave me a faded smile. ‘Hey, Micky. Least I can do. G’night.’

‘ ’night.’

I watched her wander to her room, checked my time chip and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.

That was the last conscious thought I had.

Fucking synth sleeves.

CHAPTER FOUR

The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering. Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.

Shit.

Bang bang.

I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.

Bang, bang, bang.

‘Fuck is that?’ yelled someone from an inner room.

Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.

‘Door,’ I said, feeling foolish.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she grumbled. ‘I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.’

The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.

‘Will someone fucking answer that!’ It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.

‘Got it,’ Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. ‘Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.’

She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.

‘You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?’ she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. ‘We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!!!’

There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad. He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.

Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.

‘Kovacs.’ Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. ‘What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?’

‘I’d have thought that was my line.’

Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.

‘You were told,’ snapped Yukio, ‘to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?’

‘These your high-powered friends, Micky?’ It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.

I nodded. ‘You might say that.’

Yukio’s eyes flickered to the woman’s voice and he frowned. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him, maybe it was just the five to three disadvantage he’d just walked into.

‘You know who I am,’ he began. ‘So let’s not complicate matters any—’

‘I don’t know who the fuck you are,’ said Sylvie evenly. ‘But I know you’re in our place without an invitation. So I think you’d better just leave.’

The yakuza’s face flared disbelief.

‘Yeah, get the fuck out of here.’ Jadwiga threw up both hands in something midway between a combat guard and a gesture of obscene dismissal.

‘Jad—’ I started, but by then it had all already tipped too far.

Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me. Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it.

She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odour of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped.

I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns. I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad.

‘Right.’ Yukio looked around the rest of the room, wagging the blaster mainly in Sylvie’s direction. ‘That’s enough. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but you—’

Sylvie spat out a single word.

‘Orr.’

Thunder detonated in the confined space again. This time, it was blinding. I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still half-way up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down. His mouth gaped wide. His sun lenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare.

The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.

The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons.

The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up.

Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.

The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels.

‘Well. That seemed to work.’

Orr stepped past me, peering down at what was apparently his handiwork. He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back. They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her.

‘Narrow beam,’ he diagnosed. ‘Took out the heart and most of the right lung. Not much we can do for her here.’

‘Someone close the door,’ suggested Sylvie.

As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech. Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up.

‘Report this?’ Kiyoka, a slight woman in what had to be a custom-grown Maori sleeve, wanted to know. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip.

‘To?’ Orr flipped her a rapid thumb and little finger gesture. His other hand traced tattooing across his face.

‘Oh. And him?’

Sylvie did something with her face, gestured low. I missed it, guessed and grabbed.

‘They were here for me.’

‘Yeah, no shit.’ Orr was looking at me with something that grazed open hostility. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn’t hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast. ‘Some nice friends you’ve got.’

‘I don’t think they would have got violent if Jad hadn’t jumped the goon. It was a misunderstanding.’

‘Misunder—fuck.’ Orr’s eyes widened. ‘Jad is dead, you asshole.’

‘She’s not really dead,’ I said doggedly. ‘You can excise the stack and—’

‘Excise?’ The word came out lethally soft. He trod closer, looming. ‘You want me to cut up my friend?’

Playing back the position of the gunmetal discharge tubes from memory, I guessed most of his right side was prosthetic, charging the five vents from a powerpack buried somewhere in the lower half of his ribcage. Given recent advances in nanotech, you could get large blotches of energy to go pretty much anywhere you wanted over a limited distance. The nanocon shepherd fragments just rode the blast like surfers, sucking power and tugging the containment field wherever the launch data had them headed.

I made a mental note, if I had to hit him, to go left.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t see another solution right now.’

‘You—’

‘Orr.’ Sylvie made a sideways chopping gesture. ‘Tats, this place, time.’ She shook her head. Another sign, thumb and forefinger forced apart by the fingers of the other hand. From the look on her face I got the sense she was emitting data through the team net as well. ‘Cache, the same. Three days. Puppetry. Torch and wipe, now.’

Kiyoka nodded. ‘Sense, Orr. Las? Oh.’

‘Yeah, we can do that.’ Orr wasn’t plugged all the way into this. He was still angry, speaking slowly. ‘Yeah, I mean. Okay.’

‘ ’ware?’ Kiyoka again, some complex counting off from one hand, an inclination of her head. ‘Jet?’

‘No, there’s time.’ Sylvie made a flat-palmed motion. ‘Orr and Micky. Easy. You run blank. This, this, maybe this. Down.’

‘Got it.’ Kiyoka was checking out a retinal screen as she spoke, eyes up and left to skim the data Sylvie had shot her. ‘Las?’

‘Not yet. I’ll flag you. Go.’

The Maori-sleeved woman disappeared back into her room, emerged a second later pulling on a bulky grey jacket and let herself out of the main door. She allowed herself a single backward look at Jadwiga’s corpse, then she was gone.

‘Orr. Cutter.’ A thumb at me. ‘Guevara.’

The giant gave me a final smouldering look and went to a case in the corner of the room, from which he took a heavy-bladed vibroknife. He came back and stood in front of me with the weapon, deliberately enough for me to tauten up. Only the obvious - that Orr didn’t need a knife to grease me - kept me from jumping him. My physical reaction must have been pretty obvious, because it got a derisive grunt out of the giant. Then he spun the knife in his hand and presented it to me grip first.

I took it. ‘You want me to do it?’

Sylvie moved across to Jadwiga’s corpse and stood looking down at the damage.

‘I want you to dig out the stacks on your two friends there, yes. I think you’ve had the practice for it. Jad you can leave.’

I blinked.

‘You’re leaving her?’

Orr snorted again. The woman looked at him and made a spiralling gesture. He compressed a sigh and went to his room.

‘Let me worry about Jad.’ Her face was clouded with distance, engaged at levels I couldn’t sense. ‘Just get cutting. And while you’re at it, you want to tell me who exactly we’ve killed here?’

‘Sure.’ I went to Yukio’s corpse and manhandled it onto what was left of its front. ‘This is Yukio Hirayasu - local yak, but he’s someone important’s son apparently.’

The knife burred into life in my hand, vibrations backing up unpleasantly as far as the wound in my side. I shook off a teeth-on-edge shiver, placed one cupped palm on the back of Yukio’s skull to steady it and started cutting into the spine. The mingled stink of scorched flesh and shit didn’t help.

‘And the other one?’ she asked.

‘Disposable thug. Never seen him before.’

‘Is he worth taking with us?’

I shrugged. ‘Better than leaving him here, I guess. You can toss him over the side halfway to New Hok. This one I’d keep for ransom, if I were you.’

She nodded. ‘What I thought.’

The knife bit down through the last millimetres of spinal column and sliced rapidly into the neck below. I switched off, changed grip and started a new cut, a couple of vertebrae lower down.

‘These are heavyweight yakuza, Sylvie.’ My guts were chilling over as I recalled my phone conversation with Tanaseda. The sempai had cut a deal with me purely on the strength of Yukio’s value in one piece. And he’d been pretty explicit about what would happen if things didn’t stay that way. ‘Millsport-connected, probably with First Family links. They’re going to come after you with everything they’ve got.’

Her eyes were unreadable. ‘They’re going to come after you too.’

‘Let me worry about that.’

‘That’s very generous of you. However,’ she paused as Orr came back out of his room fully dressed and headed out the door with a curt nod, ‘I think we have this handled. Ki is off wiping our electronic traces now. Orr can torchblast every room in this place in about half an hour. That leaves them with nothing but—’

‘Sylvie, this is the yakuza we’re talking about.’

‘Nothing but eye witnesses, peripheral video data, and besides which we’ll be on our way to Drava in about two hours’ time. And no one’s going to follow us there.’ There was a sudden, stiff pride in her voice. ‘Not the yakuza, not the First Families, not even the fucking Envoys. No one wants to fuck with the mimints.’

Like most bravado, it was misplaced. For one thing, I’d had it from an old friend six months back that Envoy Command had tendered for the New Hokkaido contract - they just hadn’t been cheap enough to suit the Mecsek government’s freshly rediscovered faith in unfettered market forces. A sneer across Todor Murakami’s lean face as we shared a pipe on the ferry from Akan to New Kanagawa. Fragrant smoke on the winter air of the Reach, and the soft grind of the maelstrom as backdrop. Murakami was letting his cropped Corps haircut grow out, and it stirred a little in the breeze off the water. He wasn’t supposed to be here, talking to me, but it’s hard to tell Envoys what to do. They know what they’re worth.

Hey, fuck Leo Mecsek. We told him what it’d cost. He can’t afford it, whose problem is that supposed to be? We’re supposed to cut corners and endanger Envoy lives, so he can hand the First Families back some more of the tax they pay? Fuck that. We’re not fucking locals.

You’re a local, Tod, I felt driven to point out. Millsport born and bred.

You know what I mean.

I knew what he meant. Local government don’t get to punch keys on the Envoy Corps. The Envoys go where the Protectorate needs them, and most local governments pray to whatever gods they give house room that they’ll never be found wanting enough for that contingency to be invoked. The aftermath of Envoy intervention can be very unpleasant for all concerned.

This whole tendering angle’s fucked anyway. Todor plumed fresh smoke out over the rail. No one can afford us, no one trusts us. Can’t see the point, can you?

I thought it was about offsetting non-operational costs while you guys were sitting on your arses undeployed.

Oh, yeah. Which is when?

Really? I heard it was all pretty quiet right now. Since Hun Home, I mean. Going to tell me some covert insurgency tales?

Hey, sam. He passed me the pipe. You’re not on the team any more. Remember?

I remembered.

Innenin!

It bursts on the edges of memory like a downed marauder bomb going up distant, but not far enough off to be safe. Red laser fire and the screams of men dying as the Rawling virus eats their minds alive.

I shivered a little and drew on the pipe. With Envoy-tuned sensitivity, Todor spotted it and shifted subject.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime.

Yeah. I looked at him bleakly. Where’d you hear that then?

A shrug. Around. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?

The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu’s neck.

Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now. Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior too, presumably. Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuck-up he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan’s World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right. Organised crime is like that. Radul Segesvar’s Newpest haiduci mafia or the yak, north or south, they’re all the fucking same. Fucking blood tie junkies.

War with the yakuza.

Why you going up north again? I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago.

‘Micky?’ For a moment, the name meant nothing to me. ‘Hey, Mick, you okay?’

I looked up. She was watching me with narrow concern. I forced a nod.

‘Yeah. I’m fine.’

‘Well, do you think you could pick it up a bit? Orr’ll be back and he’ll want to get started.’

‘Sure.’ I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. ‘I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Party trick, huh?’

She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamour of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.

‘Why don’t you come with us, Micky?’

I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. ‘What?’

‘Come with us.’

‘To Drava?’

‘Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?’

I freed the blade and finished the incision. ‘I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.’

‘What if I could set that up for you?’

‘Sylvie.’ I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward. ‘Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?’

She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realisation that there was something here.

‘Last time we were out,’ she said slowly, ‘we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete re-sleeving unit and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.’

‘Well, that’d make sense. That’s where you’re taking Jadwiga?’

She nodded.

I looked pensively at the chunk of spine in my hand, the ragged-lipped wound it had come out of. I thought about what the yakuza would do to me if they caught up with me in this sleeve.

‘How long are you going over for?’

She shrugged. ‘Long as it takes. We’re provisioned for three months, but last time we filled our quota in half that time. You could come back sooner if you like. The ’loaders run out of Drava all the time.’

‘And you’re sure this stuff in the bunker is still functional.’

She grinned and shook her head.

‘What?’

‘It’s New Hok, Micky. Over there, everything’s still functional. That’s the whole problem with the fucking place.’

CHAPTER FIVE

The hoverloader Guns for Guevara was exactly what she sounded like - a low-profile, heavily armoured shark of a vessel, spiking weaponry along her back like dorsal spines. In marked contrast to the commercial ’loaders that plied the routes between Millsport and the Saffron Archipelago, she had no external decks or towers. The bridge was a snubbed blister on the forward facings of the dull grey superstructure and her flanks swept back and out in smooth, featureless curves. The two loading hatches, open on either side of her nose, looked built to disgorge flights of missiles.

‘You sure this is going to work?’ I asked Sylvie as we reached the downward slope of the docking ramp.

‘Relax,’ growled Orr, behind me. ‘This isn’t the Saffron Line.’

He was right. For an operation that the government claimed was being run under stringent security guidelines, deCom embarkation struck me as sloppy in the extreme. At the side of each hatch, a steward in a soiled blue uniform was taking hardcopy documentation and running the authorisation flashes under a reader that wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a Settlement-Years experia flic. The ragged queues of embarking personnel snaked back and forth across the ramp, ankle deep in carry-on baggage. Bottles and pipes passed back and forth in the cold, bright air. There was highly-strung hilarity and mock sparring up and down the lines, repeated jokes over the antique reader. The stewards smiled back repeatedly, wearily.

‘And where the fuck is Las?’ Kiyoka wanted to know.

Sylvie shrugged. ‘He’ll be here. He always is.’

We joined the back of the nearest queue. The little knot of deComs ahead of us glanced round briefly, spent a couple of measured looks on Sylvie’s hair, then went back to their bickering. She wasn’t unusual among this crowd. A tall, black sleeve a couple of groups down had a dreadlocked mane of similar proportions, and there were others less imposing here and there.

Jadwiga stood quiet beside me.

‘This thing with Las is pathological,’ Kiyoka told me, looking anywhere but at Jad. ‘He’s always fucking late.’

‘It’s wired into him,’ said Sylvie absently. ‘You don’t get to be a career wincefish without a tendency towards brinkmanship.’

‘Hey, I’m a wincefish, and I turn up on time.’

‘You’re not a lead wincefish,’ said Orr.

‘Oh, right. Listen we’re all—’ She glanced at Jadwiga and bit her lip. ‘Lead’s just a player position. Las is wired no different to me or—’

Looking at Jad, you’d never have guessed she was dead. We’d cleaned her up in the apartment - beam weapons cauterise, there’s not often much in the way of blood - rigged her in a tight marine surplus combat vest and jacket that covered the wounds, fitted heavy black EV lenses over her shocked open eyes. Then Sylvie got in through the team net and fired up her motor systems. I’d guess it took a little concentration, but nothing to the focus she’d have to have online when she deployed the team against the mimints on New Hok. She got Jad walking at her left shoulder and we formed a phalanx around them. Simple commands to facial muscles clamped the dead deCom’s mouth shut and the grey pallor, well, with the EV lenses on and a long grey sealwrap bag slung over one shoulder, Jad looked no worse than she should have done on a shiver comedown with added endorphin crash. I don’t suppose the rest of us looked too hot either.

‘Authorisation, please.’

Sylvie handed over the sheaf of hardcopy, and the steward set about passing it through the reader one sheet at a time. She must have sent a tiny jolt through the net to the muscles in Jadwiga’s neck at the same time, because the dead woman tilted her head, a little stiffly, as if scanning the ’loader’s armoured flank. Nice touch, very natural.

‘Sylvie Oshima. Crew of five,’ said the steward, looking up to count. ‘Hardware already stowed.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Cabin allocation.’ He squinted at the reader’s screen. ‘Sorted. P19 to 22, lower deck.’

There was a commotion back up near the top of the ramp. We all looked back, apart from Jadwiga. I spotted ochre robes and beards, angry gesticulating and voices raised.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Sylvie casually.

‘Oh - Beards.’ The steward shuffled the scanned documentation back together. ‘They’ve been prowling up and down the waterfront all morning. Apparently they had a run-in last night with a couple of deComs in some place way east of here. You know how they are about that stuff.’

‘Yeah. Fucking throwbacks.’ Sylvie took the paperwork and stowed it in her jacket. ‘They got descriptions, or will any two deComs do?’

The steward smirked. ‘No vid, they say. Place was using up all its capacity on holoporn. But they got a witness description. A woman. And a man. Oh, yeah, and the woman had hair.’

‘Christ, that could be me,’ laughed Sylvie.

Orr gave her a strange look. Behind us, the clamour intensified. The steward shrugged.

‘Yeah, could be any of a couple of dozen command heads I passed through here this morning. Hey, what I want to know is, what are a bunch of priests doing in a place runs holoporn anyway?’

‘Jerking off ?’ suggested Orr.

‘Religion,’ said Sylvie, with a sudden click in her throat as if she was going to vomit. At my side, Jadwiga swayed unsteadily, and twisted her head more abruptly than people generally do. ‘Has it occurred to anybody that—’

She grunted, gut deep. I shot a glance at Orr and Kiyoka, saw their faces go tight. The steward looked on, curious, not yet concerned.

‘—that every human sacrament is a cheap evasion, that—’

Another choked sound. As if the words were being wrenched up out of somewhere buried in hard-packed silt. Jadwiga’s swaying worsened. Now the steward’s face began to change as he picked up the scent of distress. Even the deComs in the queue behind us were shifting their attention from the brawl at the top of the ramp, narrowing in on the pale woman and the speech that came sputtering up out of her.

‘—that the whole of human history might just be some fucking excuse for the inability to provide a decent female orgasm.’

I trod on her foot, hard.

‘Quite.’

The steward laughed nervously. Quellist sentiments, albeit early poetic ones, were still marked handle with care in the Harlan’s World cultural canon. Too much danger that any enthusiasm for them might spill over into her later political theory and, of course, practice. You can name your hoverloaders after revolutionary heroes if you want, but they need to be far enough back in history that no one can remember what they were fighting for.

‘I—’ said Sylvie, puzzled. Orr moved to support her.

‘Let’s have this argument later, Sylvie. We’d better get stowed first. Look.’ He nudged her. ‘Jad’s dead on her feet, and I don’t feel much better. Can we—’

She caught it. Straightened and nodded.

‘Yeah, later,’ she said. Jadwiga’s corpse stopped swaying, even lifted the back of one hand realistically to its brow.

‘Comedown blues,’ I said, winking at the steward. His nervousness ironed out and he grinned.

‘Been there, man.’

Jeering from the top of the ramp. I heard the shouted word abomination, then the sound of electrical discharge. Probably power knuckles.

‘Think they’ve reeled in more than they can stow up there,’ said the steward, peering past us. ‘Should have come heavy, they’re going to mouth off like that to a dock full of deCom. Okay, that’s us. You can go through.’

We made it through the hatch without further stumbling from anybody, and went down metal-echoing corridors in search of the cabins. At my back, Jad’s corpse kept mechanical pace. The rest of the team acted like nothing had happened

‘So what the fuck was that?’

I finally got round to asking the question about half an hour later. Sylvie’s crew stood around in her cabin, looking uncomfortable. Orr had to stoop below the reinforcing joists of the ceiling. Kiyoka stared out of the tiny one-way porthole, finding something of great interest in the water outside. Jadwiga lay face down on a bunk. Still no sign of Lazlo.

‘It was a glitch,’ said Sylvie.

‘A glitch.’ I nodded. ‘Does this kind of glitch happen often?’

‘No. Not often.’

‘But it has happened before.’

Orr ducked under a joist to loom over me. ‘Why don’t you give it a rest, Micky. No one forced you to come along. You don’t like the terms, you can just fuck off, can’t you.’

‘I’m just curious to know what we do if Sylvie drops out of the loop and starts spouting Quellisms in the middle of a mimint encounter, that’s all.’

‘Let us worry about the mimints,’ said Kiyoka tonelessly.

‘Yeah, Micky.’ Orr sneered. ‘It’s what we do for a living. You just sit back and enjoy the ride.’

‘All I want to—’

‘You shut the fuck up if you—’

‘Look.’ She said it very quietly, but Orr and Kiyoka both hooked round towards the sound of her voice. ‘Why don’t you two leave me and Micky alone to talk about this?’

‘Ah, Sylvie, he’s just—’

‘He’s got a right to know, Orr. Now you want to give us some space?’

She watched them out, waited for the cabin door to fold, then went past me back to her seat.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Look.’ It took me a moment to realise she meant it literally this time. She reached into the mass of her hair and lifted the centre cord. ‘You know how this works. There’s more processing capacity in this than in most city databases. Has to be.’

She let the cord go and shook her hair across it. A small smile flickered around her mouth. ‘Out there, we can get a viral strike flung at us hard enough to scrape out a human mind like fruit pulp. Or just 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 afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces.’ She shivered a little. ‘Ghosts of things. There’s stuff bedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.’

‘Sounds like it’s time for some fresh hardware.’

‘Yeah,’ she grinned sourly. ‘I just don’t have that much loose change right now. Know what I mean?’

I did know. ‘Recent tech. It’s a fucker, huh?’

‘Yeah. Recent tech, fucking indecent pricing. They take the Guild subsidies, the Protectorate defence funding and then pass on the whole fucking cost of the Sanction labs’ R&D to people like me.’

I shrugged. ‘Price of progress.’

‘Yeah, saw the ad. Assholes. Look, what happened back there is just gunge in the works, nothing to worry about. Maybe something to do with trying to hotwire Jad. That’s something I don’t do usually, it’s unused capacity. And that’s usually where the data management systems dump any trace junk. Running Jad’s CNS must have flushed it out.’

‘Do you remember what you were saying?’

‘Not really.’ She rubbed at the side of her face, pressed fingertips against one closed eye. ‘Something about religion? About the Beards?’

‘Well, yeah. You lifted off from there, but then you started paraphrasing early Quellcrist Falconer. Not a Quellist, are you?’

‘Fuck, no.’

‘Didn’t think so.’

She thought about it for a while. Under our feet, the Guns for Guevara’s engines began to thrum gently. Departure for Drava, imminent.

‘Could be something I caught off a dissemination drone. There’s still a lot of them out in the east - not worth the bounty to decommission, so they get left alone unless they’re fucking up local comlinks.’

‘Would any of them be Quellist?’

‘Oh, yeah. At least four or five of the factions who fucked up New Hok were Quellist-inspired. Shit, from what I hear she was fighting up there herself back when the Unsettlement kicked off.’

‘That’s what they say.’

The door chimed. Sylvie nodded at me, and I went to open it. Out in the faintly shuddering corridor stood a short, wiry figure with long black hair bound back in a ponytail. He was sweating heavily.

‘Lazlo,’ I guessed.

‘Yeah. Who the fuck are you?’

‘Long story. You want to talk to Sylvie?’

‘That’d be nice.’ The irony was ladled on. I stood aside and let him in. Sylvie gave him a weary top-to-toe look.

‘Got in the life-raft launcher,’ Lazlo announced. ‘Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it.’

Sylvie sighed. ‘It’s not big, Las, it’s not clever and some day you’ll miss the fucking boat. What are we going to do for a lead then?’

‘Well, looks to me like you’re already lining up replacements.’ A cocked glance in my direction. ‘Who is this, exactly?’

‘Micky, Lazlo.’ An idle gesture back and forth between us. ‘Lazlo, meet Micky Serendipity. Temporary travelling companion.’

‘Did you get him aboard with my flashes?’

Sylvie shrugged. ‘You never use them.’

Lazlo spotted Jadwiga’s form on the bed and a grin lit up his bony face. He strode across the cabin and slapped her on one buttock. When she didn’t respond, he frowned. I shut the door.

‘Jesus, what did she take last night?’

‘She’s dead, Las.’

‘Dead?’

‘For the moment, yes.’ Sylvie looked across at me. ‘You’ve missed rather a lot of the dance since yesterday.’

Lazlo’s eyes followed Sylvie’s gaze across the cabin. ‘And it all has something to do with tall, dark and synthetic there, right?’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Like I said, it’s a long story.’

Lazlo went across to the basin niche and ran water into his cupped hands. He lowered his face into the water and snorted. Then he wiped the surplus water back through his hair, straightened up and eyed me in the mirror. He turned pointedly towards Sylvie.

‘Alright, skipper. I’m listening.’

CHAPTER SIX

It took a day and a night to get to Drava.

From about midway across the Andrassy Sea, Guns for Guevara ran throttled back, sensor net spread as wide as it would go, weapons systems at standby. The official line from the Mecsek government was that the mimints had all been designed for a land war and so had no way of getting off New Hok. On the ground, deCom crews reported seeing machines there were no descriptors for in the Military Machine Intelligence archive, which suggested at least some of the weaponry still prowling the continent had found ways to evolve beyond its original programme parameters. The whispered word was that experimental nanotech had run wild. The official line said nanotech systems were too crude and too poorly understood at the time of the Unsettlement to have been deployed as weapons. The whispered word was dismissed as anti-government scaremongering, the official line was derided in every place you could find intelligent conversation. Without satellite cover or aerial support, there was no way to prove the thing either way. Myth and misinformation reigned.

Welcome to Harlan’s World.

‘Hard to believe,’ muttered Lazlo as we cruised the last few kilometres up the estuary and through Drava’s deserted dockyards. ‘Four centuries on this fucking planet and we still can’t go up in the air.’

Somehow he’d blagged entry to one of the open-air observation galleries the hoverloader had sprouted from its armoured spine once we were inside the Drava base scanning umbrella. Somehow else, he’d chivvied us into going up there with him, and now we all stood shivering in the damp cold of early morning as the silent quays of Drava slid by on either side. Overhead, the sky was an unpromising grey in all directions.

Orr turned up the collar on his jacket. ‘Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.’

‘Yeah, count me in,’ said Kiyoka. ‘Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.’

It was common talk among the deCom crews, an analogue of the fifty-metre bottleback stories charter boat skippers told in the Millsport bars. No matter how big the bounty you hauled back from New Hok, it was all human scale. No matter how hostile the mimints, ultimately they were things we’d built ourselves and they were barely three centuries old. You couldn’t compare that with the lure of hardware the Martians had apparently left in orbit around Harlan’s World approximately five hundred thousand years ago. Hardware that, for reasons best known to itself, would carve pretty much anything airborne out of the sky with a lance of angelfire.

Lazlo blew on his hands. ‘They could have brought them down before now if they’d wanted to.’

‘Oh, man, here we go again.’ Kiyoka rolled her eyes.

‘There’s a lot of crabshit talked about the orbitals,’ said Lazlo doggedly. ‘Like how they’ll hit anything bigger or faster than a helicopter, but somehow four hundred years ago we managed to land the colony barges okay. Like—’

Orr snorted. I saw Sylvie close her eyes.

‘—how the government has these big hyperjets they keep under the pole, and nothing ever touches them when they fly. Like all the times the orbitals take out something surface-based, only they don’t like to talk about that. Happens all the time, man. Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—’

‘I did hear that one,’ said Sylvie irritably. ‘Caught it while we were waiting for you to turn up yesterday morning. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.’

‘Skipper, they said that, sure. They would say that.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Las, old son.’ Orr dropped a heavy arm around the lead wincefish’s shoulders. ‘If it’d been angelfire, there wouldn’t have been anything left to find. You know that. And you know damn’ well there’s a fucking hole in the coverage down around the equator big enough to drive a whole fleet of colony barges through if you do the math right. Now why don’t you give the conspiracy shit a rest and check out the scenery you dragged us all up here to see.’

It was an impressive enough sight. Drava, in its day, was both trade gateway and naval port for the whole New Hokkaido hinterland. The waterfront saw shipping from every major city on the planet and the sprawl of architecture behind the docks reached back a dozen kilometres into the foothills to provide homes for almost five million people. At the height of its commercial powers, Drava rivalled Millsport for wealth and sophistication, and the navy garrison was one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere.

Now we cruised past rows of smashed-in Settlement-Years warehouses, containers and cranes tumbled across the docks like children’s toys and merchant vessels sunk at anchor end to end. There were lurid chemical stains on the water around us, and the only living things in view were a miserable-looking clutch of ripwings flapping about on the canted, corrugated roof of a warehouse. One of them flung back its neck and uttered a clattering challenge as we went past, but you could tell its heart wasn’t in it.

‘Want to watch out for those,’ said Kiyoka grimly. ‘They don’t look like much but they’re smart. Most places on this coast they’ve already polished off the cormorants and the gulls, and they’ve been known to attack humans too.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, it’s their planet.’

The deCom beachhead fortifications came into view. Hundreds of metres of razor-edged livewire crawling restlessly about inside its patrol parameters, jagged rows of crouched spider blocks on the ground and robot sentries perched brooding on the surrounding rooftops. In the water, a couple of automated minisubs poked conning towers above the surface, bracketing the curve of the estuary. Surveillance kites flew at intervals, tethered to crane stacks and a communications mast in the heart of the beachhead.

Guns for Guevara cut power and drifted in broadside between the two subs. On the dockside, a few figures paused in what they were doing and voices floated across the closing gap to the new arrivals. Most of the work was done by machines, silently. Beachhead security interrogated the hoverloader’s navigational intelligence and gave clearance. The autograpple system talked to the sockets on the dock, agreed trajectory and fired home. Cables cranked tight and pulled the vessel in. An articulated boarding corridor flexed itself awake and nuzzled up to the dockside loading hatch. Buoyancy antigrav kicked over to mooring levels with a shiver. Doors unlatched.

‘Time to go,’ said Lazlo, and disappeared below like a rat down a hole. Orr made an obscene gesture in his wake.

‘What you bring us up here in the first place for, you’re in such a fucking hurry to get off?’

An indistinct answer floated back up. Feet clattered on the companionway.

‘Ah, let him go,’ said Kiyoka. ‘No one rolls ’til we talk to Kurumaya anyway. There’ll be a queue around the ’fab.’

Orr looked at Sylvie. ‘What are we going to do about Jad?’

‘Leave her here.’ The command head was gazing out at the ugly grey bubblefab settlement with a curiously rapt expression on her face. Hard to believe it was the view - maybe she was listening to the machine systems talk, senses open and lost in the wash of transmission traffic. She snapped out of it abruptly and turned to face her crew. ‘We’ve got the cabins ’til noon. No point in moving her ’til we know what we’re doing.’

‘And the hardware?’

Sylvie shrugged. ‘Same applies. I’m not carting that lot around Drava all day while we wait for Kurumaya to give us a slot.’

‘Think he’ll ramp us again?’

‘After last time? Somehow I doubt it.’

Below deck, the narrow corridors were plugged up with jostling deComs, carry-on gear slung across shoulders or portered on heads. Cabin doors stood folded open, occupants within rationalising baggage prior to launching themselves into the crush. Boisterous shouts ricocheted back and forth over heads and angled cases. Motion was sludgily forward and port, towards the debarkation hatch. We threaded ourselves into the crowd and crept along with it, Orr in the lead. I hung back, protecting my wounded ribs as much as I could. Occasional jolts got through. I rode it with gritted teeth.

What seemed like a long time later, we spilled out the end of the debarkation corridor and stood amidst the bubblefabs. The deCom swarm drifted ahead of us, through the ’fabs and towards the centre mast. Part way there, Lazlo sat waiting for us on a gutted plastic packing crate. He was grinning.

‘What kept you?’

Orr feinted at him with a growl. Sylvie sighed.

‘At least tell me you got a queue chip.’

Lazlo opened his hand with the solemnity of a conjuror and presented a little fragment of black crystal on his palm. The number fifty-seven resolved itself from a blurred point of light inside. A string of muttered curses smoked off Sylvie and her companions at the sight.

‘Yeah, it’ll be a while.’ Lazlo shrugged. ‘Leftovers from yesterday. They’re still assigning the backlog. I heard something serious went down inside the Cleared Zone last night. We may as well eat.’

He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap moulded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out towards us, pungent enough to trigger even the meagre taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.

‘Misos and rice all round?’ asked Lazlo.

Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.

‘Hey. On me, this.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.’

‘Well, there was a lot going on.’

‘Yeah. You want anything else?’

There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own and tossed it onto the counter.

‘So you got tagged.’

‘Yeah. Ribs.’

‘Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?’

‘No. Before that.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Busy man.’

‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’ I tore dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.

The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering. Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-Years jazz.

Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place - old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-Years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualised. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.

‘This is old,’ I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.

Lazlo grunted. ‘Welcome to New Hok.’

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 recognise—’

‘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 the 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 of 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 amidst 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 clean-up.’

General protest, louder than the propaganda DJ had elicited.

‘—cannot be serious.’

‘Clean-up pays shit, skipper.’

‘Fucking grubbing about door-to-door—’

‘Guys,’ she held up her hands. ‘I don’t care, alright. If we don’t jump the queue, we’re not getting out of here ’til 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 close-mouthed, 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, grey- and black-streaked hair braided back to reveal the central cord bound up in 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 clean-up.’

That got some surf, but subdued this time. Kurumaya frowned.

‘You’re asking for clean-up?’

‘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 round. ‘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 a half dozen violently clashing colours. 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 towards 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 favour in return for the chance to make some quick cash. Otherwise, I’ve got to wait to clear the queue some time 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 try-out. 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.

Colours 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 per cent 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 round 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 authorisation 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 grey alloy armouring six metres across and ten high. Antigrav lifters at either edge were railed onto the inner surfaces of two twenty-metre towers topped with robot sentry gear. If you stood close enough to the grey metal, you could hear the restless scratching of livewire on the other side.

Kurumaya’s clean-up 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 clean-up 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 got the dead deCom mounted on one of the bugs, but piloting the vehicle second-hand was beyond Sylvie’s control options, so Jad rode pillion behind me. It would have looked pretty strange if I’d got 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 swivelled and her sun-lensed 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 round 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 ’til 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 per cent 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 likeminded 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 hungover for manners. I’ll show you this one. Give you something to aspire to next season.’

Laughter. The little group of sprogs drifted in towards 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-metre 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.

Further 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 defences 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 storeys 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 towards the sea. The raw evercrete walls were scarred from bombardment and worn from centuries of neglect. Bluish grey patches of lichen marked the places where the antibac sheathing had failed.

Overhead, watery sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and filtering down into the silent streets ahead. A gusting wind blew in off the estuary, seeming to hurry us forward. I glanced back and saw the livewire and spider blocks reknit behind us like a healing wound.

‘Better get on with it, I suppose.’ Sylvie’s voice, at my shoulder. Orr had ridden the other bug up parallel and the command head was seated behind him, head weaving back and forth as if seeking a scent. ‘At least it’s not raining.’

She touched a control on the coms jacket she wore. Her voice leapt out in the quiet, reverberated off the deserted facades. The deComs turned at the sound, keyed up and expectant as a pack of hunting dogs.

‘Alright, friends. Listen up. Without wishing to take unseemly command here—’

She cleared her throat. Whispered.

‘But someone, if not I then—’

Another cough.

‘Someone has to fucking do something. This is not another exercise in, in.’ She shook her head slightly. Her voice gathered strength, echoed off the walls again. ‘This is not some fucking political masturbation fantasy we’re fighting for, these are facts. Those in power have formed their alliances, shown their allegiance or lack of it, made their choices. And our choices in turn have been taken from us. I don’t want, I don’t want—’

She choked off. Head lowered.

The deComs stood still, waiting. Jadwiga slumped against my back, then started to slide out of the pillion seat. I grabbed backwards with one arm and stopped her. Flinched as pain sparkled through the soft woollen grey of the painkillers.

‘Sylvie!’ I hissed it across the space between us. ‘Get a fucking grip, Sylvie. Pull out of there.’

She looked up at me through the tangled mess of her hair, and for a long moment it was as if I was a total stranger.

‘Get a grip,’ I repeated softly.

She shuddered. Sat up and cleared her throat again. Waved one arm airily.

‘Politics,’ she declaimed, and the waiting crowd of deComs laughed. She waited it out. ‘Not what we are here for, ladies and gentlemen. I’m aware that I’m not the only hairhead among us, but I think I probably rank the rest of you in terms of experience, so. For those of you who aren’t too sure how this works, here’s what I suggest. Radial search pattern, splitting off at every junction until each motorised crew has a street to itself. The rest of you can follow who you like but I’d advise no less than a half dozen in each search line. Motorised crews lead on each street, those of you unlucky enough to be on foot get to check the buildings. Long pause at each building search, motorised guys don’t get ahead of the pattern, indoor guys call in backup from the riders outside if you see anything that might be mimint activity. Anything at all.’

‘Yeah, what about the bounty?’ yelled someone.

A surging murmur of agreement.

‘What I take down is mine, ain’t here for sharing it out,’ agreed someone else loudly.

Sylvie nodded.

‘You will find.’ Her amplified voice trod down the dissent. ‘That successful deCom has three stages. First you take down your mimint. Then you register the claim for it. Then you have to live long enough to get back to the beachhead and pick up the money. The last two stages of that process are especially hard to do if you’re lying back there in the street with your guts spilled and your head gone. Which is more than likely what’ll happen if one of you tries to take down a karakuri nest without help. The word crew has connotations. Those of you who aspire to be in a crew at some stage, I suggest you meditate upon that.’

The noise fizzled out into muttering. Behind me, Jadwiga’s corpse straightened up and took the weight off my arm. Sylvie surveyed her audience.

‘Right. Now the radial pattern is going to fan us out pretty fast, so keep your mapping gear online at all times. Tag every street when you’re done, stay in contact with each other and be prepared to double back to cover the gaps as the pattern opens up. Spatial analysis. Remember, the mimints are fifty times as good as us at this. If you leave a gap they’ll spot it and use it.’

‘If they’re there at all,’ came another voice from the crowd.

‘If they’re there at all,’ agreed Sylvie. ‘Which they may or may not be. Welcome to New Hok. Now.’ She stood up on the grav bug’s running boards and looked around. ‘Does anyone have anything constructive to say?’

Quiet. Some shuffling.

Sylvie smiled. ‘Good. Then let’s get on with this sweep, shall we. Radial search, as agreed. Scan up.’

A ragged cheer went up and fists brandished hardware. Some moron fired a blaster bolt into the sky. Whoops followed, volcanic enthusiasm.

‘. . . kick some motherfucking mimint ass . . .’

‘Going to make a pile, man. A fucking pile.’

‘Drava baby, here we come!’

Kiyoka cruised up on my other flank and winked at me.

‘They’re going to need all of that,’ she said. ‘And then some. You’ll see.’

An hour in, I knew what she meant.

It was slow, frustrating work. Move fifty metres down a street at webjelly pace, skirting fallen debris and dead ground cars. Watch the scans. Stop. Wait for the foot sweepers to penetrate the buildings on either side and work their way up twenty-odd levels one creeping step at a time. Listen to their structure-skewed coms transmission. Watch the scans. Tag the building clear. Wait for the foot sweepers to come down. Watch the scans. Move on, another halting fifty-metre stretch. Watch the scans. Stop.

We found nothing.

The sun fought a losing battle against the cloud cover. After a while, it started to rain.

Watch the scans. Move on up the street. Stop.

‘Not all it’s cracked up to be in the ads, eh?’ Kiyoka sat beneath the magical splatter of rain off her bug’s invisible screens and nodded at the foot sweepers as they disappeared into the latest facade. They were already drenched and the tense, flicker-eyed excitement of an hour ago was fading fast. ‘Opportunity and adventure in the fallow land of New Hok. Bring an umbrella.’

Seated behind her, Lazlo grinned and yawned. ‘Knock it off, Ki. Everyone’s got to start somewhere.’

Kiyoka leaned back in the seat, looking over her shoulder. ‘Hey, Sylvie. How much longer are we going to—’

Sylvie made a sign, one of the terse coded gestures I’d seen in action in the aftermath of the firefight with Yukio. Envoy focus gave me the quiver of one eyelid from Kiyoka as she ate up data from the command head. Lazlo nodded contentedly to himself.

I tapped the comset they’d given me in lieu of a direct line into the command head’s skull.

‘Something going on I should know about, Sylvie?’

‘Nah.’ Orr’s voice came back, dismissive. ‘We’ll cut you in when you need to know something. Right, Sylvie?’

I looked back at her. ‘Right, Sylvie?’

She smiled a little wearily. ‘Now isn’t the time, Micky.’

Watch the scans. Move along the rain-damp, damaged streets. The screens on the bugs made shimmering oval umbrellas of rainsplash over our heads, the foot sweepers cursed and got wet.

We found nothing.

By midday, we were a couple of kilometres into the city and operational tension had given way to boredom. The nearest crews were a half dozen streets away on either side. Their vehicles showed up on the mapping equipment in lazily slewed parking formations and if you tuned to the general channel, you could hear the foot sweepers grumbling their way up and down buildings, all trace of the earlier make-a-killing enthusiasm gone from their voices.

‘Oh look,’ rumbled Orr suddenly.

The thoroughfare we were working dog-legged right and then opened immediately onto a circular plaza lined with pagoda-style terracing and blocked at the far end by a multi-levelled temple supported on broadly spaced pillars. Across the open space, rain lay in broad pools where the paving had taken damage. Aside from the massive tilted wreckage of a burnt-out scorpion gun, there was no cover.

‘Is that the one they killed last night?’ I asked.

Lazlo shook his head. ‘Nah, been there for years. Besides, the way Oishii told it, last night’s never built beyond the chassis before it got fried. That one out there was a walking, talking self-prop mimint motherfucker before it died.’

Orr shot him a frowning glance.

‘Better get the sprogs downstairs,’ said Kiyoka.

Sylvie nodded. Over the local channel, she hurried the sweepers out of the last buildings and got them assembled behind the grav bugs. They wiped rain out of their faces and stared resentfully out across the plaza. Sylvie stood up on the running boards at the rear of the bug and cued the coms jacket.

‘Alright, listen,’ she told them. ‘This looks pretty safe, but there’s no way to be sure, so we’re taking a new pattern. The bugs will cruise across to the far side and check the temple’s lower level. Say ten minutes. Then one bug backs up and maintains a sentry point while the other two work their way back round on either side of the plaza. When they get back to you safely, everybody comes across in a wedge and the foot sweepers go up to check the upper levels of the temple. Has everybody got that?’

Sullen wave of assent up and down the line. They couldn’t have cared less. Sylvie nodded to herself.

‘Good enough. So let’s do it. Scan up.’

She twisted about on the bug and seated herself once more behind Orr. As she leaned into him, I saw her lips move but the synth sleeve wasn’t up to hearing what she said. The murmur of the bug’s drives lifted fractionally and Orr drifted them out into the plaza. Kiyoka nudged the bug she and Lazlo were riding into a flanking position on the left and followed. I bent to my own controls and picked up the right flank.

After the relative press of the debris-choked streets, the plaza felt at once less oppressive and more exposed. The air seemed lighter, the rainsplash on the bug shield less intense. Over the open ground, the bugs actually picked up some speed. There was an illusory sensation of progress—

and risk

The Envoy conditioning, scratching for attention. Trouble, just over the perceptual horizon. Something getting ready to blow.

Hard to tell what gleanings of subconscious detail might have triggered it this time. Envoy intuitive functions are a temperamental set of faculties at the best of times, and the whole city had felt like a trap since we left the beachhead.

But you don’t dismiss that stuff.

You don’t dismiss it when it’s saved your life half a thousand times before, on worlds as far apart and different as Sharya and Adoracion. When it’s wired into the core of who you are, deeper than the memory of your childhood.

My eyes ran a constant peripheral scan along the pagoda terracing. My right hand rested lightly on the weapons console.

Coming up on the wrecked scorpion gun.

Almost halfway.

There!

Flare of adrenalin analogue, rough through the synth system. My hand skittered on the fire control—

No.

Just the nodding flower heads on a stand of plant life sprouting up through the shattered carapace of the gun. Rain splatter knocking each flower gently down against the spring of its stalk.

My breathing eased back into action. We passed the scorpion gun and the halfway mark. The sense of impending impact stayed.

‘You okay, Micky?’ Sylvie’s voice in my ear.

‘Yeah.’ I shook my head. ‘ ’s nothing.’

At my back, Jadwiga’s corpse clutched me a little closer.

We made the shadows of the temple without incident. The angled stonework bulked over our heads, leading the eye upward towards huge statues of daiko drummers. Steep-leaning load-bearing support structures like drunken pillars, merging seamlessly with the fused-glass floor. Light fell in from side vents and rainwater from the roof in incessant clattering streams further back in the gloom. Orr pushed his bug inward with what seemed to me a lack of due care.

‘This’ll do,’ Sylvie called, voice loud enough to echo in the space we’d entered. She stood, leaned on Orr’s shoulder and twisted herself lithely to the floor beside the bug. ‘Make it quick, guys.’

Lazlo vaulted from the back of Kiyoka’s bug and prowled about for a while, apparently scanning the supporting structure of the temple. Orr and Kiyoka started to dismount.

‘What are we—’ I started, and stopped at the muffled sense of a dead comlink in my ear. I braked the bug, tugged the comset off and stared at it. My gaze flickered to the deComs and what they were doing. ‘Hoy! Someone want to tell me what the fuck’s going on here?’

Kiyoka offered me a busy smile in passing. She was carrying a webbing belt strapped with enough demolition charges to—

‘Sit tight, Micky,’ she said easily. ‘Be done in a moment.’

‘Here,’ Lazlo was saying. ‘Here. And here. Orr?’

The giant waved a hand from the other side of the deserted space. ‘In hand. Maps just like you figured, Sylvie. Couple more, max.’

They were placing the charges.

I stared up at the propped and vaulted architecture.

‘Oh no. Oh no, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’ I moved to get off and Jadwiga’s dead grip wrapped around my chest. ‘Sylvie!’

She looked up briefly from where she was knelt before a black satchelled unit on the glass floor. Hooded displays showed piles of multicoloured data, shifting as her fingers moved on the deck.

‘Just a couple of minutes, Mick. ’s all we need.’

I jerked a thumb backwards at Jadwiga. ‘Get this fucking thing off me, before I break it, Sylvie.’

She sighed and got up. Jadwiga let go of me and sagged. I twisted in the bug saddle and caught her before she could topple to the floor. Sylvie reached me about the same time. She nodded to herself.

‘Okay. Want to be useful?’

‘I want to know what the fuck this is about.’

‘Later. Right now, you can take that knife I gave you back in Tekitomura and cut the stack out of Jad’s spine for me. Seems to be a core skill for you, and I don’t know that any of the rest of us want the duty.’

I looked down at the dead woman in my arms. She’d flopped face down and the sunlenses had slipped. One dead eye caught the faint light.

‘Now you want to do the excision?’

‘Yes, now.’ Her eyes swivelled up to check a retinal display. We were on a clock. ‘In the next three minutes, because that’s about all we have.’

‘All done this side,’ called Orr.

I climbed off the bug and lowered Jadwiga to the fused-glass. The knife came to my hand as if it belonged there. I cut through the corpse’s clothing at the nape and peeled the layers back to reveal the pale flesh beneath. Then switched on the blade.

Across the temple floor, the others looked up involuntarily at the sound. I stared back, and they looked away.

Under my hands, the top of Jad’s spine came out with a pair of deft slices and a brief levering motion. The smell that came with it wasn’t pleasant. I wiped the knife on her clothing and stowed it, examined the tissue-clogged vertebrae as I straightened up. Orr reached me with long strides and held out his hand.

‘I’ll take that.’

I shrugged. ‘My pleasure. Here.’

‘We’re all set.’ Back at the satchel unit, Sylvie folded something closed with a gesture that reeked of finality. She stood up. ‘Ki, you want to do the honours?’

Kiyoka came and stood beside me, looking down at Jad’s mutilated corpse. There was a smooth grey egg in her hand. For what seemed like a long time, we all stood there in silence.

‘Running short, Ki,’ Lazlo said quietly.

Very gently, Kiyoka knelt at Jadwiga’s head and placed the grenade in the space I’d cut in her nape. As she got up again, something moved in her face.

Orr touched her gently on the arm.

‘Be good as new,’ he told her.

I looked at Sylvie. ‘So you guys want to share your plans now?’

‘Sure.’ The command head nodded at the satchel. ‘Escape clause. Datamine there blows in a couple of minutes, blips everybody’s coms and scanners out. Couple of minutes more, the noisy stuff goes up. Bits of Jad everywhere, then the house comes down. And we’re gone. Out the back door. Shielded drives, we can ride out the EMP pulse and by the time the sprogs get their scanners back on line we’ll be peripheral, invisible. They’ll find enough of Jad to make it look like we tripped a karakuri nest or a smart bomb and got vaporised in the blast. Leaving us free agents once more. Just the way we like it.’

I shook my head. ‘That is the worst fucking plan I have ever heard. What if—’

‘Hey.’ Orr gave me an unfriendly stare. ‘You don’t like it, you can fucking stay here.’

‘Skipper,’ Lazlo again, an edge in his voice this time. ‘Maybe instead of talking about this, we could just do it, you know? In the next two minutes? What do you reckon?’

‘Yeah.’ Kiyoka glanced at Jadwiga’s sprawled corpse and then away. ‘Let’s get out of here. Now.’

Sylvie nodded. The Slipins mounted up and we cruised in formation towards the sound of falling water at the back of the temple.

No one looked back.

CHAPTER EIGHT

As far as anybody could tell, it worked perfectly.

We were a good five hundred metres the other side of the temple when it blew. There was a muffled series of detonations, and then a rumbling that built to a roar. I twisted in my seat - with Jadwiga now in Orr’s pocket instead of riding pillion, the view was unobstructed - and in the narrow frame of the street we had taken I saw the whole structure slump undramatically to the ground amidst a boiling cloud of dust. A minute later, an underpass took us below street level and I lost even that fractional view.

I rode level with the other two bugs

‘You had this all mapped out?’ I asked. ‘All the time, you knew this was what you were going to do?’

Sylvie nodded gravely in the dim light of the tunnel. Unlike the temple, here the effect was unintended. Decayed illuminum panelling overhead cast a last-gasp bluish glow over everything but it was less than you’d get on a triple-moon night with clear sky. Navigation lights sprang up on the bugs in response. The underpass angled right and we lost the wash of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel behind us. The air started to turn chilly.

‘Been through here half a hundred times before,’ drawled Orr. ‘That temple’s been a bolthole dream every time. Just we never had anyone to run away from before.’

‘Yeah, well thanks for sharing.’

A ripple of deCom mirth in the blue gloom.

‘Thing is,’ Lazlo said. ‘Couldn’t really let you in on the loop without real-time auditory communication, and that’s clumsy. The skip clued us and cued us in about fifteen seconds through the crew net. You we would have had to tell, you know, with words. And the amount of state-of-the-art coms gear floating around the beachhead, no way to know who’s listening in.’

‘We had no choice,’ said Kiyoka.

‘No choice,’ echoed Sylvie. ‘Bodies burnt, and screaming skies and they tell me, I tell myself—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Sorry, guys. Fucking slippage again. Really got to get this sorted when we’re back south.’

I nodded back the way we’d come. ‘So how long before those guys get their scan systems back up?’

The deComs looked at each other. Sylvie shrugged.

‘Ten, fifteen minutes, depends what failsafe software they had.’

‘Too bad if the karakuri show up in the meantime, huh?’

Kiyoka snorted. Lazlo raised an eyebrow.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ rumbled Orr. ‘It’s too bad. Life in New Hok, better get used to it.’

‘Anyway, look.’ Kiyoka, patiently reasonable. ‘There are no bloody karakuri in Drava. They wouldn’t—’

Metallic flailing, up ahead.

Another taut exchange of glances. The weapons consoles on all three bugs lit across, tugged to readiness, presumably by Sylvie’s command-head override, and the little convoy jolted to a halt. Orr straightened up in his seat.

Ahead of us, an abandoned vehicle hulked in the gloom. No sign of movement. The frantic clashing sounds bounced past it from somewhere beyond the next bend in the tunnel.

Lazlo grinned tightly in the low light. ‘What were you saying, Ki?’

‘Hey,’ she said weakly. ‘I’m open to contrary evidence.’

The flailing stopped. Repeated.

‘The fuck is that?’ murmured Orr.

Sylvie’s face was unreadable. ‘Whatever it is, the datamine should have got it. Las, you want to start earning your wincefish pay?’

‘Sure.’ Lazlo winked at me and swung off his seat behind Kiyoka. He laced his fingers and pushed them outward until the knuckles cracked ‘You powered up there, big man?’

Orr nodded, already dismounting. He cracked the bug’s running-board storage space and dragged out a half-metre wrecking bar. Lazlo grinned again.

‘Then, ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts and stand well back. Scan up.’

And he was gone, loping along the curved wall of the tunnel, hugging the cover it offered until he reached the wrecked vehicle, then flitting sideways, seeming in the dim light to have no more substance than the shadow he cast. Orr stalked after him, a brutal apeman figure with the wrecking bar held low in his left hand. I glanced back to the bug where Sylvie sat crouched forward, eyes hooded, face blanked in the curious mix of intent and absent that signalled net engagement.

It was poetry to watch.

Lazlo grabbed part of the wreckage with one hand and hauled himself, monkey casual, up onto the vehicle’s roof. He froze into immobility, head cocked slightly. Orr hung back at the curve. Sylvie muttered inaudibly to herself, and Lazlo moved. A single leap, straight back to the floor of the tunnel and he landed running. Diagonally, across the curve towards something I couldn’t see. Orr stepped across, arms spread for balance, upper body held rigid facing the way the wincefish had gone. Another split second, a half-dozen rapid, deliberate steps forward and then he too was out of line of sight.

Seconds decayed. We sat and waited in the blue gloom.

Seconds decayed.

And—

‘. . . so what the fuck is . . . ?’

Sylvie’s voice, puzzled. Sliding up in volume as she emerged from the link-up and gave her real-world senses dominance again. She blinked a couple of times and looked sideways at Kiyoka.

The slight woman shrugged. Only now, I realised she’d been part of it, tuned into the ballet I’d just watched at standby, her body slightly stiff in the saddle of the bug while her eyes rode with the rest of the crew on Lazlo’s shoulder.

‘Fucked if I know, Sylvie.’

‘Alright.’ The command head’s gaze turned on me. ‘Seems safe. Come on, let’s go have a look.’

We rode the bugs cautiously up around the bend in the tunnel and dismounted to stare at what Lazlo and Orr had found.

The kneeling figure in the tunnel was only humanoid in the vaguest terms. There was a head, mounted on the main chassis, but the only reason it bore resemblance to a man was that something had ripped the casing apart and left a more delicate structure beneath partially exposed. At the uppermost point, a wide bracing ring had survived, halo-like, to hover on a skeletal framework over the rest of the head.

It had limbs too, in approximately the positions you’d expect on a human being, but enough of them to suggest insect rather than mammalian life. On one side of the main body mass, two of the available four arms were inert, hanging limp and in one case scorched and shredded to scrap. On the other side, one limb had been torn entirely off, with massive damage to the surrounding body casing, and two more were clearly beyond useful function. They kept trying to flex but at every attempt, sparks ripped savagely across the exposed circuitry until the movement spasmed and froze. The flaring light threw spastic shadows on the walls.

It wasn’t clear if the thing’s four lower limbs were functional or not, but it didn’t try to get up as we approached. The three functioning arms merely redoubled their efforts to achieve something indefinable in the guts of the metal dragon laid out on the tunnel floor.

The machine had four powerful-looking side-mounted legs ending in clawed feet, a long, angular head full of multibarrelled ancillary weaponry, and a spiked tail that would gouge into the ground to give added stability. It even had wings - a webbed framework of upward-curving launch cradles designed to take the primary missile load.

It was dead.

Something had torn huge parallel gashes in the left flank and the legs below the damage had collapsed. The launch cradles were twisted out of alignment and the head was wrenched to one side.

‘Komodo launcher,’ said Lazlo, skirting the tableau warily. ‘And karakuri caretaker unit. You lose, Ki.’

Kiyoka shook her head. ‘Doesn’t make any fucking sense. What’s it doing down here? What’s it fucking doing, come to that?’

The karakuri cocked its head at her. Its functional limbs crept out of the gash in the dragon’s body and hovered over the damage in a gesture that looked weirdly protective.

‘Repairs?’ I suggested.

Orr barked a laugh. ‘Yeah. Karakuri are caretakers to a point. After that, they turn scavenger. Something this badly hit, they’d dismember it for a co-op cluster to make into something new. Not try and repair it.’

‘And that’s another thing.’ Kiyoka gestured around. ‘The mech puppets don’t get out that much on their own. Where’s the rest of them? Sylvie, you’re getting nothing, right?’

‘Nothing.’ The command head looked up and down the tunnel pensively. Blue light glinted off strands of silver in her hair. ‘This is all there is.’

Orr hefted his wrecking bar. ‘So we going to switch it off or what?’

‘Worth fuck-all bounty anyway,’ grumbled Kiyoka. ‘Even if we could claim it, which we can’t. Why not just leave it for the sprogs to find?’

‘I am not,’ said Lazlo, ‘walking the rest of this tunnel with that thing still on ops behind me. Turn it off, big man.’

Orr looked questioningly at Sylvie. She shrugged and nodded.

The wrecking bar swung. Inhumanly swift, into the eggshell remnants of the karakuri’s head. Metal grated and tore. The halo ripped loose, bounced on the tunnel floor and rolled away into the shadows. Orr pulled the bar clear and swung again. One of the machine’s arms came up, fending - the bar flattened it into the ruins of the head. Eerily silent, the karakuri struggled to rise on lower limbs that I now saw were irretrievably mangled. Orr grunted, lifted one booted foot and stomped down hard. The machine went over, thrashing at the damp tunnel air. The giant moved in, wielding the bar with the economical savagery of experience.

It took a while.

When he was done, when the sparks had bled dry amidst the wreckage at his feet, Orr straightened and wiped his brow. He was breathing hard. He glanced at Sylvie again.

‘That do?’

‘Yeah, it’s off.’ She went back to the bug they were sharing. ‘Come on, we’d better get cracking.’

As we all mounted up again, Orr caught me watching him. He flexed his brows good-naturedly at me and puffed out his cheeks.

‘Hate it when you’ve got to do them by hand,’ he said. ‘Specially after just paying out all that cred on new blaster upgrades.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, that’s tough.’

‘Ah, be better when we hit the Uncleared, you’ll see. Plenty of room to deploy the hardware, no need to hide the splash. Still.’ He pointed at me with the wrecking bar. ‘If we do have to do another by hand, you’re aboard now. You can turn off the next one.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Hey, no big deal.’ He handed the bar back over his shoulder to Sylvie, who stowed it. The bug quivered under his hands and drifted forward, past the wreckage of the fallen karakuri. The flexed brows again, and a grin. ‘Welcome to deCom, Micky.’

PART TWO

This Is Someone Else

‘Pull on the New Flesh like Borrowed Gloves And Burn your Fingers Once Again’

Bay City Graffito
on a bench outside the Central Penal Storage Facility

CHAPTER NINE

Static hiss. The general channel was wide open.

‘Look,’ said the scorpion gun reasonably. ‘There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone.’

I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang. A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty metres below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.

‘Leave us alone,’ it repeated. ‘And we’ll do you the same favour.’

‘Can’t do that,’ Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery co-op’s system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. ‘You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.’

‘Yeah.’ Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. ‘And besides which, we want the fucking land.’

‘The essence of empowerment,’ said the dissemination drone from somewhere safe upstream, ‘is that land should not find ownership outside the parameters of the common good. A commonweal economic constitution . . .’

‘You are the aggressors here.’ The scorpion gun cut across the drone with a hint of impatience. It had been hardwired with a strong Millsport accent that reminded me vaguely of the late Yukio Hirayasu. ‘We ask only to exist as we have for the last three centuries, undisturbed.’

Kiyoka snorted. ‘Oh, come off it.’

‘Doesn’t work that way,’ rumbled Orr.

It certainly didn’t. In the five weeks since we crept out of the Drava suburbs and into the Uncleared, Sylvie’s Slipins had taken down a total of four co-op systems, and over a dozen individual autonomous mimints of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention tagging the array of mothballed hardware we’d turned up in the command bunker that had yielded my new body. The call-in bounty Sylvie and her friends had amassed was huge. Provided they could ride out Kurumaya’s semi-allayed suspicions, they’d made themselves temporarily rich.

So, after a fashion, had I.

‘. . . those who enrich themselves through the exploitation of that relationship cannot permit the evolution of a truly representative democratic . . .’

Drone’s the right fucking word.

I cranked up my neurachem eyes and scanned the valley floor for signs of the co-op. The new sleeve’s enhancements were basic by modern standards - there was, for example no vision-chip time display of the sort that now came as standard on even the cheapest synth sleeves - but they worked with smooth power. The Quellist base leapt into focus at what felt like touching distance. I watched the spaces between the prefabs.

‘. . . in a struggle that has surfaced again and again in every place the human race finds a foothold because in every such place are found the rudiments of—’

Movement.

Hunched-up bundles of limbs, like huge, self-conscious insects. The karakuri advance guard, scuttling. Levering back doors and windows on the prefabs with can-opener strength, slipping inside and back out again. I counted seven. About a third strength - Sylvie had estimated the co-op’s offensive strength ran to nearly a score of mech puppets, along with three spider tanks, two of them cobbled together out of spares, and of course the core self-propelled weapon, the scorpion gun itself.

‘Then you leave me no choice,’ it said. ‘I shall be forced to neutralise your incursion with immediate effect.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lazlo through a yawn. ‘You’ll be forced to try. So let’s get to it, my metal friend.’

‘I am already about it.’

Faint shiver, as I thought of the murderous weapon crawling up the valley towards us, heat-seeker eyes casting about for our traces. We’d been stalking the mimint co-op through these mountains for the last two days, and it was an unpleasant turnaround to find ourselves abruptly the hunted. The hooded stealth suit I wore would shut out my body’s radiance, and my face and hands were liberally daubed with a chameleochrome polymer that had much the same effect, but with the domed overhang above and a straight twenty-metre drop under my barely ledged boots, it was hard not to feel cornered.

Just the fucking vertigo, Kovacs. Hold it down.

It was one of the less amusing ironies of my new life in the Uncleared. Along with the standard combat biotech, my recently acquired sleeve - Eishundo Organics, whoever they once were - came equipped with gekko-gene enhancement in palms and soles of the feet. I could - assuming I actually fucking wanted to - scramble up a hundred metres of cliff face with no more effort than most people needed to climb a ladder. In better weather I could do it in bare feet, and double my grip, but even like this I could hang here pretty much indefinitely. The million tiny gene-engineered spines in my hands were bedded solidly in the rock, and the perfectly-tuned, fresh-from-the-tank muscle system required only occasional shifts in posture to beat the cramping tiredness of long strain. Jadwiga, re-sleeved out of the tank next to mine and twitchy with the changeover, had vented an ear-splitting whoop as she discovered the genentech and then proceeded to crawl around on the walls and ceiling of the bunker like a lizard on tetrameth for the rest of the afternoon.

Personally, I don’t like heights.

On a world where no one goes up in the air much for fear of angelfire, it’s a common enough condition. Envoy conditioning will shut down the fear with the smooth power of a massive hydraulic crusher, but it doesn’t take away the myriad tendrils of caution and dislike we use to cushion ourselves against our phobias on a day-to-day basis. I’d been up on the rock face for nearly an hour, and I was almost ready to give myself away to the scorpion gun if the resulting firefight would get me down.

I shifted my gaze, peered across to the north wall of the valley. Jad was up there somewhere, waiting. I found I could almost picture her. Equally stealthed up, considerably more poised but still lacking the internal wiring that would have linked her in tight with Sylvie and the rest of the crew. Like me, she was making do with an induction mike and a security-scrambled audio channel patched into Sylvie’s crew net. Not much chance that the mimints would be able to crack it - they were two hundred years behind us in cryptographics and hadn’t had to deal with the codes of human speech at all for the bulk of that time.

The scorpion gun stalked into view. Running the same khaki drab as the karakuri, but massive enough to be clearly visible even without my racked-up vision. Still a kilometre off the Quellist base, but it had crossed the river and was prowling the high ground on the south side with clear line of sight on the hasty cover positions the rest of the team had taken downriver. The tail-end primary weapons pod that had earnt the machine its name was flexed for horizontal fire.

I chinned the scrambled channel and muttered into the induction rig.

‘Contact, Sylvie. We’re going to need to do this now, or fall back.’

‘Take it easy, Micky,’ she drawled back. ‘I’m on my way in. And we’re well covered for the moment. It isn’t going to start shooting up the valley at random.’

‘Yeah, it wasn’t going to fire on a Quellist installation either. Programmed parameters. Remember that?’

A brief pause. I heard Jadwiga making chicken noises in the background. On the general channel, the dissemination drone burbled on.

Sylvie sighed. ‘So I misjudged their political hardwiring. You know how many rival factions there were fighting up here during the Unsettlement? All fucking squabbling with each other at the end when they should have been fighting the government forces. You know how hard it is to tell some of them apart at a rhetorical code level? This has got to be some captured government armour, rewired by some fucking para-Quellist splinter movement after Alabardos. November 17th Protocol Front, maybe, or the Drava Revisionists. Who the fuck knows?’

‘Who the fuck cares?’ echoed Jadwiga.

‘We would have,’ I pointed out. ‘If we’d been eating our breakfast two prefabs to the left an hour ago.’

It was unfair - if the smart shell had missed us, we had our command head to thank for it. Behind my eyes, the scene played back in perfect recall. Sylvie slammed abruptly to her feet at the breakfast table, face blank, mind flung out, reaching for the thin electronic squeal of the incoming that only she had picked up. Deploying viral tinsel transmissions at machine speed. Whole seconds later, I heard the shrill whistle of the smart shell’s descent through the sky above us.

‘Correct!’ she’d hissed at us, eyes empty, voice a scream robbed of amplification and razed to inhuman cadence. It was sheer blind reflex, speech centres in the brain spewing an analogue of what she was pumping out at transmission levels, like a man gesturing furiously on an audio-phone link. ‘Correct your fucking parameters.’

The shell hit.

Muffled crump as the primary detonation system blew, rattle of light debris on the roof above our heads, and then - nothing. She’d locked out the shell’s main payload, isolated it from the detonator with emergency shutdown protocols stolen out of its own rudimentary brain. Sealed it shut and killed it with deCom viral plug-ins.

We scattered across the valley like belaweed seed from the pod. A ragged approximation of our drilled ambush configuration, wincefish spread wide in front while Sylvie and Orr hung back at the apex of the pattern with the grav bugs. Mask up and hide and wait, while Sylvie marshalled the weaponry in her head and reached out for the approaching enemy.

‘. . . our warriors will emerge from the foliage of their ordinary lives to tear down this structure that for centuries has . . .’

Now, on the far side of the river, I could make out the first of the spider tanks. Turret questing left and right, poised in the fringe of vegetation at the water’s edge. Set against the scorpion gun’s ponderous bulk, they were flimsy-looking machines, smaller even than the manned versions I’d murdered on worlds like Sharya and Adoracion, but they were aware and alert in a way that a human crew could never be. I wasn’t looking forward to the next ten minutes.

Deep in the combat sleeve, the chemistry of violence stirred like a snake, and called me a liar.

A second tank, then a third, stepping delicately into the swift flow of the river. Karakuri scuttling along the bank beside them.

‘Here we go, people.’ A sharp whisper, for Jadwiga’s and my benefit. The rest would already know, advised on the internal net in less time than it takes to form a conscious human thought. ‘Through the primary baffles. Move on my command.’

The self-propelled gun was past the little huddle of prefabs now. Lazlo and Kiyoka had taken up positions close to the river not two kilometres downstream of the base. The karakuri advance guard had to be almost on top of them by now. The undergrowth and long silver grass along the valley twitched in a dozen places with their passing. The rest kept pace with the bigger machines.

‘Now!’

Fire bloomed, pale and sudden amidst the trees downstream. Orr, cutting loose against the first of the mech puppets.

‘Go! Go!’

The lead spider tank staggered slightly in the water. I was already moving, a route down the rock I’d mapped out a couple of dozen times while I was waiting under the overhang. Cascading seconds, the Eishundo sleeve took over and put my hands and feet in place with engineered poise. I jumped the last two metres and hit the scree slope. An ankle tried to turn on the uneven footing - emergency sinew servos yanked taut and stopped it. I stood and sprinted.

A spider turret swivelled. The scree shattered into shale where I’d been. Splinters stung the back of my head and ripped into my cheek.

‘Hey!’

‘Sorry.’ The strain was in her voice like unshed tears. ‘On it.’

The next shot went way over my head, maybe homing in on some seconds-decayed image of my scramble down the rock face that she’d stabbed into the sighting software, maybe just a blind shot in the machine equivalent of panic. I snarled relief, drew the Ronin shard blaster from the sheath on my back and closed with the mimints.

Whatever Sylvie had done to the co-op’s systems was brutally effective. The spider tanks were swaying drunkenly, loosing fire at random into the sky and the upper crags of the valley’s sides. Around them, karakuri ran about like rats on a sinking raft. The scorpion gun stood in the midst of it all, apparently immobilised, low on its haunches.

I reached the gun in under a minute, pushing the sleeve’s biotech to its anaerobic limits. Fifteen metres off, a semi-functional karakuri stumbled into my path, upper arms waving confusedly. I shot it left-handed with the Ronin, heard the soft cough of the blast and saw the storm of monomolecular fragments rip it apart. The shard gun clanked another round into the chamber. Against the small mimints, it was a devastating weapon, but the scorpion gun was heavily armoured and its internal systems would be hard to damage with directional fire.

I got up close, slapped the ultravibe mine against one towering metal flank, then tried to get out of the way before it blew.

And something went wrong.

The scorpion gun lurched sideways. Weapons systems on its spine woke to sudden life and swivelled. One massive leg flexed and kicked out. Intended or not, the blow grazed my shoulder, numbed the arm below it and dumped me full length into the long grass. I lost the shard blaster from fingers gone abruptly nerveless.

‘Fuck.’

The gun moved again. I got to my knees, saw peripheral movement. High up on the carapace, a secondary turret was trying to bring its machine guns to bear on me. I spotted the blaster lying in the grass and dived after it. Combat custom chemicals squirted in my muscles and feeling fizzed back down the numbed arm. Above me on the self-propelled weapon’s bodywork, the machine rifle turret triggered and slugs ripped the grass apart. I grabbed up the blaster and rolled frantically back towards the scorpion gun, trying to get under the angle of fire. The machine-rifle storm tracked me, showering ripped-up earth and shredded undergrowth. I shielded my eyes with one arm, threw up the Ronin right-handed and fired blind at the sound of the guns. Combat conditioning must have put the shot somewhere close - the hail of slugs choked off.

And the ultravibe mine came to life.

It was like a swarm of autumn fire beetles in feeding frenzy, amplified for some bug’s-eye experia documentary. A shrilling, chittering explosion of sound as the bomb shattered molecular bonds and turned a metre-broad sphere of armoured machinery into iron filings. Metallic dust fountained out of the breach where I’d slapped the mine. I scrabbled backwards along the scorpion gun’s flank, unstrapping a second bomb from the bandolier. They’re not much bigger than the ramen bowls they very closely resemble, but if you get caught in the blast radius, you’re paste.

The scream of the first mine cut off as its field collapsed inward and it turned itself to dust. Smoke boiled out of the massive gash it had left. I snapped the fuse on the new mine and pitched it into the hole. The gun’s legs flexed and stamped, uncomfortably close to where I was crouched, but it looked spasmodic. The mimint seemed to have lost directional sense of where the attack was coming from.

‘Hey, Micky.’ Jadwiga, on the covert channel, sounding a little puzzled. ‘You need any help there?’

‘Don’t think so. You?’

‘Nah, just you should see—’ I lost the rest in the shriek as the new mine cut in. The breached hull vomited fresh dust and violet electrical discharge. Across the general channel the scorpion gun began a high-pitched electronic weeping, as the ultravibe chewed deeper into its guts. I felt every hair on my body rise at the sound.

In the background, someone was shouting. Sounded like Orr.

Something blew in the scorpion gun’s innards, and it must have knocked out the mine because the chittering insect scream shut off almost the same instant. The weeping died away like blood soaking into parched earth.

‘Say again?’

‘I said,’ yelled Orr, ‘command head down. Repeat, Sylvie is down. Get the fuck out of there.’

Sense of something massive tumbling—

‘Easier said than done, Orr.’ There was a tight, high-tension grin in Jad’s voice. ‘We’re a little fucking pressed right now.’

‘Seconded,’ gritted Lazlo. He was using the audio link - Sylvie’s collapse must have taken out the crew net. ‘Get the heavy ordnance up here, big man. We could use—’

Kiyoka broke in. ‘Jad, you just hang—’

Something flashed at the corner of my vision. I whipped about just as the karakuri came at me with all eight arms crooked to grab. No confused lurching to it this time, the mech puppet was up and running at capacity. I got my head out of the way just in time to miss a scything upper limb and pulled the shard blaster’s trigger point blank. The shot blew the karakuri backward in pieces, lower section shredded. I shot the upper half again to make sure, then swung about and skirted the dead bulk of the scorpion gun, Ronin cradled tight in both hands.

‘Jad, where are you?’

‘In the fucking river.’ Short, crunching explosions behind her voice on the link. ‘Look for the downed tank and the million fucking karakuri that want it back.’

I ran.

I killed four more karakuri on the way to the river, all of them far too fast-moving to be corrupted. Whatever had floored Sylvie hadn’t left her time to finish the intrusion run.

On the audio link, Lazlo yelped and cursed. It sounded like damage. Jadwiga shouted a steady stream of obscenities at the mimints, counterpoint for the flat reports of her shard blaster.

I winced past the tumbling wreckage of the last mech puppet and sprinted flat out for the bank. At the edge, I jumped. Drenching impact of icy water splashed to groin height and suddenly the swirling sound of the river. Mossed stones underfoot and a sensation like hot sweat in my feet as the genentech spines tried instinctively to grip inside my boots. Grab after balance. I nearly went over, didn’t quite. Flexed like a tree in a high wind, beat my own momentum barely and stayed upright, knee deep. I scanned for the tank.

Near the other bank, I found it, collapsed in what looked like about a metre of fast-flowing water. Cranked up vision gave me Jadwiga and Lazlo huddled in the lee of the wreck, karakuri crawling on the riverbank, but seemingly not keen to trust themselves to the current the river was running. A couple had jumped to the tank’s hull, but didn’t seem able to get much purchase. Jadwiga was firing at them one-handed, almost at random. Her other arm was wrapped around Lazlo. There was blood on both of them.

The range was a hundred metres - too far for effective shooting with the shard blaster. I ploughed into the river until it reached chest height and was still too far off. The current tried to knock me down.

‘Motherfucking—’

I kicked off and swam awkwardly, Ronin held to my chest with one arm. Instantly, the current started tugging me away downstream.

‘Fuuuck—’

The water was freezing, crushing my lungs closed against the need to breathe, numbing the skin on face and hands. The current felt like a living thing, yanking insistently at my legs and shoulders as I thrashed about. The weight of the shard blaster and the bandolier of ultravibe mines tried to drag me under.

Did drag me under.

I flailed to the surface of the water, sucked for air, got half and half, went under again.

Get a grip, Kovacs.

Think.

Get a fucking GRIP.

I kicked for the surface, forced myself up and filled my lungs. Took a bearing on the rapidly receding wreck of the spider tank. Then I let myself be dragged down, reached for the bottom and grabbed hold.

The spines gripped. I found purchase with my feet as well, braced myself against the current and started to crawl across the river bed.

It took longer than I’d have liked.

In places the stones I chose were too small or too poorly embedded and they ripped loose. In other places, my boots couldn’t gouge enough purchase. I gave up seconds and metres of ground each time, flailed back again. Once I nearly lost the shard blaster. And anaerobic enhancement or not, I had to come up every three or four minutes for air.

But I made it.

After what seemed like an eternity of grabbing and rooting around in the stabbing, cramping cold, I stood up in waist-high water, staggered to the bank and hauled myself panting and shaking out of the river. For a couple of moments, it was all I could do to kneel there, coughing.

Rising machine hum.

I staggered to my feet, trying to hold the shard blaster somewhere close to still in both trembling hands. My teeth were chattering as if something had short circuited in my jaw muscles.

‘Micky.’

Orr, seated astride one of the bugs, a long-barrelled Ronin of his own in one raised hand. Stripped to the waist, blast discharge vents still not fully closed up in the right-hand side of his chest, heat rippling the air around them. Face streaked with the remnants of stealth polymer and what looked like carbonised dust. He was bleeding a little from karakuri slashes across his chest and left arm.

He stopped the bug and stared at me in disbelief.

‘Fuck happened to you? Been looking for you everywhere.’

‘I, I, I, the kara, kara, the kara—’

He nodded. ‘Taken care of. Jad and Ki are cleaning up. Spiders are out too, both of them.’

‘And sssssSylvie?’

He looked away.

CHAPTER TEN

‘How is she?’

Kiyoka shrugged. She drew the insulating sheet up to Sylvie’s neck and cleaned the sweat off the command head’s face with a biowipe.

‘Hard to tell. She’s running a massive fever, but that’s not unheard of after a gig like this. I’m more worried about that.’

A thumb jerked at the medical monitors beside the bunk. A datacoil holodisplay wove above one of the units, shot through with violent colours and motion. Recognisable in one corner was a rough map of electrical activity in a human brain.

‘That’s the command software?’

‘Yeah.’ Kiyoka pointed into the display. Crimson and orange and bright grey raged around her fingertip. ‘This is the primary coupling from the brain to the command net capacity. It’s also the point where the emergency decoupling system sits.’

I looked at the multicoloured tangle. ‘Lot of activity.’

‘Yeah, far too much. Post run, most of that area should be black or blue. The system pumps in analgesics to reduce swelling in the neural pathways and the coupling pretty much shuts down for a while. Ordinarily, she’d just sleep it off. But this is.’ She shrugged again. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this before.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at Sylvie’s face. It was warm inside the prefab, but my bones still felt chilled in my flesh from the river.

‘What went wrong out there today, Ki?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say we ran up against an anti-viral that already knew our intrusion systems.’

‘In three-hundred-year-old software? Come off it.’

‘I know.’

‘They say the stuff is evolving.’ Lazlo stood in the doorway, face pale, arm strapped up where the karakuri had laid it open down to the bone. Behind him, the New Hok day was decaying to dark. ‘Running totally out of control. That’s the only reason we’re up here now, you know. To put a stop to it. See, the government had this top-secret AI-breeding project—’

Kiyoka hissed through her teeth. ‘Not now, Las. For fuck’s sake. Don’t you think we’ve got a few bigger things to worry about?’

‘—and it got out of hand. This is what we’ve got to worry about, Ki. Right now.’ Lazlo advanced into the prefab, gesturing at the datacoil. ‘That’s black clinic software in there, and it’s going to eat Sylvie’s mind if we don’t find a blueprint for it. And that’s bad news, because the original architects are all back in fucking Millsport.’

‘And that,’ shouted Kiyoka, ‘is fucking bullshit.’

‘Hoy!’ To my amazement, they both shut up and looked at me. ‘Uh, look. Las. I don’t see how even evolved software is going to map onto our particular systems just like that. I mean, what are the odds?’

‘Because it’s the same people, Mick. Come on. Who writes the stuff for deCom? Who designed the whole deCom programme? And who’s buried to the fucking balls in developing secret black nanotech? The fucking Mecsek administration, that’s who.’ Lazlo spread his hands, gave me a world-weary look. ‘You know how many reports there are, how many people I know, I’ve talked to, who’ve seen mimints there are no fucking archive descriptors for? This whole continent’s an experiment, man, and we’re just a little part of it. And the skipper there just got dumped in the rat’s maze.’

More movement at the door - Orr and Jadwiga, come to see what all the shouting was about. The giant shook his head.

‘Las, you really got to buy yourself that turtle farm down in Newpest you’re always talking about. Go barricade yourself in there and talk to the eggs.’

‘Fuck you, Orr.’

‘No, fuck you, Las. This is serious.’

‘She no better, Ki?’ Jadwiga crossed to the monitor and dropped a hand on Kiyoka’s shoulder. Like mine, her new sleeve was grown on a standard Harlan’s World chassis. Mingled Slavic and Japanese ancestry made for savagely beautiful cheekbones, epicanthic folds to the pale jade eyes and a wide slash of a mouth. Combat biotech requirements hauled the body towards long-limbed and muscular, but the original gene stock brought it out at a curiously delicate ranginess. Skin tone was brown, faded out with tank pallor and five weeks of miserable New Hok weather.

Watching her cross the room was almost like walking past a mirror. We could have been brother and sister. Physically, we were brother and sister - the clone bank in the bunker ran to five different modules, a dozen sleeves grown off the same genetic stem in each. It had turned out easiest for Sylvie to hotwire only the one module.

Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with re-sleeves. The pheremonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.

‘She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. ‘I just don’t know what’s going on in there.’

Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of colour in the coil.

‘Ki.’ I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister. I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. ‘Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?’

‘What?’ Orr, predictably.

Kiyoka looked unhappy. ‘I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—’

‘You are not fucking taking her hair.’

I got up from the bed and faced the giant. ‘And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?’

‘You shut your fucking m—’

‘Orr, he’s got a point.’ Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. ‘If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op, and her own anti-virals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?’

Lazlo nodded vigorously. ‘Might be her only hope, man.’

‘She’s been like this before,’ said Orr stubbornly. ‘That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up fine.’

I saw the look swoop among them. No. Not fine exactly.

‘If I induce the decoupler,’ said Kiyoka slowly, ‘I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever - she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.’

‘Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.’ Orr glared around at us. ‘She’s a fucking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.’

‘Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.’ I turned back to the bed. ‘Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?’

‘Yeah, it’s security-buffered.’

‘And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?’

‘Uh, yeah, but . . .’

‘Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?’

Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. ‘I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.’

‘Then—’

‘Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.’ Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?’

‘That’s not really the issue here,’ I said mildly. ‘All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—’

He swayed towards me. ‘You’re talking about fucking killing her.’

Jadwiga pushed him back. ‘He’s talking about saving her, Orr.’

‘And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up? Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?’

I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. ‘Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.’

‘We can’t do it anyway, Mick.’ Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again. ‘If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.’

You could kill this sleeve, anyway, I didn’t say. Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—

I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.

Maybe Orr was right.

‘One thing’s sure,’ said Jadwiga sombrely. ‘We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.’

More silence, while the idea settled in.

‘Can she be moved?’ I asked.

Kiyoka made a face. ‘She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.’

‘Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,’ muttered Lazlo. ‘It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route. I know it’s a risk.’

A slow nod from Jadwiga. ‘But probably worth it.’

‘Going to be the whole night,’ said Lazlo. ‘You got any meth?’

‘Is Mitzi Harlan straight?’

She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to businesslike clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.

‘You don’t fucking touch her,’ he warned me.

From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old Alain Marriott experia flics like Polar Quarry and The Deep Chase. It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.

Mostly.

But with skill you could feel out the whisper of local net traffic between the members of a crew, the flickering traces of electronic activity that the deComs carried with them like the scent of cigarettes on a smoker’s clothes. With more skill, you could tell the difference between these and mimint spoor and, with the right scrambler codes, you could open communication. It took until just before dawn, but in the end, Jad and Lazlo managed to get a line on three other deCom crews working the Uncleared between our position and the Drava beachhead. Coded needlecasts sang back and forth, establishing identity and clearance, and Jadwiga sat back with a broad tetrameth grin on her face.

‘Nice to have friends,’ she said to me.

Once briefed, all three crews agreed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to provide cover for our retreat within their own operational range. It was pretty much an unwritten rule of deCom conduct in the Uncleared to offer that much succour - you never knew when it might be you - but the competitive standoffishness of the trade made for grudging adherence. The positions of the first two crews forced us into a long, crooked path of withdrawal and both were grumpily unwilling to move either to meet us or to provide escort south. With the third we got lucky. Oishii Eminescu was camped two hundred and fifty kilometres north west of Drava with nine heavily armed and equipped colleagues. He offered immediately to move up and fetch us from the previous crew’s cover radius, and then to bring us all the way back to the beachhead.

‘Truth is,’ he told me, as we stood at the centre of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, ‘We can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it ’til it breaks.’

‘Seems overly rational.’

He laughed. ‘You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.’

‘I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.’

‘Yeah, that’s the song.’ A wry grimace. ‘They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?’

I stared at the darkening horizon. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Got to think past that stuff, sam. Got to. It’ll kill you if you don’t.’

On the other side of one of the bubblefabs, someone went past in the thickening gloom and called something out in Stripjap. Oishii grinned and yelled back. Laughter rattled back and forth. Behind us, I caught the scent of woodsmoke as someone kindled a fire. It was a standard deCom camp - temporary ’fabs blown and hardened from stock that would dissolve down just as rapidly as soon as it was time to move on. Barring occasional stopovers in abandoned buildings like the Quellist listening post, I’d been living in similar circumstances with Sylvie’s crew for most of the last five weeks. Still, there was a relaxed warmth around Oishii Eminescu that was at odds with most of the deComs I’d run into so far. A lack of the usual racing-dog edginess.

‘How long you been doing this?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, a while. While longer than I’d like, but—’

A shrug. I nodded.

‘But it pays. Right?’

He grinned sourly. ‘Right. I’ve got a younger brother studying Martian artefact tech in Millsport, parents both coming up on needing re-sleeves they can’t afford. Way the economy’s going right now, nothing else I could do would pay enough to cover the outlay. And the way Mecsek’s butchered the education charter and the sleeve pension system, these days, you don’t pay, you don’t get.’

‘Yeah, they’ve really fucked things up since I was last here.’

‘Been away, huh?’ He didn’t push the point the way Plex had. Old-style Harlan’s World courtesy - if I wanted to tell him I’d been doing time in storage, he probably figured I’d get round to it. And if I didn’t, well then, what business was it of his anyway.

‘Yeah, about thirty, forty years. Lot of changes.’

Another shrug. ‘Been coming for longer than that. Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened. Mecsek’s just the late stage bad news.’

‘This enemy you cannot kill,’ I murmured.

He nodded and finished the quote for me. ‘You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.’

‘So I guess someone’s not been watching the waves very carefully.’

‘That isn’t it, Micky.’ He was looking away towards the failing light in the west, arms folded. ‘Times have changed since she was around, that’s all. What’s the point of toppling a First Families regime, here or anywhere else, if the Protectorate are just going to come in and unload the Envoys on you for your trouble?’

‘You got a point there.’

He grinned again, more real humour in it this time. ‘Sam, it’s not a point. It’s the point. It’s the single big difference between then and now. If the Envoy Corps had existed back in the Unsettlement, Quellism would have lasted about six months. You can’t fight those fuckers.’

‘They lost at Innenin.’

‘Yeah, and how often have they lost since? Innenin was a minor glitch, a blip on the scope, strictly.’

Memory roared briefly down on me. Jimmy de Soto screaming and clawing at the ruins of his face with fingers that have already scooped out one eye and look like getting the other if I don’t . . .

I locked it down.

Minor glitch. Blip on the scope.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said.

‘Maybe I am,’ he agreed quietly.

We stood for a while in silence after that, watching the dark arrive. The sky had cleared enough to show a waning Daikoku spiked on mountains to the north and a full but distant Marikanon like a copper coin thrown high over our heads. Swollen Hotei still lay below the horizon to the west. Behind us, the fire settled in. Our shadows shaded into solidity amidst flickering red glow.

When it started to get too hot to stand there comfortably, Oishii offered a mannered excuse and drifted away. I endured the heat across my back for another minute after he’d gone, then turned and stared blink-eyed into the flames. A couple of Oishii’s crew crouched on the far side of the fire, warming their hands. Rippling, indistinct figures in the heated air and darkness. Low tones of conversation. Neither of them looked at me. Hard to tell if that was old-style courtesy like Oishii’s or just the usual deCom cliquishness.

What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?

Always the easy questions.

I left the fire and picked my way through the bubblefabs to where we’d pitched three of our own, diplomatically separate from Oishii’s. Smooth cold on my face and hands as my skin noticed the sudden lack of warmth. Moonglow on the ’fabs made them look like breaching bottlebacks in a sea of grass. When I reached the one where Sylvie was bedded down, I noticed brighter light splintering out around the closed flap. The others were in darkness. Alongside, two bugs leaned at canted angles on their parking racks, steering gear and weapon stands branching against the sky. The third was gone.

I touched the chime patch, pulled open the flap and went in. On one side of the interior, Jadwiga and Kiyoka sprang hastily apart on a tangle of bedding. Opposite them, beside a muffled illuminum night-lamp, Sylvie lay corpselike in her sleeping bag, hair combed carefully back from her face. A portable heater glowed at her feet. There was no one else in the ’fab.

‘Where’s Orr?’

‘Not here.’ Jad rearranged her clothing crossly. ‘You might have fucking knocked, Micky.’

‘I did.’

‘Okay, you might have fucking knocked and waited, then.’

‘Sorry, it’s not what I was expecting. So where’s Orr?’

Kiyoka waved an arm. ‘Gone on the bug with Lazlo. They volunteered for perimeter watch. Got to show willing, we figured. These people are going to carry us home tomorrow.’

‘So why don’t you guys use one of the other ’fabs?’

Jadwiga looked across to Sylvie. ‘Because someone’s got to keep watch in here too,’ she said softly.

‘I’ll do it.’

They both looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then at each other. Then Kiyoka shook her head.

‘Can’t. Orr’d fucking kill us.’

‘Orr isn’t here.’

Another exchange of glances. Jad shrugged.

‘Yeah, fuck it, why not.’ She stood up. ‘C’mon, Ki. Watch won’t change for another four hours. Orr’s not going to be any the wiser.’

Kiyoka hesitated. She leaned over Sylvie and put a hand on her forehead.

‘Alright, but if anything—’

‘Yeah, I’ll call you. Go on, get out of here.’

‘Yeah, Ki - come on.’ Jadwiga chivvied the other woman to the doorflap. As they were stepping out she paused and grinned back at me. ‘And Micky. I’ve seen the way you look at her. No peeking and prodding, eh? No squeezing the fruit. Keep your fingers out of pies that don’t belong to you.’

I grinned back. ‘Fuck you, Jad.’

‘Yeah, you wish. In your dreams, man.’

Kiyoka mouthed a more conventional thanks, and they were gone. I sat down beside Sylvie and stared at her in silence. After a couple of moments, I reached out and stroked her brow in an echo of Kiyoka’s gesture. She didn’t move. Her skin was hot and papery dry.

‘Come on, Sylvie. Pull out of there.’

No response.

I took back my hand and stared at the woman some more.

What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?

She’s not Sarah. Sarah’s gone. What the fuck are you—

Oh, shut up.

It’s not like I had another choice, is it?

Recall of the final moments in Tokyo Crow came and demolished that one. The safety of the table with Plex, the warm anonymity and the promise of a ticket out tomorrow - I remembered standing up and walking away from it all, as if in answer to a siren song. Into the blood and fury of the fight.

In retrospect it was a moment so hinged, so loaded with implications of shifting fate, that it should have creaked at me as I moved to step through it.

But in retrospect they always are.

Got to say, Mick, I like you. Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows. Can’t. Put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.

That’s nice.

But it’s not enough.

My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve, it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone-new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.

Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. A half dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament micro-jacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others - precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.

The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state-installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel. I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.

I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.

Is this enough?

Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.

I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.

Is this—

A hand closed on my arm.

The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.

‘You,’ she said in Japanese, and coughed. ‘Help me. Help me.’

It was not her voice.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro-government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.

‘Merry fucking Christmas,’ muttered one of Oishii’s crew.

Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.

We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.

Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.

It wasn’t over. Not nearly.

Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been - none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.

The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.

Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full check-up.

She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?

A detached deCom shrug. Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.

The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.

Burn some of that stored credit, grinned Jadwiga. Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.

The beachhead gate juddered up for us and we passed through into the compound. In comparison to the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ’fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.

‘Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,’ Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. ‘See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?’

Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.

‘I’ll go, skipper,’ offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing. Frosted snow crunched under his feet. ‘Rest of you go get some coffee or something.’

‘Cool,’ said Jadwiga. ‘And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.’

‘Yeah, I’ll tell him that.’ Lazlo rolled his eyes. ‘Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?’

I blinked. ‘Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?’

Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head towards the centre of the camp.

‘Come on then. Let’s get this over with.’

Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly-heated outer chamber of the command ’fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets. Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls and a corner-mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots. Our breath clouded faintly in the air.

‘So what did you want to talk to me about?’ I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.

‘What?’

‘Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?’

A grin surfaced on his face. ‘Well, you know I always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.’

‘Las.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. ‘You were there with her when she woke up, right.’

‘Right.’

‘What did she say to you? Really.’

I shifted round to look at him. ‘Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.’

‘Yeah.’ He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. ‘See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.’

‘Really?’ I kept my tone mild.

‘Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.’ He turned to meet my eyes. ‘You’ve lost your appetite.’

‘She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.’

He shook his head. ‘Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now, you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.’

‘I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.’

And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline. So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.

We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.

‘Not going to tell me, huh?’

‘There’s nothing to tell, Las.’

More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.

‘Look, Micky.’ Lazlo hesitated. ‘I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.’

‘Thanks,’ I said dryly. ‘And to what do I owe this honour?’

‘Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—’

The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.

‘All yours. See you in the bar.’

We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.

Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ’fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.

‘Oshima’s ill?’ he asked flatly.

‘Yeah, she caught something off a co-op cluster in the highlands. ’ Lazlo scratched his ear and looked around the empty chamber. ‘Not much going on here, huh? Locked down for the microbliz?’

‘The highlands.’ Kurumaya wasn’t going to be drawn. ‘Nearly seven hundred kilometres north of where you agreed to operate. Where you contracted to work clean-up.’

Lazlo shrugged. ‘Well, look, that was the skipper’s call. You’d have to—’

‘You were under contract. More importantly, under obligation. You owed giri to the beachhead, and to me.’

‘We were under fire, Kurumaya-san.’ The lie came out, Envoy smooth. Swift delight as the dominance conditioning took flight - it had been a while since I’d done this. ‘Following the ambush in the temple, our command software was compromised, we’d taken severe organic damage, to myself and another team member. We were running blind.’

Quiet opened up in the wake of my words. Beside me Lazlo twitched with something he wanted to say. I shot him a warning glance and he stopped. The beachhead commander’s eyes flickered between the two of us, settled finally on my face.

‘You are Serendipity?’

‘Yes.’

‘The new recruit. You offer yourself as spokesman?’

Tag the pressure point, go after it. ‘I, too, owe giri in this circumstance, Kurumaya-san. Without my companions’ support, I would have died and been dismembered by karakuri in Drava. Instead, they carried me clear and found me a new body.’

‘Yes. So I see.’ Kurumaya looked down briefly at his desk and then back to me. ‘Very well. So far you have told me no more than the report your crew transmitted from within the Uncleared, which is minimal. You will please explain to me why, running blind as you were, you chose not to return to the beachhead.’

This was easier. We’d batted it back and forth around camp fires in the Uncleared for over a month, refining the lie. ‘Our systems were scrambled, but still partly functional. They indicated mimint activity behind us, cutting off our retreat.’

‘And presumably therefore threatening the sweepers you had undertaken to protect. Yet you did nothing to aid them.’

‘Jesus, Shig, we were fucking blinded.’

The beachhead commander turned his gaze on Lazlo. ‘I didn’t ask for your interpretation of events. Be quiet.’

‘But—’

‘We fell back to the north east,’ I said, with another warning glance at the wincefish beside me. ‘As far as we could tell, it was a safe zone. And we kept moving until the command software came back online. By that time, we were almost out of the city, and I was bleeding to death. Of Jadwiga, we had only the cortical stack. For obvious reasons, we took a decision to enter the Uncleared and locate a previously mapped and targeted bunker with clone bank and sleeving capacity. As you know from the report.’

‘We? You were involved in that decision?’

‘I was bleeding to death,’ I repeated.

Kurumaya’s gaze turned downward again. ‘You may be interested to know that following the ambush you describe, there were no further sightings of mimint activity in that area.’

‘Yeah, that’s ’cause we brought the fucking house down on them,’ snapped Lazlo. ‘Go dig that temple up, you’ll find the pieces. Less a couple we had to take down hand to fucking hand in a tunnel on our way out.’

Again, Kurumaya favoured the wincefish with a cold stare.

‘There has not been time or manpower to excavate. Remote sensing indicates traces of machinery within the ruins, but the blast you triggered has conveniently obliterated most of the lower level structure. If there—’

‘If? Fucking if?’

‘—were mimints as you claim, they would have been vaporised. The two in the tunnel have been found, and seem to corroborate the story you transmitted to us once you were safely removed to the Uncleared. In the meantime, you may also be interested to know that the sweepers you left behind did encounter karakuri nests several hours later and two kilometres further west. In the ensuing suppression, there were twenty-seven deaths. Nine of them real, stack unrecovered.’

‘That is a tragedy,’ I said evenly. ‘But we would not have been able to prevent it. Had we returned with our injured and our damaged command systems, we would only have been a burden. Under the circumstances, we looked for ways to return to full operational strength as rapidly as possible instead.’

‘Yes. Your report says that.’

He brooded for a few moments. I flickered another look at Lazlo, in case he was about to open his mouth again. Kurumaya’s eyes lifted to meet mine.

‘Very well. You are billeted along with Eminescu’s crew for the time being. I will have a software medic examine Oshima, for which you will be billed. Allowing that her condition is stable, there will be a full investigation into the temple incident as soon as the weather clears.’

‘What?’ Lazlo took a step forward. ‘You expect us to fucking hang around here while you dig up that mess? No fucking way, man. We’re gone. Back to Tek’to on that fucking ’loader out there.’

‘Las—’

‘I do not expect you to stay in Drava, no. I am ordering it. There is a command structure here, whether you like it or not. If you attempt to board the Daikoku Dawn, you will be stopped.’ Kurumaya frowned. ‘I would prefer not to be so direct, but if you force me to, I will have you confined.’

‘Confined?’ For a couple of seconds, it was as if Lazlo hadn’t heard the word before and was waiting for the command head to explain it to him. ‘Fucking confined? We take down five co-ops in the last month, over a dozen autonomous mimints, render safe an entire bunker full of nasty hardware, and this is the fucking thanks we get coming back in?’

Then he yelped and stumbled back, open palm jammed to one eye as if Kurumaya had just poked him in it. The command head got to his feet behind the desk. His voice was sibilant with suddenly uncapped rage.

‘No. This is what happens when I can no longer trust the crews I am held responsible for.’ He jerked a glance at me. ‘You. Serendipity. Get him out of here, and convey my instructions to the rest of your companions. I do not expect to have this conversation again. Out, both of you.’

Las was still clutching at his eye. I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him out and he angrily shrugged it away. Muttering, he lifted a trembling finger to point at Kurumaya, then seemed to think better of it and turned on his heel. He made for the door in strides.

I followed him out. At the doorway, I looked back at the command head. It was hard to read anything in the taut face, but I thought I caught a waft of it coming off him nonetheless - rage at disobedience, worse still remorse at the failure to control both situation and self. Disgust at the way things had degenerated, in the command ’fab right here, right now, and maybe in the market free-for-all of the whole Mecsek Initiative. Disgust, for all I knew, at the way things were sliding for the entire damned planet.

Old school.

I bought Las a drink in the bar and listened to him curse Kurumaya for a fucking stick-up-the-arse piece of shit, then went to look for the others. I left him in good company - the place was crowded with irritable deComs off the Daikoku Dawn, complaining loudly about the weather and the subsequent lockdown on deployment. Superannuated fastload jazz formed a suitably strident backdrop, mercifully shorn of the DJ dissemination I’d come to associate with it over the past month. Smoke and noise filled the bubblefab to the roof.

I found Jadwiga and Kiyoka sitting in a corner, deep in each other’s eyes and a conversation that looked a little intense to try to join. Jad told me, impatiently, that Orr had stayed with Sylvie in the accommodation ’fab and that Oishii was around somewhere, at the bar maybe, talking to someone last time she saw him, anyway somewhere over in the direction of her vaguely waving arm. I took the multiple hints and left the two of them to it.

Oishii wasn’t really in the direction Jadwiga had pointed, but he was at the bar and he was talking to a couple of other deComs, only one of whom I recognised as being on his crew. He welcomed me with a grin and a lifted glass. Voice pitched over the noise.

‘Get a grilling, did you?’

‘Something like that.’ I lifted my hand to get attention behind the bar. ‘I get the impression Sylvie’s Slipins have been pushing the line for a while now. You want a refill?’

Oishii looked judiciously at the level of his drink. ‘No, I’m okay. Pushing the line, you could say that. Not the most community-minded crew around, for sure. Still, they top the boards a lot of the time. You can live on that for a while, even with a guy like Kurumaya.’

‘Nice to have a reputation.’

‘Yeah, which reminds me. There’s someone looking for you.’

‘Oh?’ He was looking into my eyes as he told me. I quelled reaction and raised an eyebrow to go with the elaborately casual interest in my voice. Ordered a Millsport single malt from the barman and turned back to Oishii. ‘You get a name?’

‘Wasn’t me that spoke to him.’ The command head nodded at his non-crew companion. ‘This is Simi, lead wince for the Interruptors. Simi, that guy was asking around about Sylvie and her new recruit, you get a name?’

Simi squinted sideways for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared and he snapped his fingers.

‘Yeah, got it. Kovacs. Said his name was Kovacs.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everything seemed to stop.

It was as if all the noise in the bar had abruptly frozen to arctic sludge in my ears. The smoke stopped moving, the pressure of the people behind me at the bar seemed to recede. It was a shock reaction I hadn’t had from the Eishundo sleeve, even when locked in combat with the mimints. Across the dreamy quiet of the moment, I saw Oishii watching me intently, and I lifted the glass to my lips on autopilot. The single malt went down, burning, and as the warmth hit the pit of my stomach the world started up again just as suddenly as it had stopped. Music, noise, the shifting crush of people around me.

‘Kovacs,’ I said. ‘Really?’

‘You know him?’ asked Simi.

‘Heard of him.’ There wasn’t much point in going for the deep lie. Not with the way Oishii was watching my face. I sipped at my drink again. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

‘Nah,’ Simi shook his head, clearly not that interested. ‘He was just asking where you were, if you’d gone out with the Slipins. Was a couple of days back, so I told him, yeah, you were all out in the Uncleared. He—’

‘Did he—’ I stopped myself. ‘Sorry, you were saying?’

‘He seemed pretty concerned to talk to you. Persuaded someone, think it was Anton and the Skull Gang, to take him out into the Uncleared for a look. So you know this guy, right? He a problem for you?’

‘Of course,’ said Oishii quietly, ‘might not be the same Kovacs you know. It’s a common enough name.’

‘There’s that,’ I admitted.

‘But you don’t think so?’

I manufactured a shrug. ‘Seems unlikely. He’s looking for me, I’ve heard of him. Most probable thing is, we’ve got some shared history.’

Oishii’s crew colleague and Simi both nodded dismissive, boozed-up assent. Oishii himself seemed more closely intrigued.

‘And what have you heard about him, this Kovacs?’

This time the shrug was easier. ‘Nothing good.’

‘Yeah,’ Simi agreed sweepingly. ‘That’s right. Seemed like a real hard-assed psycho motherfucker to me.’

‘Did he come alone?’ I asked.

‘Nah, whole squad of enforcer types with him. ’Bout four, five of them. Millsport accents.’

Oh good. So this wasn’t a local matter any more. Tanaseda was living up to his promise. A global writ for your capture. And from somewhere they’d dug up—

You don’t know that. Not yet.

Oh, come on. It has to be. Why use the name? Whose sense of humour does that sound like to you?

Unless—

‘Simi, listen. He didn’t ask for me by name, did he?’

Simi blinked at me. ‘Dunno, what is your name?’

‘Okay. Never mind.’

‘Guy was asking after Sylvie,’ explained Oishii. ‘Her name, he knew. Knew the Slipins, seems like. But he really seemed interested in some new recruit Sylvie might have had in her team. And that name, he didn’t know. Right, Simi?’

‘ ’s about it, yeah.’ Simi peered into his empty glass. I signalled the barman and got refills all round.

‘So. These Millsport types. Any of them still around, you reckon?’

Simi pursed his lips. ‘Could be. Don’t know, I didn’t see the Skull Gang go out, don’t know how much extra weight they were carrying.’

‘But it’d make sense,’ said Oishii softly. ‘If this Kovacs did his research, he’ll know how hard it is to track movement in the Uncleared. It’d make sense to leave a couple of guys behind in case you came back.’ He paused, watching my face. ‘And to needlecast the news if you did.’

‘Yeah.’ I drained my glass and shivered slightly. Got up. ‘Think I need to talk to my crew-mates. If you gentlemen will excuse me.’

I shouldered my way back through the crowd until I reached Jadwiga and Kiyoka’s corner again. They’d wrapped each other up in a passionate mouth-to-mouth embrace, oblivious to their surroundings. I slid into the seat next to them and tapped Jadwiga on the shoulder.

‘Stop that, you two. We’ve got problems.’

‘Well,’ rumbled Orr. ‘I think you’re full of shit.’

‘Really?’ I kept a grip on my temper with an effort, and wished I’d just gone for full Envoy-effect persuasion, instead of trusting my deCom colleagues with the use of their own decision-making faculties. ‘This is the yakuza we’re talking about.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Do the math. Six weeks ago we were collectively responsible for the death of a high-ranking yakuza’s son and his two enforcers. And now there’s someone looking for us.’

‘No. There’s someone looking for you. Whether he’s looking for the rest of us remains to be seen.’

‘Listen. All of you.’ Inclusive glance around the windowless billet they’d found for Sylvie. Spartan single berth, integral storage lockers in the walls, a chair in one corner. With the command head curled up on the bunk and her crew stood around, it was a tense, cramped space. ‘They know Sylvie, they’ve tied her to me. Oishii’s pal said as much.’

‘Man, we wiped that room cleaner than—’

‘I know, Jad, but it wasn’t enough. They got witnesses who saw the two of us, peripheral video maybe, maybe something else. The point is I know this Kovacs, and believe me, if we wait around for him to catch up with us, you’re going to find out that it doesn’t much matter whether he’s looking for me, or Sylvie, or both of us. The man is an ex-Envoy. He’ll take down everybody in this room, just to keep it simple.’

That old Envoy terror - Sylvie was asleep, out on recuperative chemicals and sheer exhaustion, and Orr was too fired up with confrontation, but the rest of them flinched. Beneath the armoured deCom cool, they’d grown up on the horror stories from Adoracion and Sharya, just like everybody else. The Envoys came and they tore your world apart. It wasn’t that simple, of course; the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

‘What about we spike this ahead of time?’ wondered Jadwiga. ‘Find Kovacs’ holdout buddies in the beachhead and shut them down before they can transmit out.’

‘Probably too late, Jad.’ Lazlo shook his head. ‘We’ve been in a couple of hours. Anybody who wants to knows about it by now.’

Gathering momentum. I stayed silent and watched it roll the way I wanted. Kiyoka weighed in, frowning.

‘Anyway, we got no way to find these fuckers. Millsport accents and hard faces are plankton standard around here. At a minimum, we’d need to case the beachhead datastack and,’ she indicated Sylvie’s foetal form, ‘we’re in no position to do that.’

‘Even with Sylvie online, we’d be pushed,’ said Lazlo gloomily. ‘Way Kurumaya feels about us right now, he’ll jump if we clean our teeth at the wrong voltage. I suppose that thing’s intrusion-proofed. ’

He nodded at the personal space resonance scrambler perched on the chair. Kiyoka nodded back, slightly wearily I thought.

‘State of the art, Las. Really. Picked it up in Reiko’s Straight-to-Street before we shipped out. Micky, the point is, we’re under virtual lockdown here. You say this Kovacs is coming for us, what do you suggest we do?’

Here we go.

‘I suggest I get out of here tonight on the Daikoku Dawn, and I suggest I take Sylvie with me.’

Quiet rocked the room. I tracked glances, gauged emotion, estimated where this was going.

Orr rolled his head on his neck, like a freak fighter warming up.

‘You,’ he said deliberately, ‘can go fuck yourself.’

‘Orr—’ said Kiyoka.

‘No fucking way, Ki. No fucking way does he take her anywhere. Not on my watch.’

Jadwiga looked at me narrowly. ‘What about the rest of us, Micky? What are we supposed to do when Kovacs turns up looking for blood?’

‘Hide.’ I told her. ‘Pull some favours, get yourselves out of sight either somewhere in the beachhead or out in the Uncleared with someone else’s crew if you can persuade them. Shit, you could even get Kurumaya to arrest you, if you trust him to keep you locked up safe.’

‘Hey, fuckhead, we can do all of that without handing Sylvie over to y—’

‘Can you, Orr?’ I locked gazes with the giant. ‘Can you? Can you wade back out into the Uncleared with Sylvie the way she is now? Who’s going to carry her out there? What crew? What crew can afford the dead weight?’

‘He’s right, Orr.’ Lazlo shrugged. ‘Even Oishii isn’t going to go back out there with that on his back.’

Orr looked around him, eyes flickering cornered.

‘We can hide her here, in the—’

‘Orr, you’re not listening to me. Kovacs will tear this place apart to get to us. I know him.’

‘Kurumaya—’

‘Forget it. He’ll go through Kurumaya like angelfire, if that’s what it takes. Orr, there’s only one single thing that’ll stop him, and that’s knowing that Sylvie and I are gone. Because then he won’t have time to piss about looking for the rest of you. When we arrive in Tek’to, we make sure the news gets back to Kurumaya and by the time Kovacs is here, it’ll be common knowledge around the beachhead that we skipped. That’ll be enough to kick him out of here on the next ’loader.’

More quiet, this time like something counting down. I watched them buy in, one by one.

‘Makes sense, Orr.’ Kiyoka clapped the giant on the shoulder. ‘It isn’t pretty, but it scans.’

‘At least this way, the skipper’s out of the firing line.’

Orr shook himself. ‘I don’t fucking believe you people. Can’t you see he’s trying to scare you all?’

‘Yeah, he’s succeeding in scaring me,’ snapped Lazlo. ‘Sylvie’s down. If the yakuza are hiring Envoy assassins, we’re severely outclassed.’

‘We need to keep her safe, Orr.’ Jadwiga was staring at the floor as if digging a tunnel might be a good next move. ‘And we can’t do it here.’

‘Then I’m going too.’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t going to be possible,’ I said quietly. ‘I figure Lazlo can get us in one of the life-raft launchers, the way he came aboard in Tek’to. But with the hardware you’re carrying, the power source, penetrate the hull unauthorised, you’re going to set off every leakage alarm the Daikoku Dawn has.’

It was inspired guesswork, a blind leap off the rapid scaffolding of Envoy intuition, but it seemed to hit home. The Slipins looked back and forth at each other, and finally Lazlo nodded.

‘He’s right, Orr. No way can I get you up that chute quietly.’

The ordnance giant stared at me for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he looked away, at the woman on the bed.

‘If you hurt her in any way at all—’

I sighed. ‘The best way I know to hurt her, Orr, is to leave her here. Which I don’t plan to do. So save the attitude for Kovacs.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jadwiga grimly. ‘And this is a promise. As soon as Sylvie’s back on line, we take that motherfucker and we—’

‘Admirable,’ I agreed. ‘But a little premature. Plan your revenge later, okay? Right now let’s just all concentrate on surviving.’

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

When pressed, Lazlo admitted that security around the ’loader ramps at Kompcho was lax verging on laughable. At the Drava beachhead, with mimint assault a constant fear, the dockside would be sewn up tight with electronic intrusion countermeasures.

‘So,’ I tried for patient calm. ‘You’ve never actually done this life-raft chute thing in Drava?’

‘Well, yeah, once.’ Lazlo scratched his ear. ‘But I had some jamming help from Suki Bajuk.’

Jadwiga snorted. ‘That little trollop.’

‘Hey, jealous. She’s a fucking good command deCom. Even whiffed off her head, she greased the entry codes like—’

‘Not all she greased that weekend, from what I hear.’

‘Man, just because she isn’t—’

‘Is she here?’ I asked loudly. ‘Now, in the beachhead?’

Lazlo went back to scratching his ear. ‘Dunno. We could check, I guess, but—’

‘It’ll take forever,’ predicted Kiyoka. ‘And anyway, she may not be up for another code greasing, if she finds out what this is about. Helping you get your kicks is one thing, Las. Bucking Kurumaya’s lockdown might not appeal so much, you know what I mean?’

‘She doesn’t have to know,’ said Jadwiga.

‘Don’t be a bitch, Jad. I’m not putting Suki in the firing line without—’

I cleared my throat. ‘What about Oishii?’

They all looked round at me. Orr’s brow furrowed. ‘Maybe. He and Sylvie go back to the early days. Hired on as sprogs together.’

Jadwiga grinned. ‘Sure he’ll do it. If Micky asks him.’

‘What?’

There were grins appearing on everyone’s mouths now, it seemed. Welcome release to the building tension. Kiyoka sniggered behind a hand pressed to her nose. Lazlo looked elaborately at the ceiling. Stifled snorts of hilarity. Only Orr was too angry to join in the fun.

‘Didn’t you notice over the last couple of days, Micky?’ Jadwiga, playing this one until it creaked. ‘Oishii likes you. I mean, he really likes you.’

I looked around the cramped room at my companions, and tried to match Orr for deadpan lack of amusement. Mostly, I was irritated at myself. I hadn’t noticed, or at least hadn’t identified the attraction for what - Jadwiga said - it was. For an Envoy, that was a serious failure to perceive exploitable benefit.

Ex-Envoy.

Yeah, thanks.

‘That’s good,’ I said evenly. ‘I’d better go talk to him, then.’

‘Yeah,’ Jadwiga managed, straightfaced. ‘See if he wants to give you a hand.’

The laughter erupted, explosive in the confined space. An unwanted grin forced its way onto my mouth.

‘You motherfuckers.’

It didn’t help. The hilarity scaled upward. On the bed, Sylvie stirred and opened her eyes at the sound. She propped herself up on one elbow and coughed painfully. The laughter drained out of the room as rapidly as it had come.

‘Micky?’ Her voice came out weak and rusty.

I turned to the bed. Caught out of the corner of one eye the venomous glare Orr fired at me. I leaned over her.

‘Yeah, Sylvie. I’m here.’

‘What are you laughing for?’

I shook my head. ‘That’s a very good question.’

She gripped my arm with the same intensity as that night in Oishii’s encampment. I steeled myself for what she might say next. Instead, she just shivered and stared at her fingers where they sank into the arm of the jacket I was wearing.

‘I,’ she muttered. ‘It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—’

‘Leave her alone, Micky.’ Orr tried to shoulder me aside, but Sylvie’s grip on my arm defeated the move. She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

‘What’s going on?’ she pleaded.

I glanced sideways at the giant.

‘You want to tell her?’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Night fell across Drava in swathes of snow-chipped gloom, settling like a well worn blanket around the huddled ’fabs of the beachhead and then the higher, angular ruins of the city itself. The microblizzard front came and went with the wind, brought the snow in thick, swirling wraps that plastered your face and got inside the neck of your clothing, then whirled away, thinning out to almost nothing, and then back again to dance in the funnelled glare of the camp’s Angier lamps. Visibility oscillated, went down to fifty metres and then cleared, went down again. It was weather for staying inside.

Crouched in the shadow of a discarded freight container at one end of the wharf, I wondered for a moment how the other Kovacs was coping, out in the Uncleared. Like me, he’d have the standard Newpest native’s dislike for the cold, like me he’d be—

You don’t know that, you don’t know that’s who he—

Yeah, right.

Look, where the fuck are the yakuza going to get hold of a spare personality copy of an ex-Envoy? And why the fuck would they take the risk? Under all that Old Earth ancestor crabshit veneer, in the end they’re just fucking criminals. There’s no way—

Yeah, right.

It’s the itch we all live with, the price of the modern age. What if? What if, at some nameless point in your life, they copy you. What if you’re stored somewhere in the belly of some machine, living out who knows what parallel virtual existence or simply asleep, waiting to be released into the real world.

Or already unleashed and out there somewhere. Living.

You see it in the experia flics, you hear the urban myths of friends of friends, the ones who through some freak machine error end up meeting themselves in virtual or, less often, reality. Or the Lazlo-style conspiracy horror stories of military-authorised multiple sleeving. You listen, and you enjoy the existential shiver it sends up your spine. Once in a very long time, you hear one you might even believe.

I’d once met and had to kill a man who was double-sleeved.

I’d once met myself, and it hadn’t ended well.

I was in no hurry to do it again.

And I had more than enough else to worry about.

Fifty metres down the dock, the Daikoku Dawn bulked dimly in the blizzard. She was a bigger vessel than the Guns for Guevara, by the look of her an old commercial ’loader, taken out of mothballs and regeared for deCom haulage. A whiff of antique grandeur hung about her. Light gleamed cosily from portholes and clustered in colder white and red constellations on the superstructure above. Earlier, there’d been a desultory trickle of figures up the gangways as the outgoing deComs went aboard, and lights at the boarding ramps, but now the hatches were closing up and the hoverloader stood isolated in the chill of the New Hok night.

Figures through the muffling swirl of white on black to my right. I touched the hilt of the Tebbit knife and cranked up my vision.

It was Lazlo, leading with a wincefish flex in his stride and a fierce grin on his snow-chilled face. Oishii and Sylvie in tow. Chemical functionality trowelled across the woman’s features, a more intense control in the other command head’s demeanour. They crossed the open ground along the quayside and slipped into the shelter of the container. Lazlo scrubbed at his face with both hands and shook the melting snow from splayed fingers. He’d strapped his healing arm with a combat servosplint and didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. I caught the blast of alcohol on his breath.

‘Okay?’

He nodded. ‘Anyone who’s interested, and a few who probably weren’t, now knows Kurumaya’s got us locked down. Jad’s still in there, being loudly pissed off to anyone who’ll listen.’

‘Oishii? You set?’

The command head regarded me gravely. ‘If you are. Like I said, you’ll have five minutes max. All I can do without leaving traces.’

‘Five minutes is fine,’ said Lazlo impatiently.

Everybody looked at Sylvie. She managed a wan smile under the scrutiny.

‘Fine,’ she echoed. ‘Scan up. Let’s do it.’

Oishii’s face took on the abrupt inwardness of net time. He nodded minutely to himself.

‘They’re running the navigational systems at standby. Drives and systems test in two hundred and twenty seconds. You’d better be in the water by the time it kicks in.’

Sylvie scraped up some hollow-eyed professional interest and a stifled cough.

‘Hull security?’

‘Yeah, it’s on. But the stealth suits should throw back most of the scan. And when you get down to water level, I’m going to pass you off as a couple of ripwings waiting for easy fish in the wake turbulence. Soon as the system test cycle starts, get up that chute. I’ll vanish you on the internal scanners, and the navgear will assume it lost the rips in the wake. Same for you coming out, Lazlo. So stay in the water until she’s well down the estuary.’

‘Great.’

‘You get us a cabin?’ I asked.

The corner of Oishii’s mouth twitched. ‘Of course. No luxury spared for our fugitive friends. Starboard lower are mostly empty, S37 is all yours. Just push.’

‘Time to go,’ hissed Lazlo. ‘One at a time.’

He flitted out of the cover of the container with the same accomplished wincefish lope I’d seen deployed in the Uncleared, was a moment exposed to view along the quay and then swung himself lithely off the edge of the wharf and was gone again. I glanced sideways at Sylvie and nodded.

She went, less smoothly than Lazlo, but still with an echo of the same grace. I thought I heard a faint splash this time. I gave her five seconds and followed, across the blizzard-shrouded open space, crouch to grab the top rung of the inspection ladder and down, hand over rapid hand, to the chemical stink of the estuary below. When I was immersed to the waist I let go and fell back into the water.

Even through the stealth suit and the clothes I wore over it, the shock of entry was savage. The cold stabbed through, clutched at my groin and chest and forced the air out of my lungs through gritted teeth. The gekko-grip cells in my palms flexed their filaments in sympathy. I drew in a fresh breath and cast about in the water for the others.

‘Over here.’

Lazlo gestured from a corrugated section of the dock where he and Sylvie were clinging to a corroded cushioning generator. I slipped through the water towards them and let my genentech hands grip me directly to the evercrete. Lazlo breathed in jerkily and spoke through chattering teeth.

‘Get ttto the stttern and tttread water between the dock and the hull. You’ll sssee the launchers. Dddddon’t dddrink the water, eh.’

We traded clenched grins and kicked off.

It was hard work, swimming against a body reflex that wanted nothing more than to curl up tight against the cold and shudder. Before we’d gone halfway, Sylvie was falling behind and we had to go back for her. Her breath was coming in harsh bursts, her teeth were gritted and her eyes were starting to roll.

‘Cccan’t hold it tttogether,’ she muttered as I turned in the water and Lazlo helped haul her onto my chest. ‘Dddon’ttt tell me we’re whu-whu-wwinning, whu-winning fffucking wh-what?’

‘Be okay,’ I managed through my own clamped jaws. ‘Hold on. Las, you keep going.’

He nodded convulsively and flailed off. I struck out after him, awkward with the burden on my chest.

‘Is there no other fucking choice?’ she moaned, barely above a whisper.

Somehow I got us both to the rising bulk of the Daikoku Dawn’s stern where Lazlo was waiting. We paddled round into the crevice of water between the ’loader’s hull and the dock and I slapped a hand against the evercrete wall to steady myself.

‘Llless thththan a mmminute,’ said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. ‘Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.’

The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.

‘Up there,’ he yelled over the engine noise.

I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chainlink inspection ladder up the loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.

The note of the engines deepened, settling down.

Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and onto the scant, down-curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie towards the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top and after some manoeuvring the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.

A couple of metres above me, I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him - a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up. I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum and got moving again.

At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.

‘This is it.’ He thumped the yielding surface above his head. ‘This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawlspace between levels. Just pop the nearest access panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.’

We worked the canvasynth raft back from one edge of the hatchway and warm, stale air gusted through into the chute. I laughed with sheer involuntary pleasure at the feel of it. Lazlo nodded sourly.

‘Yeah, enjoy. Some of us are going back in the fucking water now.’

Sylvie squeezed through and I was about to follow, when the wincefish tugged at my arm. I turned back. He hesitated.

‘Las? Come on, man, we’re running out of time.’

‘You.’ He lifted a warning finger. ‘I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her. You keep her safe ’til we can get to you. ’til she’s back on-line.’

‘Alright.’

‘I’m trusting you,’ he repeated.

Then he turned, unlatched his hold on the hatch and was sliding rapidly down the curve of the launcher chute. As he disappeared at the bottom, I heard a faint whoop come floating back up.

I stared after him for what seemed like far too long, then turned and forced my way irritably through the canvasynth barrier between myself and my newly acquired responsibilities.

The memory rolled back over me.

In the bubblefab—

‘You. Help me. Help me!’

Her eyes pin me. Muscles of her face taut with desperation, mouth slightly open. It’s a sight that sends a deep and unlooked-for sense of arousal bubbling through my guts. She’s thrown back the sleeping bag and leaned across to grab at me, and in the low light from the muffled illuminum lamp, under the reaching arm, I can see the slumped mounds her breasts make across her chest. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her like this - the Slipins don’t suffer from coyness and after a month of close quarters camping across the Uncleared, I could probably draw most of them naked from memory - but something about Sylvie’s face and posture is suddenly deeply sexual.

‘Touch me.’ The voice that is not hers rasps and prickles the hairs on my neck erect. ‘Tell me you’re fucking real.’

‘Sylvie, you’re not—’

Her hand shifts, from my arm to my face.

‘I think I know you,’ she says wonderingly. ‘Black Brigade elect, right. Tetsu battalion. Odisej? Ogawa?’

The Japanese she’s using is archaic, centuries out of date. I fight down the ghost of a shiver and stay in Amanglic. ‘Sylvie, listen to me—’

‘Your name’s Silivi?’ Face racked with doubt. She shifts languages to meet me. ‘I don’t remember, I, it’s, I can’t—’

‘Sylvie.’

‘Yeah, Silivi.’

‘No,’ I say through lips that feel numb. ‘Your name’s Sylvie.’

‘No.’ There’s a sudden panic in her now. ‘My name’s. My name’s. They call me, they called me, they—’

Her voice stops up and her eyes flinch sideways, away from mine. She tries to get up out of the sleeping bag. Her elbow skids on the slick material of the lining and she slips over towards me. I put out my arms and they’re suddenly full of her warm, tightly muscled torso. The fist I snapped closed when she spoke opens involuntarily and the cortical stacks crushed inside it spill onto the floor. My palms press against taut flesh. Her hair moves and brushes at my neck and I can smell her, warmth and female sweat welling up out of the opened sleeping bag. Something trips again in the pit of my stomach, and maybe she can feel it too because she makes a low moaning sound into the flesh of my throat. Lower down in the confines of the bag, her legs shift around impatiently and then part for my hand as it slides down over one hip and between her thighs. I’m stroking her cunt before I realise what I’m doing, and she’s damp to the touch.

‘Yes.’ It gusts out of her. ‘Yes, that. There.’

This time when her legs shift, her whole body tilts from the hips upward and her thighs spread as wide as the sleeping bag will allow. My fingers slip into her and she makes a tight hissing noise, pulls back from the clasp on my neck and glares at me as if I’ve just stabbed her. Her fingers hook into my shoulder and upper arm. I rub long, slow ovals up inside her and feel her hips pump in protest at the deliberate pace of the motion. Her breath starts to come in shortening bursts.

‘You’re real,’ she mutters in between. ‘Oh, you’re real.’

And now her hands are moving over me, fingers tangling in the fastenings of my jacket, rubbing at my rapidly swelling crotch, gripping my face at the jaw. She seems unable to decide what to do with the body she’s touching, and slowly the realisation soaks through me that as she slides irretrievably into the crevasse of her orgasm, she’s testing the assertion coming faster and faster across her lips you’re real, you’re real, you’re fucking real, aren’t you, you’re real, oh, you’re real, yes, you fucker, yes, yes, you’re real you’re fucking real—

Her voice locks up in her throat with her breath, and her stomach flexes her almost double with the force of the climax. She twines around me like the long lethal ribbons of belaweed out beyond Hirata’s reef, thighs clenched on my hand, body folded onto and over my chest and shoulder. From somewhere I know she’s staring off that shoulder at the shadows on the far side of the bubblefab.

‘My name is Nadia Makita,’ she says quietly.

And again, it’s like current through my bones. Like the moment she grabbed my arm, the shock of the name. The litany kicks off in my head. It’s not possible it’s not—

I ease her loose from my shoulder, pull her back and the motion dislodges a fresh wave of pheromones. Our faces are a couple of centimetres apart.

‘Micky,’ I mutter. ‘Serendipity.’

Her head darts forward like a bird’s and her mouth fastens on mine, shutting off the words. Her tongue is hot and feverish, and her hands are working at my clothes again, this time with determined purpose. I struggle out of my jacket, unfasten the heavy canvasynth trousers and her hand is burrowing in the gap as they open. Weeks in the Uncleared with barely the privacy to masturbate, a body kept on ice for centuries, it’s all I can do to keep from coming as her hand closes around the shaft of my cock. She feels it and grins in the kiss, lips unsticking from mine, the faintest scrape of teeth on teeth and the grate of a chuckle deep in her throat. She kneels upright on the sleeping bag, balancing with one arm on my shoulder while the other stays between my legs, working. Her fingers are long and slim and hot and clammy with sweat, curling into a practised grip and pumping gently up and down. I force the trousers down past my hips and lean backward to give her space. The ball of her thumb rubs back and forth against my glans like a metronome. I groan my lungs empty and instantly she slackens the pace almost to a halt. She presses her free hand flat on my chest, pushes me towards the floor while her grip on my hard-on tightens almost to crushing. Coiled muscle in my stomach keeps me flexed upright from the floor against the pressure she’s exerting and damps down the pulsing need to come.

‘Do you want to be inside me?’ she asks seriously.

I shake my head. ‘Whatever, Sylvie. Whatever—’

A hard tug on the root of my cock. ‘My name is not Sylvie.’

‘Nadia. Whatever.’ I grasp her by one curved arse cheek, one long hard thigh and drag her forward onto me. She takes the hand from my chest, reaches down and spreads herself, then sinks slowly onto my cock. Our gasps blend at the contact. I search inside myself somewhere for a little Envoy control, settle my hands at her hips and help her lift herself up and down. But this isn’t going to last long. She reaches for my head and draws it down to one swollen breast, presses my face into the flesh and guides me to the nipple. I suck it in and grip the other breast in one hand while she rises on her knees and rides us both to a climax that dims out my vision as it explodes through us.

We collapse onto each other in the dimly-lit bubblefab, slick with sweat and shuddering. The heater throws a reddish glow across our tangled limbs and tight pressed bodies and there’s a tiny sound in the gloom that could be this woman weeping or maybe just the wind outside, trying to find a way in.

I don’t want to look her in the face to find out which.

In the bowels of the steadily thrumming Daikoku Dawn, we levered ourselves up from the crawlspace into a corridor and made our dripping way to S37. As promised, the door flexed open at a push. Inside, lights sprang up in an unexpectedly luxurious space. I’d subconsciously been preparing myself for something along the lines of the spartan two-bunk accommodation we’d had on the Guns for Guevara, but Oishii had done us proud. The cabin was a well-appointed comfort class with an autoform bed space that could be programmed to swell up as twin singles or a broad double. The fixtures showed wear but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.

‘Vvvery nice,’ I chattered as I closed the door on lock. ‘Well done, Oishii. I appprove.’

En-suite facilities were almost the size of another single cabin themselves, complete with airblast drier in the shower cabinet. We peeled naked and dumped our soaked clothing, then took turns rinsing the chill out of our bones first under a pummelling hail of hot water, then in a gently buffeting storm of warm air. It took a while, one at a time, but there was no hint of invitation in Sylvie’s face as she stepped into the cabinet and so I stayed outside rubbing at my chilled flesh. At one point, watching her as she turned with water streaming down over her breasts and belly, trickling between her legs and tugging at a tiny tuft of drenched pubic hair, I felt myself beginning to harden. I moved quickly to pick up the jacket from my stealth suit and sat awkwardly with it covering my erection. The woman in the shower caught the movement and looked at me curiously, but she said nothing. No reason why she should. Last time I’d seen Nadia Makita, she’d been slipping into a post-coital drowse in a bubblefab out on the New Hok plains. Small, confident smile on her lips, one arm wrapped loosely around my thigh. When I finally pulled loose, she only turned over in the sleeping bag and muttered to herself.

She hadn’t been back since.

And meanwhile you dressed and tidied up before the others got back, like a criminal trying to cover his tracks.

Met Orr’s suspicious gaze with even Envoy deceit.

Slipped away with Lazlo to your own ’fab, to lie awake until dawn, disbelieving what you’d seen and heard and done.

Finally, Sylvie stepped out of the cabinet airblasted all but dry. With an effort I stopped myself staring at the suddenly sexualised landscape of her body and went to change places with her. She said nothing, just touched me on one shoulder with a loosely curled fist and frowned. Then she disappeared into the cabin next door.

I stayed under the shower for nearly an hour, turning back and forth in water just below scalding, masturbating vaguely and trying not to think too much about what I was going to have to do when we got to Tekitomura. The Daikoku Dawn throbbed around me as she ploughed southward. When I got out of the shower, I dumped our soaked clothing in the cabinet and left the airblast on full, then wandered through to the cabin. Sylvie was sleeping soundly beneath the coverlet of a bedspace she’d programmed to mould as a double.

I stood and watched her sleep for a long time. Her mouth was open and her hair was in chaotic disarray around her face. The ebony central cord had twisted so that it lay phallically across one cheek. Imagery I didn’t need. I smoothed it back with the rest of the hair until her face was clear. She muttered in her sleep and moved the same loosely curled fist she’d punched me with up to touch her mouth. I stood and watched her some more.

She’s not.

I know she’s not. It’s not possi—

What, just like it’s not possible there’s another Takeshi Kovacs out there hunting you? Where’s your sense of wonder, Tak?

I stood and watched.

And in the end I shrugged irritably and climbed into the bedspace beside her, and tried to sleep.

It took a while.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The crossing back to Tekitomura was far faster than our trip out had been with the Guns for Guevara. Flogging steadily through the icy sea away from the New Hok coast, the Daikoku Dawn was constrained by none of the caution her sister ship had shown going in, and ran at full speed for the bulk of the voyage. According to Sylvie, we raised Tekitomura on the horizon not long after the sun came up and woke her through windows we’d forgotten to blank. Less than an hour after that we were crowding the ramps at Kompcho.

I woke to a sunlit cabin, stilled engines and Sylvie, dressed and staring at me over arms folded across the backrest of a chair she’d straddled beside the bedspace. I blinked at her.

‘What?’

‘What the fuck were you doing last night?’

I propped myself upright beneath the covers and yawned. ‘You want to expand on that a little? Give me some idea what you’re talking about?’

‘What I’m talking about,’ she snapped, ‘is waking up with your dick jammed against my spine like a fucking shard blaster barrel.’

‘Ah.’ I rubbed at one eye. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?’

I shrugged. ‘Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?’

‘Oh.’ She looked away. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’

‘Well you did.’ I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was. I nodded at what she was wearing. ‘Clothes are dry, I see.’

‘Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.’ Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, ‘I’ll get yours for you.’

We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed. We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.

‘We’d better get you covered up,’ I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. ‘No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.’

She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. ‘I thought the idea was to leave traces.’

‘Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.’

‘Alright.’

The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct - a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.

‘How may I help you?’

‘I have vital information for you,’ I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. ‘I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hoverloader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.’

The construct smiled again. ‘That’s impossible, sir.’

‘Yeah? Then go check out cabin S37.’ I cut the call, turned off the terminal and nodded at Sylvie, who was struggling to get the last of her riotous hair stuffed inside the curtain-cloth headscarf.

‘Very becoming. We’ll make a god-fearing maiden of modest demeanour out of you yet.’

‘Fuck off.’ The natural spring in the command head mane was still pushing the edges of the scarf forward and out. She attempted to smear the cloth backward, out of the way of her peripheral vision. ‘You think they’ll come here?’

‘Eventually. But they’ve got to check the cabin, which they’ll be in no hurry to do, crank call like that. Then check back with Drava, then trace the call. It’ll be the rest of the day, maybe longer.’

‘So we’re safe leaving this place untorched?’

I glanced around at the shabby little room. ‘Sniffer squad won’t get much off what we’ve touched that isn’t blurred with the last dozen occupants. Maybe just enough to confirm against the cabin traces. Not worth worrying about. Anyway, I’m short on incendiaries right now. You?’

She nodded at the door. ‘Get them anywhere on Kompcho wharf for a couple of hundred a crate.’

‘Tempting. Bit rough on the other guests, though.’

A shrug. I grinned.

‘Man, wearing that thing’s really pissing you off, isn’t it. Come on, we’ll break the trail somewhere else. Let’s get out of here.’

We went down canted plastic stairs, found a side exit and slipped into the street without checking out. Back into the pulsing flow of deCom commerce and stroll. Groups of sprogs clowning around on corners for attention, crew packs ambling along in the subtly integrated fashion I’d started to notice at Drava. Men, women and machines carrying hardware. Command heads. Dealers of knocked-off chemicals and small novelty devices working from laid-out plastic sheets that shimmered in the sun. The odd religious maniac declaiming to passing jeers. Street entertainers aping the local trends for laughs, running cheap holo storytell and cheaper puppet shows, collection trays out for the sparse shower of near-exhausted credit chips and the hope that not too many spectators would fling the totally exhausted variety. We cut back and forth in it for a while, surveillance evasion habit on my part and a vague interest in some of the acts.

‘—the blood curdling story of Mad Ludmila and the Patchwork Man—’

‘—hardcore footage from the deCom clinics! See the latest in surgery and body testing to the limits, ladies and gentlemen, to the very limits—’

‘—the taking of Drava by heroic deCom teams in full colour—’

‘—God—’

‘—pirated full sense repro. One hundred per cent guaranteed genuine! Josefina Hikari, Mitzi Harlan, Ito Marriott and many more. Get wet with the most beautiful First Family bodies in surroundings that—’

‘—deCom souvenirs. Karakuri fragments—’

On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium. Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.

Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.

‘Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.’

The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.

‘See anything you like?’

‘Not really, no.’ I went up to the counter. ‘I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.’

‘Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.’ The woman winked. ‘Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.’

She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.

She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.

‘Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says - see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.’ She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. ‘Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.’

‘I said something I could wear.’

‘So you did. So you did. Well, Ronin don’t make much smaller than the 86 in the monomol range. You want a slug gun maybe?’

‘No, the shredder’s good, but it’s got to be smaller than that. What else have you got?’

The woman sucked at her upper lip. It made her look like a crone. ‘Well, there are some of the Old Home brands as well - H&K, Kalashnikov, General Systems. It’s mostly pre-owned, see. Sprog trade-ins for mimint smasher gear. Look. Do you a GS Rapsodia. Scan resistant and very slim, straps flat under clothing but the butt’s automould. Reacts to body heat, swells to fit your grip. How’s that?’

‘What’s it ranged at?’

‘Depends on dispersal. Tightened up I’d say you could take down a target at forty, fifty metres if your hands don’t shake. On widespread, you don’t get much range at all, but it’ll clean out a room for you.’

I nodded. ‘How much?’

‘Oh, we can come to some arrangement on that.’ The woman winked clumsily. ‘Is your friend buying too?’

Sylvie was on the other side of the emporium, a half dozen metres away. She heard and glanced across at the datacoil.

‘Yeah, I’ll take that Szeged squeeze gun you’re listing there. Is that all the ammunition you’ve got for it?’

‘Ah . . . yes.’ The older woman blinked at her, then back at the display. ‘But it’ll take a Ronin SP9 load too, they made them compatible. I can throw in two or three clips if you—’

‘Do that.’ Sylvie met my eyes with something in her face I couldn’t read. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

‘Good idea.’

No one spoke again until Sylvie had brushed through the shell curtains and out. We both stared after her for a couple of moments.

‘Knows her datacode,’ chirped the woman finally.

I looked at the lined face and wondered if there was anything behind the words. As a blatant demonstration of the deCom power her head had been scarfed to disguise, Sylvie reading detail off the datacoil at distance pretty much screamed for attention. But it wasn’t clear what capacity this other woman’s mind was running on, or if she cared about anything much beyond a quick sale. Or if she’d even remember us in a couple of hours time.

‘It’s a trick,’ I said weakly. ‘Shall we, um, talk about price?’

Out in the street, I found Sylvie stood at the edges of a crowd that had gathered in front of a holoshow storyteller. He was an old man, but his hands were nimble on the display controls and a synth-system taped to his throat modulated his voice to fit the different characters of his tale. The holo was a pale orb full of indistinct shapes at his feet. I heard the name Quell as I tugged at Sylvie’s arm.

‘Jesus, you think you could have been a bit more fucking obvious in there?’

‘Ssh, shut up. Listen.’

‘Then Quell came out of the house of the belaweed merchant and she saw a crowd had gathered on the wharfside and were shouting and gesturing furiously. She couldn’t see very clearly what was happening. Remember, my friends, this was on Sharya where the sun is a violent actinic glare and—’

‘And where there’s no such thing as belaweed,’ I muttered in Sylvie’s ear.

‘Sssh.’

‘—so she squinted and squinted but, well.’ The storyteller set aside his controls and blew on his fingers. In the holodisplay, his Quell figure froze and the scene around her began to dim. ‘Perhaps I will end here today. It is very cold and I am no longer a young man, my bones—’

A chorus of protests from the gathered crowd. Credit chips cascaded into the upturned webjelly sieve at the storyteller’s feet. The man smiled and picked up the controls again. The holo brightened.

‘You are very kind. Well, see then, Quell went among the shouting crowd and in the middle what did she see but a young whore, clothing all ripped and torn so that her perfect, swollen, cherry-nippled breasts stood proudly in the warm air for all to see and the soft dark hair between her long, smooth thighs was like a tiny frightened animal beneath the stoop of a savage ripwing.’

The holo shifted for an obliging close-up. Around us, people stood on tiptoe. I sighed.

‘And standing over her, standing over her were two of the infamous black-clad religious police, bearded priests holding long knives. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust and their teeth glinted in their beards as they grinned at the power they held over this helpless woman’s young flesh.

‘But Quell placed herself between the points of those knives and the exposed flesh of the young whore and she said in a ringing voice: what is this? And the crowd fell silent at her voice. Again she asked: what is this, why are you persecuting this woman? and again all were silent, until finally one of the two black-clad priests stated that the woman had been caught in the sin of whoring, and that by the laws of Sharya she must be put to death, bled into the desert sand and her carcass thrown into the sea.’

For just a second, the grief and rage flickered at the edges of my mind. I locked it down and breathed out, hard. The listeners around me were pressing closer, ducking and craning for a better view of the display. Someone crowded me and I hooked an elbow back savagely into their ribs. A yelp, and aggrieved cursing that someone else hushed at.

‘So Quell turned to the crowd and asked who among you have not sinned with a whore at one time or another, and the crowd grew quieter and would not meet her eyes. But one of the priests rebuked her angrily for her interference in a matter of holy law, and so she asked him directly have you never been with a whore and many in the crowd who knew him laughed so that he had to admit that he had. But this is different, he said, for I am a man. Then, said Quell, you are a hypocrite, and from her long grey coat she took a heavy-calibre revolver and she shot the priest in both kneecaps. And he collapsed to the ground screaming.’

Two tiny bangs and small, shrill shrieks from the holodisplay. The storyteller nodded and cleared his throat

‘Someone take him away, Quell commanded, and at this two of the crowd lifted the priest up and carried him off, still screaming. And I would guess that they were glad of the chance to leave because now these people were quiet and afraid when they saw the weapon in Quell’s hand. And as the screaming died away in the distance, there was a silence broken only by the moaning of the seawind along the wharf, and the whimpering of the comely whore at Quell’s feet. And Quell turned herself to the second priest and pointed the heavy-calibre revolver at him. Now you, she said. Will you tell me that you have never been with a whore? And the priest drew himself up and looked her back in the eye, and he said I am a priest, and I have been with no woman in my life for I would not soil the sacredness of my flesh.’

The storyteller struck a dramatic pose and waited.

‘He’s pushing his luck with this stuff,’ I murmured to Sylvie. ‘Citadel’s only up the hill.’

But she was oblivious, staring down at the little globe of the holodisplay. As I watched, she swayed a little.

Oh shit.

I grabbed at her arm and she shook me off irritably.

‘Well, Quell looked back at this black-clad man and as she stared into his hot jet eyes she knew that he spoke the truth, that he was a man of his word. So she looked at the revolver in her hand and then back at the man. And she said then you are a fanatic and cannot learn, and she shot him in the face.’

Another report, and the holodisplay splattered vivid red. Close-up on the ruined face of the priest. Applause and whoops among the crowd. The storyteller waited it out with a modest smile. At my side, Sylvie stirred like someone waking up. The storyteller grinned.

‘Well now my friends, as you can probably imagine, this comely young whore was most grateful to her rescuer. And when the crowd had carried the second priest’s body away, she invited Quell to her home where she—’ The storyteller set down his controls once more and wrapped his arms around himself. He gave a performance shudder and rubbed both hands on his upper arms. ‘But it really is too cold to continue, I fear. I could not—’

Amidst a new chorus of protest, I took Sylvie by the arm again and led her away. She said nothing for the first few paces, then vaguely she looked back at the storyteller and then at me.

‘I’ve never been to Sharya,’ she said in a puzzled voice.

‘No, and I’m willing to bet nor has he.’ I looked her carefully in the eyes. ‘And Quell certainly never got to go there either. But it makes a good story, right.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I bought a pack of disposable phones from an alcove dealer on the waterfront and used one of them to call Lazlo. His voice came through wavery with the squabble of antique jamming and counterjamming that floated over New Hok like smog from some early millennium city on Earth. The wharfside noises around me didn’t help much. I pinned the phone hard against my ear.

‘You’ll have to speak up,’ I told him.

‘. . . said she’s still not well enough to use the net, then?’

‘She says not. But she’s holding up okay. Listen, I’ve set the traces. You can expect a very pissed-off Kurumaya to come battering down your door later today. Better start practising your alibis.’

‘Who, me?’

I grinned despite myself. ‘Any sign of this Kovacs then?’

His reply was inaudible behind a sudden thicket of static and flutter.

‘Say again?’

‘...in this morning, said he saw the Skull Gang up near Sopron yesterday with some faces he didn’t know, looked li—. . . south at speed. Probably get in some time tonight.’

‘Alright. When Kovacs does show up, you watch yourselves. The man is a dangerous piece of shit. You keep it tight. Scan up.’

‘Will do.’ A long, static-laced pause. ‘Hey, Micky, you’re taking good care of her, right?’

I snorted. ‘No, I’m about to scalp her and sell off the spare capacity to a data brokerage. What do you think?’

‘I know you ca—’ Another wave of distortion squelched his voice. ‘. . . f not, then get her to someone who can help.’

‘Yeah, we’re working on that.’

‘. . . Millsport?’

I guessed at content. ‘I don’t know. Not yet, at any rate.’

‘If that’s what it takes, man.’ His voice was fading out now, faint with distance and wrenched with the jamming. ‘Whatever it takes.’

‘Las, I’m losing you. I’ve got to go.’

‘. . . an up, Micky.’

‘Yeah, you too. I’ll be in touch.’

I cut the connection, took the phone away from my ear and weighed it in my hand. I stared out to sea for a long time. Then I dug out a fresh phone and dialled another number from decades-old memory.

Like a lot of the towns on Harlan’s World, Tekitomura clung to the skirts of a mountain range up to its waist in the ocean. Available space for building on was scarce. Back around the time that Earth was gearing up for the Pleistocene ice age, it seems that Harlan’s World suffered a rapid climatic change in the opposite direction. The poles melted to ragged remnants and the oceans rose to drown all but two of the little planet’s continents. Mass extinctions followed, among them a rather promising race of tusked shore-dwellers who, there’s some evidence to suggest, had developed rudimentary stone tools, fire and a religion based on the complicated gravitational dance of Harlan’s World’s three moons.

It wasn’t enough to save them, apparently.

The colonising Martians, when they arrived, didn’t seem to have a problem with the limited terrain. They built intricate, towering eyries directly into the rock of the steepest mountain slopes and largely ignored the small nubs and ledges of land available at sea level. Half a million years later, the Martians were gone but the ruins of their eyries endured for the new wave of human colonisers to gawp at and leave mostly alone. Astrogation charts unearthed in abandoned cities on Mars had brought us this far, but once we arrived we were on our own. Unwinged, and denied much of our usual sky-going technology by the orbitals, humanity settled for conventional cities on two continents, a sprawling multi-islanded metropolis at the heart of the Millsport Archipelago, and small, strategically located ports elsewhere to provide linkage. Tekitomura was a ten-kilometre strip of densely-built waterfront, backed up as far as the brooding mountains behind would allow and thereafter thinning out to nothing. On a rocky foothill, the citadel glowered over the skyline, perhaps aspiring in its elevation towards the semi-mystical status of a Martian ruin. Further back, the narrow mountain tracks blasted by human archaeologue teams threaded their way up to the real thing.

There were no archaeologues working the Tekitomura sites any more. Grants for anything not related to cracking the military potential of the orbitals had been cut to the bone, and those Guild Masters not absorbed by the military contracting had long since shipped out to the Latimer system on the hypercast. Pockets of stubborn and largely self-funding wild talent held out at a few promising sites near Millsport and points south, but on the mountainside above Tekitomura, the dig encampments sat forlorn and empty, as abandoned as the skeletal Martian towers they had been built next to.

‘Sounds too good to be true,’ I said as we bought provisions in a waterfront straight-to-street. ‘You’re sure we’re not going to be sharing this place with a bunch of teenage lovebirds and wirehead derelicts?’

For answer, she gave me a significant look and tugged at a single lock of her hair that had escaped from the cling of the headscarf. I shrugged.

‘Alright then.’ I hefted a sealpack of amphetamine cola. ‘Cherry-flavoured okay?’

‘No. It tastes like shit. Get the plain.’

We bought packs to carry the provisions, picked an upward-sloping street out of the wharf district, more or less at random, and walked. In under an hour, the noise and buildings began to fade out behind us and the incline grew steeper. I kept glancing across at Sylvie as our pace slacked off and our steps became more deliberate, but she showed no sign of wavering. If anything, the crisp air and cold sunlight seemed to be doing her good. The tense frown that had flitted on and off her face all morning ironed out and she even smiled once or twice. As we climbed higher, the sun glinted off exposed mineral traces in the surrounding rocks, and the view became worth stopping for. We rested a couple of times to drink water and gaze out over the shoreline sprawl of Tekitomura and the sea beyond.

‘Must have been cool to be a Martian,’ she said at one point.

‘I suppose.’

The first eyrie crept into view on the other side of a vast rock buttress. It towered the best part of a kilometre straight up, all twists and swellings that were hard to look at comfortably. Landing flanges rolled out like tongues with slices cut out of them, spires sported wide, vented roofing hung with roost-bars and other less identifiable projections. Entrances gaped, an anarchic variety of oval-derived openings from long, slim, vaginal to plumped-up heart shape and everything between. Cabling dangled everywhere. You got the fleeting but repeating impression that the whole structure would sing in a high wind, and maybe somehow revolve like a gargantuan windchime.

On the approach track, the human structures huddled small and solid, like ugly puppies at the feet of a fairytale princess. Five cabins in a style not much more recent than the relics on New Hok, all showing the faint blue interior light of damped-down automated systems. We stopped at the first one we came to and dumped our packs. I squinted back and forth at angles of fire, tagging potential cover for any attackers and thinking about delivery solutions that would beat it. It was a more or less automatic process, the Envoy conditioning killing time the way some people whistle through their teeth.

Sylvie ripped off her headscarf and shook her hair free with obvious relief.

‘Be a minute,’ she said.

I considered my semi-instinctive assessment of the dig site’s defensibility. On any planet where you could go up in the air easily, we’d be a sitting target. But on Harlan’s World, the normal rules don’t apply. Top mass limit on flying machines is a six-seat helicopter running an antique rotor-motor lift, no smart systems and no mounted beam weaponry. Anything else gets turned into mid-air ash. Likewise individual flyers in antigrav harnesses or nanocopters. The angelfire restrictions are, it appears, as much about a level of technology as physical mass. Add to that a height limit of about four hundred metres, which we were already well above, and it was safe to assume that the only way anyone would be approaching us was on foot up the path. Or climbing the sheer drop alongside, which they were very welcome to do.

Behind me, Sylvie grunted in satisfaction and I turned to see the cabin door flex itself open. She gestured ironically.

‘After you, professor.’

The blue standby light flickered and blinked up to white as we carried our packs inside, and from somewhere I heard the whisper of aircon kicking in. A datacoil spiralled awake on the table in one corner. The air reeked of antibacterials, but you could smell that it was shifting as the systems registered occupancy. I shoved my pack into a corner, peeled off my jacket and grabbed a chair.

‘Kitchen facilities are in one of the others,’ Sylvie said, wandering about and opening internal doors. ‘But most of this stuff we bought is self-heating anyway. And everything else we need, we’ve got. Bathroom there. Beds in there, there and there. No automould, sorry. Specs I ran into when I was doing the locks say it sleeps six. Data systems wired in, linked directly into the global net through the Millsport University stack.’

I nodded and passed my hand idly through the datacoil. Opposite me, a severely dressed young woman shimmered into sudden existence. She made a quaint formal bow.

‘Professor Serendipity.’

I glanced at Sylvie. ‘Very funny.’

‘I am Dig 301. How may I help you?’

I yawned and looked round the room. ‘Does this place run any defensive systems, Dig?’

‘If you are referring to weapons,’ said the construct delicately, ‘I am afraid not. Discharge of projectiles or ungoverned energy so close to a site of such xenological significance would be unpardonable. However, all site units do lock on a coding system that is extremely hard to break.’

I shot another glance at Sylvie. She grinned. I cleared my throat.

‘Right. What about surveillance? How far down the mountain do your sensors reach?’

‘My awareness range covers only the site and ancillary buildings. However, through the totality of the global datalink, I can access—’

‘Yeah, thanks. That’ll be all.’

The construct winked out, leaving the room behind looking momentarily gloomy and still. Sylvie stepped across to the main door and thumbed it closed. She gestured around.

‘Think we’ll be safe here?’

I shrugged, remembering Tanaseda’s threat. A global writ for your capture. ‘As safe as anywhere else I can think of right now. Personally, I’d be heading out for Millsport tonight, but that’s exactly why—’

I stopped. She looked at me curiously.

‘Exactly why what?’

Exactly why we’re sticking with an idea you came up with and not me. Because anything I come up with, there’s a good chance he’s going to come up with too.

‘Exactly what they’ll expect us to do,’ I amended. ‘If we’re lucky they’ll skip right past us on the fastest transport south they can arrange.’

She took the chair opposite me and straddled it.

‘Yeah. Leaving us to do what meantime?’

‘Is that a proposition?’

It was out before I realised I’d said it. Her eyes widened.

‘You—’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry, that was. A joke.’

As a lie, it would have got me thrown out of the Envoys to howls of derision. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura shaking her head in disbelief. It wouldn’t have convinced a Loyko monk shot up with credence sacrament for Acceptance Fortnight. And it certainly didn’t convince Sylvie Oshima.

‘Look, Micky,’ she said slowly. ‘I know I owe you for that night with the Beards. And I like you. A lot. But—’

‘Hey, seriously. It was a joke, okay. A bad joke.’

‘I’m not saying I haven’t thought about it. I think I even dreamed about it a couple of nights ago.’ She grinned and something happened in my stomach. ‘You believe that?’

I manufactured another shrug. ‘If you say so.’

‘It’s just.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know you, Micky. I don’t know you any better than I did six weeks ago, and that’s a little scary.’

‘Yeah well; changed sleeves. That can—’

‘No. That’s not it. You’re locked up, Micky. Tighter than anyone I’ve ever met, and believe me I’ve met some fucked-up cases in this business. You walked into that bar, Tokyo Crow, with nothing but that knife you carry and you killed them all like it was a habit. And all the time, you had this little smile.’ She touched her hair, awkwardly it seemed to me. ‘This stuff, I get pretty much total recall when I want it. I saw your face, I can still see it now. You were smiling, Micky.’

I said nothing.

‘I don’t think I want to go to bed with someone like that. Well,’ she smiled a little herself. ‘That’s a lie. Part of me does, part of me really wants to. But that’s a part I’ve learnt not to trust.’

‘Probably very wise.’

‘Yeah. Probably.’ She shook hair back from her face and tried on a firmer smile. Her eyes hit mine again. ‘So you went up to the citadel and you took their cortical stacks. What for, Micky?’

I smiled back. Got up from the chair. ‘You know, Sylvie, part of me really wants to tell you. But—’

‘Alright, alright—’

‘—it’s a part of me I’ve learnt not to trust.’

‘Very witty.’

‘I try. Look, I’m going to go check a couple of things outside before it starts getting dark. Be back in a while. You think you still owe me for the Beards, do me a small favour while I’m gone. Try to forget I came on quite as crass as I did just now. I’d really appreciate that.’

She looked away, at the datacoil. Her voice was very quiet.

‘Sure. No problem.’

No, there’s a problem. I bit back the words as I made my way to the door. There really fucking is. And I still have no idea what to do about it.

The second call picks up almost at once. A brusque male voice, not interested in talking to anyone.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yaroslav?’

‘Yeah.’ Impatiently. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A little blue bug.’

Silence opens like a knife wound behind the words. Not even static to cover it. Compared to the connection I had with Lazlo, the line is crystal clear. I can hear the shock at the other end.

‘Who is this?’ His voice has shifted completely. Hardened like sprayed evercrete. ‘Enable the videofeed, I want to see a face.’

‘Wouldn’t help you much. I’m not wearing anything you’d recognise.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘Let’s just say you didn’t have much faith in me when I went to Latimer, and I lived up to that lack of faith perfectly.’

‘You! You’re back on the World?’

‘No, I’m calling from orbit. What the fuck do you think?’

Long pause. Breathing on the line. I look up and down the Kompcho wharf with reflexive caution.

‘What do you want?’

‘You know what I want.’

Another hesitation. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Yeah, right. Put her on.’

‘I mean it. She left.’ There’s a catch in the throat as he says it - enough to believe him. ‘When did you get back?’

‘A while ago. Where’s she gone?’

‘I don’t know. If I had to guess . . .’ His voice dies off in breath blown through slack lips. I shoot a glance at the watch I ransacked from the bunker in the Uncleared. It’s been keeping perfect time for three hundred years, indifferent to human absence. After years of chipped-in time displays, it still feels a little odd, a little archaic.

‘You do have to guess. This is important.’

‘You never told anyone you were coming back. We thought—’

‘Yeah, I’m not much for homecoming parties. Now guess. Where’s she gone?’

I can hear the way his lips tighten. ‘Try Vchira.’

‘Vchira Beach? Oh, come on.’

‘Believe what you like. Take it or leave it.’

‘After all this time? I thought—’

‘Yeah, so did I. But after she left, I tried to—’ He stops. Click in his throat as he swallows. ‘We still had joint accounts. She paid hard-class passage south on a Kossuth speed freighter, bought herself a new sleeve when she got there. Surfer specs. Cleaned out her account to make the price. Burnt it all. She’s, I know she’s down there with fucking—’

It chokes off. Thick silence. Some corroded vestige of decency makes me wince. Keeps my voice gentle.

‘So you think Brasil’s still around, huh?’

‘What changes on Vchira Beach?’ he asks bitterly.

‘Alright, Yaros. That’s all I need. Thanks, man.’ A cranked eyebrow at my own words. ‘You take it easy, huh.’

He grunts. Just as I’m about to kill the connection, he clears his throat and starts to speak.

‘Listen, if you see her. Tell her . . .’

I wait.

‘Ah, fuck it.’ And he hangs up.

Daylight fading.

Below me, lights were starting to come on across Tekitomura as night breathed in from the sea. Hotei sat fatly on the western horizon, painting a dappled orange path across the water towards the shore. Marikanon hung coppery and bitten at one edge overhead. Out to sea, the running lights of sweepers already studded the deeper gloom. Faintly, the sounds of the port floated up to me. No sleep at deCom.

I glanced back towards the archaeologue cabin and the Martian eyrie caught at the corner of my eye. It rose massive and skeletal into the darkening sky on my right, like the bones of something long dead. The copper-orange mix of moonlight fell through apertures in the structure and emerged at sometimes surprising angles. There was a cold breeze coming in with the night and the dangling cables stirred idly on it.

We avoid them because we can’t make much use of them on a world like this, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. I knew an archaeologue once who told me human settlement patterns avoid the relics of Martian civilisation like this on every world in the Protectorate. It’s instinctive, she told me. Atavistic fear. Even the dig towns start to die as soon as the excavations stop. No one stays around from choice.

I stared into the maze of shattered moonlight and shadow made by the eyrie, and I felt a little of that atavistic fear seeping into me. It was all too easy to imagine, in the failing light, the slow-paced strop of broad wings and a spiral of raptor silhouettes turning against the evening sky above, bigger and more angular than anything that had flown on earth in human memory.

I shrugged off the thought, irritably.

Let’s just focus on the real problems we’ve got, eh, Micky? It’s not like there aren’t enough of them.

The door of the cabin flexed open and light spilled out, making me abruptly aware of how chilly the air had turned.

‘You coming in to eat something?’ she asked.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Time on the mountain did nothing much to help.

The first morning, I slept in but it left me headachy and vague when I finally ventured out of the bedroom. Eishundo Organics didn’t design their sleeves for decadence, it seemed. Sylvie was not around, but the table was littered with breakfast items of one sort or another, tabs mostly pulled. I poked around in the debris and found an unused coffee canister, tabbed it and drank it standing at the window. Half-recalled dreams skittered about in the back of my head, mostly cell-deep stuff about drowning. Legacy of the overlong time the sleeve had been tanked - I’d had the same thing at the beginning in the Uncleared. Mimint engagement and the rapid flow of life with Sylvie’s Slipins had damped it out in favour of more conventional flight-and-fight scenarios and reconstituted gibberish from the memories of my own overlaid consciousness.

‘You are awake,’ said Dig 301, glimmering into existence at the edges of my vision.

I glanced over at her and raised my coffee canister. ‘Getting there.’

‘Your colleague left a message for you. Would you like to hear it?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Micky, I’m going for a walk into town.’ Sylvie’s voice came out of the construct’s mouth without a corresponding shift in visuals. In my fragile state of wakefulness, it hit me harder than it should have. Spikily incongruous, and an unwelcome reminder of my central problem. ‘Bury myself in the datawash down there. I want to see if I can get the net up and running, maybe use it to call through to Orr and the others. See what’s going on over there. I’ll bring back some stuff. Message ends.’

The sudden re-emergence of the construct’s own voice made me blink. I nodded and carried my coffee to the table. Cleared some of the breakfast litter away from the datacoil and brooded on it for a while. Dig 301 hovered at my back.

‘So I can get into Millsport University through this, right? Search their general stack?’

‘It will be quicker if you ask me,’ said the construct modestly.

‘Alright. Do me a précis search on.’ I sighed. ‘Quellcrist F—’

‘Commencing.’ Whether out of boredom at the years of disuse or just poor intonation recognition, the construct was already off and running. The datacoil brightened and expanded. A miniature copy of Dig 301’s head and shoulders appeared near the top and started in on the précis. Illustrative images tumbled into the space beneath. I watched, yawning, and let it run. ‘Found, one, Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed. Quellcrist is a species of shallow-water seaweed, ochre in colour, found mostly in temperate zones. Though containing some nutrients, it does not compare well in this with Earth-origin or purpose-bred hybrid species and is not therefore considered a sufficiently economic food crop to cultivate.’

I nodded. Not where I wanted to start, but—

‘Some medicinal substances may be extracted from mature Quellcrist strands but outside of certain small communities in the south of the Millsport Archipelago, the practice is uncommon. Quellcrist is in fact remarkable only for its unusual life cycle. If and when stranded in waterless conditions for long periods of time, the plant’s pods dry out to a black powder which can be carried by the wind over hundreds of kilometres. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into microfronds from which a whole plant may grow in a matter of weeks.

‘Found, two, Quellcrist Falconer, nom de guerre of Settlement-Years insurgent leader and political thinker Nadia Makita, born Millsport, April 18th 47 (Colonial Reckoning), died October 33rd 105. Only child of Millsport journalist Stefan Makita and marine engineer Fusako Kimura. Makita studied demodynamics at Millsport University and published a controversial master’s thesis, Gender Role Leakage and the New Mythology as well as three collections of verse in Stripjap, which quickly attained cult status among the Millsport literati. In later life—’

‘Can you give me a little closer focus here, Dig.’

‘In the winter of 67, Makita left academia, reputedly turning down both a generous offer of a research post within the faculty of social sciences and literary patronage from a leading member of the First Families. Between October 67 and May 71, she travelled widely on Harlan’s World, supported partly by her parents and partly through a variety of menial jobs including belaweed cutter and ledgefruit harvester. It is generally thought that Makita’s experiences among these workers helped to harden her political convictions. Pay and conditions for both groups were uniformly poor, with debilitating illnesses common on the belaweed farms and fall fatalities high among the ledgefruit workers.

‘In any event, by the beginning of 69, Makita was publishing articles in the radical journals New Star and Sea of Change in which a clear departure can be traced from the liberal reformist tendency she had evinced as a student (and to which her parents both subscribed). In its place, she proposed a new revolutionary ethic which borrowed from existing strands of extremist thought but was remarkable for the vitriol with which said strands were themselves savagely critiqued almost as much as ruling class policy. This approach did nothing to endear her to the radical intelligentsia of the period and she found herself, though recognised as a brilliant thinker, increasingly isolated from the revolutionary mainstream. Lacking a descriptor for her new political theory, she named it Quellism via an article The Occasional Revolution, in which she argued that modern revolutionaries must when deprived of nourishment by oppressive forces blow away across the land like Quellcrist dust, ubiquitous and traceless but bearing within them the power of revolutionary regeneration where and whensoever fresh nourishment may arise. It is generally accepted that her own adoption of the name Quellcrist followed shortly after and derives from this same source of inspiration. The origin of the surname Falconer, however, remains in dispute.

‘With the outbreak of the Kossuth belaweed riots in May 71 and the resulting crackdown, Makita made her first appearance as a guerrilla in—’

‘Hold it.’ The canister coffee wasn’t great and the steady march of comfortably familiar fact had grown hypnotic as I sat there. I yawned again and got up to toss the canister. ‘Okay, maybe not that close-focused after all. Can we skip further forward.’

‘A revolution,’ said Dig 301 obligingly, ‘which the newly ascendant Quellists could not hope to win whilst holding down internal opposition from—’

‘Further than that. Let’s get to the second front.’

‘Fully twenty-five years later, that seemingly rhetorical boast now at last came to fruition as a working axiom. To use Makita’s own imagery, the Quellcrist powder that Konrad Harlan’s self-described harrowing storm of justice had blown far and wide in the aftermath of the Quellist defeat now sprouted new resistance in a dozen different places. Makita’s second front began exactly as she had predicted it would, but this time the insurgency dynamic had shifted beyond recognition. In the context of . . .’

Digging around in the packs for more coffee, I let the narrative wash over me. This too I knew. By the time of the second front, Quellism was no longer the new fish on the reef. A generation of quiet incubation under the heel of the Harlanite crackdown had made it the only radical force left on the World. Other tendencies brandished their guns or sold their souls and were taken down all the same, stripped back to a bitter and disillusioned rump of hasbeens by Protectorate-backed government forces. The Quellists meanwhile simply slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita had always argued they should be prepared to do. Technology has given us access to timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of - we must be prepared to use that timescale, to live on that timescale, if we are to realise our own dreams. And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger and fed at core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising; the whisper that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.

If the semi-mythical nature of her twenty-five-year existence as a fugitive had been difficult for the security forces to get to grips with, Nadia Makita’s return was worse. She was fifty-three years old but sleeved in new flesh, impossible even for intimate acquaintances to identify. She stalked through the ruins of the previous revolution like a vengeful ghost and her first victims were the backbiters and betrayers from within the ranks of the old alliance. This time, there would be no factional squabbles to diffract the focus, hamstring the Quellist lead and sell her out to the Harlanites. The neoMaoists, the Communitarians, the New Sun Path, the Parliament Gradualists and the Social Libertarians. She sought them out as they sat in their dotage, muttering over their respective fumbled grabs at power, and she slaughtered them all.

By the time she turned on the First Families and their tame assembly, it was no longer a revolution.

It was the Unsettlement.

It was a war.

Three years, and the final assault on Millsport.

I tabbed the second coffee and drank it while Dig 301 read the story to its close. As a kid, I’d heard it countless times and always hoped each telling for a last minute reversal, a reprieve from the inevitable tragedy.

‘With Millsport firmly in the hands of government forces, the Quellist assault broken and a moderate compromise being brokered in the assembly, Makita perhaps believed that her enemies would have other more pressing matters to attend to before hunting her down. She had above all believed in their love of expediency, but faulty intelligence led her to misjudge the vital role her own capture or elimination had to play in the peace accord. By the time the error was realised, flight was all but impossible . . .’

Scratch the ‘all but’. Harlan sent more warships to ring the Alabardos Crater than had been deployed in any single naval engagement of the war. Crack helicopter pilots flew their craft at the upper edges of the four-hundred-metre limit with semi-suicidal brinkmanship. Spec ops snipers crammed inside, armed with weapons as heavy as it was thought the orbitals’ parameters would permit. Orders were to bring down any escaping aircraft by all and any means including, if necessary, mid-air collision.

‘In a final, desperate attempt to save her, Makita’s followers risked a high-level flight in a stripped-down jetcopter which it was believed the orbital platforms might ignore. However—’

‘Yeah, okay, Dig. That’ll do.’ I drained my coffee. However, they fucked up. However, the plan was flawed (or possibly a deliberate betrayal). However, a lance of angelfire lashed down from the sky over Alabardos and carved the jetcopter into a flash-burnt mid-air image of itself. However, Nadia Makita floated gently down to the ocean as randomised organic molecules amongst metallic ash. I didn’t need to hear it again. ‘What about the escape legends?’

‘As with all heroic figures, legends about Quellcrist Falconer’s secret escape from real death are rife.’ Dig 301’s voice seemed faintly tinged with reproach, but that might have been my groggy imagination. ‘There are those who believe she never entered the jetcopter in the first place and that later she slipped away from Alabardos disguised among the occupying ground troops. More credible theories derive from the idea that at some point before her death, Falconer’s consciousness was backed up and that she was revived once the post-war hysteria had died down.’

I nodded. ‘So where would they have stored her?’

‘Beliefs vary.’ The construct raised one elegant hand and extended slim fingers in sequence. ‘Some claim she was needlecast offworld, either to a deep-space datavault—’

‘Oh yeah, that’s likely.’

‘—or to another of the Settled Worlds where she had friends. Adoracion and Nkrumah’s Land are the favourites. Another theory suggests that she was stored after sustaining a combat injury in New Hokkaido from which she was expected to die. That when she recovered, her followers abandoned or forgot the copy—’

‘Yep. As you would with your honoured hero-leader’s consciousness. ’

Dig 301 frowned at the interruption. ‘The theory presupposes widespread, chaotic fighting, extensive sudden deaths and a breakdown of overall communication. Such salients did occur at various stages in the New Hokkaido campaigns.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Millsport is another theorised location. Historians of the period have argued that the Makita family was sufficiently elevated among the middle class to have had access to discreet storage facilities. Many data brokerage firms have successfully fought legal battles to maintain the anonymity of such stacks. The total discreet storage capacity in the Millsport metropolitan zone is estimated at over—’

‘So which theory do you believe?’

The construct stopped so abruptly her mouth stayed open. A ripple blinked through the projected presence. Tiny machine-code specs shimmered briefly into existence at her right hip, left breast and across her eyes. Her voice took the flattened tone of rote.

‘I am a Harkany Datasystems service construct, enabled at basic interactional level. I cannot answer that question.’

‘No beliefs, huh?’

‘I perceive only data and the probability gradients it provides.’

‘Sounds good to me. Do the math. What’s the majority probability here?’

‘The highest likelihood outcome from the data available is that Nadia Makita was aboard the Quellist jetcopter at Alabardos, was vaporised with it by orbital fire and no longer exists.’

I nodded again and sighed.

‘Right.’

Sylvie came back a couple of hours later, carrying fresh fruit and a hotbox full of spiced shrimpcakes. We ate without talking much.

‘Did you get through?’ I asked her at one point.

‘No.’ She shook her head, chewing. ‘There’s something wrong. I can feel it. I can feel them out there, but I can’t pin down enough for a transmission link.’

Her eyes lowered, creased in a frown that looked like pain.

‘There’s something wrong,’ she repeated quietly.

‘You didn’t take the scarf off, did you?’

She looked at me. ‘No. I didn’t take the scarf off. That doesn’t affect functionality, Micky. It just pisses me off.’

I shrugged. ‘You and me both.’

Her eyes tracked to the pocket where I habitually kept the excised cortical stacks, but she said nothing.

We stayed out of each other’s way for the rest of the day. Sylvie sat at the datacoil most of the time, periodically inducing shifts in the coloured display without touching it or speaking. At one point, she went into her bedroom and lay there for an hour, staring at the ceiling. Glancing in on my way past to the bathroom, I saw her lips moving silently. I took a shower, stood by the window, ate fruit and drank coffee I didn’t want. Eventually I went outside and wandered around the margins of the eyrie’s base, talking desultorily to Dig 301 who, for some reason, had taken it upon herself to tag along. Maybe she was there to make sure I didn’t deface anything.

An undefined tension sat in the cold mountain air. Like sex unperformed, like bad weather coming in.

We can’t stay like this forever, I knew. Something has to give.

But instead it got dark and after another monosyllabic meal, we went to our separate beds early. I lay in the deadened quiet of the cabin’s soundproofing, imagining night sounds that mostly belonged to a climate much further south. It hit me suddenly that I should have been there nearly two months back. Envoy conditioning - focus on your immediate surroundings and cope - had kept me from thinking about it much over the past several weeks, but whenever I had time my mind slipped back to Newpest and the Weed Expanse. It wasn’t like anyone would be missing me exactly, but appointments had been made and now broken, and Radul Segesvar would be wondering if my silent disappearance might in fact signify detection and capture, with all the associated grief that could bring home to him on the Expanse. Segesvar owed me, but it was a debt of arguable worth and with the southern mafias, it doesn’t do to push that angle too hard. The haiduci don’t have the ethical discipline of the yakuza. And at a couple of months silently overdue, I was pushing it to the limit.

My hands were itching again. Gene-twitch of the desire to grab a rock surface and scale it the fuck out of here.

Face it, Micky. It’s time to cut loose from this. Your deCom days are over. Fun while it lasted, and it got you a new face and these gekko hands, but enough’s enough. It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

I turned on my side and stared at the wall. On the other side, Sylvie would be lying in the same quiet, the same automould isolation. Maybe the same harbour chop of distressed sleep as well.

What am I supposed to do? Leave her?

You’ve done worse.

I saw Orr’s accusatory stare. You don’t fucking touch her.

Heard Lazlo’s voice. I’m trusting you, Micky.

Yeah, my own voice jeered through me. He’s trusting Micky. Takeshi Kovacs, he hasn’t met yet.

And if she is who she says she is?

Oh, come on. Quellcrist Falconer? You heard the machine. Quellcrist Falconer got turned into airborne ash at seven hundred metres above Alabardos.

Then who is she? The ghost, the one in the stack. Maybe she’s not Nadia Makita, but she sure as hell thinks she is. And she sure as fuck isn’t Sylvie Oshima. So who is she?

No idea. Is that supposed to be your problem?

I don’t know, is it?

Your problem is that the yakuza have hired your own sweet self out of some archive stack to take you down. Very fucking poetic and you know what, he’ll probably do not a bad job for them. He’ll certainly have the resources - a global writ, remember. And you can bet the incentive scheme has a real fucking edge on it. You know the rules on double sleeving.

And at the moment the only thing linking all this to that sleeve you’re wearing is the woman next door and her low-grade mercenary pals. So the sooner you cut loose from them, head south and get on with the job in hand, the better for all concerned.

The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.

And stop fucking calling me that.

Impatiently, I threw off the cover and got out of bed. I cracked the door and saw an empty room beyond. The table and the weaving datacoil, bright in the darkness, the bulk of our two packs leaning together in a corner. Hotei light painted the shapes of the windows in pale orange on the floor. I trod naked through the moonsplash and crouched by the packs, rooting around for a can of amphetamine cola.

Fuck sleep.

I heard her behind me, and turned with a cold, unfamiliar unease feathering my bones. Not knowing who I’d be face to face with.

‘You too, huh?’

It was Sylvie Oshima’s voice, Sylvie Oshima’s slightly quizzical lupine look as she stood facing me with arms wrapped around herself. She was naked as well, breasts gathered up and pressed in the V of her arms like a gift she planned to give me. Hips tilted in mid-step, one curved thigh slightly behind the other. Hair in tangled disarray around her sleep-smudged face. In the light from Hotei, her pale skin took on tones of warm copper and fireglow. She smiled uncertainly.

‘I keep waking up. Feels like my head’s running on overdrive.’ She nodded at the cola can in my hand. ‘That isn’t going to help, you know.’

‘I don’t feel like sleeping.’ My voice came out a little hoarse.

‘No.’ The smile inked out to sudden seriousness. ‘I don’t feel like sleeping either. I feel like doing what you wanted before.’

She unfolded her arms and her breasts hung free. A little self-consciously, she raised her arms and pushed back the mass of her hair, pressing her hands to the back of her head. She shifted her legs so that her thighs brushed together. Between the angles of her lifted elbows, she was watching me carefully.

‘Do you like me like this?’

‘I.’ The posture raised and modelled her breasts higher on her chest. I could feel the blood rushing into my cock. I cleared my throat. ‘I like you like that very much.’

‘Good.’

And she stood without moving, watching me. I dropped the cola can on top of the pack it had come from and took a step towards her. Her arms unlinked and draped themselves around my shoulders, tightening across my back. I filled one hand with the soft weight of her breast, reached down with the other to the juncture of her thighs and the remembered dampness that—

‘No, wait.’ She pushed the lower hand away. ‘Not there, not yet.’

It was a tiny jarring moment, a jolt to expectations mapped out in the bubblefab two days earlier. I shrugged it off and gathered both hands to the breast I held, squeezing the nipple forward and sucking it into my mouth. She reached down and took my erection in her hand, stroking it back and forth with a touch that seemed forever on the point of letting go. I frowned, remembering a harder, more confident grip from before, and closed her hand tighter with my own. She chuckled.

‘Oh, sorry.’

Stumbling a little, I pushed her to the edge of the table, pulled loose of her grip and knelt on the floor in front of her. She murmured something deep in her throat and spread her legs a little, leaning back and bracing herself on the table top with both hands.

‘I want your mouth on me,’ she said thickly.

I ran spread hands up her thighs and pressed the ball of each thumb either side of her cunt. A shiver ran through her and her lips parted. I bent my head and slid my tongue inside her. She made a tight, caught-up sound and I grinned. She felt the smile somehow and one hand slapped me across the shoulder.

‘Bastard. Don’t you fucking stop, you bastard.’

I pushed her legs wider and went to work in earnest. Her hand came back to knead at my shoulder and neck and she shifted restlessly on the edge of table, hips tilting back and forth with the motion of my tongue. The hand moved to tangle in my hair. I managed another split grin against the pressure she was exerting but this time she was too far gone to say anything coherent. She started to murmur, whether to me or herself I couldn’t tell. At first it was simply the repeated syllables of assent, but as she tightened towards climax, something else began to emerge. Lost in what I was doing, it took me time to recognise it for what it was. In the throes of orgasm, Sylvie Oshima was chanting a skein of machine code.

She finished with a hard judder and two hands crushing my head into the juncture of her thighs. I reached back and gently prised her grip away, rose to my feet against her, grinning.

And found myself face to face with another woman.

It was impossible to define what had changed, but Envoy sense read it out for me and the absolute knowledge behind was like an elevator dropping through my stomach.

Nadia Makita was back.

She was there in the narrowing of the eyes and the deep quirk in one corner of her mouth that didn’t belong to any expression Sylvie Oshima owned. In a kind of hunger that licked around her face like flames, and in breath that came in short, harsh bursts as if the orgasm, once spent, was now creeping back in some mirror-image replay.

‘Hello there, Micky Serendipity,’ she husked.

Her breathing slowed and her mouth twisted into a grin to replace the one that had just melted off my own face. She slipped off the table, reached down and touched me between the legs. It was the old, confident grasp I remembered, but I’d lost a lot of my erection with the shock.

‘Something wrong?’ she murmured.

‘I—’ She was using both hands on me like someone gently gathering in rope. I felt myself swelling again. She watched my face.

‘Something wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said quickly.

‘Good.’

She slid elegantly down on one knee, eyes still locked on mine, and took the head of my cock into her mouth. One hand stayed on the shaft, stroking while the other found its way to my right thigh and curled around the muscle there, gripping hard.

This is fucking insane, a cold, mission-time shard of Envoy selfhood told me. You need to stop this right now.

And her eyes still on me, as her tongue and teeth and hand drove me into the explosion.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Later, we lay draped wetly across each other in my bed, hands still loosely linked from the last frantic clasping. Our skins were sticky in patches with the mixed juices we’d spilled, and repeated climaxes had stung our muscles into lax submission. Flash images of what we’d done to and with each other kept replaying behind my eyes. I saw her crouched on top of me, crossed hands flat on my chest, pressing down hard with each movement. I saw myself slamming into her from behind. I saw her cunt descending onto my face. I saw her writhing under me, sucking wildly on the central cord of her own hair while I thrust between legs she had crooked over my hips like a vice. I saw myself taking the cord, wet with her saliva, into my own mouth as she laughed into my face and came with a powerful clenching of muscles that dragged me down after her.

But when she started talking to me, the altered lilt of her Amanglic sent an instant shiver down my spine.

‘What?’ She must have felt the shudder go through me.

‘Nothing.’

She rolled her head to face me. I could feel her stare pinned to the side of my face like heat. ‘I asked you a question. What’s the matter?’

I closed my eyes briefly.

‘Nadia, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nadia Makita.’

‘Yes.’

I glanced sideways at her. ‘How the fuck did you get here, Nadia?’

‘What is that, a metaphysical question?’

‘No. Technological.’ I propped myself up on one arm and gestured at her body. Envoy response conditioning or not, most of me was amazed at the detached sense of calm I was managing. ‘You can’t be unaware of what’s going on here. You live in the command software, and sometimes you get out. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess you come up through the basic instinct channels, riding the surge. Sex, maybe fear or fury too. Stuff like that blots out a lot of the conscious mind’s functions, and that’d give you the space. But—’

‘You’re some kind of expert, are you?’

‘Used to be.’ I watched her for reaction. ‘I was an Envoy once.’

‘A what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. What I want to know is while you’re here, what’s happened to Sylvie Oshima?’

‘Who?’

‘You’re wearing her fucking body, Nadia. Don’t get obtuse on me.’

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. ‘I don’t really want to talk about this.’

‘No, you probably don’t. And you know what, nor do I. But sooner or later, we’re going to have to. You know that.’

Long quiet. She opened her legs and rubbed absently at a patch of flesh on her inner thigh. She reached across and squeezed my shrunken prick. I took her hand and pushed it gently away.

‘Forget it, Nadia. I’m wrung out. Even Mitzi Harlan couldn’t get another hard-on out of me tonight. It’s time to talk. Now where is Sylvie Oshima?’

She rolled away from me again.

‘I’m supposed to be this woman’s keeper?’ she asked bitterly. ‘You think I’m in control of this?’

‘Maybe not. But you’ve got to have some idea.’

More quiet, but this time it quivered with tension. I waited. Finally, she rolled back to face me, eyes desperate.

‘I dream this fucking Oshima, do you know that,’ she hissed. ‘She’s a fucking dream, how am I supposed to know where she goes when I wake up?’

‘Yeah, she dreams you too, apparently.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

I sighed. ‘Tell me what you dream.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.’

The eyes flared.

‘Alright,’ she snapped. ‘I dream that you scare her. How’s that? I dream that she wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests. That she wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity. Or just fuck her and leave her. If you were thinking of getting your dick up this woman, Micky, or whoever the fuck you really are, I’d forget it. You’re better off sticking with me.’

I let that one soak out in silence for a moment. She flexed a smile at me.

‘This the kind of thing you wanted to hear?’

I shrugged. ‘It’ll do to be going on with. Did you push her into the sex? To get access?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’

‘I can probably find out from her.’

‘You’re assuming she’ll be back.’ Another smile, more teeth this time. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

And on like that. We snapped and snarled at each other for a while longer, but beneath the weight of post-coital chemistry, none of it came to anything. In the end, I gave up and sat on the outer edge of the bed, staring out towards the main room and the Hotei-lit panels on the floor. A few minutes later, I felt her hand on my shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

‘Yeah? For what?’

‘I just realised I asked for this. I mean, I asked you what you were thinking about. If I didn’t want to know, why ask, right?’

‘There is that.’

‘It’s just.’ She hesitated. ‘Listen, Micky, I’m getting sleepy here. And I lied back there, I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back. I don’t know if I’ll wake up tomorrow morning or not. That’s enough to make anyone edgy, right?’

I stared at the orange stained floor in the other room. A momentary sense of vertigo came and went. I cleared my throat.

‘There’s always the amphetamine cola,’ I said roughly.

‘No. Sooner or later, I’ll have to sleep. It might as well be now. I’m tired, and worse than that I’m happy and relaxed. Feels like if I’ve got to go, this’ll do. It’s only chemical, I know, but I can’t hold out against it forever. And I think I will be back. Something’s telling me that. But right now I don’t know when, and I don’t know where I’m going. And that scares me. Could you.’ Another pause. I heard the click as she swallowed in the quiet. ‘Would you mind holding me while I go under?’

Orange moonlight on a worn and darkened floor.

I reached back for her hand.

Like most of the combat custom I’d ever worn, the Eishundo sleeve came fitted with an internal wake-up. At the hour I’d fixed in my head, whatever dreams I was having coalesced into the rising rim of a tropical sun over quiet waters. Scent of fruit and coffee drifting from somewhere unseen and the cheerful murmur of voices off. The cool of sand at early morning under my naked feet, and a faint but persistent breeze in my face. Sound of breakers

Vchira Beach? Already?

My hands were balled in the pockets of faded surfslacks, traces of sand in the lining of the pockets that—

The sense impressions vanished abruptly as I woke up. No coffee, and no beach to drink it on. No sand under my feet or my uncurling fingers. There was sunlight, but it was altogether thinner than in the wake-up imaging, strained colourlessly through the windows in the other room and into a grey, downward pressing quiet.

I turned over gingerly and looked at the face of the woman sleeping next to me. She didn’t move. I remembered the fear in Nadia Makita’s eyes the night before as she let herself slide fractions at a time into sleep. Increments of consciousness slipping like taut rope through her hands and away, and then stopped as she flinched and blinked herself awake again. And then the moment, abrupt and and unawaited, when she let go completely and didn’t come back. Now I lay and watched the peace on her face as she slept, and it didn’t help.

I slid out of bed and dressed quietly in the other room. I didn’t want to be around when she woke up.

I certainly didn’t want to wake her myself.

Dig 301 shaded into existence opposite me and opened her mouth. Combat neurachem got there first. I made a slicing gesture across my own throat and jerked a thumb back at the bedroom. Swept up my jacket from the back of a chair, shouldered my way into it and nodded at the door.

‘Outside,’ I murmured.

Outside, the day was shaping up better than its first impressions. The sun was wintry, but you could get warm if you stood in its rays directly and the cloud cover was starting to break up. Daikoku stood like the ghost of a scimitar blade to the south west and there was a column of specks circling slowly out over the ocean, ripwings at a guess. Down below, a couple of vessels were visible at the limits of my unaided vision. Tekitomura made a backdrop mutter in the still air. I yawned and looked at the amphetamine cola in my hand, then tucked it into my jacket. I was as awake as I wanted to be right now.

‘So what did you want?’ I asked the construct beside me.

‘I thought you would like to know that the site has visitors.’

The neurachem slammed on line. Time turned to sludge around me as the Eishundo sleeve went to combat aware. I was staring sideways in disbelief at Dig 301 when the first blast cut past me. I saw the flare of disrupted air where it came through the construct’s projected presence and then I was spinning away sideways as my jacket caught fire.

‘Motherfu—’

No gun, no knife. I’d left them both inside. No time to reach the door, and Envoy instinct kicked me away from it anyway. Later, I’d realise what the situational intuition already knew - going back inside was a bolthole suicide. Jacket still in flames, I tumbled into the cover of the cabin wall. The blaster beam flashed again, nowhere near me. They were firing at Dig 301 again, misreading her for a solid human target.

Not exactly ninja-grade combat skills, flashed through my mind. These guys are the local hired help.

Yeah but they have guns and you don’t.

Time to change arenas.

Fire-retardant material in my jacket had the flames down to smoke and heat across my ribs. The scorched fibres oozed damping polymer. I drew one hard breath and sprinted.

Yells behind me, boiling instantly from disbelief to anger. Maybe they thought they’d taken me down with the first shot, maybe they just weren’t all that bright. It took them a pair of seconds to start shooting. By then I was almost to the next cabin. Blaster fire crackled in my ears. Heat flared close to my hip and my flesh cringed. I flinched sideways, got the cabin at my back and scanned the ground ahead.

Three more cabins, gathered in a rough arc on the ground quarried out by the original archaeologues. Beyond them, the eyrie lifted off into the sky from massive cantilevered supports, like some vast premillennial rocket poised for launch. I hadn’t been inside the day before, there was altogether too much abrupt space underfoot and a straight drop five hundred metres to the slanted mountainside below. But I knew from previous experience what the alien perspectives of Martian architecture could do to human perceptions, and I knew the Envoy conditioning would hold up.

Local hired help. Hold that thought.

They’d come in after me hesitantly at best, confused by the dizzying swoop of the interior, maybe even spiked with a little superstitious dread if I was lucky. They’d be off balance, they’d be afraid.

They’d make mistakes.

Which made the eyrie a perfect killing ground.

I bolted across the remaining open space, slipped between two of the cabins and made for the nearest outcropping of Martian alloy, where it rose out of the rock like a tree root five metres thick. The archaeologues had left a set of metal steps bolted into the ground beside it. I took them three at a time and stepped onto the outcropping, boots slithering on alloy the colour of bruises. I steadied myself against a bas-relief technoglyph facing that formed the side of the closest cantilever support as it extended outward into the air. The support was at least ten metres high, but a couple of metres to my left there was a ladder epoxied to the bas-relief surface. I grabbed a rung and started climbing.

More shouts from back among the cabins. No shooting. It sounded as if they were checking corners, but I didn’t have the time to crank up the neurachem and make sure. Sweat jumped from my hands as the ladder creaked and shifted under my weight. The epoxy hadn’t taken well to the Martian alloy. I doubled my speed, reached the top and swung off with a tiny grunt of relief. Then I lay flat on top of the cantilever support, breathing and listening. Neurachem brought me the sounds of a badly organised search thrashing about below. Someone was trying to shoot the lock off one of the cabins. I stared up at the sky and thought about it for a moment.

‘Dig? You there?’ Voice a murmur.

‘I am in communication range, yes.’ The construct’s words seemed to come out of the air beside my ear. ‘You need speak no louder than you are. I assume from the situational context you do not wish me to become visible in your vicinity.’

‘You assume right. What I would like you to do is, on my command, become visible inside one of the locked-up cabins down there. Better yet, more than one if you can handle multiple projections. Can you do that?’

‘I am enabled for one-to-one interaction up to and including every member of the original Dig 301 team at any given time, plus a guest potential of seven.’ It was hard to tell at this volume, but there seemed to be a trace of amusement in the construct’s voice. ‘This gives me a total capacity of sixty-two separate representations. ’

‘Yeah, well, three or four should do for now.’ I rolled with painstaking care onto my front. ‘And, listen, can you project as me?’

‘No. I can choose among an index of personality projections, but I am not able to alter them in any way.’

‘You have any males?’

‘Yes, though fewer options than—’

‘Alright, that’s fine. Just choose a few out of the index that look like me. Male, about my build.’

‘When do you wish this to commence?’

I got my hands positioned under me.

‘Now.’

‘Commencing.’

It took a couple of seconds, and then chaos erupted among the cabins below. Blasterfire crackled back and forth, punctuated with shouts of warning and the sound of running feet. Fifteen metres above it all, I pushed hard with both hands, came up in a crouch and then exploded into the sprint.

The cantilever arm ran out fifty-odd metres over empty space, then buried itself seamlessly in the main body of the eyrie. Wide oval entrances gaped at the join. The dig team had attempted to attach a safety rail along the top of the arm, but as with the ladder, the epoxy hadn’t done well over time. In places the cabling had torn loose and now hung over the sides, elsewhere it was simply gone. I grimaced and narrowed focus to the broad flange at the end where the arm joined the main structure. Held the sprint.

Neurachem reeled in a voice shouting above the others—

‘—pid motherfuckers, cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fucking fire! Up there, he’s up there!’

Ominous quiet. I put on desperate increments of speed. Then the air was ripped through with blast beams. I skidded, nearly went over a gap in the rail. Flung myself forward again.

Dig 301 at my ear, thunderous under neurachem amp.

‘Portions of this site are currently considered unsafe—’

My own wordless snarl.

Blast heat at my back and the stink of ionised air.

The new voice below again, neurachemmed in close. ‘Fucking give me that, will you. I’ll show you how to—’

I threw myself sideways across the flange. The blast I knew was coming cut a scorching pain across my back and shoulder. Pretty sharp shooting at that range with a weapon that clumsy. I went down, rolled in approved fashion, came up and dived for the nearest oval opening.

Blasterfire chased me inside.

It took them nearly half an hour to come in after me.

Holed up in the swooping Martian architecture, I strained with the neurachem and followed the argument as best I could. I couldn’t find a vantage point this low in the structure that would give me a view of the outside - fucking Martian builders - but peculiar funnelling effects in the eyrie’s internal structure brought me the sound of voices in gusts. The gist of what was said wasn’t hard to sort out. The hired help wanted to pack up and go home, their leader wanted my head on a stick.

You couldn’t blame him. In his place, I wouldn’t have been any different. You don’t go back to the yakuza with half a contract fulfilled. And you certainly don’t turn your back on an Envoy. He knew that better than anyone there.

He sounded younger than I’d expected.

‘—believe you’re fucking scared of this place. For Christ’s sake, you all grew up just down the hill. It’s only a fucking ruin.’

I glanced around at the billowing curves and hollows, felt the gentle but insistent way their lines sucked focus upward until your eyes started to ache. Hard morning light fell in from unseen vents overhead, but somehow on the way down it softened and changed. The clouded bluish alloy surfaces seemed to suck it in and the reflected light that came back was oddly muted. Below the mezzanine level I’d climbed to, patches of gloom alternated with gashes and holes in flooring where no sane human architect would have put them. A long way below that, the mountainside showed grey rock and sparse vegetation.

Only a ruin. Right.

He was younger than I’d expected.

For the first time, I started to wonder constructively exactly how young. At an absolute minimum, he was certainly short a couple of formative experiences I’d had around Martian artefacts.

‘Look, he’s not even fucking armed.’

I pitched my voice to carry outside.

‘Hoy, Kovacs! You’re so fucking confident, why don’t you come in and get me yourself ?’

Sudden silence. Some muttering. I thought I caught a muffled guffaw from one of the locals. Then his voice, raised to match mine.

‘That’s good eavesdropping gear they fitted you with.’

‘Isn’t it.’

‘You planning to give us a fight, or just listen in and shout cheap abuse?’

I grinned. ‘Just trying to be helpful. But you can have a fight if you want it - just come on in. Bring the hired help too, if you must.’

‘I’ve got a better idea. How about I let my hired help run an open-all-orifices train on your travelling companion, as long as it takes you to come out? You could use your neurachem to listen in on that as well if you like. Although, to be honest, the sound’ll probably carry enough without. They’re enthusiastic, these boys.’

The fury spiked up through me, too fast for rational thought. Muscles in my face skipped and juddered, and the frame of the Eishundo sleeve cabled rigid. For two sluggish heartbeats, he had me. Then the Envoy systems came soaking coldly through the emotion, bleaching it back out for assessment.

He isn’t going to do that. If Tanaseda traced you through Oshima and the Slipins, it’s because he knows she’s implicated in Yukio Hirayasu’s death. And if he knows that, he’ll want her intact. Tanaseda is old school and he’s promised an old-school execution. He isn’t going to want damaged goods.

And besides, this is you we’re talking about. You know what you’re capable of and it isn’t this.

I was younger then. Now. I am. I wrestled the concept in my head. Out there. I’m younger out there. There’s no telling—

Yes there is. This is Envoy bluff and you know it, you’ve used it enough yourself.

‘Nothing to say about that?’

‘We both know you won’t do it, Kovacs. We both know who you’re working for.’

This time the pause before he called back was barely noticeable. Good recovery, very impressive.

‘You seem remarkably well informed for a man on the run.’

‘It’s my training.’

‘Soak up the local colour, huh?’

Virginia Vidaura’s words at Envoy induction, a subjective century ago. I wondered how long ago she’d said it to him.

‘Something like that.’

‘Tell me something, man, ’cause I’d genuinely like to know. With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living? As a career move, I got to say it puzzles me.’

A cold knowledge crept up through me as I listened. I grimaced and shifted my position slightly. Said nothing.

‘Serendipity, right? It’s Serendipity?’

‘Well, I have got another name,’ I shouted back. ‘But some fuckhead stole it. Until I get it back, Serendipity’s fine.’

‘Maybe you won’t get it back.’

‘Nah, it’s good of you to worry, but I know the fuckhead in question. He isn’t going to be a problem for much longer.’

The twitch was tiny, barely a missed beat. Only the Envoy sense picked it up, the anger, shut down as rapidly as it flared.

‘Is that so?’

‘Yeah, like I said. Real fuckhead. Strictly a short-lived thing.’

‘That sounds like overconfidence to me.’ His voice had changed fractionally. Somewhere in there, I’d stung him. ‘Maybe you don’t know this guy as well as you like to think.’

I barked a laugh. ‘Are you kidding? I taught him every fucking thing he knows. Without me—’

And there. The figure I’d known was coming. The one I couldn’t listen for with neurachem while I traded veiled insults with the voice outside. A crouched, black-clad form sliding in through the opening five metres under me, some kind of spec-ops eye-mask-and-sensor gear turning the head insectile and inhuman. Thermographic imaging, sonic locater, motion alert, at a probable minimum—

I was already falling. Pushed off from the ledge, boot-heels aligned to hit the neck below the masked head and snap it.

Something in the headgear warned him. He jumped sideways, looking up, twisting the blaster towards me. Beneath the mask, his mouth jerked open to yell. The blast cut through air I’d just dropped out of. I hit the floor crouched, a handsbreadth off his right elbow. Blocked the swing of the blaster barrel as it came round. The yell came out of his mouth, shivery with the shock. I struck upward into his throat with the blade of one hand and the sound choked to retching. He staggered. I straightened, went after him and chopped again.

There were two more of them.

Framed in the opening, side by side. The only thing that saved me was their incompetence. As the lead commando dropped strangling to death at my feet, either one could have shot me - instead, they both tried at the same time and tangled. I sprinted directly at them.

There are worlds I’ve been where you can gun down a man with a knife at ten metres and claim it as self defence. The legal argument is that it doesn’t take very long to close that gap and stab.

That much is true.

If you really know what you’re doing, you don’t even need the knife.

This was five metres or less. I got in a flurry of blows, stamping down at shin and instep, blocked weapons however I could, hooking an elbow round hard into a face. A blaster came loose and I fielded it. Triggered it in a savage close-quarters arc.

Muffled shrieks and a short-lived explosion of blood as flesh seared open and then cauterised. Steam wisped, and their bodies tumbled away from me. I had time for a hard breath, a glance down at the weapon in my hands - piece of shit Szeged Incandess - and then another blaster beam flared off the alloy surface beside my head. They were coming in force.

With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living?

Just fucking incompetent, I guess.

I backed up. Someone poked a head into the oval opening and I chased them away with a barely aimed burst of fire.

And too fucking fascinated with yourself for your own good.

I grabbed a projection one handed and hauled myself up, hooking my legs onto the wide, spiralling ramp that led back to my initial hiding place on the mezzanine. The Eishundo sleeve’s gekko grip failed on the alloy. I slipped, grabbed again in vain, and fell. Two new commandos burst through a gap to the left of the one I was covering. I fired randomly and low with the Szeged, trying to get back up. The beam chopped a foot off the commando on the right. She screamed and stumbled, clutched at her injured leg, toppled gracelessly and fell through a gash in the floor. Her second scream floated back up through the gap.

I came up off the ground and flung myself at her companion.

It was a clumsy fight, both of us hampered by the weapons we held. I lunged with the butt of the Szeged, he blocked and tried to level his own blaster. I smashed it aside and kicked at a knee. He turned the blow with a shin-kick of his own. I got the Szeged butt under his chin and rammed upward. He dropped his weapon and punched me hard simultaneously in the side of the throat and the groin. I reeled back, hung on somehow to the Szeged and suddenly had the distance to use it. Proximity sense screamed a warning at me through the pain. The commando ripped out a side-arm and pointed it. I flinched aside, ignoring the pain and the proximity warning in my head, levelled the blaster.

Sharp splatter from the gun in the commando’s hand. The cold wrap of a stunblast.

My hand spasmed open and the Szeged clattered away somewhere.

I staggered backwards and the floor vanished under my feet.

—fucking Martian builders—

I dropped out of the eyrie like a bomb, and fell wingless away from the rapidly contracting iris of my own consciousness.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.’

It was like a mantra, like an incantation, and someone seemed to have been singing it to me for hours. I wasn’t sure if I could have disobeyed it anyway - my left arm was an icy branch of numbness from fist to shoulder and my eyes seemed gummed shut. My shoulder felt wrenched, maybe dislocated. Elsewhere, my body throbbed with the more general ache of a stunblast hangover. I was cold everywhere.

‘Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t—’

‘I heard you the first time, Dig.’ My throat felt clogged. I coughed and an alarming dizziness swung through me. ‘Where am I?’

A brief hesitation. ‘Professor Serendipity, perhaps that information would be better dealt with later. Don’t open your left hand.’

‘Yeah, got it. Left hand, don’t open it. Is it fucked?’

‘No,’ said the construct reluctantly. ‘Apparently not. But it is the only thing holding you up.’

Shock, like a stake in the chest. Then the rolling wave of false calm as the conditioning kicked in. Envoys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing - waking up in unexpected places is part of the brief. You don’t panic, you just gather data and deal with the situation. I swallowed hard.

‘I see.’

‘You can open your eyes now.’

I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred metres of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.

The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-grey alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.

‘What’s going on, Dig?’ I croaked.

‘As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.’

‘Recovery bay?’ I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. ‘So how does that work?’

‘We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—’

‘Alright.’ I stared grimly up at my closed fist. ‘How long have I been out?’

‘Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high-altitude, high-risk environments.’

No shit.

How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me. They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realisation of the fall. Grabbing at something half-seen as the stunblast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.

A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked-muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.

‘Where are the others?’

‘They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.’

‘So they think I fell all the way.’

‘It appears so. The man you referred to as Kovacs has detailed some of his employees to begin a search at the base of the mountain. I understand they will try to recover your body along with that of the woman you mutilated in the firefight.’

‘And Sylvie? My colleague?’

‘They have taken her with them. I have recorded footage of—’

‘Not right now.’ I cleared my throat, noticing for the first time how parched it felt. ‘Look, you said there are openings. Ways back into the eyrie from here. Where’s the nearest?’

‘Behind the triflex downspire to your left, there is an entry port of ninety-three centimetres diameter.’

I craned my neck and spotted what I assumed Dig 301 was talking about. The downspire looked very much like a two-metre inverted witch’s hat that massive fists had crumpled badly in three different places. It was surfaced in uneven bluish facets that caught the shadowed light beneath the eyrie and gleamed as if wet. The lowest deformation brought its tip almost horizontal and offered a saddle of sorts that I thought I might be able to cling to. It was less than two metres from where I hung.

Easy. Nothing to it.

If you can make the jump with one arm crippled, that is.

If your trick hand grips better on Martian alloy than it did an hour ago upstairs.

If—

I reached up with my right arm and took hold of the loop of cable, close to my other hand. Very gently, I took up the tension and began to lift myself on the new grip. My left arm twinged as the weight came off it, and a jagged flash of heat spiked through the numbness. My shoulder creaked. The heat branched out across abused ligaments and started turning into something resembling pain. I tried to flex my left hand, but got nothing outside from a sparking sensation in the fingers. The pain in my shoulder swelled and began to soak down through the muscles of the arm. It felt as if, when it finally got going, it was going to hurt a lot.

I tried again with the fingers of my left hand. This time the sparking gave way to a bone-deep, pulsing ache that brought tears squirting into my eyes. The fingers would not respond. My grip was welded in place.

‘Do you wish me to alert emergency services?’

Emergency services: the Tekitomura police, closely followed by deCom security with tidings of Kurumaya’s displeasure, tipped-off local yakuza with the new me at their grinning head and who knew, maybe even the Knights of the New Revelation, if they could afford the police bribes and had been keeping up on current events.

‘Thanks,’ I said weakly. ‘I think I’ll manage.’

I glanced up at my clamped left hand, back at the triflex downspire, down at the drop. I drew a long hard breath. Then, slowly, I worked my right hand along the cable until it was touching its locked-up mate. Another breath and I hinged my body upward from the waist. Barely recovered nerve tissue in my stomach muscles sputtered protest. I hooked with my right foot, missed, flailed and hooked again. My ankle lodged over the cable. More weight came off my left arm. The pain began in earnest, racking explosions through the joints and down the muscles.

One more breath, one more glance d—

No, don’t fucking look down.

One more breath, teeth gritted.

Then I began, with thumb and forefinger, to unhinge my paralysed fingers one at a time from the cable.

I left the swooping bluish gloom of the eyrie’s interior half an hour later, still on the edge of a persistent manic giggle. The adrenalin humour stayed with me all the way along the cantilever arm, down the shaky archaeologue ladder - not easy with one arm barely functional - then the steps. I hit solid ground still smirking stupidly, and picked my way between the cabins with ingrained caution and tiny explosive snorts of hilarity. Even when I got back to the cabin we’d used, even inside and staring at the empty bed I’d left Sylvie in, I could feel the trace of the comedown grin twitching on and off my lips and the laughter still bubbled faintly in my stomach.

It had been a close thing.

Ungripping my fingers from the cable hadn’t been much fun, but compared with the rest of the escapade, it was a joy. Once released, my left arm dropped and hung at the end of a shoulder socket that ached like a bad tooth. It was as much use to me as a dead weight slung around my neck. A sustained minute of cursing before I could bring myself to then unsling my right foot, swing free by my right hand and use the momentum to make an ungainly leap sideways at the downspire. I grabbed, clawed, found that the Martians for once had built in a material that offered something approaching decent friction and clamped myself panting into the saddle at the bottom. I stayed like that for a good ten minutes, cheek pressed to the cold alloy.

Careful exploratory leaning and peering showed me the floor hatch Dig 301 had promised, within grasping distance if I stood up on the tip of the downspire. I flexed my left arm, got some response above the elbow and reckoned it might serve, if nothing else, as a wedge in the hatch. From that position, I could probably lever my legs up and inside.

Another ten minutes and I was sweatily ready to try.

A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.

Nothing to it.

Eventually, I got up and made my way out.

In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared, there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder. The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.

There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.

On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia. Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.

In too much of a hurry.

Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?

I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.

I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.

I wondered what he would do.

I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.

‘Dig?’

She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.

‘Professor Serendipity?’

‘You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?’

‘Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic metres of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—’

‘Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.’

‘Commencing.’

I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.

‘And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.’

*

He had a good body.

I skipped about in the footage for the best shots, got one as the intruders came up the mountain path towards the cabin. Froze it on him and stared for a while. He had some of the bulk you expect from battlefield custom, but there was a lilt to it, a way of stepping and standing that leaned more towards Total Body theatre than combat. Face a smooth blend of more racial variants than you’d usually get on Harlan’s World. Custom-cultured, then. Gene codes bought in from offworld. Skin tanned the colour of worn amber, eyes a startling blue. Broad, protruding cheekbones, a wide, full-lipped mouth and long, crinkled black hair bound back with a static braid. Very pretty.

And very pricey, even for the yakuza.

I quelled the faint scratching of disquiet and got Dig 301 to pan about a bit among the intruders. Another figure caught my eye. Tall and powerful, rainbow-maned. The site microcams yanked in a close-up of steel-lensed eyes and subcutaneous circuitry in a grim, pale face.

Anton.

Anton and at least a couple of slim wincefish types who preceded him up the path with the loose, in-step co-ordination of deCom operational pitch. One of them was the woman whose foot I’d shot off in the eyrie. Two, no three, more came behind the command head, standing out clearly from the rest of the party now that I was looking for that characteristic scattered-but-meshed pattern.

Somewhere in me, a faint grey sense of loss readied itself for recognition at the sight.

Anton and the Skull Gang

Kovacs had brought his New Hok hunting dogs back with him.

I thought back to the confusion of the firefight amidst the cabins and the eyrie, and it made some more sense. A boatload of yakuza enforcers and a deCom crew, mingled and getting in each other’s way. Very poor logistics for an Envoy. No way I would have made that mistake at his age.

What are you talking about? You just did make that mistake at his age. That’s you out there.

A faint shiver coiled down my spine.

‘Dig, move it up to the bedroom again. Where they pull her out.’

The coil jumped and shimmered. The woman with the tangled hyperwired hair blinked awake among twisted sheets. The crash of gunfire outside had woken her. Eyes wide as she registered what it was. Then the door burst open and the room filled with bulky forms brandishing hardware and yelling. When they saw what they had, the shouting powered down to chuckles. Weapons were put up and someone reached for her. She punched him in the face. A brief struggle flared and guttered out as weight of numbers squashed her speed reflexes. Sheets torn away, efficient disabling blows administered to thigh and solar plexus. While she wheezed on the floor, one grinning thug grabbed at a breast, groped between her legs and made pumped-hip rutting motions over her. A couple of his companions laughed.

I was seeing it for the second time. Still, the rage leapt up through me like flames. In my palms, the gekko spines sweated awake.

A second enforcer appeared in the doorway, saw what was going on and bellowed in furious Japanese. The thug leapt away from the woman on the floor. He made a nervous bow, a stammered apology. The newcomer stepped in close and backhanded the man three times with shattering force. The thug cowered against the wall. More yelling from the newcomer. Amidst some of the more colourful insults I’d ever heard in Japanese, he was telling someone to bring clothes for the captive.

By the time Kovacs got back from overseeing the hunt for himself, they had her dressed and seated on a chair in the centre of the cabin’s main living space. Her hands rested in her lap, wrists bound neatly, one over the other with a restraint patch you couldn’t see. The yakuza stood at a careful distance from her, weapons still out. The would-be romantic sulked in a corner, disarmed, one side of his mouth swollen, upper lip split. Kovacs’ eyes flickered over the damage and he turned to the enforcer at his side. A muttered exchange the microcams were not amped to pick up. He nodded, looked again at the woman before him. I read a curious hesitation in his stance.

Then he turned back to the cabin door.

‘Anton, you want to come in here?’

The Skull Gang command head stepped into the room. When the woman saw him, her mouth twisted.

‘You fucking sellout piece of shit.’

Anton’s lip curled, but he said nothing.

‘You know each other, I believe.’ But there was a faint question in Kovacs’ voice and he was still watching the woman before him.

Sylvie tipped her gaze at him. ‘Yeah, I know this asshole. And? Got something to do with you, has it, fuckhead?’

He stared at her, and I tensed in my chair. This segment was first time through for me, and I didn’t know what he’d do. What would I have done at that age? No, scratch that. What was I about to do at that age? My mind fled back through the silted-up decades of violence and rage, trying to anticipate.

But he only smiled.

‘No, Mistress Oshima. It has nothing to do with me any more. You are a package I have to deliver in good condition, that’s all.’

Someone muttered, someone else guffawed. Still cranked tight, my neurachem hearing caught a crude joke about packages. In the coil, my younger self paused. His eyes flickered to the man with the broken lip.

‘You. Come here.’

The enforcer didn’t want to. You could see it in his stance. But he was yakuza, and in the end it’s all face with them. He straightened up, met Kovacs’ eyes and stepped forward with a filed-tooth sneer. Kovacs looked back at him neutrally and nodded.

‘Show me your right hand.’

The yakuza tipped his head to one side, gaze still locked on Kovacs’ eyes. It was a gesture of pure insolence. He flipped up his hand, extended fingers making it a loosely bent blade. He inclined his head again, the other way, still staring deep into this tani piece of shit’s eyes.

Kovacs moved like whiplash on a broken trawler cable.

He snatched the offered hand at the wrist and twisted downward, blocking the other man’s response options with his body. He held the captured arm straight out and his other hand arced over the wrestling lock of both bodies, blaster pointed. A beam flared and sizzled.

The enforcer shrieked as his hand went up in flames. The blaster must have been powered down - most beam weapons will take a limb clean off, vaporised across the width of the blast. This one had only burnt away skin and flesh to the bone and tendon. Kovacs held the man a moment longer, then turned him loose with an elbow-strike cuff across the side of the head. The enforcer collapsed across the floor with his scorched hand clamped under his armpit and his trousers visibly stained. He was weeping uncontrollably.

Kovacs mastered his breathing and looked around the room. Stony faces stared back. Sylvie had turned hers away. I could almost smell the stench of cooked flesh.

‘Unless she attempts to escape, you do not touch her, you do not speak to her. Any of you. Is that clear? In this scheme of things, you matter less than the dirt under my fingernails. Until we get back to Millsport, this woman is a god to you. Is that clear?’

Silence. The yakuza captain bellowed in Japanese. Muttered assent crept out in the wake of the dressing down. Kovacs nodded and turned to Sylvie.

‘Mistress Oshima. If you’d like to follow me, please.’

She stared at him for a moment, then got to her feet and followed him out of the cabin. The yakuza filed after them, leaving their captain and the man on the floor. The captain stared at his injured enforcer for a moment, then booted him savagely in the ribs, spat on him and stalked out.

Outside, they’d loaded the three men I’d killed in the eyrie onto a fold-down grav stretcher rack. The yakuza captain detailed a man to drive it, then took point ahead of a protective phalanx around Kovacs and Sylvie. Beside and behind the stretcher rack, Anton and the four remaining members of the Skull Gang formed up into a lax rearguard. Dig’s outdoor microcams followed the little procession out of sight along the path down to Tekitomura.

Stumbling fifty metres behind them all, still nursing his ruined and as yet untreated hand, came the disgraced enforcer who had dared to touch Sylvie Oshima.

I watched him go, trying to make sense of it.

Trying to make it fit.

I was still trying when Dig 301 asked if I was finished, if wanted to see something else. I told her no, absently. In my head, Envoy intuition was already doing what needed to be done.

Setting fire to my preconceptions and burning them to the ground.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The lights were all out in Belacotton Kohei Nine Point

Twenty-Six when I got there, but in a unit half a dozen bays down on the right, the upper level windows glowed fitfully, as if the place was on fire inside. There was a frenetic hybrid Reef Dive/Neojunk rhythm blasting out into the night, even through the cranked down loading bay shutter, and three thickset figures stood around outside in dark coats, breathing steam and flapping their arms against the cold. Plex Kohei might have the floorspace to throw big dance parties, but it didn’t look as if he could afford machine security on the door. This was going to be easier than I’d expected.

Always assuming Plex was actually there.

Are you kidding me? Isa’s fifteen-year-old Millsport-accented scorn down the line when I phoned her late that afternoon. Of course he’ll be in. What day is it?

Uh. I estimated. Friday?

Right, Friday. So what do the local yokels do up there on a Friday?

Fuck should I know, Isa? And don’t be such a metrosnob.

Uh, Friday? Hello? Fishing community? Ebisu night?

He’s having a party.

He’s cranking some credit out of cheap floorspace and good take connections, is what he’s doing, she drawled. All those warehouses. All those family friends in the yak.

Don’t suppose you’d know which warehouse exactly.

Stupid question. Picking my way through the fractal street-planning of the warehouse district hadn’t been my idea of fun, but once I hit Belacotton Kohei section, it hadn’t been hard to find my way to the party - you could hear the music across half a dozen alleys in every direction.

Don’t suppose I would. Isa yawned down the line. I guessed she’d not been out of bed that long. Say, Kovacs. You been pissing people off up there?

No. Why?

Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t really be telling you this for nothing. But seeing as how we go back.

I stifled a grin. Isa and I went back all of a year and a half. When you’re fifteen I guess that’s a long time.

Yeah?

Yeah, been a lot of big heat down here, asking after you. Paying big for answers, too. So if you’re not already, I’d start looking over the shoulder of that deep-voiced new sleeve you’ve got yourself there.

I frowned and thought about it. What kind of big heat?

If I knew that, you’d have to pay me for it. But as it happens, I don’t. Only players talked to me were bent Millsport PD, and them you can buy for the price of an Angel Wharf blowjob. Anybody could have sent them.

And I don’t suppose you told them anything about me.

Don’t suppose I did. You planning on soaking up this line much longer, Kovacs? Only, I’m not like you. I have a social life.

No, I’m gone. Thanks for the newsflash, Isa.

She grunted. My clit-tingling pleasure. You stay in one piece, maybe we get to do some more business I can charge you for.

I pressed the sealseam of my newly acquired coat closed to the collar, flexed my hands inside the black polalloy gloves - spike of brief agony from the left - and poured gangster attitude into my stride as I came round the curve of the alley. Think Yukio Hirayasu at his most youthfully arrogant. Ignore the fact the coat wasn’t hand-tailored - straight-to-street off-the-rack branded was the best I could do at short notice, a garment the real Hirayasu wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But it was a rich matt black to match the spray-on gloves and, in this light, it should pass. Envoy deceit would do the rest.

I’d thought briefly about crashing Plex’s party the hard way. Going in heavy against the door, or maybe scaling the back of the warehouse and cracking a skylight entry. But my left arm was still a single throbbing ache from fingertip to neck and I didn’t know how far I could trust it to do what I wanted in a critical situation.

The door detail saw me coming and drew together. Neurachem vision calibrated them for me at distance - cheap, wharf-front muscle, maybe some very basic combat augmentation in the way they moved. One of them had a tactical marine tattoo across his cheek, but that could have been a knock-off, courtesy of some parlour with army surplus software. Or, like a lot of tacs, he could just have fallen on post-demob hard times. Downsizing. The universal catch-all and catechism on Harlan’s World these days. Nothing was more sacred than cost cutting, and even the military weren’t entirely safe.

‘Hold it, sam.’

It was the one with the tattoo. I cut him a withering glance. Halted, barely.

‘I have an appointment with Plex Kohei. I don’t expect to be kept waiting.’

‘Appointment?’ His gaze lifted and slipped left, checking a retinal guest list. ‘Not tonight you don’t. Man’s busy.’

I let my eyes widen, built the volcanic pressure of fury the way I’d seen it from the yak captain in Dig 301’s footage.

‘Do you know who I am?’ I barked.

The tattooed doorman shrugged. ‘I know I don’t see your face on this list. And round here, that means you don’t get in.’

At my side, the others were looking me up and down with professional interest. Seeing what they could break easily. I fought down the impulse to take up a fighting stance and eyed them with mannered disdain instead. Launched the bluff.

‘Very well. You will please inform your employer that you have turned Yukio Hirayasu from his door, and that thanks to your diligence in this matter, he will now speak to me in sempai Tanaseda’s presence tomorrow morning, unadvised and thus unprepared. ’

Gazes flew back and forth between the three of them. It was the names, the whiff of authentic yakuza clout. The spokesman hesitated. I turned away. Was only midway through the motion when he made up his mind, and broke.

‘Alright. Hirayasu-san. Just one moment please.’

The great thing about organised crime is the level of fear it likes to maintain among its minions and those who associate with them. Thug hierarchy. You can see the same pattern on any of a dozen different worlds - the Hun Home triads, Adoracion’s familias vigilantes, the Provo Crews on Nkrumah’s Land. Regional variations, but they all sow the same crop of respect through terror of retribution. And all reap the same harvest of stunted initiative in the ranks. No one wants to take an independent decision, when independent action runs the risk of reinterpretation as a lack of respect. Shit like that can get you Really Dead.

Better by far, to fall back on hierarchy. The doorman dug out his phone and punched up his boss.

‘Listen, Plex, we’ve—’

He listened a moment himself, face immobile. Angry insect sounds from the phone. I didn’t need neurachem to work out what was being said.

‘Uh, yeah, I know you said that, man. But I’ve got Yukio Hirayasu out here wanting a word, and I—’

Another break, but this time the doorkeep seemed happier. He nodded a couple of times, described me and what I’d just said. At the other end of the line, I could hear Plex dithering. I gave it a couple of moments, then snapped my fingers impatiently and gestured for the phone. The doorman caved in and handed it over. I mustered Hirayasu’s speech patterns from memory a couple of months old, coloured in what I didn’t know with standard Millsport gangster idiom.

‘Plex.’ Grim impatience.

‘Uh. Yukio? That really you?’

I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. ‘No, I’m a fucking ledgedust dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.’

‘Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were gone.’

‘Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?’

‘Tana—’ Plex swallowed audibly. ‘Is Tanaseda here?’

‘Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.’

‘All over what?’

‘All over what?’ I cranked the yelp again. ‘What do you fucking think?’

I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.

‘I thought they—’

‘Are you going to fucking let me in or what?’

The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.

Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene - translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.

A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood-warm. The music got even louder.

We forged through the tightly packed dancespace without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissedout vacant. The take scene is pretty laid back wherever you go on Harlan’s World - careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amidst incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody wants them outside of the military.

A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirrorwood panelling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.

I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automould bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful, wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had got them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dancespace image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognisable enough to dance to. Or whatever.

‘Hey Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.’ Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. ‘That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom grown?’

I nodded at his playmates. ‘Get rid of them.’

‘Uh, sure.’ He turned back to the automould and clapped his hands. ‘Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.’

They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.

‘Yeah, him too.’

The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at Plex, who was moving towards a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the side wall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous, take and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.

‘Uh, you want a pipe, man?’

‘Plex.’ I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. ‘Just what the fuck is going on?’

He flinched. Stuttered.

‘I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—’

‘Fuck that, Plex. Talk to me.’

‘Look, man, it’s not my fault.’ His tone worked towards aggrieved. ‘Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that kaikyo shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I know biotech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was fucked up.’

So.

My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio. Kaikyo - a strait, a stolen goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.

‘Where’d they take her?’ I asked quietly.

It wasn’t Yukio’s tone any more but I wasn’t going to get much further as Yukio anyway. I didn’t know enough to sustain the lie in the face of Plex’s lifelong acquaintance.

‘Took her to Millsport, I guess.’ He was building himself a pipe, maybe to balance out the take blur. ‘I mean, Yukio, has Tanaseda really not—’

‘Where in Millsport?’

Then he got it. I saw the knowledge soak through him, and he reached suddenly under the module’s upper shelf. Maybe he had some neurachem wiring somewhere in that pale, aristocratic body he wore, but for him it would have been little more than an accessory. And the chemicals slowed him down so much it was laughable.

I let him get a hand on the gun, let him get it halfway clear of the shelf it was webbed under. Then I kicked his hand away, knocked him back onto the automould with a backfist and stamped down on the shelf. Ornate glassware splintered, the paper parcels flew and the shelf cracked across. The gun fell out on the floor. Looked like a compact shard blaster, big brother to the GS Rapsodia under my coat. I scooped it up and turned in time to catch Plex scrambling for some kind of wall alarm.

‘Don’t.’

He froze, staring hypnotised at the gun.

‘Sit down. Over there.’

He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.

Fucking set fire to it or something.

‘Who.’ His mouth worked. ‘Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.’

I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.

‘Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.’

His face creased. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.

‘Fuck. Kovacs?’

‘Good guess.’ I put the stack away again. ‘The original. Accept no imitations. Now, unless you want to be sharing a pocket with your boyhood pal here, I suggest you go on answering my questions the way you were when you thought I was him.’

‘But, you’re.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re never going to get away with this, Kovacs. They’ve got. They’ve got you looking for you, man.’

‘I know. They must be desperate, right?’

‘It isn’t funny, man. He’s fucking psychotic. They’re still counting the bodies he left in Drava. They’re really dead. Stacks gone, the works.’

I felt a brief spike of shock, but it was almost distant. Behind it there was the grim chill that had come with my sight of Anton and the Skull Gang in Dig 301’s recorded footage. Kovacs had gone to New Hok and he’d done the groundwork with Envoy intensity. He’d brought back what he needed. Corollary. What he couldn’t use he’d left in smoking ruin behind him.

‘So who’d he kill, Plex?’

‘I. I don’t know, man.’ He licked his lips. ‘A lot of people. All her team, all the people she—’

He stopped. I nodded, mouth tight. Detached regret for Jad, Kiyoka and the others clamped and tamped down where it wouldn’t get in the way.

‘Yes. Her. Next question.’

‘Look, man, I can’t help you. You shouldn’t even—’

I shifted towards him, impatiently. Raging at the edges like lit paper. He flinched again, worse than he had when he thought I was Yukio.

‘Alright, alright. I’ll tell you. Just leave me alone. What do you want to know?’

Go to work. Soak it up.

‘First of all I want to know what you know, or think you know, about Sylvie Oshima.’

He sighed. ‘Man, I told you not to get involved. Back in that sweeper bar. I warned you.’

‘Yeah, me and Yukio both, it seems. Very public-spirited of you, running round warning everybody. Why’d she scare you so much, Plex?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Let’s pretend I don’t.’ I raised a hand, displacement gesture as the anger threatened to get out. ‘And let’s also pretend that if you try to lie to me, I’ll torch your fucking head off.’

He swallowed. ‘She’s, she says she’s Quellcrist Falconer.’

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘So is she?’

‘Fuck, man, how would I know?’

‘In your professional opinion, could she be?’

‘I don’t know.’ He sounded almost plaintive. ‘What do you want from me? You went with her to New Hok, you know what it’s like up there. I suppose, yeah, I suppose she could be. She might have stumbled on a cache of backed-up personalities. Got contaminated somehow.’

‘But you don’t buy it?’

‘It doesn’t seem very likely. I can’t see why a personality store would be set up to leak virally in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, even for a bunch of fuckwit Quellists. Where’s the value? And least of all a backup of their precious fucking revolutionary wet-dream icon.’

‘So,’ I said tonelessly. ‘Not a big fan of the Quellists, then?’

For the first time I could remember, Plex seemed to shed his shield of apologetic diffidence. A choked snort came out of him - someone with less breeding would have spat, I guess.

‘Look around you, Kovacs. You think I’d be living like this if the Unsettlement hadn’t hit the New Hok ’weed trade the way it did? Who do you think I’ve got to thank for that?’

‘That’s a complex historical question—’

‘Like fuck it is.’

‘—that I’m not really qualified to answer. But I can see why you’d be pissed off. It must be tough having to trawl your playmates out of second-rate dancehalls like this one. Not being able to afford the dress code on the First Families party circuit. I feel for you.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

I felt the way my own expression chilled over. Evidently he saw it too, and the sudden rage leaked back out of him almost visibly. I talked to stop myself hitting and hurting him.

‘I grew up in a Newpest slum, Plex. My mother and father worked the belaweed mills, everybody did. Temp contracts, day rate, no benefits. There were times we were lucky if we ate twice a day. And this wasn’t any fucking trade slump either, it was business as usual. Motherfuckers like you and your family got rich off it.’ I drew a breath and cranked myself back down to a dead irony. ‘So you’re going to have to forgive my lack of sympathy for your tragically decayed aristo circumstances, because I’m a little short right now. ’kay?’

He wet his lips and nodded.

‘Okay. Okay, man, it’s cool.’

‘Yeah.’ I nodded back. ‘Now. No reason for a stored copy of Quell to be set on viral deploy, you said.’

‘Yeah. Right, that’s right.’ He was stumbling over himself to get back to safe ground. ‘And, anyway, look, she’s, Oshima’s loaded to the eyes with all sorts of baffles to stop viral stuff soaking through the coupling. That deCom command shit is state of the art.’

‘Yeah, so that brings us back to where we started. If she isn’t really Quell, why are you so scared of her?’

He blinked at me. ‘Why am I—? Fuck, man, because whether she is Quell or whether she isn’t, she thinks she is. That’s a major psychosis. Would you put a psychotic in charge of that software?’

I shrugged. ‘From what I saw in New Hok, half of deCom would qualify for the same ticket. They’re not overly balanced as a profession.’

‘Yeah, but I doubt many of them think they’re the reincarnation of a revolutionary leader three centuries dead. I doubt they can quote—’

He stopped. I looked at him.

‘Quote what?’

‘Stuff. You know.’ He looked away, twitchily. ‘Old stuff from the war, the Unsettlement. You must have heard the way she talks sometimes, that period-flic Japanese she comes out with.’

‘Yeah, I have. But that’s not what you were going to say, Plex. Is it.’

He tried to get up from the automould. I stepped closer and he froze. I looked down at him with the same expression I’d had when I talked about my family. Didn’t even lift the shard gun.

‘Quote what?’

‘Man, Tanaseda would—’

‘Tanaseda isn’t here. I am. Quote. What?’

He broke. Gestured weakly. ‘I don’t even know if you’d understand what I’m talking about, man.’

‘Try me.’

‘Well, it’s complicated.’

‘No, it’s simple. Let me help you get started. The night I came to collect my sleeve, you and Yukio were talking about her. At a guess, you’d been doing some business with her, at a second guess you’d met her in that sweeper dock dive you took me to for breakfast, right?’

He nodded reluctantly.

‘Okay. So the only thing I can’t work out is why you were so surprised to see her there.’

‘I didn’t think she’d come back,’ he muttered.

I remembered my first view of her that night, the entranced expression on her face as she stared at herself in the mirrorwood bar. Envoy recall dug out a fragment of conversation from the Kompcho apartment, later. Orr, talking up Lazlo’s antics:

... still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?

And Sylvie: What’s that?

You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko. Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.

And Jad: She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament.

I shivered. No, not equipped. Not equipped to remember anything much, wandering around in the Tekitomura night torn between Sylvie Oshima and Nadia Makita, aka Quellcrist fucking Falconer. Not equipped to do anything except maybe navigate by dredged-up fragments of recall and dream, and fetch up in some vaguely remembered bar where, just as you were trying to put yourself back together, some hard-faced gang of bearded scum with a licence to kill from God came to grind your face in the assumed inferiority of your gender.

I remembered Yukio when he burst into the Kompcho apartment the next morning. The fury in his face.

Kovacs, what exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?

And his words to Sylvie when he saw her.

You know who I am.

Not a passing reference to his evident membership of the yakuza. He thought she knew him.

And Sylvie’s even response. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Because at that moment, she didn’t. Envoy recall froze frame for me on the disbelief in Yukio’s face. Not offended vanity after all. He was genuinely shocked.

In the scant seconds of the confrontation, in the seared flesh and blood of the aftermath, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he was so angry. Anger was a constant. The constant companion of the last two years and longer, rage in myself and the rage reflecting from those around me. I no longer questioned it, it was a state of being. Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.

Or:

Because you just wandered into the midst of a complicated deal with a dangerously unstable woman with a head full of state-of-the-art battle-tech software and a direct line back to—

What?

‘What was she selling, Plex?’

The breath came out of him. He seemed to crumple with it.

‘I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. She called it the Qualgrist Protocol. Something biological. They took it away from me as soon as I hooked her up with them. Soon as I told them the preliminary data checked out.’ He looked away again, this time with no trace of nerves. His voice took on a slurred bitterness. ‘Said it was too important for me. Couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut. They brought in specialists from Millsport. Fucking Yukio came with them. They cut me out.’

‘But you were there. You’d seen her that night.’

‘Yeah, she was giving them stuff on blanked deCom chips. Pieces at a time, you know, ’cause she didn’t trust us.’ He coughed out a laugh. ‘No more than we trusted her. I was supposed to go along each time and check the prelim scrollup codes. Make sure they were genuine antiques. Everything I okayed, Yukio took and handed on to his pet fucking EmPee team. I never saw any of it. And you know who fucking found her in the first place. I did. She came to me first. And all I get is flushed out with a finder’s fee.’

‘How’d she find you?’

A dejected shrug. ‘Usual channels. She’d been asking around Tekitomura for weeks, apparently. Looking for someone to move this stuff for her.’

‘But she didn’t tell you what it was?’

He picked moodily at a smear of bodypaint on the automould. ‘Nope.’

‘Plex, come on. She made a big enough splash with you that you called in your yak pals, but she never showed you what it was she had.’

‘She asked for the fucking yak, not me.’

I frowned. ‘She did?’

‘Yeah. Said they’d be interested, said it was something they could use.’

‘Oh, that’s crabshit, Plex. Why would the yakuza be interested in a biotech weapon three centuries old. They’re not fighting a war.’

‘Maybe she thought they could sell it on to the military for her. For a percentage.’

‘But she didn’t say that. You just told me she said it would be something they could use.’

He stared up at me. ‘Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not wired for that fucking Envoy total-recall shit like you. I don’t remember what she said, exactly. And I don’t fucking care. Like they said, it’s got nothing to do with me any more.’

I stepped away from him. Leaned back on the container wall and examined the shard gun absently. Peripheral vision told me he wasn’t moving from his slump on the automould. I sighed and it felt like weight shifting off my lungs, only to settle in again.

‘Alright, Plex. Just a couple more questions, easy ones, and I’m out of your hair. This new edition of me they’ve got, it was chasing Oshima, right? Not me?’

He clicked his tongue, barely audible above the fusion beat outside.

‘Both of you. Tanaseda wants your head on a stick for what you did to Yukio, but you’re not the main attraction.’

I nodded bleakly. For a while I’d thought Sylvie must have somehow given herself away down in Tekitomura yesterday. Talked to the wrong person, been caught on the wrong surveillance cam, done something to bring the pursuit team crashing down on us like angelfire. But it wasn’t that. It was simpler and worse - they’d vectored in on my own unshielded blunder through the Quellcrist Falconer archives. Must have had a global watch on the dataflows since this whole fucking mess blew up.

And you walked right into it. Nice going.

I grimaced. ‘And is Tanaseda running this?’

Plex hesitated.

‘No? So who’s reeling his line in then?’

‘I don’t—’

‘Don’t back up on me, Plex.’

‘Look, I don’t fucking know. I don’t. But it’s up the food chain, I know that. First Families is what I hear, some Millsport court spymistress.’

I felt a qualified sense of relief. Not the yakuza, then. Nice to know my market value hadn’t fallen that far.

‘This spymistress got a name?’

‘Yeah.’ He got up abruptly and went to the hospitality module. Stared down into the smashed interior. ‘Name of Aiura. Real hardcase by all accounts.’

‘You haven’t met her?’

He poked about in the debris I’d left, found an undamaged pipe. ‘No. I don’t even get to see Tanaseda these days. No way I’d be let inside something at First Families level. But there’s stuff about this Aiura on the court gossip circuit. She’s got a reputation.’

I snorted. ‘Yeah, don’t they all.’

‘I’m serious, Tak.’ He fired up the pipe and looked reproachfully at me through the sudden smoke. ‘I’m trying to help you here. You remember that mess about sixty years ago, when Mitzi Harlan wound up in a Kossuth skullwalk porn flic?’

‘Vaguely.’ I’d been busy at the time, stealing bioware and offworld databonds in the company of Virginia Vidaura and the Little Blue Bugs. High-yield criminality masquerading as political commitment. We watched the news for word of the police efforts at pursuit, not much else. There hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the incessant scandals and misdemeanours of Harlan’s World’s aristo larvae.

‘Yeah, well, the word is that this Aiura ran damage limitation and clean-up for the Harlan family. Closed down the studio with extreme prejudice, hunted down everyone involved. I heard most of them got the skyride. She took them up to Rila Crags at night, strapped them to a grav pack each and just flipped the switch.’

‘Very elegant.’

Plex drew his lungs full of smoke and gestured. His voice came out squeaky.

‘Way she is, apparently. Old school, you know.’

‘You got any idea where she got the copy of me from?’

He shook his head. ‘No, but I’d guess Protectorate military storage. He’s young, a lot younger than you. Are now, I mean.’

‘You’ve met him?’

‘Yeah, they hauled me in for an interview last month when he first got up here from Millsport. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they talk. He’s still calling himself an Envoy.’

I grimaced again.

‘He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—’

‘Yeah, alright, he’s young. Got it. Did he say anything about me?’

‘Not really, mostly he just asked questions and listened. Only,’ Plex drew on the pipe again. ‘I got the impression he was, I don’t know, disappointed or something. About what you were doing these days.’

I felt my eyes narrow. ‘He said that?’

‘No, no,’ Plex waved the pipe, trickled smoke from his nose and mouth. ‘Just an impression I got, ’s all.’

I nodded. ‘Okay, one last question. You said they took her to Millsport. Where?’

Another pause. I shot him a curious look.

‘Come on, what have you got to lose now? Where are they taking her?’

‘Tak, let it go. This is just like the sweeper bar, all over again. You’re getting involved in something that doesn’t—’

‘I’m already involved, Plex. Tanaseda’s taken care of that.’

‘No, listen. Tanaseda will deal. You’ve got Yukio’s stack, man. You could negotiate for its safe return. He’ll do it, I know him. He and Hirayasu senior go back a century or more. He’s Yukio’s sempai, he’s practically his adoptive uncle. He’ll have to cut a deal.’

‘And you think this Aiura’s going to let it go at that?’

‘Sure, why not.’ Plex gestured with the pipe. ‘She’s got what she wants. As long as you stay out of—’

‘Plex, think about it. I’m double-sleeved. That’s a UN rap, big-time penalties for all involved. Not to mention the issue of whether they’re even entitled to hold a stored copy of a serving Envoy in the first place. If the Protectorate ever finds out about this, Aiura the spymistress is going to be looking at some serious storage, First Families connections or not. The sun’ll be a fucking red dwarf by the time they let her out.’

Plex snorted. ‘You think so? You really think the UN are going to come out here and risk upsetting the local oligarchy for the sake of one double sleeving?’

‘If it’s made public enough, yes. They’ll have to. They can’t be seen to do anything else. Believe me, Plex, I know, I used to do this for a living. The whole Protectorate system hangs together on an assumption that no one dare step out of line. As soon as someone does, and gets away with it, no matter how small that initial transgression, it’ll be like the first crack in the dam wall. If what’s been done here becomes common knowledge, the Protectorate will have to demand Aiura’s cortical stack on a plate. And if the First Families don’t comply, the UN will send the Envoys, because a refusal by local oligarchy to comply can only be read one way, as insurrection. And insurrections get put down, wherever they are, at whatever cost, without fail.’

I watched him, watched it sink in as it had sunk into me when I first heard the news in Drava. The understanding of what had been done, the step that had been taken and the sequence of inevitability that we were all now locked into. The fact that there was no way back from this situation that didn’t involve someone called Takeshi Kovacs dying for good.

‘This Aiura,’ I said quietly, ‘has backed herself into a corner. I would love to know why, I would love to know what it was that was so fucking important it was worth this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. One of us has to go, me or him, and the easiest way for her to make that happen is to keep sending him after me until either he kills me or I kill him.’

He looked back at me, pupils blasted wide with the mix of whiff and mushrooms, pipe forgotten and trailing faint fumes from the cupped bowl of his hand. Like it was all too much to take in. Like I was a piece of take hallucination that refused to morph into something more pleasant or just go away.

I shook my head. Tried to get Sylvie’s Slipins out of it.

‘So, like I said, Plex, I need to know. I really need to know. Oshima, Aiura, and Kovacs. Where do I find these people?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s no good, Tak. I mean, I’ll tell you. You really want to know, I’ll tell you. But it isn’t going to help. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no way you can—’

‘Why don’t you just tell me, Plex. Get it off your chest. Let me worry about the logistics.’

So he told me. And I did the logistics, and worried at it.

All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reef dive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.

PART THREE

That Was A While Ago

‘That Quell, sure, man, she got something going on, something you gotta think about. Thing is, some things last, some things don’t, but sometimes you got something don’t last won’t be because it’s gone, be because it’s waiting for its time to come again, maybe waiting on a change. Music’s like that, and so is life, man, so is life.’

Dizzy Csango
in an interview for New Sky Blue magazine

CHAPTER TWENTY

There were storm warnings all the way south.

On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models of the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout. Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.

This one had been building for a while - I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava - and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbours among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.

The skipper of the Haiduci’s Daughter took it philosophically.

‘Seen worse,’ he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge. ‘Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.’

I grunted noncommittally. He squinted away from the display at me.

‘You were away then, right?’

‘Yeah, offworld.’

He laughed raspingly. ‘Yeah, that’s right. All that exotic travel you been doing. So when do I get to see your pretty face on KossuthNet, then? Got a one-to-one lined up with Maggie Sugita when we get in?’

‘Give me time, man.’

‘More time? Haven’t you had enough time yet?’

It was the line of banter we’d maintained all the way down from Tekitomura. Like quite a few freight skippers I’d met, Ari Japaridze was a shrewd but relatively unimaginative man. He knew next to nothing about me, which, he told me, was the way he liked things to stay with his passengers, but he was nobody’s fool. And it didn’t take an archaeologue to work out that if a man comes aboard your raddled old freighter an hour before it leaves and offers as much for a cramped crewroom berth as you’d pay for a Saffron Line cabin - well, that man probably isn’t on friendly terms with law enforcement. For Japaridze, the holes he’d turned up in my knowledge of the last couple of decades on Harlan’s World had a very simple explanation. I’d been away, in the time-honoured criminal sense of the word. I countered this assumption with the simple truth about my absence and got the rasping laugh every time.

Which suited me fine. People will believe what they want to believe - look at the fucking Beards - and I got the distinct impression that there was some storage time in Japaridze’s past. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but I got an invite up to the bridge on our second evening out of Tekitomura and by the time we left Erkezes on the southernmost tip of the Saffron Archipelago, we were swapping notes on preferred Newpest drinking-holes and how best to barbecue bottleback steaks.

I tried not to let the time chafe at me.

Tried not to think about the Millsport Archipelago and the long westward arc we were cutting away from it.

Sleep was hard.

The night-time bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter provided a viable alternative. I sat with Japaridze and drank cheap Millsport blended whisky, watching as the freighter ploughed her way south into warmer seas and air that was fragrant with the scent of belaweed. I talked, as automatic as the machines that kept the vessel on her curving course, stock tales of sex and travel, memories of Newpest and the Kossuth hinterlands. I massaged the muscles of my left arm where they still ached and throbbed. I flexed my left hand against the pain it gave me. Beneath it all, I thought about ways to kill Aiura and myself.

By day, I prowled the decks and mingled with the other passengers as little as possible. They were an unappealing bunch anyway, three burnt-out and bitter-talking deComs heading south, maybe for home, maybe just for the sun; a hard-eyed webjelly entrepreneur and his bodyguard, accompanying an oil shipment to Newpest; a young New Revelation priest and his carefully wrapped wife who joined ship at Erkezes. Another half dozen less memorable men and women who kept to themselves even more than I did and looked away whenever they were spoken to.

A certain degree of social interaction was unavoidable. Haiduci’s Daughter was a small vessel, in essence not much more than a tug welded onto the nose of four duplex freight pods and a powerful hoverload driver. Access gantries ran at two levels from the forward decks between and alongside the pods and back to a narrow observation bubble bolted on to the rear. What living space there was felt crowded. There were a few squabbles early on, including one over stolen food that Japaridze had to break up with threats of putting people off at Erkezes, but by the time we left the Saffron Archipelago behind, everybody had pretty much settled down. I had a couple of forced conversations with the deComs over meals, trying to show interest in their hard-luck stories and life-in-the-Uncleared bravado. From the webjelly oil merchant I got repetitive lectures on the economic benefits that would emerge from the Mecsek regime’s austerity programme. The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterwards.

We made good time from Erkezes to the Gulf and there was no sign of a storm when we got there. I found myself crowded out of my usual brooding spots as the other passengers came out to enjoy the novelty of warm weather and sun strong enough to tan. You couldn’t blame them - the sky was a solid blue from horizon to horizon, Daikoku and Hotei both showing clear and high up. A strong breeze out of the north east kept the heat pleasant and lifted spray from the ruffled surface of the sea. Westward, waves broke white and just audible on the great curving reefs that heralded the eventual rise of the Kossuth gulf coastline further south.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said a quiet voice beside me at the rail.

I glanced sideways and saw the priest’s wife, still scarfed and robed despite the weather. She was alone. Her face, what I could see of it, tilted up at me out of the tightly drawn circle of the scarf that covered her below the mouth and above the brow. It was beaded with sweat from the unaccustomed heat but didn’t seem unconfident. She had scraped her hair back so that not a trace made it past the cloth. She was very young, probably not long out of her teens. She was also, I realised, several months pregnant.

I turned away, mouth suddenly tight.

Focused on the view beyond the deck rail.

‘I’ve never travelled this far south before,’ she went on, when she saw I wasn’t going to take her up on her first gambit. ‘Have you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is it always this hot?’

I looked at her again, bleakly. ‘It isn’t hot, you’re just inappropriately dressed.’

‘Ah.’ She placed her gloved hands on the rail and appeared to examine them. ‘You do not approve?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. We live in a free world, didn’t you know? Leo Mecsek says so.’

‘Mecsek.’ She made a small spitting sound. ‘He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.’

‘Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.’

She flinched.

‘You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—’

‘Four.’ I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. ‘I’m talking about four isolated incidents. And that’s just this year.’

I saw colour rise in her cheeks. She seemed to be looking down at her own slightly protruding belly.

‘The New Revelation is not always most honestly served by those most active in its advocacy,’ she murmured. ‘Many of us—’

‘Many of you cringe along in compliance, hoping to peel something of worth from the less psychotic directives of your gynocidal belief system because you don’t have the wit or nerve to build something entirely new. I know.’

Now she was flushing to the roots of her painstakingly hidden hair.

‘You misjudge me.’ She touched the scarf she wore. ‘I have chosen this. Chosen it freely. I believe in the Revelation, I have my faith.’

‘Then you’re more stupid than you look.’

An outraged silence. I used it to crank the flurry of rage in my own chest back under control.

‘So I’m stupid? Because I choose modesty in womanhood, I’m stupid. Because I don’t display and cheapen myself at every opportunity like that whore Mitzi Harlan and her kind, because—’

‘Look,’ I said coldly. ‘Why don’t you exercise some of that modesty and just shut your womanly little mouth? I really don’t care what you think.’

‘See,’ she said, voice turned slightly shrill. ‘You lust after her like all the others. You give in to her cheap sensual tricks and—’

‘Oh, please. For my money, Mitzi Harlan’s a stupid, superficial little trollop, but you know what? At least she lives her life as if it belongs to her. Instead of abasing herself at the feet of any fucking baboon who can grow a beard and some external genitalia.’

‘Are you calling my husband a—’

‘No.’ I swung on her. It seemed I didn’t have it cranked down after all. My hands shot out and grasped her by the shoulders. ‘No, I’m calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband’s angle, he’s a man, he’s got everything to gain from this crabshit. But you? You’ve thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You’ll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it’s soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you’ll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we’ve won for ourselves to come back and try again. You’ll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you’ll condemn her to the same fucking thing.’

Then there was a hand on my arm.

‘Hey, man.’ It was one of the deComs, backed up by the entrepreneur’s bodyguard. He looked scared but determined. ‘That’s enough. Leave her alone.’

I looked at his fingers, where they hung on my elbow. I wondered briefly about breaking them, locking out the arm behind them and—

A memory flared to life inside me. My father shaking my mother by the shoulders like a belaweed rack that wouldn’t come loose of its mooring, screaming abuse and whisky fumes into her face. Seven years old, I’d gone for his arm and tried to tug it away.

He’d clouted me almost absently that time, across the room and into a corner. Gone back to her.

I unlocked my hands from the woman’s shoulders. Shook off the deCom’s grip. Mentally shook myself by the throat.

‘Now back off, man.’

‘Sure,’ I said it quietly. ‘Like I said, sister. ’s a free world. Got nothing to do with me.’

The storm clipped us round the ear a couple of hours later. A long trailing scarf of bad weather that darkened the sky outside my porthole and caught the Haiduci’s Daughter broadside on. I was flat on my back in my bunk at the time, staring at the metal grey ceiling and giving myself a furious lecture on undesirable involvement. I heard the engine thrum kick up a notch and guessed Japaridze was pulling more buoyancy from the grav system. A couple of minutes later the narrow cabin space seemed to lurch sideways and on the table opposite a glass slid a couple of centimetres before the antispill surface gripped it in place. The water it held slopped alarmingly and splashed over the edge. I sighed and got off the bunk, bracing myself across the cabin and leaning down to peer out of the porthole. Sudden rain slapped the glass.

Somewhere in the freighter, an alarm went off.

I frowned. It seemed an extreme response to what wasn’t much more than some choppy water. I shouldered my way into a light jacket I’d bought from one of the freighter’s crewmembers, stowed Tebbit knife and Rapsodia beneath it and slipped out into the corridor.

Getting involved again, are we?

Hardly. If this tub is going to sink, I want advance warning.

I followed the alarms up to main deck level and out into the rain. A member of the crew passed me, hefting a clumsy long-barrelled blaster.

‘ ’s going on?’ I asked her.

‘Search me, sam.’ She spared me a grim look, jerked her head aft. ‘Main board’s showing a breach in cargo. Maybe a ripwing trying to get in out of the storm. Maybe not.’

‘You want a hand?’

She hesitated, suspicion swimming momentarily on her face, then made a decision. Maybe Japaridze had said something to her about me, maybe she just liked my recently acquired face. Or maybe she was just scared, and could use the company.

‘Sure. Thanks.’

We worked our way back towards the cargo pods, and along one of the gantries, bracing ourselves each time the freighter rolled. Rain whipped in at odd, wind-driven angles. The alarm shrilled querulously over the weather. Ahead, in the sudden, sullen gloom of the squall, a row of red lights pulsed on and off along one section of the left-hand freight pod. Below the flashing alert signals, pale light showed from the edge of a cracked hatch. The crew-woman hissed and gestured with the blaster barrel.

‘That’s it.’ She started forward. ‘Someone’s in there.’

I shot her a glance. ‘Or something. Ripwings, right?’

‘Yeah, but it takes a pretty sharp ripwing to figure out the buttons. Usually they’ll just short the system with a beakbutt and hope it lets them in. And I don’t smell anything burning.’

‘Me neither.’ I calibrated the gantry space, the rise of the cargo pods over us. Drew the Rapsodia and dialled it to maximum dispersal. ‘Okay, so let’s do this sensibly. Let me go in there first.’

‘I’m supposed—’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you are. But I used to do this for a living. So how about you have this one on me. Stay here, shoot anything that comes out of that hatch unless you hear me call it first.’

I moved to the hatch as carefully as I could on the unstable footing and examined the locking mechanism. There didn’t appear to be any damage. The hatch hung outward a couple of centimetres, maybe tipped that way by the pitch of the freighter in the squall.

After whichever pirate ninja opened it had cracked the lock, that is.

Thanks for that.

I tuned out the squall and the alarm. Listened for motion on the other side, cranked the neurachem tight enough to pick up heavy breathing.

Nothing. No one there.

Or someone with stealth combat training.

Will you shut up.

I fitted one foot against the edge of the hatch and gave it a cautious shove. The hinges were balanced to a hair - the whole thing swung weightily outward. Without giving myself time to think, I twisted into the gap, Rapsodia tracking for a target.

Nothing.

Waist-high steel barrels stood in shiny ranks across the cargo space. The gaps between were too thin to hide a child, let alone a ninja. I crossed to the nearest and read the label. Finest Saffron Seas Luminescent Xenomedusal Extract, cold press filtered. Webjelly oil, designer branded for added value. Courtesy of our entrepreneurial expert on austerity.

I laughed and felt the tension puddle back out of me.

Nothing but—

I sniffed.

There was a scent, fleeting on the metallic air in the cargo pod.

And gone.

The New Hok sleeve’s senses were just acute enough to know it was there, but with the knowledge and the conscious effort, it vanished. Out of nowhere, I had a sudden flash recollection of childhood, an uncharacteristically happy image of warmth and laughter that I couldn’t place. Whatever the smell was, it was something I knew intimately.

I stowed the Rapsodia and moved back to the hatch.

‘There’s nothing in here. I’m coming out.’

I stepped back into the warm splatter of the rain and heaved the hatch closed again. It locked into place with a solid thunk of security bolts, shutting in whatever trace scent of the past I’d picked up on. The pulsing reddish radiance over my head died out and the alarm, which had settled to an unnoticed background constant, was abruptly silent.

‘What were you doing in there?’

It was the entrepreneur, face tense closing on angry. He had his security in tow. A handful of crew members crowded behind. I sighed.

‘Checking on your investment. All sealed and safe, don’t worry. Looks like the pod locks glitched.’ I looked at the crew-woman with the blaster. ‘Or maybe that extra smart ripwing showed up after all and we scared it off. Look, this is a bit of a long shot I know, but is there a sniffer set anywhere aboard?’

‘Sniffer set? Like, for the police you mean?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. You could ask the skipper.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah well, like I said—’

‘I asked you a question.’

The tension in the entrepreneur’s features had made it all the way to anger. At his side, his security glared supportively.

‘Yeah, and I answered it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’

‘You’re not going anywhere. Tomas.’

I cut the bodyguard a glance before he could act on the command. He froze and shifted his feet. I shifted my eyes to the entrepreneur, fighting a strong urge to push the confrontation as far as it would go. Since my run-in with the priest’s wife, I’d been twitchy with the need to do violence.

‘If your tuskhead here touches me, he’s going to need surgery. And if you don’t get out of my way, so will you. I already told you, your cargo’s safe. Now suppose you step aside and save us both an embarrassing scene.’

He looked back at Tomas, and evidently read something instructive in his expression. He moved.

‘Thank you.’ I pushed my way through the gathered crewmembers behind her. ‘Anybody seen Japaridze?’

‘On the bridge, probably,’ said someone. ‘But Itsuko’s right, there’s no sniffer gear on the ’duci. We’re not fucking seacops.’

Laughter. Someone sang the signature tune to the experia show of the same name, and the rest took it up for a couple of bars. I smiled thinly and shouldered my way past. As I left, I heard the entrepreneur demanding loudly that the hatch be opened again immediately.

Oh well.

I went to find Japaridze anyway. If nothing else, at least he could provide me with a drink.

The squall passed.

I sat on the bridge and watched it fade away eastward on the weather scanners, wishing the knot inside me would do the same. Outside, the sky brightened and the waves stopped knocking the Haiduci’s Daughter about. Japaridze slacked off the emergency drive to the grav motors and the freighter settled back into her former stability.

‘So tell me the truth, sam.’ He poured me another shot of Millsport blended and settled back in the chair across the navigation table. There was no one else on the bridge. ‘You’re casing the webjelly consignment, right?’

I lifted an eyebrow. ‘Well, if I am, that’s a pretty unhealthy question to ask me.’

‘Nah, not really.’ He winked and knocked his drink back in one. Since it had become clear that the weather was going to leave us alone, he’d let himself get slightly drunk. ‘That fucking prick, for me you can have his cargo. Just so long as you don’t try and lift it while it’s on the ’duci.’

‘Right.’ I raised my glass to him.

‘So who is it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Who you running radar for? The yak? Weed Expanse gangs? Thing is—’

‘Ari, I’m serious.’

He blinked at me. ‘What?’

‘Think about it. If I’m a yak research squad, you go asking questions like that, it’s going to get you Really Dead.’

‘Ah, crabshit. You ain’t going to kill me.’ He got up, leaned across the table towards me and peered into my face. ‘You don’t got the eyes for it. I can tell.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah, besides.’ He sank back into his seat and gestured untidily with his glass. ‘Who’s going to sail this tub into Newpest harbour if I’m dead. She’s not like those Saffron Line AI babies, you know. Every now and then, she needs the human touch.’

I shrugged. ‘I guess I could scare someone on the crew into it. Show them your smouldering corpse for an incentive.’

‘That’s good thinking.’ He grinned and reached for the bottle again. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But like I said, I don’t see it in your eyes.’

‘Met a lot like me, have you?’

He filled our glasses. ‘Man, I was one like you. I grew up in Newpest just like you and I was a pirate, just like you. Used to work route robberies with the Seven Per Cent Angels. Crabshit stuff, skimmer cargo coming in over the Expanse.’ He paused and looked me in the eyes. ‘I got caught.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘Yeah, it was too bad. They took the flesh off me and they dumped me in the store for three decades, near enough. When I got out, all they had to sleeve me in was some wired-for-shit methhead’s body. My family had all grown up, or moved away, or, you know, died or something. I had a daughter, seven years old when I went in, she was ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing by the time I got out. She had a life and a family of her own. Even if I had known how to relate to her, she didn’t want to know me. I was just a thirty-year gap in her eyes. Likewise her mother, who’d found some other guy, had kids, well, you know how it goes.’ He sank his drink, shivered and stared at me through suddenly teared eyes. He poured himself another. ‘My brother died in a bug crash a couple of years after I went away, no insurance, no way to get a re-sleeve. My sister was in the store, she’d gone in ten years after me, wasn’t getting out for another twenty. There’d been another brother, born a couple of years after I went away, I didn’t know what to say to him. My father and mother were separated - he died first, got his re-sleeve policy through and went off somewhere to be young, free and single again. Wouldn’t wait for her. I went to see her but all she did was stare out of the window with this smile on her face, kept saying soon, soon, it’ll be my turn soon. Gave me the fucking creeps.’

‘So you went back to the Angels.’

‘Good guess.’

I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.

‘Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.’

‘Yeah?’ I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. ‘How long this time?’

He grinned, like a man in front of a fire. ‘Eighty-five.’

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whisky and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.

‘This time, I lost them all for good. Whatever second life my mother got, I missed that. And she’d opted out of a third time around, just had herself stored with instructions for rental re-sleeve on a list of family occasions. Release of her son Ari from penal storage wasn’t on that list, so I took the hint. Brother was still dead, sister got out of the store while I was in, went north decades before I got out again, I don’t know where. Maybe looking for her father.’

‘And your daughter’s family?’

He laughed and shrugged. ‘Daughter, grandkids. Man, by then I was another two generations out of step with them, I didn’t even try to catch up. I just took what I had and I ran with it.’

‘Which was what?’ I nodded at him. ‘This sleeve?’

‘Yeah, this sleeve. I got what you might call lucky. Belonged to some rayhunter captain got busted for hooking out of a First Families marine estate. Good solid sleeve, well looked after. Some useful seagoing software racked in, and some weird instinctive shit for weather. Sort of painted a career for me all on its own. I got a loan on a boat, made some money. Got a bigger boat, made some more. Got the ’duci. Got a woman back in Newpest now. Couple of kids I’m watching grow up.’

I raised my glass without irony. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Yeah, well, like I said. I got lucky.’

‘And you’re telling me this because?’

He leaned forward on the table and looked at me. ‘You know why I’m telling you this.’

I quelled a grin. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know. He was doing his best.

‘Alright, Ari. Tell you what, I’ll lay off your cargo. I’ll mend my ways, give up piracy and start a family. Thanks for the tip.’

He shook his head. ‘Not telling you anything you don’t already know, sam. Just reminding you, is all. 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.’

He was right, of course.

As a messenger, he was also a little late.

Evening caught up with the Haiduci’s Daughter on her westward curve a couple of hours later. The sun split like a cracked egg either side of a rising Hotei and reddish light soaked out across the horizon in both directions. The low rise of Kossuth’s gulf coastline painted a thick black base for the picture. High above, thin cloud cover glowed like a shovel full of heated coins.

I avoided the forward decks, where the rest of the passengers had gathered to watch the sunset - I doubted I’d be welcome among them given my various performances today. Instead I worked my way back along one of the freight gantries, found a ladder and climbed it to the top of the pod. There was a narrow walkway there and I settled cross-legged onto its scant breadth.

I hadn’t lived quite the idiotic waste of youth Japaridze had, but the end result wasn’t much different. I beat the traps of stupid crime and storage at an early age, but only just. By the time I hit my late teens, I’d traded in my Newpest gang affiliations for a commission in the Harlan’s World tactical marines - if you’re going to be in a gang, it might as well be the biggest one on the block and no one fucked with the tacs. For a while, it seemed like the smart move.

Seven uniformed years down that road, the Corps recruiters came for me. Routine screening put me at the top of a shortlist and I was invited to volunteer for Envoy conditioning. It wasn’t the kind of invitation you turned down. A couple of months later I was offworld, and the gaps started opening up. Time away, needlecast into action across the Settled Worlds, time laid down in military storage and virtual environments between. Time speeded up, slowed down, rendered meaningless anyway by interstellar distance. I began to lose track of my previous life. Furlough back home was infrequent and brought with it a sense of dislocation each time that discouraged me from going as often as I could have. As an Envoy, I had the whole Protectorate as a playground - might as well see some of it, I reasoned at the time.

And then Innenin.

When you leave the Envoys, there are a very limited number of career options. No one trusts you enough to lend you capital, and you’re flat out forbidden under UN law to hold corporate or governmental posts. Your choices, apart from straight-up poverty, are mercenary warfare or crime. Crime is safer, and easier to do. Along with a few colleagues who’d also resigned from the Corps after the Innenin debacle, I ended up back on Harlan’s World running rings around local law enforcement and the petty criminals they played tag with. We carved out reputations, stayed ahead of the game, went through anyone who opposed us like angelfire.

An attempted family reunion started out badly, plunged downhill from there. Ended in shouting and tears.

It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right - all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some unnoticed moment during my time in the Corps.

But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.

I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.

On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked south east where the dark was gathering, approximately towards Newpest.

I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.

Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half dozen metres away. I edged round to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good metre from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.

‘Fuck are you looking at?’

For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.

‘I’m not going to see them,’ I told it after a while. ‘So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.’

But still, in the fast growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.

Like not being alone.

The ripwing and I sat hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

We pulled into Newpest harbour a little after noon the next day and crept to a mooring with painstaking care. The whole port was jammed up with hoverloaders and other vessels fleeing the threat of heavy weather in the eastern gulf, and the harbourmaster software had arranged them according to some counterintuitive mathematical scheme that the Haiduci’s Daughter didn’t have an interface for. Japaridze took the con on manual, cursing machines in general and the Port Authority AI in particular as we wound our way through the apparently random thickets of shipping.

‘Fucking upgrade this, upgrade that. If I’d wanted to be a fucking techhead, I would have got a job with deCom.’

Like me, he had a slight but insistent hangover.

We said our farewells on the bridge and I went down to the foredeck. I tossed my pack ashore while the autograpples were still cranking us in, and leapt the closing gap to the wharf from the rail. It got me a couple of glances from bystanders but no uniformed attention. With a circling storm out on the horizon and a harbour packed to capacity, port security had other things to worry about than reckless disembarkation. I picked up the pack, slung it on one shoulder and drifted into the sparse flow of pedestrians along the wharf. The heat settled on me wetly. In a couple of minutes I was off the waterfront, streaming sweat and flagging down an autocab.

‘Inland harbour,’ I told it. ‘Charter terminal, and hurry.’

The cab made a U-turn and plunged back into the main cross-town thoroughfares. Newpest unfolded around me.

It’s changed a lot in the couple of centuries I’ve been coming back to it. The town I grew up in was low-lying, like the land it was built on, sprawling in stormproofed snub profile units and super-bubbles across the isthmus between the sea and the great clogged lake that would later become the Weed Expanse. Back then Newpest carried the fragrance of belaweed and the stink of the various industrial processes it was subject to like the mix of perfume and body odour on a cheap whore. You couldn’t get away from either without leaving town.

So much for youthful reminiscence.

As the Unsettlement receded into history, a return to relative prosperity brought new growth, out along the inner shore of the Expanse and the long curve of the coastline, and upward into the tropical sky. The height of the buildings in central Newpest soared, rising on the back of increased confidence in storm management technology and a burgeoning, moneyed middle class who needed to live near their investments but didn’t want to have to smell them. By the time I joined the Envoys, environmental legislation had started to take the edge off the air at ground level and there were skyscrapers downtown to rival anything you could find in Millsport.

After that, my visits were infrequent and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice when exactly the trend started to reverse and why. All I knew was that now there were quarters of the southern city where the stink was back, and the brave new developments along the coast and the Expanse were collapsing, kilometre by kilometre, into creeping shantytown decay. In the centre there were beggars on the streets and armed security outside most of the large buildings. Looking out of the side window of the autocab, I caught an echo of irritated tension in the way people moved that hadn’t been there forty years ago.

We crossed the centre in a raised priority lane that sent the digits on the cab meter spinning into a blur. It didn’t last long - aside from one or two glossy limos and a scattering of cabs, we had the vaulted road to ourselves and when we picked up the main Expanse highway on the other side, the charge count settled down to a reasonable rate. We curled away from the high-rise zone and out across the shanties. Low-level housing, pressed up close to the carriageway. This story I already knew from Segesvar. The cleared embankment space on either side of the road had been sold off while I was away and previous health and safety restrictions waived. I caught a glimpse of a naked two-year-old child gripping the wire fence around a flat roof, mesmerised by the blastpast of the traffic two metres from her face. On another roof further along, two kids not much older hurled makeshift missiles that missed and fell bouncing in our wake.

The inland harbour exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighbourhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the programme ran that way - maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway - steel-boned and upjutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.

We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly-coloured holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.

‘You for hire?’

He turned lacklustre eyes on me without lifting his head.

‘Mama.’

I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalise. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.

‘Where you want to go?’

‘Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.’

He smirked. ‘Yeah, Vchira Beach - it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?’

‘Southern reach. The Strip.’

‘Sourcetown.’ His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. ‘You a surfer?’

‘Do I look like a surfer?’

Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blonde woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared Give me Mitzi Harlan’s job - I could do it lying down. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.

‘Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?’

‘Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.’

‘An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?’

She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. ‘Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?’

‘Just what you see.’

‘Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.’

The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the two-fifty mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.

‘Sure. Seems very reasonable You want to show me my ride?’

Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package - a blunt-nosed twenty-metre twin turbine rig that deserved the name hoverloader more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sealanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armoured skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.

‘That get much use?’ I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.

She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. ‘There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or,’ - an involuntary glance back towards the terminal building - ‘wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?’

‘No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.’ I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one. Dialled a local number.

‘Southside holdings,’ said an androgynous synth voice. ‘Due to—’

I reeled off the fourteen-digit discreet coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.

‘Kovacs, where the fuck have you been?’

I grinned despite myself. ‘Hey Rad. Nice to talk to you too.’

‘It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?’

‘It’s been two months, Radul.’

‘It’s been more than two.’

‘It’s been nine weeks - that’s my final offer.’

He laughed down the line, a sound that reminded me of a trawl winch cranking at speed. ‘Okay, Tak. So how was your trip? Catch any fish?’

‘Yes, I did.’ I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the cortical stacks. ‘Got some for you right here as promised. Canned for ease of carriage.’

‘Of course. Hardly expect you to bring it fresh. Imagine the stink. Especially after three months.’

‘Two months.’

The trawler winch again. ‘Nine weeks, I thought we agreed. So are you in town, finally?’

‘Near enough, yeah.’

‘You coming out to visit?’

‘Yeah, see, that’s the problem. Something’s come up and I can’t. But I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fish—’

‘No, nor would I. Your last consignment hasn’t kept well. Barely fit for consumption these days. My boys think I’m crazy still serving it up, but I told them. Takeshi Kovacs is old school. He pays his debts. We do what he asks, and when he surfaces finally, he will do what is right.’

I hesitated. Calibrated.

‘I can’t get you your money right now, Rad. I daren’t go near a major credit transaction. Wouldn’t be good for you any more than for me. I’ll need time to sort it out. But you can have the fish, if you send someone to collect in the next hour.’

The silence crawled back onto the line. This was pushing the elastic of the debt to failure point, and we both knew it.

‘Look, I got four. That’s one more than expected. You can have them now, all of them. You can serve them up without me, use them how you like, or not at all if my credit’s really out.’

He said nothing. His presence on the line was oppressive, like the wet heat coming off the Weed Expanse. Envoy sense told me this was the break, and Envoy sense is rarely wrong.

‘The money’s coming, Rad. Hit me with a surcharge, if that’s what it takes. As soon as I’m done with this other shit, we’re back to business as usual. This is strictly temporary.’

Still nothing. The silence was beginning to sing, the tiny lethal song of a cable snagged and under stress. I stared out across the Expanse, as if I could find him and make eye contact.

‘He would have got you,’ I said bluntly. ‘You know that.’

The silence lasted a moment longer, then snapped across. Segesvar’s voice rang with false boisterousness.

‘What you talking about, Tak?’

‘You know what I’m talking about. Our meth-dealing friend, back in the day. You ran with the others, Rad, but the way your leg was, you wouldn’t have had a chance. If he’d come through me, he would have caught you up. You know that. The others ran, I stayed.’

On the other end of the line I heard him breathe out, like something uncoiling.

‘So,’ he said. ‘A surcharge. Shall we say thirty per cent?’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I lied, for both of us.

‘Yes. But I think your previous fish will have to be taken off the menu now. Why don’t you come here to give your traditional valediction, and we’ll discuss the terms of this. Refinancing.’

‘Can’t do that, Rad. I told you, I’m only passing through. An hour from now I’m gone again. Be a week or more before I can get back.’

‘Then,’ I could almost see him shrug. ‘You will miss the valediction. I would not have thought you would want that.’

‘I don’t.’ This was punishment, another surcharge on top of my volunteered thirty per cent. Segesvar had me worked out, it’s a core skill in organised crime and he was good at his trade. The Kossuth haiduci might not have the cachet and sophistication of the yakuza further north, but it’s essentially the same game. If you’re going to make a living out of extortion, you’d better know how to get to people. And how to get to Takeshi Kovacs was painted all over my recent past like blood. It couldn’t have taken a lot of working out.

‘Then come,’ he said warmly. ‘We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake. Old times’ sake, heheh? And a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.’

Out of nowhere, Lazlo’s face.

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her.

I glanced across to where Suzi Petkovski was lowering the canopy back over the turbine.

‘Sorry, Rad. This is too important to juggle. You want your fish, send someone out to the inland harbour. Charter terminal, ramp seven. I’ll be here for an hour.’

‘No valediction?’

I grimaced. ‘No valediction. I don’t have the time.’

He was quiet for a moment.

‘I think,’ he said finally, ‘that I would like very much to look in your eyes right now, Takeshi Kovacs. Perhaps I will come myself.’

‘Sure. Be good to see you. Just make it inside the hour.’

He hung up. I gritted my teeth and smashed a fist against the crate beside me.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’

You look after her, right. You keep her safe.

Yeah, yeah. Alright.

I’m trusting you, Micky.

Alright, I fucking hear you.

The chime of a phone.

For a moment, I held the one I was using stupidly to my ear. Then it hit me that the sound came from the opened pack beside me. I leaned over and pushed aside three or four phones before I found the one with the lit display. It was one I’d used before, one with a broken seal.

‘Yeah?’

Nothing. The line was open but there was no sound on it. Not even static. Perfect black silence yawned into my ear.

‘Hello?’

And something whispered up out of the dark, just barely more audible than the tension I’d felt in the previous call.

hurry

And then there was only the silence again.

I lowered the phone and stared at it.

I’d made three calls in Tekitomura, used three phones from the pack. I’d called Lazlo, I’d called Yaroslav, I’d called Isa. It could have been any of the three that had just rung. To know for sure, I’d need to check the log to see who the phone had connected with before.

But I didn’t need to.

A whisper out of dark silence. A voice over distance you couldn’t measure.

hurry

I knew which phone it was.

And I knew who was calling me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Segesvar was as good as his word. Forty minutes after he hung up, a garish red and black open-top sports skimmer came howling off the Expanse and into the harbour at illegal speed. Every head on the wharf turned to watch it arrive. It was the kind of boatcraft that on the seaward side of Newpest would have occasioned an instant Port Authority override ’cast and an ignominious stall in the water there and then. I don’t know whether the inland harbour was ill-equipped, if Segesvar had expensive counterjamming software installed in his rich-kid toy, or if the Weed Expanse gangs just had the Inland PA in their pocket. In any event, the Expansemobile didn’t stall out. Instead it banked about, raising spray, and made a fast line for the gap between ramps six and seven. A dozen metres out, it cut its motors and swept in on momentum. Behind the wheel, Segesvar spotted me. I nodded and raised one hand. He waved back.

I sighed.

This stuff trails out behind us across the decades, but it isn’t like the spray Radul Segesvar’s arrival was cutting from the water in the harbour. It doesn’t fall tracelessly back. It just hangs there instead, like the raised dust you get in the wake of a Sharyan desert cruiser, and if you turn about and head back into your own past, you find yourself coughing on it.

‘Hey, Kovacs.’

It was a shout, maliciously loud and cheerful. Segesvar was standing up in the cockpit, still steering. Broad, gullwing-framed sunshades covered his eyes in conscious rejection of the Millsport fashion for ultra-engineered finger-width lenses. A paper-thin, hand-sanded iridescent swamp pantherskin jacket draped his frame. He waved again and grinned. From the bow of the vessel a grapple line fired with a metallic bang. It was harpoon-headed, unrelated to any of the sockets along the ramp edge and it chewed a hole in the evercrete facing of the wharf, half a metre below the point where I stood. The skimmer cranked itself in and Segesvar leapt out of the cockpit to stand on the bow, looking up at me.

‘You want to bellow my name a couple more times,’ I asked him evenly. ‘In case someone didn’t get it first time round.’

‘Oops.’ He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. ‘Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?’

‘Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?’

‘I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?’

I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The haiduci straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own - pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry. It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties. Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d re-sleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most haiduci - and like me - he’d had his share of time in storage.

‘Nice sleeve,’ he said, pacing a circle around me. ‘Very nice. What happened to the other one?’

‘Long story.’

‘Which you’re not going to tell me.’ He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. ‘Right?’

‘Right.’

He sighed theatrically. ‘This is disappointing, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as close-mouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.’

‘Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.’

He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one that got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.

‘There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?’

‘If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.’

‘Some other time.’

‘Yeah, you’re always so fucking driven, aren’t you? If it’s not the Envoys or the neoQuells, it’s some fucking private revenge scheme. You know, Tak, it isn’t really my business, but someone needs to tell you this and looks like I get the job. You need to stop and smell the weed, man. Remember that you’re living.’ He put his sunlenses back on and jerked his head towards the terminal. ‘Alright, come on then. Machine coffee, why not? It’ll be a novelty.’

Back in the cool, we sat at a table near glass panels that gave a view out onto the harbour. Half a dozen other spectators sat in the same area with their associated baggage, waiting. A wasted-looking man in rags was doing the rounds among them, holding out a tray for credit chips and a hard luck story for anyone who was interested. Most weren’t. There was a faint odour of cheap antibacterial in the air that I hadn’t noticed before. The cleaning robots must have been by.

The coffee was grim.

‘See,’ said Segesvar, setting his aside with an exaggerated scowl. ‘I should have your legs broken just for making me drink that.’

‘You could try.’

For a moment, our eyes locked. He shrugged.

‘It was a joke, Tak. You’re losing your sense of humour.’

‘Yeah, I’m putting a thirty per cent surcharge on it.’ I sipped at my own coffee, expressionless. ‘Used to be my friends could get it for nothing, but times change.’

He let that lie for a moment, then cocked his head and looked me in the eye again.

‘You think I’m treating you unfairly?’

‘I think you’re conveniently forgetful of the real meaning behind the words you saved my ass back there, man.’

Segesvar nodded as if he’d expected no less. He looked down at the table between us.

‘That is an old debt,’ he said quietly. ‘And a questionable one.’

‘You didn’t think so at the time.’

It was too far back to summon easily to mind. Back before the Envoy conditioning went in, back where things get blurred with the passing decades. Most of all, I remembered the stink in the alley. Alkaline precipitates from the belaweed processing plant and dumped oil from the hydraulic systems on the compression tanks. The meth dealer’s curses and the glint of the long bottleback gaff as he slashed it through the damp air towards me. The others were gone, their youthful thug enthusiasm for the robbery evaporating in swift terror as that honed steel hook came out and ripped open Radul Segesvar’s leg from kneecap to thigh. Gone yelling and sprinting away into the night like exorcised sprites, leaving Radul dragging himself one yelping metre at a time along the alley after them, leaving me, sixteen years old, facing the steel with empty hands.

Come ’ere, you little fuck. The dealer was grinning at me in the gloom, almost crooning as he advanced, blocking my escape. Try to tumble me on my own patch, will you. I’m going open you up and feed you your own fucking guts, my lad.

And for the first time in my life, I realised with a sensation like cold hands on my young neck, that I was looking at a man who was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him.

Not batter me like my father, not cut me up like one of the inept gang thugs we squabbled with daily on the streets of Newpest. Kill me. Kill me, and then probably rip out my stack and toss it into the scummed-up waters of the harbour where it would stay for longer than the life of anyone I knew or cared about. It was that image, that terror of being sunk and lost in poisoned water, that drove me forward, made me count the swing of the sharpened steel and hit him as he came off balance on the end of the downstroke.

Then we both went over in the muck and debris and ammoniac stink of the processing plant’s leavings, and I fought him there for the gaff.

Took it from him.

Lashed out and, more by luck than judgment, ripped open his belly with it.

The fight went out of him like water down a sink. He made a loud gurgling, eyes wide and glued to mine. I stared back, rage and fear still punching through the veins in my temples, every chemical switch in my body thrown. I was barely aware of what I’d just done. Then he sank backwards away from me and into the pile of muck. He sat down there as if it was an armchair he liked. I struggled off my knees, dripping alkaline slime from face and hair, still caught in his gaze, still gripping the handle of the gaff. His mouth made flapping motions, his throat gave up wet, desperate sounds. I looked down and I saw his innards still looped over the hook in my hand.

Shock caught me up. My hand spasmed open involuntarily and the hook fell out of it. I staggered away, spraying vomit. The weak, pleading sounds he made damped out beneath the hoarse rasp in my throat as my stomach emptied itself. The hot, urgent reek of fresh sick joined the general stench in the alley. I convulsed with the force of my heaving, and fell over in the mess.

I think he was still alive when I got back to my feet and went to help Segesvar. The sounds he was making followed me all the way out of the alley, and news reports the next day said he’d finally bled to death some time close to dawn. Then again, the same sounds followed me around for weeks afterwards, whenever I went anyway quiet enough to hear myself think. For the best part of the next year, I woke up with them clotted in my ears as often as not.

I looked away from it. The glass panels of the terminal slid back into focus. Across the table, Segesvar was watching me intently. Maybe he was remembering too. He grimaced.

‘So you don’t think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappear for nine weeks without a word, leave me holding your shit and looking like a fool in front of the other haiduci. Now you want to reschedule the finance? You know what I’d do to anyone else who pulled this shit?’

I nodded. Recalled with wry humour my own fury at Plex a couple of months back as I stood seeping synthetic body fluids in Tekitomura.

We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak.

I’d wanted to kill him, just for saying it like that.

‘You think thirty per cent is unjust?’

I sighed.

‘Rad, you’re a gangster and I’m.’ I gestured. ‘No better. I don’t think either of us knows much about what’s just and unjust. You do what you like. I’ll find you the money.’

‘Alright.’ He was still staring at me. ‘Twenty per cent. That fit your sense of commercial propriety?’

I shook my head, said nothing. I dug in my pocket for the cortical stacks, kept my fist closed as I leaned across with them. ‘Here. This is what you came for. Four fish. Do what you want with them.’

He pushed my arm aside and jabbed an angry finger in my face.

‘No, my friend. I do what you want with them. This is a service I’m providing you, and don’t you fucking forget that. Now, I said twenty per cent. Is that fair?’

The decision crystallised out of nowhere, so fast it was like a slap across the back of the head. Picking it apart later, I couldn’t decide what triggered it, only that it felt like listening again to that tiny voice out of the darkness, telling me to hurry. It felt like a sudden prickle of sweat across my palms and the terror that I was going to be too late for something that mattered.

‘I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your haiduci pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.’

He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from haiduci experia flics like Friends of Ireni Cozma and Outlaw Voices. It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the druglike grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.

‘Alright, fuck it. Fifteen per cent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen per cent, right?’

I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. ‘Alright, fifteen per cent. Do you still want these?’

He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight-of-hand and pocketed them.

‘You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,’ he growled. ‘Anybody ever tell you that?’

‘That’s a compliment, right?’

He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.

‘DeCom vet,’ he mumbled. ‘Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—’

‘No, I haven’t got any money,’ said Segesvar impatiently. ‘Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.’

He caught my glance.

‘What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?’

Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied grey turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.

To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.

An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more to it than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.

‘Weed trade’s been bad, huh?’ I shouted over the turbines.

Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.

‘Say what?’

‘The weed trade,’ I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. ‘Been bad recently, right?’

She shrugged.

‘Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.’

It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics was some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.

I went back to watching the skyline.

After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment, then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing and pressed it to my ear.

‘Yeah, what?’

The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear

there isn’t much time left

‘Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.’

can’t hold them back much longer . . .

‘Yeah, I’m working on it.’

working now . . . It sounded like a question.

‘Yeah, I said—’

there are wings out there . . . a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked . . .

It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again

cracked open from edge to edge . . . it’s beautiful, Micky . . .

And gone.

I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.

Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.

‘Bad news?’

‘Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?’

She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one handed.

‘Not safely, no.’

I nodded and thought back through the communique I’d just had.

‘And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?’

‘About double?’

‘Fine. Do it.’

A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximised. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist. Get below and keep your hands off . . . something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.

She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.

‘You too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.’

‘I can hang on.’

‘Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.’

I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin. Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers. Cables and jacks. I thought back too, to the kid’s demeanour and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Always good to have someone to talk to, right?’

She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rainbowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.

Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.

You start by noticing detail - the arched root system of a tepes thicket, breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mudbank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.

You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go.

... hurry . . .

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her, her, her, her . . .

Her. Sylvie, maned in silver grey. Her face—

Her face, subtly changed by the woman who had crept out and stolen it from her. Her voice, subtly modulated . . .

I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back.

Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.

She wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity.

She wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests.

Todor Murakami’s lean, attentive features on the ferry. Pipe smoke, whipped away in the wind.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime. Why you going up north again?

It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.

Stop fucking calling me that.

And screams. And gaping holes cut in spines at neck height. And the weight of cortical stacks in my palm, still slick with clinging gore. And the hollow that would never be filled.

Sarah.

The job in hand.

I’m trying to fucking help.

... hurry . . .

I’m trusting you . . .

I’m trying to fucking . . .

... hurry . . .

I’m TRYING—

‘Coastline.’ Suzi Petkovski’s voice rinsed through the cabin speaker, laconic and firm enough to grab at. ‘Be hitting Sourcetown in fifteen.’

I dumped my brooding and looked left where the Kossuth coast was slicing back towards us. It raised as a dark bumpy line on the otherwise featureless horizon, then seemed to leap in and resolve as a procession of low hills and the occasional flash of white dunes beyond and between. The backside of Vchira, the drowned nubs of an ancient mountain range worn down geological ages past to a seven-hundred-kilometre curve of marsh-fringed tidal barrier on one side and the same stretch of crystalline white sand on the other.

Some day, one of Sourcetown’s long-term inhabitants had informed me nearly half a century ago, the sea’s going to break through all along here. Break through and pour into the Weed Expanse like an invading army breaching a long disputed frontier. Wear down the last remaining bastions and wreck the beach. Some Day, man, the Sourcetowner repeated slowly, and capitalised the phrase and grinned at me with what I’d already come to recognise as typical surfer detachment, Some Day, but Not Yet. And until Yet, you just got to keep looking out to sea, man. Just keep looking out there, don’t look behind you, don’t worry what’s keeping it all in place.

Some Day, but Not Yet. Just look out to sea.

You could call it a philosophy, I suppose. On Vchira Beach, it often passed for one. Limited maybe, but then I’ve seen far worse ways of relating to the universe deployed elsewhere.

The sky had cleared up as we reached the southern fringes of the Expanse and I started to see signs of habitation in the sunlight. Sourcetown isn’t really a place, it’s an approximation, a loose term for a hundred-and-seventy-kilometre coastal strip of surfer support services and their associated infrastructure. In its most tenuous form, it comes into being as scattered tents and bubblefabs along the beach, generational fire-circles and barbecue sites, roughly woven belaweed shacks and bars. Settlement permanence increases and then decreases as the Strip approaches and then passes the places where the surf is not merely good but phenomenal. And then, in the Big Surf zones, habitation thickens to an almost municipal density. Actual streets appear on the hills behind the dunes, rooted street lighting along them and clusters of evercrete platforms and jetties sprouting backwards off the spine of land and into the Weed Expanse. Last time I’d been here, there were five such accretions, each with its gang of enthusiasts who swore that the best surf on the continent was right fucking here, man. For all I knew, any one of them could have been correct. For all I knew, there’d be another five by now.

No less subject to flux were the inhabitants themselves. There were population cycles in lazy motion all the way along the Strip - some of them geared to the turn of Harlan’s World’s five seasons, some to the complicated rhythm of the trilunar tides, and some to the longer, languid pulse of a functional surfer sleeve’s lifetime. People came and went and came back. Sometimes their locational loyalties to a part of the beach endured from cycle to cycle, lifetime to lifetime, sometimes they shifted. And sometimes, that loyalty was never there to begin with.

Finding someone on the Strip was never going to be easy. In a lot of cases, that was the reason people came here.

‘Kem Point coming up.’ Petkovski’s voice again, against a backdrop of downwinding turbines. She sounded tired. ‘This good for you?’

‘Yeah, as good as anywhere. Thanks.’ I peered out at the approaching evercrete platforms and the low-rise tangle of buildings they held up over the waters of the Expanse, the untidy sprawl of structure marching up the hill beyond. There were a handful of figures sitting in view on balconies or jetties, but for the most part the little settlement looked emptied of life. I had no idea if this was the right end of Sourcetown or not, but you’ve got to start somewhere. I grabbed a handstrap and hauled myself to my feet as the skimmer banked left. Glanced across the cabin at my silent companion. ‘Nice talking to you, Mikhail.’

He ignored me, gaze pinned to the window. He’d said nothing the whole time we’d shared the cabin space, just stared morosely out at the vast lack of scenery around us. A couple of times, he’d caught me watching as he scrubbed at his jack sockets, and stopped abruptly with a tightening look on his face. But even then, he said nothing.

I shrugged, was about to swing out onto the railed decking, then thought better of it. I crossed the cabin and propped myself against the glass, interrupting Mikhail Petkovski’s field of vision. He blinked up at me, momentarily surprised out of his self-absorption.

‘You know,’ I said cheerfully. ‘You got lucky in the mother stakes. But out there, it’s all guys like me. And we don’t give a flying fuck whether you live or die. You don’t get off your arse and start taking an interest, no one else is going to.’

He snorted. ‘The fuck’s it got to do with—’

Someone more street would have read my eyes, but this one was too washed out with the wirewant, too puffed up with maternal life support. I reached easily for his throat, dug in and hauled him out of the seat.

‘See what I mean? Who’s going to stop me crushing your larynx now?’

He croaked. ‘Ma—’

‘She can’t hear you. She’s busy up there, earning a living for you both.’ I gathered him in. ‘Mikhail, you are infinitely less important in the scheme of things than her efforts have led you to believe.’

He reached up and tried to unpin my fingers. I ignored the feeble prisings and dug in deeper. He started to look genuinely frightened.

‘The way you’re headed,’ I told him in conversational tones, ‘you’re going to end up on a spare-parts tray under low lighting. That’s the only use you are to men like me, and no one else is going to get in our way when we come for you, because you’ve given no one a reason to care. Is that what you want to be? Spare parts and a two-minute rinse and flush?’

He jerked and flapped, face turning purple. Shook his head in violent denial. I held him a couple of moments longer, then loosened my grip and dumped him back in the chair. He gagged and coughed, eyes wide on me and flooded with tears. One hand crept up to massage his throat where I’d marked it. I nodded.

‘All this, Mikhail? Going on all around you? This is life.’ I leaned closer over him and he flinched. ‘Take an interest. While you still can.’

The skimmer bumped gently against something. I straightened up and went out onto the side deck into sudden heat and brightness. We were floating amidst a crosswork of weathered mirrorwood jetties secured at strategic intervals by heavy evercrete mooring buttresses. The skimmer’s motors kept up a low mutter and gentle pressure against the nearest landing stage. Late afternoon sun glinted hard off the mirrorwood. Suzi Petkovski was standing up in the cockpit and squinting against the reflected light.

‘That’ll be double,’ she reminded me.

I handed over a chip and waited while she ran it. Mikhail chose not to emerge from the cabin. Maybe he was thinking things over. His mother handed me back the chip, shaded her eyes and pointed.

‘They got a place you can hire bugs cheap about three streets over. By that transmission mast you can see. The one with the dragon flags.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sure. Hope you find what you’re looking for here.’

I skipped the bug hire, at least initially, and wandered up through the little town, soaking up my surroundings. Up to the crest of the hill, I could have been in any Expanse-side suburb of Newpest. The same utilitarian architecture predominated, the same frontage mix of waterware mech- and soft-shops mingling with eating houses and bars. The same stained and worn fused-glass streets and the same basic smells. But from the top of the rise looking down, the resemblance ended like waking from a dream.

Below me, the other half of the settlement fell away downward in haphazard structures built out of every material you could readily bring to mind. Bubblefabs rubbed shoulders with wood-frame houses, driftwood shacks and, towards the bottom, actual canvas tents. The fused-paving thoroughfares gave way to poorly laid evercrete slabs, then to sand, then finally to the broad, pale sweep of the beach itself. Here there was more movement on the streets than on the Expanse side, most of it semi-clad and drifting towards the shoreline in the late sun. Every third figure had a board slung under one arm. The sea itself was burnished a dirty gold in the low angle light and flecked with activity, surfers floating astride their boards or upright and cutting casual slices across the gently flexing surface of the water. The sun and distance turned them all to anonymous black tin cut-outs.

‘Some fucking view, eh sam?’

It was a high, child’s voice, at odds with the words it uttered. I glanced round and saw a boy of about ten watching me from a doorway. Body rib-thin and bronzed in a pair of surfslacks, eyes a sun-faded blue. Hair a tangled mess from the sea. He was leaned in the door, arms folded nonchalantly across his bared chest. Behind him in the shop, I saw racked boards. Shifting screen displays for acquatech software.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ I admitted.

‘First time at Vchira?’

‘No.’

Disappointment notched his voice. ‘Not looking for lessons then?’

‘No.’ I paused a moment, measuring advisability. ‘You been long on the Strip yourself?’

He grinned. ‘All my lives. Why?’

‘I’m looking for some friends. Thought you might know them.’

‘Yeah? You a cop? Enforcer?’

‘Not recently.’

It seemed to be the right answer. His grin came back.

‘They got names, these friends?’

‘They did last time I was here. Brasil. Ado, Tres.’ I hesitated. ‘Vidaura, maybe.’

His lips twisted and pursed and he sucked his teeth. It was all gesture learnt in another, much older body.

‘Jack Soul Brasil?’ he asked warily.

I nodded.

‘You a Bug?’

‘Not recently.’

‘Multiflores crew?’

I drew breath. ‘No.’

‘BaKroom Boy?’

‘Do you have a name?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Sure. Milan. Round here they call me Gun-getter. ’

‘Well, Milan,’ I told him evenly. ‘You’re beginning to irritate the fuck out of me. Now are you going to be able to help me or not? You know where Brasil is, or are you just getting off on the rep vapour he trailed through here thirty years back?’

‘Hey.’ The pale blue eyes narrowed. His arms unfolded, fists tensed to small hammers at his sides. ‘You know, I fucking belong here, sam. I surf. Been shooting curls at Vchira since before you were a fucking splatter up your mother’s tube.’

‘I doubt that, but let’s not quibble. I’m looking for Jack Soul Brasil. I’ll find him with or without you, but you can maybe save me some time. Question is, are you going to?’

He stared back at me, still angry, stance still aggressive. In the ten year old sleeve, it was less than impressive.

‘Question is, sam, what’s it worth to help you?’

‘Ah.’

Paid, Milan was forthcoming in grudging fragments designed to disguise and eke out the very limited nature of his knowledge. I bought him rum and coffee in a street café across from the shop he was tending - can’t just close it up, sam, be more than my job’s worth - and waited out the storytelling process. Most of what he told me was readily identifiable as well-worn beach legend, but from a couple of things he said I decided he really had met Brasil a few times, maybe even surfed with him. The last encounter seemed to have been a decade or so back. Side-by-side empty-handed combat heroism in confrontation with a gang of encroaching Harlan Loyalist surfers a few klicks south from Kem Point. Facedown and general battery, Milan acquits himself with modestly understated savagery, collects a few wounds - you should have seen the fucking scars on that sleeve, man, sometimes I still miss it - but the highest praise is reserved for Brasil. Like a fucking swamp panther, sam. Fuckers ripped him in the chest, he didn’t even notice. He tore them all down. Just, like, nothing left when he was done. Sent them back north in pieces. All followed by orgiastic celebration - bonfire glow and the cries of women in wild orgasm on a surf backdrop.

It was a standard picture, and I’d had it painted for me before by other Vchira enthusiasts in the past. Looking past the more obvious embellishments, I panned out a little useful detail. Brasil had money - all those years with the Little Blues, right. No way he has to scratch a living teaching wobblies, selling boards and training up some fucking Millsport aristo’s spare flesh five years ahead of time - but the man still didn’t hold with clone reincarnation. He’d be wearing good surfer flesh, but I wouldn’t know his face. Look for them fucking scars on his chest, sam. Yes, he still wore his hair long. Current rumour had him holed up in a sleepy beach hamlet somewhere south. Apparently he was learning to play the saxophone. There was this jazzman, used to play with Csango Junior, who’d told Milan . . .

I paid for the drinks and got up to go. The sun was gone and the dirty gold sea all but tarnished through to base metal. Across the beach below us, lights were coming to firefly life. I wondered if I’d catch the bug-hire place before it shut.

‘So this aristo,’ I said idly. ‘You teach his body to surf for five years, hone the reflexes for him. What’s your end?’

Milan shrugged and sipped at what was left of his rum. He’d mellowed with the alcohol and the payment. ‘We trade sleeves. I get what he’s wearing in return for this, aged sixteen. So my end’s a thirty-plus aristo sleeve, cosmetic alterations and witnessed exchange, so I don’t try to pass myself off as him, otherwise catalogue intact. Top-of-the-range clone stock, all the peripherals fitted as standard. Sweet deal, huh?’

I nodded absently. ‘Yeah, if he looks after what he’s wearing, I guess. Aristo lifestyles I’ve seen can make for some pretty heavy wear and tear.’

‘Nah, this guy’s in shape. Comes down here on and off to check on his investment, you know, swim and surf a bit. Would have been down this week but that Harlan limo thing put a lock on it. He’s running a little extra weight he could do without, can’t surf for shit of course. But that’ll sort out easy enough when I—’

‘Harlan limo thing?’ Envoy awareness slithered along my nerves.

‘Yeah, you know. Seichi Harlan’s skimmer. This guy’s real close with that branch of the family, had to—’

‘What happened to Seichi Harlan’s skimmer?’

‘You didn’t hear about this?’ Milan blinked and grinned. ‘Where you been, sam? Been all over the net since yesterday. Seichi Harlan, taking his sons and daughter-in-law across to Rila, the skimmer just wiped out there in the Reach.’

‘Wiped out how?’

He shrugged. ‘They don’t know yet. Whole thing just exploded, footage they showed looks like from the inside. Sank in seconds, what was left of it. They’re still looking for the pieces.’

They’d be lucky. The maelstrom made itself felt a long way in at this time of year and the currents in the Reach were lethally unpredictable. Sinking fragments of wreckage might get carried for kilometres before they settled. The broken remains of Seichi Harlan and his family could end up in any of a dozen resting places amidst the scattered islets and reefs of the Millsport archipelago. Stack recovery was going to be a nightmare.

My thoughts fled back to Belacotton Kohei and Plex’s take-soaked mutterings. I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. He’d said biological, but on his own admission his knowledge was incomplete. He’d been shut out by high-level yakuza rank and the Harlan family retainer, Aiura. Aiura, who ran damage limitation and clean-up for the Harlan family.

Another wisp of detail settled into place in my mind. Drava wrapped in snow. Waiting in Kurumaya’s antechamber, staring disinterestedly through the global news scrolldown. Accidental death of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district.

It wasn’t a connection as such, but Envoy intuition doesn’t work that way. It just goes on piling up the data until you start to see the shape of something in the mass. Until the connections make themselves for you. I couldn’t see anything yet, but the fragments were singing to me like windchimes in a storm.

That and the tiny insistent pulse of backbeat: hurry, hurry, there isn’t time.

I traded a badly-remembered Vchira handshake with Milan, and set off back up the hill, hurrying.

The bug-hire place was still lit, and staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with surfer physique. He woke up around the eyes for long enough to find out that I wasn’t a wave rider, aspiring or otherwise, and then settled into mechanical client-service mode. Dayjob shielding around the briefly glimpsed inner core that kept him at Vchira, the heat of enthusiasm wrapped carefully back up again for when he could share it with someone who understood. But he set me up competently enough with a garishly-coloured single-seat speed bug and showed me the streetmap software with the return points I could use up and down the Strip. At request, he also provided me with a pre-moulded polalloy crash suit and helmet, though you could see his already low opinion of me go through the floor when I asked for it. It seemed there were still a lot of people on Vchira Beach who couldn’t tell risk and idiocy apart.

Yeah, maybe including you, Tak. Done anything safe yourself recently?

Ten minutes later, I was suited up and powering out of Kem Point behind a cone of headlamp glow in the gathering gloom of evening.

Somewhere south, listening for a badly played saxophone.

I’d had better sets of clues to follow, but there was one thing massively in my favour. I knew Brasil, and I knew that if he heard someone was looking for him, he wasn’t likely to hide. He’d come out to deal with it the way you paddled up to a big wave. The way you faced down a spread of Harlan Loyalists.

Make enough noise, and I wouldn’t have to find him.

He’d find me.

Three hours later, I pulled off the highway and into the cold bluish wash of bug-swarmed Angier lamps around an all-night diner and machine shop. Looking back a little wearily, I judged I’d made enough noise. My supply of low-value credit chips was depleted, I was lightly fogged from too much shared drink and smoke up and down the Strip, and the knuckles of my right hand still ached slightly from a badly thrown punch in a beachside tavern where strangers asking after local legends weren’t well regarded.

Under the Angier lamps, the night was pleasantly cool and there were knots of surfers clowning about in the parking area, bottles and pipes in hand. Laughter that seemed to bounce off the darkened distance around the lampglow, someone telling a broken-board story in a high, excited voice. One or two more serious groups gathered around the opened innards of vehicles undergoing repair. Laser cutters flickered on and off, showering weird green or purple sparks off exotic alloys.

I got a surprisingly good coffee at the counter and took it outside to watch the surfers. It wasn’t a culture I’d ever accessed during my youth in Newpest - gang protocols wouldn’t permit a serious commitment to both scuba and wave-riding, and the diving found me first. I never switched allegiances. Something about the silent world beneath the surface drew me. There was a vast, slow-breathing calm down there, a respite from all the street craziness and my own even more jagged home life.

You could bury yourself down there.

I finished the coffee and went back inside the diner. Ramen soup smells wreathed the air and tugged at my guts. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t eaten since a late ship’s breakfast on the bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter with Japaridze. I climbed onto a counter stool and nodded at the same meth-eyed kid I’d bought my coffee from.

‘Smells good. What have you got?’

He picked up a battered remote and thumbed it in the general direction of the autochef. Holodisplays sprang up over the various pans. I scanned them and chose a hard-to-spoil favourite.

‘Give me the chillied ray. That’s frozen ray, right?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You expecting fresh, maybe? Place like this? At that price?’

‘I’ve been away.’

But it elicited no response in his meth-stunned face. He just set the autochef in motion and wandered away to the windows, staring out at the surfers as if they were some form of rare and beautiful sealife caught in an aquarium.

I was halfway through my bowl of ramen, when the door opened behind me. No one said anything, but I knew already. I set down the bowl and turned slowly on the stool.

He was on his own.

It wasn’t the face I remembered, not even close. He’d sleeved to fairer and broader features than the last time around, a tangled mane of blonde traced with grey, and cheekbones that owed at least as much to Slavic genes as they did to his predilection for Adoracion custom. But the body wasn’t much different - inside the loose coveralls he wore, he still had the height and slim breadth in chest and shoulders, the tapered waist and legs, the big hands. And his moves still radiated the same casual poise when he made them.

I knew him as certainly as if he’d torn open the coverall to show me the scars on his chest.

‘I hear you’re looking for me,’ he said mildly. ‘Do I know you?’

I grinned.

‘Hello Jack. How’s Virginia these days?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.’

She sat on the slope of the dune at my side and traced triangles in the sand between her feet with a bottleback prod. She was still wet from the swim, water pearling on sun-darkened skin all over the surfer sleeve, razored black hair spiked damp and uneven on top of her head. The elfin face beneath was taking some getting used to. She was at least ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. Then again, she was probably having the same problem with me. She stared down at the sand as she spoke, features unreadable. She talked hesitantly, the same way she’d woken me in the spare room at dawn, asking if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. She’d had all night to get over the surprise, but she still looked at me in snatched glances, as if it wasn’t allowed.

I shrugged.

‘I’m the believable part, Virginia. I’m not the one back from the dead. And don’t call me ‘‘kid’’.’

She smiled a little. ‘We’re all back from the dead at some point, Tak. Hazards of the profession, remember?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah.’ She stared away down the beach for a while, where the sunrise was still a blurred blood rumour through early morning mist. ‘So do you believe her?’

‘That she’s Quell?’ I sighed and scooped up a handful of sand. Watched it trickle away through my fingers and off the sides of my palm. ‘I believe she believes she is.’

Virginia Vidaura made an impatient gesture. ‘I’ve met wireheads that believe they’re Konrad Harlan. That isn’t what I asked you.’

‘I know what you asked me, Virginia.’

‘Then deal with the fucking question,’ she said without heat. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything in the Corps?’

‘Is she Quell?’ Trace moisture from the swim had left tiny lines of sand still clinging to my palms. I brushed my hands together brusquely. ‘How can she be, right? Quell’s dead. Vaporised. Whatever your pals back at the house might like to wish for in their political wet dreams.’

She looked over her shoulder, as if she thought they might hear us. Might have woken and come stretching and yawning down to the beach after us, rested and ready to take violent offence at my lack of respect.

‘I can remember a time you might have wished for it too, Tak. A time you might have wanted her back. What happened to you?’

‘Sanction IV happened to me.’

‘Ah, yes. Sanction IV. Revolution called for a bit more commitment than you’d expected, did it?’

‘You weren’t there.’

A small quiet opened up behind the words. She looked away. Brasil’s little band were all nominally Quellists - or neoQuellists at least - but Virginia Vidaura was the only one among them with Envoy conditioning. She’d had the capacity for wilful self-deception gouged out of her in a way that would permit no easy emotional attachment to legend or dogma. She’d have, I reasoned, an opinion worth listening to. She’d have perspective.

I waited. Down the beach, wavecrash kept up a slow, expectant backbeat.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said finally.

‘Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?’

Her mouth quirked. ‘Still quoting her though, I see.’

‘Paraphrasing. Look, Virginia, you correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no record of any backup up of Nadia Makita ever made. Right?’

‘There’s no record of any backup of Takeshi Kovacs either. Seems to be one out there though.’

‘Yeah, don’t remind me. But that’s the fucking Harlan family, and you can see a rationale for why they’d do it. You can see the value.’

She looked sidelong at me. ‘Well, it’s good to see your time on Sanction IV didn’t damage your ego.’

‘Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have uses. It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.’

‘Hardly plankton-standard.’ She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. ‘Takeshi, you know Yaros and I...’

‘Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, what he really said was ah fuck it, but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?’

She sighed. ‘No. It didn’t.’

‘Want to talk about it?’

‘There’s no point, it was all so long ago.’ A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. ‘I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.’

I shrugged. ‘We must be prepared to live on timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realise our own dreams.’

This time the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.

‘You trying to be fucking funny?’

‘No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—’

‘Shut up, Tak.’

The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognise them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—

Well, never mind.

I shut up. Listened to the waves.

A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and grey, but all the way up four storeys of seaward facing rooms, the windows winked broadly at us.

An off-note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.

‘Ouch.’ I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.

‘At least he’s trying,’ she said obscurely.

‘Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.’

She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.

‘You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?’

‘I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like round here?’

Surfers.

You’ll find them pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World, because pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World there’s an ocean that throws waves to die for. And to die for has a couple of meanings here. 0.8G, remember, and three moons - you can ride a wave along some parts of Vchira for half a dozen kilometres at a time, and the height of the things some of these guys get up on has to be seen to be believed. But the low gravity and the trilunar tug has its flip side, and the oceans on Harlan’s World run current systems like nothing ever seen on Earth. Chemical content, temperature and flow all vary alarmingly and the sea does bitchy, unforgiving things with very little warning. The turbulence theorists are still getting to grips with a lot of it, back in their modelled simulations. Out on Vchira Beach, they’re doing a different kind of research. More than once I’ve seen the Young effect played out to perfection on a seemingly stable nine-metre face, like some Promethean myth in frame advance - the perfect rising shoulder of water eddies and stumbles drunkenly under the rider, then shatters apart as if caught by artillery frag fire. The sea opens its throat, swallows the board, swallows the rider. I’ve helped pull the survivors from the surf a few times. I’ve seen the dazed grins, the glow that seems to come off their faces as they say things like I didn’t think that bitch was ever going to get off my chest or man, did you see that shit come apart on me or most often of all, urgently, did you get my plank out okay, sam. I’ve watched them go back out again, the ones that didn’t have dislocated or broken limbs or cracked skulls from the wipeout, and I’ve watched the gnawing want in the eyes of the ones who have to wait to heal.

I know the feeling well enough. It’s just that I tend to associate it with trying to kill people other than myself.

‘Why us?’ Mari Ado asked with the blunt lack of manners she obviously thought went with her offworld name.

I grinned and shrugged.

‘Couldn’t think of anyone else stupid enough.’

She took a feline kind of offence at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that, it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.

‘Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction IV.’

Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.

Ado glanced sideways. ‘Don’t you think, Sierra?’

Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty. The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue colourwashed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than the spray-on swimwear and some cheap jewellery. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten. But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.

Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylised grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.

I cleared my throat.

‘You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction IV’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.’

As an insult, it was as unjust as it was complex. Mari Ado, ex of the Little Blue Bugs, was criminally competent in a number of insurgency roles that had nothing to do with wavecraft, and for that matter no less well endowed physically than a number of the other female bodies in the room, Virginia Vidaura included. But I knew she was sensitive about her shape, and unlike Virginia or myself, she’d never been offworld. In effect I’d called her a local yokel, a surf nerd, a cheap source of sexual service and sexually unappealing all in one. Doubtless Isa, had she been there to witness it, would have yipped with delight.

I’m still a little sensitive myself where Sanction IV’s concerned.

Ado looked back across the table to the big oak armchair at the end. ‘Throw this motherfucker out, Jack.’

‘No.’ It was a low drawl, almost sleepy. ‘Not at this stage.’

He sprawled almost horizontal in the dark wood seat, legs stretched out in front of him, face drooping forward, opened hands pressed loosely one on top of the other in his lap, almost as if he was trying to read his own palm.

‘He’s being rude, Jack.’

‘So were you.’ Brasil curled himself upright and forward in the chair. His eyes met mine. A faint sweat beaded his forehead. I recognised the cause. Fresh sleeve notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much. He hadn’t given up his bad habits.

‘But she’s got a point, Kovacs. Why us? Why would we do this for you?’

‘You know damn well this isn’t for me,’ I lied. ‘If the Quellist ethic isn’t alive on Vchira, then tell me where the fuck else I go looking for it. Because time is short.’

A snort from down the table. A young male surfer I didn’t know. ‘Man, you don’t even know if this is Quell we’re talking about. Look at you, you don’t even believe it yourself. You want us to go up against the Harlan family for the sake of a glitch in some deCom psychobitch’s fucked up head? No way, sam.’

There were a couple of mutterings I took for assent. But the majority stayed silent and watched me.

I hooked the young surfer’s gaze. ‘And your name is?’

‘Fuck’s it to you, sam?’

‘This is Daniel,’ said Brasil easily. ‘He’s not been here long. And yes, you’re looking at his real age there. Listening to it too, I’m afraid.’

Daniel flushed and looked betrayed.

‘Fact remains, Jack. We’re talking about Rila Crags here. No one ever got inside there without an invitation.’

A smile tripped like lightning from Brasil to Virginia Vidaura and on to Sierra Tres. Even Mari Ado chortled sourly into her coffee.

‘What? Fucking what?’

I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. ‘I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.’

‘Natsume,’ said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. ‘Name mean anything to you?’

The look she got back was answer enough.

‘Nikolai Natsume.’ Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.’

‘That’s a real story?’ I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. ‘I thought it was a propaganda myth.’

Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. ‘Hey, Natsume never got inside.’

‘Yeah, he did,’ said Ado. ‘You don’t want to believe that crap they sell in school these days. He—’

‘We can discuss Natsume’s achievements later,’ said Brasil mildly. ‘For now it’s enough that if we have to crack Rila, the precedent already exists.’

There was a brief pause. The surfer who hadn’t believed in Natsume’s existence outside legend was whispering in Daniel’s ear.

‘Okay, that’s fine,’ said someone else finally. ‘But if the Harlan family have got this woman, whoever she is, is there any point in mounting a raid? Interrogation tech they’ve got up at Rila, they’ll have cracked her by now.’

‘Not necessarily.’ Virginia Vidaura leaned forward across her cleared plate. Small breasts moved under her sprayon. It was strange seeing her in the surfer uniform too. ‘DeCom are running state-of-the-art gear and more capacity than most AI mainframes. They’re built as well as the wetware engineers know how. Supposed to be able to beat Martian naval intelligence systems, remember. I think even good interrogation software is going to look pretty sick against that.’

‘They could just torture her,’ said Ado, returning to her seat. ‘This is the Harlans we’re talking about.’

I shook my head. ‘If they try that, she can just withdraw into the command systems. And besides, they need her coherent at complicated levels. Inflicting short-term pain isn’t going to get them there.’

Sierra Tres lifted her head.

‘You say she’s talking to you?’

‘I think so, yes.’ I ignored a couple more disbelieving noises from down the table. ‘At a guess, I’d say she’s managed to use her deCom gear to hook into a phone I used to call one of her crew a while back. Probably a residual trace in the team net system, she could run a search for it. But he’s dead now and it’s not a good connection.’

Hard laughter from a couple of the company, Daniel included. I memorised their faces.

Maybe Brasil noticed. He gestured for quiet.

‘Her team are all dead, right?’

‘Yes. That’s what I was told.’

‘Four deComs, in a camp full of deComs.’ Mari Ado made a face. ‘Slaughtered just like that? Hard to believe, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t—’

She talked over me. ‘That they’d let it happen, I mean. This, what’s his name, Kurumaya was it? Old-school deCom big daddy, he’s going to just let the Harlanites walk in and do that under his nose? And what about the rest of them? Doesn’t say much for their esprit de corps, does it?’

‘No,’ I said evenly. ‘It doesn’t. DeCom runs as a competition-based nail-it-and-cash-in bounty dynamic. The crews are tight-knit internally. Outside of that, from what I saw there’s not a lot of loyalty. And Kurumaya will have bowed to whatever oligarchy pressure was brought to bear, probably after the event. Sylvie’s Slipins never did themselves any favours with him, certainly not enough for him to buck the hierarchy.’

Ado curled her lip. ‘Sounds charming.’

‘Signs of the times,’ said Brasil unexpectedly. He looked at me. ‘When you strip away all the higher loyalties, we inevitably fall back on fear and greed. Right?’

In the wake of the quote, no one said anything. I scanned the faces in the room, trying to reckon support against dislike and the shades of grey between. Sierra Tres cranked one expressive eyebrow and stayed silent. Sanction IV, fucking Sanction IV, hung in the air about me. You could make a good case for my actions there being governed by fear and greed. Some of the faces I was watching already had.

Then again, none of them were there.

None of them were fucking there.

Brasil stood up. He searched the faces around the table, maybe for the same things I’d been looking at.

‘Think about this, all of you. It will affect us all, one way or the other. Each one of you is here because I trust you to keep your mouth shut, and because if there’s something to be done I trust you to help me do it. There’ll be another meeting tonight at sundown. There’ll be a vote. Like I said, give it some thought.’

Then he picked up his saxophone from a stool by the window and ambled out of the room as if there was nothing more important going on in his life at that moment.

After a couple of seconds, Virginia Vidaura got up and went out after him.

She didn’t look at me at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Brasil found me again later, on the beach.

He came trudging up out of the surf with the board slung under one arm, body stripped to shorts, scar tissue and spray-on ankle boots, raking the sea out of his hair with his free hand. I lifted an arm in greeting and he broke into a jog towards where I sat in the sand. No mean feat after the hours he’d had in the water. When he reached me, he was barely breathing heavily.

I squinted up at him in the sun. ‘Looks like fun.’

‘Try?’ He touched the surfboard, angled it towards me. Surfers don’t do that, not with a board they’ve owned any longer than a couple of days. And this one looked older than the sleeve that was carrying it.

Jack Soul Brasil. Even here on Vchira Beach, there was no one else much like him.

‘Thanks, I’ll pass.’

He shrugged, dug the board into the sand and flopped down beside me. Water sprang off him in droplets. ‘Suit yourself. Good swell out there today. Nothing too scary.’

‘Must be dull for you.’

A broad grin. ‘Well that’s the trap, isn’t it.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah, it is.’ He gestured out to sea. ‘Get in the water, you do every wave for what it’s worth. Lose that, you might as well go back to Newpest. Leave Vchira for good.’

I nodded. ‘Get many like that?’

‘The burnouts? Yeah, some. But leaving’s okay. It’s the ones who stay on that hurt to look at.’

I glanced at the scar tissue on his chest.

‘You’re such a sensitive guy, Jack.’

He smiled out at the sea. ‘Trying to be.’

‘That why you won’t do the clone thing, huh? Wear every sleeve for what it’s worth?’

‘Learn every sleeve for what it’s worth,’ he corrected me gently. ‘Yeah. Plus you wouldn’t believe what clone storage costs these days, even in Newpest.’

‘Doesn’t seem to bother Ado or Tres.’

He grinned again. ‘Mari’s got an inheritance to spend. You know what her real name is, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, I remember. And Tres?’

‘Sierra knows people in the trade. When the rest of us packed in the Bug stuff, she went on contracting for the haiduci for a while. She’s owed some favours up in Newpest.’

He shivered slightly, let it run up to a shudder that twitched his shoulders. Sneezed suddenly.

‘Still doing that shit, I see. Is that why Ado’s so thin?’

He looked at me oddly. ‘Ado’s thin because she wants to be thin. How she goes about it is her business, wouldn’t you say?’

I shrugged. ‘Sure. I’m just curious. I figured you guys would have got bored with self-infection by now.’

‘Ah, but you never liked it in the first place, did you? I remember last time you were here, when Mari tried to sell you on that batch of HHF we had. You always were a little puritanical on the subject.’

‘I just never saw the point of making myself ill for fun. Thought as a trained medic, you’d be at least that smart too.’

‘I’ll remind you of that next time we’re sharing a bad tetrameth comedown. Or a single-malt hangover.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘You’re right.’ He nodded sagely. ‘That chemical shit is Stone-Age stuff. I ran Hun Home flu against a spec-inhibited immune system for ten years and all I got was buzz and some really cool delirium dreams. Real waveclimbers. No headaches, no major organ damage, not even a runny nose once the inhibitors and the virus meshed. Tell me one drug you could do that with.’

‘Is that what you’re running these days? HHF?’

He shook his head. ‘Not for a long time. Virginia got us some Adoracion custom a while back. Engineered spinal-fever complex. Man, you should see my dreams now. Sometimes I wake up screaming.’

‘I’m happy for you.’

For a while, we both watched the figures in the water. A couple of times Brasil grunted and pointed out something in the way one of the surfers moved. None of it meant very much to me. Once he applauded softly as someone wiped out, but when I glanced at him, there was no apparent mockery in his face.

A little later he asked me again, gesturing at the pegged board.

‘You sure you don’t want to try out? Take my plank? Man, that mothballed shit you’re wearing looks practically made for it. Odd for military custom, come to think of it. Kind of light.’ He prodded idly at my shoulder with a couple of fingers. ‘In fact I’d say that’s near-perfect sports sleeve trim you’re carrying. What’s the label?’

‘Ah, some defunct bunch, never heard of them before. Eishundo.’

‘Eishundo?’

I glanced at him, surprised. ‘Yeah, Eishundo Organics. You know them?’

‘Fuck, yeah.’ He scooted back in the sand and stared at me. ‘Tak, that’s a design classic you’re wearing. They only ever built the one series, and it was a century ahead of its time at least. Stuff no one had ever tried before. Gekko grip, recabled muscle structure, autonomic survival systems like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘No, I would.’

He wasn’t listening. ‘Flexibility and endurance through the roof, reflex wiring you don’t start to see again until Harkany got started back in the early three hundreds. Man, they just don’t build them like that any more.’

‘They certainly don’t. They went bust, didn’t they?’

He shook his head vehemently. ‘Nah, that was politics. Eishundo was a Drava co-operative, set up in the eighties, typical Quiet Quellist types except I don’t think they ever made any big secret of the fact. Would have been shut down probably, but everyone knew they made the best sport sleeves on the planet and they ended up supplying half the brats in the First Families.’

‘Handy for them.’

‘Yeah, well. Like I said, there was nothing to touch them.’ The enthusiasm leached from his face. ‘Then, with the Unsettlement, they declared for the Quellists. Harlan family never forgave them for that. When it was over they blacklisted everyone who’d ever worked for Eishundo, even executed a few of the senior biotech guys as traitors and terrorists. Providing arms to the enemy, all that tired line of shit. Plus, with the way things turned out at Drava, they were pretty fucked anyway. Man, I can’t believe you’re sitting there wearing that thing. It’s a fucking piece of history, Tak.’

‘Well, that’s good to know.’

‘You sure you don’t want to—’

‘Sell it to you? Thanks, no, I’ll—.’

‘Surf, man. You sure you don’t want to surf? Take the plank out and get wet? Find out what you can do in that thing?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll just live with the suspense.’

He looked at me curiously for a while. Then he nodded and went back to watching the sea. You could feel the way just watching it did something for him. Balanced out the fever he’d set raging inside himself. I tried, a little grimly, not to feel envy.

‘So maybe some other time,’ he said quietly. ‘When you’re not carrying so much.’

‘Yeah. Maybe.’ It wasn’t any other time I could usefully imagine, unless he was talking about the past, and I couldn’t see any way to get back there.

He seemed to want to talk.

‘You never did this stuff at all, did you? Even back in Newpest?’

I shrugged. ‘I know how to fall off a plank, if that’s what you mean. Did the local beaches for a couple of summers when I was a kid. Then I started hanging out with a crew and they were strictly subaqua. You know how it goes.’

He nodded, maybe remembering his own Newpest youth. Maybe remembering the last time we’d had this conversation, but I wouldn’t count on it. The last time we’d talked about it was fifty-odd years ago, and if you don’t have Envoy recall, that’s a long time and a lot of conversations past.

‘Fucking stupid,’ he muttered. ‘Who’d you run with?’

‘Reef Warriors. Hirata chapter, mostly. Dive Free, Die Free. Leave the Scum on the Surface. We would have cut up guys like you as soon as look at you back then. What about you?’

‘Me? Oh, I thought I was a real fucking free spirit. Stormriders, Standing Wave, Vchira Dawn Chorus. Some others, I don’t remember them all now.’ He shook his head. ‘So fucking stupid.’

We watched the waves.

‘How long have you been out here?’ I asked him.

He stretched and tipped his head back towards the sun, eyes clenched shut. A sound like a cat purring made its way up out of his chest, broke finally into a chuckle.

‘Here on Vchira? I don’t know, I don’t keep track. Got to be close to a century by now, I guess. On and off.’

‘And Virginia says the Bugs folded two decades back.’

‘Yeah, near enough. Like I said, Sierra still gets out and about occasionally. But most of the rest of us haven’t been in worse than a beach brawl for ten, twelve years.’

‘Let’s hope you haven’t got rusty then.’

He flipped another grin at me. ‘You take a lot for granted.’

I shook my head. ‘No, I just listen carefully. This will affect us all, one way or the other? You got that right. You’re going to go with this, whatever the others do. You think it’s for real.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Brasil lay back flat on the sand and closed his eyes. ‘Well, here’s something you might want to think about then. Something you probably don’t know. Back when the Quellists were fighting the First Families for continental dominance of New Hokkaido, there was a lot of talk about government death squads targeting Quell and the other Contingency Committee names. Sort of counterblow to the Black Brigades. So you know what they did?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

He squinted an eye open. ‘You do?’

‘No. But I don’t like rhetorical questions. You’re going to tell me something, get on and tell me.’

He closed his eyes again. I thought something like pain passed over his face.

‘Alright. Do you know what data shrapnel is?’

‘Sure.’ It was an old term, almost outmoded. ‘Cheap virals. Stone-Age stuff. Bits of cannibalised standard code in a broadcast matrix. You lob them into enemy systems and they try to carry out whatever looped functions they were for originally. Clogs up the operating code with inconsistent commands. That’s the theory, anyway. I hear it doesn’t work all that well’

In fact, I knew the limitations of the weapon pretty well at first hand. Final resistance on Adoracion a hundred and fifty years ago had broadcast data shrapnel to slow down the Envoy advance across the Manzana Basin, because it was all they had left. It hadn’t slowed us down all that much. The furious hand-to-hand fighting that followed in the covered streets of Neruda had hurt us far more. But Jack Soul Brasil, with his adopted name and passion for a culture whose planet he’d never seen, didn’t need to hear about that right now.

He shifted his long body on the sand.

‘Yeah, well, the New Hokkaido contingency committee didn’t share your scepticism. Or maybe they were just desperate. Anyway, they came up with something similar based on digitised human freight. They built shell personalities for each committee member, just a surface assembly of basic memory and self—’

‘Oh you are fucking kidding me!’

‘—and loaded them into widecast datamines, to be deployed inside the Quellist sectors and triggered if they were overrun. No, I’m not kidding you.’

I closed my own eyes.

Oh fuck.

Brasil’s voice ticked onward, remorseless. ‘Yeah, plan was, in the event of a rout, they’d trigger the mines and leave a few dozen of their own defenders, maybe the vanguard units of the encroaching forces as well, each solidly convinced they were Quellcrist Falconer. Or whoever.’

Sound of waves, and distant cries across the water.

Would you mind holding me while I go under?

I saw her face. I heard the changed voice that wasn’t Sylvie Oshima.

Touch me. Tell me you’re fucking real.

Brasil was still going, but you could hear him winding down. ‘Quite a smart weapon when you think about it. Widespread confusion, who the fuck do you trust, who do you arrest? Chaos, really. Maybe it buys time for the real Quell to get out. Maybe just. Creates chaos. The final blow. Who knows?’

When I opened my eyes again, he was sitting up and staring out to sea again. The peace and the humour in his face was gone, wiped away like make-up, like seawater dried off in the sun. Out of nowhere, inside the tight muscled surfer physique, he looked suddenly bitter and angry.

‘Who told you all that?’ I asked him.

He glanced back at me and the ghost of his former smile flickered.

‘Someone you need to meet,’ he said quietly.

We took his bug, a stripped-down two-seat not much bigger than the single I’d rented but, as it turned out, far faster. Brasil took the trouble to pull on a battered-looking pantherskin crash suit, something else that marked him out as different from all the other idiots cruising up and down the highway in swimwear at speeds that would flay flesh to the bone if they spilled and rolled.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said, when I mentioned it. ‘Some chances are worth taking. The rest is just deathwish.’

I picked up my polalloy helmet and moulded it on. My voice came through the speaker tinnily.

‘Got to watch that shit, huh?’

He nodded. ‘All the time.’

He cranked the bug up, settled his own helmet and then kicked us down the highway at an even two hundred kilometres an hour, heading north. Back along the path I’d already traced looking for him. Past the all-night diner, past the other stops and knots of population where I’d scattered his name like blood around a bottleback charter boat, back through Kem Point and further. In daylight, the Strip lost a lot of its romance. The tiny hamlets of window light I’d passed going south the previous evening showed up as sunblasted utilitarian low rises and ’fabs. Neon and holosigns were switched off or bleached out to near invisibility. The dunetown settlements shed their cosy main-street-at-night appeal and became simple accretions of structure on either side of a detritus-strewn highway. Only the sound of the sea and the fragrances in the air were the same, and we were going too fast to register them.

Twenty kilometres north of Kem Point a small, badly-paved side road led away into the dunes. Brasil throttled back for the turn, not as much as I would have liked, and took us off the highway. Sand boiled from under the bug, scoured out from around the irregular chunks of evercrete and off the bedrock the road had been laid over. With grav-effect vehicles, paving is often as much about signalling where the path goes as providing an actual surface. And just over the first line of dunes, whoever had laid this track had abandoned the effort in favour of illuminum and carbon-fibre marker poles driven into the ground at ten-metre intervals. Brasil let our speed bleed off and we cruised sedately along the trail of poles as it snaked seaward through the sandscape. A couple of dilapidated bubblefabs appeared along the route, pitched at unlikely angles on the slopes around us. It wasn’t clear if anyone was living in them. Further on, I saw a combat-rigged skimmer parked under a tented dust canopy in a shallow defile. Spiderlike watchdog systems like miniature karakuri flexed themselves awake on its upper surfaces at the sound of the bug’s engine or maybe the heat we gave off. They raised a couple of limbs in our direction, then settled down again as we passed.

We crested the final set of dunes, and Brasil stopped the bug sideways on to the sea. He lifted off his helmet, leaned forward on the controls and nodded down the slope.

‘There you go. Tell you anything?’

A long time ago, someone had driven an armoured hoverloader up the beach until its nose rammed the line of dunes, and then apparently just left it there. Now the vessel sprawled in its collapsed skirt like a swamp panther that had crouched for approaching prey and then been slaughtered where it lay. The rear steerage vanes had blown round to an angle that suited the prevailing wind, and were apparently jammed there. Sand had crept into the jigsaw lines of the armouring and built up along the facing side of the skirt so the armoured flanks of the ’loader seemed to be the upper surfaces of a much larger buried structure. The gunports on the side I could see offered blast barrels cranked to the sky, a sure sign that the hydraulic governors were shot. The dorsal hatches were blown back as if for evacuation.

On the side of the central fuselage, up near the blister of the bridge, I spotted traces of colour. Black and red, wound together in a familiar pattern that touched me in the spine with a cold hand; the time-abraded traces of a stylised Quellcrist frond.

‘Oh, no way.’

‘Yeah.’ Brasil shifted in the bug’s saddle. ‘That’s right.’

‘Has this been here since . . . ?’

‘Yeah, pretty much.’

We rode the bug down the dune and dismounted near the tail end. Brasil cut the power and the vehicle sank to the sand like an obedient seal. The ’loader bulked above us, smart metal armour soaking up the heat of the sun so there was a faint chill close up. At three points along the pitted flank, access ladders led down from the edge of the skirt rail and buried their feet in the sand. The one at the rear, where the vessel had tilted towards the ground, was angled outward and almost horizontal. Brasil ignored it, grabbed at the skirt rail and levered himself up onto the deck above with effortless grace. I rolled my eyes and followed suit.

The voice caught me as I straightened up.

‘So is this him?’

I blinked in the sun and made out a slight figure ahead of us on the lightly canted deck. He stood about a head shorter than Brasil and wore a simple grey coverall whose sleeves were hacked off at the shoulders. From the features below the sparse white hair, he had to be in his sixties at least, but the exposed arms were ropey with muscle and ended in big, bony hands. And the soft voice had a corded strength behind it. There was a tension to the question that approached hostility.

I stepped forward to join Brasil. Mirrored the way the old man stood with his hands hanging at his sides like weapons he might need. Met his eyes incuriously.

‘Yeah, I’m him.’

His gaze seemed to flinch downward, but it wasn’t that. He was looking me over. There was a moment of silence.

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘Yes.’ My voice softened a fraction. I’d misread the tension in him. It wasn’t hostility. ‘I’ve spoken to her.’

Inside the hoverloader, there was an unexpected sense of space and natural light. Combat vessels of this sort are usually pretty cramped, but Soseki Koi had had a lot of time to change all that. Bulkheads had been ripped out and in places the upper level deck had been peeled back to create five-metre light wells. The sun poured in through the few vision ports and the opened dorsal hatches, blasted its way elsewhere between cracked armouring that might have been battle damage or deliberate modification. A riot of plantlife clustered about these opened areas, spilling out of hung baskets and twining up exposed struts in the skeleton of the fuselage. Illuminum panelling had been carefully replaced in some areas, left to decay in others. Somewhere not visible, waterflow over rocks chuckled in patient counterpoint to the bassline pounding of the surf outside.

Koi got us seated on padded matting around a low, formally-set table at the bottom of one of the light wells. He served us with traces of old-school ceremony from the ’loader’s autochef, which sat on a shelf behind him and still seemed to be working pretty well. To the selection of grilled meat and pan noodles, he added a pot of belaweed tea and fruit grown from the plants overhead - vine plums and thick, thirty-centimetre lengths of Kossuth chainberry. Brasil dug into everything with the enthusiasm of a man who’d been in the water all day. I picked at my food, took just enough to be polite apart from the chainberry, which was some of the best I’d ever tasted. Koi held himself rigidly back from questions while we ate.

Eventually, Brasil tossed the stripped threads of his last piece of chainberry onto his plate, wiped his fingers on a napkin and nodded at me.

‘Tell him. I gave him the highlights, but it’s your story.’

‘I—’ I looked across the table of devastated food and saw the hunger that sat there. ‘Well. It’s a while back now. A few months. I was up in Tekitomura, on. Business. I was in this bar down on the waterfront, Tokyo Crow. She was—’

It felt strange, telling it. Strange, and if I was honest, very distant. Listening to my own voice now, I suddenly had a hard time myself believing the path I’d tracked from that night of splattered blood and screaming hallucinations, out across the machine-haunted wastes of New Hok and back south again, running from a doppelgänger. Quixotic chivalry in wharfside bars, frantic schizophrenic sex and repeated waterborne flight in the company of a mysterious and damaged woman with hair of living steel, mountainside gunbattles with the shards of myself amidst the ruins of our Martian heritage. Sylvie was right when she christened me Micky in the shadows of the crane. It was pure experia.

No wonder Radul Segesvar was having a hard time coming to terms with what I’d done. Told this tale of muddled loyalties and blown-off-course rerouting, the man who’d come to him two years previously for backing would have laughed out loud in disbelief.

No, you wouldn’t have laughed.

You would have stared, cold with detachment as you barely listened, and thought about something else. About the next New Revelation slaughter, blood on the blade of a Tebbit knife, a steep-sided pit out in the Weed Expanse and a shrill screaming that goes on and on . . .

You would have shrugged the story away, true or not, content with what you had instead.

But Koi drank it in without a word. When I paused and looked at him, he asked no questions. He waited patiently and once, when I seemed to have stalled, he made a single, gentle gesture for me to continue. Finally, when I was done, he sat for a while and then nodded to himself.

‘You say she called you names when she first came back.’

‘Yes.’ Envoy recall lifted them from the depths of inconsequential memory for me. ‘Odisej. Ogawa. She thought I was one of her soldiers, from the Tetsu battalion. Part of the Black Brigades.’

‘So.’ He looked away, face indecipherable. Voice soft. ‘Thank you, Kovacs-san.’

Quiet. I exchanged glances with Brasil. The surfer cleared his throat.

‘Is that bad?’

Koi drew breath as if it hurt him.

‘It isn’t helpful.’ He looked at us again and smiled sadly. ‘I was in the Black Brigades. Tetsu battalion wasn’t part of them, it was a separate front.’

Brasil shrugged. ‘Maybe she was confused.’

‘Yes, maybe.’ But the sadness never left his eyes.

‘And the names?’ I asked him. ‘Do you recognise them?’

He shook his head. ‘Ogawa’s not an uncommon name for the north, but I don’t think I knew anyone called that. It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but it doesn’t chime. And Odisej, well,’ a shrug, ‘there’s the kendo sensei, but I don’t think she had a Quellist past.’

We sat in silence for a little while. Finally, Brasil sighed.

‘Ah, fuck.’

For some reason, the tiny explosion seemed to animate Koi. He smiled again, this time with a gleam I hadn’t seen in him before.

‘You sound discouraged, my friend.’

‘Yeah, well. I really thought this might be it, you know. I thought we were really going to do this.’

Koi reached for the plates and began to clear them onto the ledge behind his shoulder. His movements were smooth and economical, and he talked as he worked.

‘Do you know what day it is next week?’ he asked conversationally.

We both blinked at him.

‘No? How unhealthy. How easily we wrap ourselves up in our own concerns, eh? How easily we detach from the wider scheme of life as it’s lived by the majority.’ He leaned forward to collect the furthest dishes and I handed them to him. ‘Thank you. Next week, the end of next week, is Konrad Harlan’s birthday. In Millsport, celebration will be mandatory. Fireworks and festivities without mercy. The chaos of humans at play.’

Brasil got it before me. His face lit up. ‘You mean . . . ?’

Koi smiled gently. ‘My friend, for all I know this might well really be it, as you rather cryptically describe it. But whether it is or not, I can tell you now we are really going to do this. Because we really have no other choice.’

It was what I wanted to hear, but I still couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. On the ride south, I’d imagined I might get Brasil and Vidaura, maybe another few of the neoQuell faithful, to weigh in on my side whatever the holes in their wish fulfilment. But Brasil’s data shrapnel story, the way it fitted the New Hok detail and the understanding that it came from someone who knew, who’d been there, the meeting with this small, self-contained man and his serious approach to gardening and food - all this was pushing me towards the vertiginous edge of a belief that I’d been wasting my time.

The understanding that I hadn’t was almost as dizzying.

‘Consider,’ said Koi, and something seemed to have changed in his voice. ‘Maybe this ghost of Nadia Makita is exactly that, a ghost. But is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough? Has it not already been enough for the oligarchs to panic and disobey the binding covenants of their puppet masters back on Earth? How then can we not do this? How can we not take back from their grip this object of their terror and rage?’

I traded another look with Brasil. Raised an eyebrow.

‘This isn’t going to be easy to sell,’ the surfer said grimly. ‘Most of the ex-Bugs will fight if they think it’s Quell they’re going to get, and they’ll talk the others round. But I don’t know if they’ll do it for a woken ghost, however fucking vengeful.’

Koi finished clearing the plates, took up a napkin and examined his hands. He found a ribbon of chainberry juice caught around one wrist and cleaned it off with meticulous attention. His gaze was fixed on the task as he spoke. ‘I will speak to them, if you wish. But in the end, if they have no conviction of their own, Quell herself wouldn’t ask them to fight, and nor will I.’

Brasil nodded. ‘Great.’

‘Koi.’ Suddenly, I needed to know. ‘Do you think this is a ghost we’re chasing?’

He made a tiny sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh. ‘We are all chasing ghosts, Kovacs-san. Living as long as we now do, how could we not be.’

Sarah.

I forced it down, wondering if he saw the wince at the edges of my eyes as I did it. Wondering with sudden paranoia if he already somehow knew. My voice grated coming out.

‘That isn’t what I asked you.’

He blinked and suddenly smiled again

‘No, it isn’t. You asked me if I believed, and I evaded your question. Forgive me. On Vchira Beach, cheap metaphysics and cheap politics rub shoulders and both are in frequent demand. With a little effort, a passable living can be made from dispensing them, but then the habit becomes hard to break.’ He sighed. ‘Do I believe we are dealing with the return of Quellcrist Falconer? With every fibre of my being I want to, but like any Quellist I am impelled to face the facts. And the facts do not support what I want to believe.’

‘It’s not her.’

‘It’s not likely. But in one of her less passionate moments, Quell herself once offered an escape clause for situations such as these. If the facts are against you, she said, but you cannot bear to cease believing - then at least suspend judgment. Wait and see.’

‘I’d have thought that mitigates pretty effectively against action.’

He nodded. ‘Mostly it does. But in this case, the issue of what I want to be true has nothing to do with whether we act or not. Because this much I do believe: even if this ghost has no more than talismanic value, its time is here and its place is among us. One way or another, there is a change coming. The Harlanites recognise it as well as we do, and they have already made their move. It only remains for us to make ours. 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.’

That stayed in my head like an echo, long after we left Soseki Koi to his preparations and rode the bug back along the Strip. That, and his simple question. The simple conviction behind it.

Is not a woken and vengeful ghost enough?

But it wasn’t the same for me. Because this ghost I’d held, and I’d watched moonlight across the floor of a cabin in the mountains while she slipped away from me into sleep, not knowing if she’d be waking again.

If she could be woken again, I didn’t want to be the one to tell her what she was. I didn’t want to be there to watch her face when she found out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After that, it went rapidly.

There is thought and there is action, a youngish Quell once said, stealing liberally, I later discovered, from Harlan’s World’s ancient samurai heritage. Do not confuse the two. When the time comes to act, your thought must already be complete. There will be no room for it when the action begins.

Brasil went back to the others and presented Koi’s decision as his own. There was a splutter of dispute from some of the surfers who still hadn’t forgiven me for Sanction IV, but it didn’t last. Even Mari Ado dropped her hostility like a broken toy as it became clear I was peripheral to the real issue. One by one, in the sunset-painted shade and glow of the common living room, the men and women of Vchira Beach gave their assent.

It seemed that a woken ghost was going to be enough.

The component parts of the raid floated together with a speed and ease that for the more suggestible might have implied the favour of gods or agents of destiny. For Koi, it was simply the flow of historical forces, no more in question than the laws of gravity or thermodynamics. It was a confirmation that the time had come, that the political pot was boiling over. Of course it was going to spill, of course it was all going to fall in the same direction, onto the floor. Where else could it go?

I told him I thought it was luck, and he just smiled.

And it came together anyway.

Personnel:

The Little Blue Bugs. They barely existed any more as an actual entity, but there were enough of the old crew around to form a core that corresponded roughly to legend. Newcomers drawn in over the years by the legend’s gravitational pull sketched an outlined weight of numbers and claimed the nomenclature by association. Over even more years, Brasil had learned to trust some of them. He’d seen them surf and he’d seen them fight. More importantly, he’d seen them all prove their ability to adopt Quell’s maxim and get on with living a full life when armed struggle was inappropriate. Together, the old and the new, they were as close to a Quellist taskforce as it was possible to get without a time machine.

Weapons:

The casually parked military skimmer in Koi’s backyard was emblematic of a tendency that ran the length and breadth of the Strip. The Bugs weren’t the only heavy-heist types to have taken refuge on Vchira Beach. Whatever it was that drew Brasil and his kind to the waves, it was a general tug that manifested itself just as easily in an enthusiasm for law-breaking of a dozen different stripes. Sourcetown was awash with retired thugs and revolutionaries and it seemed none of them had ever felt like giving up their toys for good. Shake down the Strip and hardware tumbled out of it like vials and sex toys from the sheets of Mitzi Harlan’s bed.

Planning:

Overrated as far as most of Brasil’s crew were concerned. Rila Crags was almost as notorious as the old secret police headquarters on Shimatsu Boulevard, the one Black Brigade member Iphigenia Deme brought down in smoking rubble when they tried to interrogate her in the basement and triggered her implanted enzyme explosives instead. The desire to do the same thing at Rila was a palpable prickle in the air of the house. It took a while to convince the more passionate among the newly reconfigured Bugs that an all-out assault on the Crags would be suicide of an infinitely less productive form than Deme’s.

‘Can’t blame them,’ said Koi, his Black Brigade past suddenly glinting in the edge on his voice. ‘They’ve been waiting long enough for the chance to make someone pay.’

‘Daniel hasn’t,’ I said pointedly. ‘He’s barely been alive two decades.’

Koi shrugged. ‘Rage at injustice is a forest fire - it jumps all divides, even those between generations.’

I stopped wading and looked back at him. You could see how he might be getting carried away. We were both sea-giants out of legend now, knee-deep in a virtual ocean amidst the islands and reefs of the Millsport Archipelago at 1:2000 scale. Sierra Tres had called in some haiduci favours and got us time in a high-resolution mapping construct belonging to a firm of marine architects whose commercial management techniques wouldn’t bear too much close legal scrutiny. They weren’t overjoyed about the loan, but that’s what happens when you cosy up with the haiduci.

‘Have you ever actually seen a forest fire, Koi?’

Because they sure as hell aren’t common on a world that’s ninety five per cent ocean.

‘No.’ He gestured. ‘It was a metaphor. But I have seen what happens when injustice finally triggers retribution. And it lasts for a long time.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

I stared away towards the waters of the southern Reach. The construct had reproduced the maelstrom there in miniature, gurgling and grinding and tugging at my legs beneath the surface. If the depth of the water had been to the same scale as the rest of the construct, it probably would have dragged me off my feet.

‘And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?’

‘Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.’ I went on looking into the maelstrom. ‘During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.’

‘I see.’ His voice showed no reaction. ‘Did it work?’

‘Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.’

‘Yes. And the fire?’

I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. ‘Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.’

He waded across and looked.

‘Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.’

‘They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.’

The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.

‘Then will he not know to come here?’ Koi asked softly. ‘To Vchira?’

‘I don’t think so.’ I reran my own second-guessing rationale as I boarded the Haiduci’s Daughter in Tekitomura, hoping it sounded as convincing out loud. ‘He’s too young to know anything about my time with the Bugs, and there’s no official record they can feed him. Vidaura he knows, but for him she’s still a trainer back in the Corps. He’ll have no feel for what she might be doing now, or any post-service connection we might have. This Aiura bitch will give him what they’ve got on me, maybe on Virginia too. But they don’t have much and what they do have is misleading. We’re Envoys, we both covered our tracks and sewed the dataflows with tinsel every move we made.’

‘Very thorough of you.’

I searched the lined face for irony, and found none apparent. I shrugged. ‘It’s the conditioning. We’re trained to disappear without trace on worlds we hardly know. Doing it somewhere you grew up is child’s play. All these motherfuckers have got to work with is underworld rumour and a series of sentences in storage. That’s not much to go on with a whole globe to cover and no aerial capacity. And the one thing he probably thinks he knows about me is that I’ll avoid Newpest like the plague.’

I shut down the updraft of family feeling that had stabbed through me on the Haiduci’s Daughter. Let go a compressed breath.

‘So where will he look for you?’

I nodded at the model of Millsport in front of us, brooding on the densely settled islands and platforms. ‘I think he’s probably looking for me right there. It’s where I always came when I wasn’t offworld. It’s the biggest urban environment on the planet, the easiest place to disappear if you know it well, and it’s right across the bay from Rila. If I were an Envoy, that’s where I’d be. Hidden, and in easy striking distance.’

For a moment, my unaccustomed aerial viewpoint grew dizzying as I looked down on the wharflines and streets, unfocused memory down the disjointed centuries blurring the old and new into a smudged familiarity.

And he’s down there somewhere.

Come on, there’s no way you can be sure of—

He’s down there somewhere like an antibody, perfectly shaped to match the intruder he’s looking for, asking soft questions in the flow of city life, bribing, threatening, levering, breaking, all the things that they taught us both so well. He’s breathing deep as he does it, living it for its own dark and joyous sake like some inverted version of Jack Soul Brasil’s philosophy of life.

Plex’s words came trickling back to me.

He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—

I thought back along my train of associations in the last year, the people I might have endangered.

Todor Murakami, if he was still hanging around undeployed. Would my younger self know him? Murakami had joined the Corps almost the same time as I had, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the early days, hadn’t deployed together until Nkrumah’s Land and Innenin. Would Aiura’s pet Kovacs make the connection? Would he be able to play Murakami successfully? Come to that, would Aiura let her newly double-sleeved creation anywhere near a serving Envoy? Would she dare?

Probably not. And Murakami, with the full weight of the Corps behind him, could look after himself

Isa.

Oh, shit.

Fifteen-year-old Isa, wearing tough-as-titanium woman-of-the-world like a pantherskin jacket over a soft and privileged upbringing among what was left of Millsport’s middle class. Razor-sharp smart, and just as brittle. Like a pretend edition of little Mito, just before I left for the Envoys. If he found Isa then—

Relax, you’re covered. Only place she can put you is in Tekitomura. They get Isa, they’ve got nothing.

But—

It took me that long, that heartbeat, to care. The knowledge of the gap was a cold revulsion welling up through me.

But he’ll break her in half if she gets in his way. He’ll go through her like angelfire.

Will he? If she reminds you of Mito, isn’t she going to remind him too? It’s the same sister for both of you. Isn’t that going to stop him?

Isn’t it?

I cast my mind back into the murk of operational days with the Corps, and didn’t know.

‘Kovacs!’

It was a voice out of the sky. I blinked and looked up from the modelled streets of Millsport. Over our heads, Brasil hung in the air of the virtuality clad in garish orange surf shorts and tatters of low-level cloud. With his physique and long fair hair blown back by stratospheric winds, he looked like a disreputable minor god. I raised a hand in greeting.

‘Jack, you’ve got to come and look at this northern approach. It isn’t going to—’

‘Got no time for that, Tak. You need to bail out. Right now.’

I felt a tightening around my chest. ‘What is it?’

‘Company,’ he said cryptically, and vanished in a twist of white light.

The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep, marine architects and fluid dynamic engineers by appointment, were in north Sourcetown, where the Strip started to morph into resort complexes and beaches with safe surf. It wasn’t a part of town any of Brasil’s crew would have been seen dead in under normal circumstances, but they merged competently enough with the tourist hordes. Only someone who was looking for hardcore surfer poise would have spotted it beneath the violently mismatched high-colour branded beachwear they’d adopted like camouflage. In the sober surroundings of a nilvibe conference chamber ten floors up from the promenade, they looked like an outbreak of some exotic anti-corporate fungal infection.

‘A priest, a fucking priest?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Sierra Tres told me. ‘Apparently alone, which I understand is unusual for the New Revelation.’

‘Unless they’re borrowing tricks from the Sharyan martyr brigades,’ said Virginia Vidaura sombrely. ‘Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels. What have you been up to, Tak?’

‘It’s personal,’ I muttered.

‘Isn’t it always.’ Vidaura grimaced and looked around at the assembled company. Brasil shrugged, and Tres showed no more emotion than usual. But Ado and Koi both looked angrily intent. ‘Tak, I think we have a right to know what’s going on. This could jeopardise everything we’re working for.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with what we’re working for, Virginia. It’s irrelevant. These bearded fucks are too stupid incompetent to touch us. They’re strictly the bottom of the food chain.’

‘Stupid or not,’ Koi pointed out, ‘One of them has succeeded in following you here. And is now asking after you in Kem Point.’

‘Fine. I’ll go and kill him.’

Mari Ado shook her head. ‘Not alone, you won’t.’

‘Hey, this is my fucking problem, Mari.’

‘Tak, calm down.’

‘I am fucking calm!’

My shout sank into the nilvibe muffling like pain drowned in IV endorphin. No one said anything for a while. Mari Ado looked pointedly away, out of the window. Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow. Brasil examined the floor with elaborate care. I grimaced and tried again. Quietly.

‘Guys, this is my problem, and I would like to deal with it myself.’

‘No.’ It was Koi. ‘There is no time for this. We have already spent two days that we can ill afford in preparation. We cannot delay further. Your private vendettas will have to wait.’

‘It isn’t going to take—’

‘I said no. By tomorrow morning your bearded friend will in any case be looking in entirely the wrong place for you.’ The ex-Black Brigade commando turned away, dismissing me the way Virginia Vidaura would sometimes do when we’d performed badly in Envoy training sessions. ‘Sierra, we’ll need to up the realtime ratio on the construct. Though I don’t imagine it ramps that high anyway, does it?’

Tres shrugged. ‘Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.’

‘That’s fine.’ Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. ‘It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels - the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.’

Tres nodded, already moving. ‘I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.’

She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.

‘Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.’

I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.

‘You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?’

Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.

‘Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.’

‘Yeah, I think we should.’

I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.

The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘You know where I’m going.’

‘No.’ She tightened up on me. ‘No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.’

‘It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.’

I tried to move towards the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far from reliable option. I swung back towards her, exasperated.

‘Virginia, let me go.’

‘What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—’

‘It isn’t going to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—’

I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own and our eyes were only about a hand’s breadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.’

‘What is there to talk about?’

She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember - it’s a good few years younger, for one thing - but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair. Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.

Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.

‘Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.’

‘I am happy.’ She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated. It’s a tiny spark of the woman I used to know. ‘I mean, wouldn’t you be? Sentence commuted for cash equivalence. And the money’s still flooding in, there’ll be biocoding work for the next decade. Until the ocean settles down again, we’ve got whole new levels of flow to domesticate, and that’s just locally. Someone’s still got to model the impact where the Mikuni current hits the warm water coming up from Kossuth, and then do something about it. We’ll be tendering as soon as the government funding clears. Josef says the rate we’re going, I’ll have paid off the whole sentence in another ten years.’

‘Josef?’

‘Oh, yeah, I should have said.’ The smile comes out again, wider this time. More open. ‘He’s really great, Tak. You should meet him. He’s running the project up there, he’s one of the reasons I got out in the first wave. He was doing the virtual hearings, he was my project liaison when I got out and then we just, ah, you know.’

She looked down at her lap, still smiling.

‘You’re blushing, Sarah.’

‘I am not.’

‘Yeah, you are.’ I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. ‘So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?’

She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. ‘We’re both playing for keeps, Tak. He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.’

So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?

‘That’s great,’ I say.

‘And what about you?’ she asks with arch concern. ‘Are you happy?’

I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.

‘Well, happy.’ I pull another face. ‘That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.’

‘Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?’

‘For a while.’

‘And what about now?’

I gesture vaguely. ‘Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘Are you kidding?

Her face falls. ‘You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the re-sleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with . . .’

She shakes her head.

‘Criminals?’ I ask.

‘Don’t laugh at me, Tak.’

I sigh. ‘I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.’

She smiled again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it was edged with pain.

‘People can change,’ she says. ‘You should try it.’

There’s an awkward pause.

‘Maybe I will.’

And another.

‘Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—’

‘No, come on.’ I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the table top with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes. ‘Have you no self respect, woman? Stay for one more.’

So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.

And I never see her again.

‘Sachilowska?’ Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. ‘Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai street.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again what, to spite her?’

Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.

‘It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d got out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.’

‘So were you.’

‘Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.’

‘Okay.’ Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. ‘So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.’

Behind the sound of the waves, I heard Japaridze again.

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.

‘Yeah, that’s right. It happens all the time.’ I turned back to face her across the filtered cool of the screen-shaded table. ‘But I didn’t lose her in the differential, Virginia. I let her go. I let her go with that piece of shit, Josef, and I just walked away.’

Understanding dawned across her face. ‘Oh, okay. So that’s how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction IV. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.’

‘It wasn’t just that,’ I lied.

‘Alright.’ Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway. ‘So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?’

‘North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?’

‘They converted?’

‘He fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.’

‘Really? Was she that much of a victim?’

‘Virginia, she was fucking indentured!’ I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable. Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. ‘Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New anti-engineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing but the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.’

‘She could have left.’

‘They had a fucking child, alright?’ Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. ‘They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.’

Vidaura nodded. ‘And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.’

‘Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.’

‘So what happened? She upset some venerable male?’

‘No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable. ’ The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. ‘Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.’

The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earthbound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, pre-human, interstellar civilisation cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels; God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Re-sleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.

I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. ‘She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the centre of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.’

I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicoloured idiot tide it was.

‘Afterwards, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometres out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.’

‘That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.’

‘Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.’

I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.

‘So you’ve been there,’ she murmured.

I nodded. ‘Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, snivelling by her grave. I got the story out of him.’ My face twitched with the memory. ‘Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.’

She shook her head slightly. ‘The rest of who?’

‘The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.’ I looked at my hands. ‘And a few others who got in my way.’

She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.

‘Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.’

‘You’ve got Envoy recall,’ she said numbly.

I gestured again. ‘Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—’

‘You took their stacks?’

‘Josef and the priests’, yes.’

‘You destroyed them?’

‘Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.’ I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now. And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. ‘Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.’

‘I think I see where this is going.’

‘Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.’ I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. ‘I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.’

Vidaura looked down into her lap. ‘Is that what you tell yourself?’

‘No, it’s just a theory.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there’s a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they’ve gone to hell. Either way suits me.’

‘How are you financing this?’ she whispered.

I found a bared-teeth grin from somewhere and put it on. ‘Well, contrary to popular belief, some parts of what happened on Sanction IV worked out quite well for me. I’m not short of funds.’

She looked up, face tightening towards anger. ‘You made money out of Sanction IV?’

‘Nothing I didn’t earn,’ I said quietly.

Her features smoothed somewhat as she backed the anger up. But her voice still came out taut. ‘And are these funds going to be enough?’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Well,’ she frowned. ‘To finish this vendetta. You’re hunting down the priests from the village but—’

‘No, I did that last year. It didn’t take me very long, there weren’t that many. Currently, I’m hunting down the ones who were serving members of the Ecclesiastical Mastery when she was murdered. The ones who wrote the rules that killed her. That’s taking me longer, there are a lot of them, and they’re more senior. Better protected.’

‘But you’re not planning to stop with them?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I don’t know how much Virginia told the others once we got back inside the cranked up virtuality. I stayed down in the mapping construct while the rest of them adjourned to the hotel-suite section, which somehow I couldn’t help thinking of as upstairs. I don’t know what she told them, and I didn’t much care. Mostly, it was a relief just to have let someone else in on the whole story.

Not to be the only one.

People like Isa and Plex knew fragments, of course, and Radul Segesvar somewhat more. But for the rest, the New Revelation had hidden what I was doing to them from the start. They didn’t want the bad publicity or the interference of infidel powers like the First Families. The deaths were passed off as accidents, monastery burglaries gone wrong, unfortunate petty muggings. Meanwhile, the word from Isa was that there were private contracts out on me at the Mastery’s behest. The priesthood had a militant wing, but they obviously didn’t place too much faith in it because they’d also seen fit to engage a handful of Millsport sneak assassins. One night in a small town on the Saffron Archipelago, I let one of them get close enough to test the calibre of the hired help. It wasn’t impressive.

I don’t know how much Virginia Vidaura told her surfer colleagues, but the presence of the priest in Kem Point alone made it very clear that we could not return from a raid on Rila Crags and stay on the Strip. If the New Revelation could track me this far, so could others far more competent.

As a sanctuary, Vchira Beach was blown.

Mario Ado voiced what was probably a general feeling.

‘You’ve fucked this up, dragging your personal crabshit into the harbour with you. You find us a solution.’

So I did.

Envoy competence, one out of the manual - work with the tools to hand. I cast about in the immediate environment, summoned what I had that could be influenced and saw it immediately. Personal shit had done the damage, personal shit would haul us out of the swamp, not to mention solve some more of my own more personal problems by way of a side-effect. The irony of it grinned back at me.

Not everyone was so amused. Ado for one.

‘Trust the fucking haiduci?’ There was a well-bred Millsport sneer behind the words. ‘No thank you.’

Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow.

‘We’ve used them before, Mari.’

‘No, you’ve used them before. I steer well clear of scum like that. And anyway, this one you don’t even know.’

‘I know of him. I’ve dealt with people who’ve dealt with him before, and from what I hear he’s a man of his word. But I can check him out. You say he owes you, Kovacs?’

‘Very much so.’

She shrugged. ‘Then that should be enough.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sierra. You can’t—’

‘Segesvar is solid,’ I interrupted. ‘He takes his debts seriously in both directions. All it needs is the money. If you’ve got it.’

Koi glanced at Brasil, who nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We can get it easily enough.’

‘Oh, happy fucking birthday, Kovacs!’

Virginia Vidaura nailed Ado with a stare. ‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Mari. It isn’t your money. That’s safely on deposit in a Millsport merchant bank, isn’t it?’

‘What’s that supposed to—’

‘Enough,’ said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day - real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old-style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialled the discreet coding on speaker phone with no visual.

It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amidst a lot of background noise, some of it real/virtual adjustment connection flutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.

‘I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?’

‘How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.’

The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.

‘I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.’

I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.

‘Check the account,’ I told Segesvar. ‘The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.’

‘You’re calling from a construct?’

‘Go check your cashflow, Rad. I’ll hold.’

The rest was easy.

In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep and most programmes don’t bother to include the sub-routines that would cause it. Long term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely . . . odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that. You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.

We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, running what-if scenarios and bickering. Every now and then one of us would vent an exasperated grunt, fall backwards into the knee-deep water of the mapping construct and backstroke off out of the archipelago, towards the horizon. Provided you chose your angle of escape carefully and didn’t collide with an unremembered islet or scrape your back on a reef, it was an ideal way to get away and unwind. Floating out there with the voices of the others grown faint with distance, you could feel your consciousness loosen off again, like a cramped muscle relaxing.

At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included. You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.

‘There you are,’ she said, with an odd lightness of tone.

‘Here I am,’ I agreed.

She cleared her throat. ‘How’s your head?’

‘Cooling off.’ I raised the sake cup in one hand. ‘Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.’

‘You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.’

But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand and poured.

‘Kampai,’ she said.

‘Por nosotros.’

We drank. She settled onto the automould opposite me. ‘Trying to make me feel homesick?’

‘Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?’

‘I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.’

‘Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.’

‘And the beach life.’ She reclined a little on the automould and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and tanned from life on Vchira, and the spray-on swimsuit she was wearing showed it off full-length. I felt my pulse pick up slightly.

‘Very beautiful,’ I admitted. ‘Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.’

She seemed to realise the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.

‘What else did he tell you?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.’

‘You were looking for me.’

‘Yeah.’ Something stopped me at that simple admission. ‘I was.’

‘And now that you’ve found me, what?’

My pulse had settled at an accelerated pounding. The edged whine of overstay in virtual was back. Images cascaded through my head. Virginia Vidaura, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, unattainable Envoy trainer, poised before us at induction, a dream of female competence beyond everyone’s reach. Splinters of mirth in voice and eyes that might have kindled to sensuality in a less clearly defined set of relationships. A cringingly clumsy attempt at flirtation from Jimmy de Soto once in the mess bar, slapped down with brutal disinterest. Authority wielded with an utter lack of sexual tension. My own lurid undischarged fantasies, slowly flattening under an immense respect that went in at the same bone deep level as the Envoy induction.

And then combat, the final dissipation of any romantic fumes that might have endured the training years. Vidaura’s face in a dozen different sleeves on a dozen different worlds, sharpened with pain or fury or just the intense focus of mission time. The stink of her too-long-unwashed body in a cramped shuttle on the dark side of Loyko’s moon, the slick feel of her blood on my hands one murderous night in Zihicce when she almost died. The look on her face when the orders to crush all resistance in Neruda came through.

I’d thought those moments had taken us beyond sex. They seemed to scoop out emotional depths that made fucking seem shallow by comparison. The last time I’d visited Vchira and seen the way Brasil leaned towards her - her Adoracion ancestry alone enough to strike sparks of desire off him - I’d felt a vague sort of superiority. Even with Yaroslav and the on-and-off long-term commitment they’d managed, I’d always believed that somehow he wasn’t getting to the core of the woman I had fought beside in more corners of the Protectorate than most people would ever see.

I adopted a quizzical look that felt like taking cover.

‘You think this is a good idea?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said huskily. ‘Do you?’

‘Umm. In all honesty, Virginia, I’m rapidly beginning not to care. But I’m not the one attached to Jack Soul Brasil.’

She laughed. ‘This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.’

I looked around the suite. ‘He could pop up any minute. So could any of them for that matter. I’m not much for display sex.’

‘Me neither.’ She got up and offered me her hand. ‘Come with me.’

She led me out of the suite and into the corridor. In both directions, identical doors mirrored each other across the anonymous grey carpeting and receded into a pale mist after a few dozen metres. We went, hand-in-hand, right up to the beginnings of the fade-out, feeling the faint cold that breathed out of it, and Vidaura opened the last door on the left. We slipped inside, hands already on each other.

It doesn’t take long to peel off spray-ons. Five seconds after the door closed, she had my surf shorts to my ankles and was rolling my rapidly hardening cock between her palms. I tugged free with an effort, got her swimsuit off her shoulders and skinned down to her waist, pressed the heel of one palm hard against the juncture of her thighs. Her breathing tautened and the muscles in her stomach flexed. I knelt and forced the suit down further, over her hips and thighs until she could step easily out of it. Then I spread the lips of her cunt with my fingers, traced the opening lightly with my tongue and stood up to kiss her on the mouth. Another tremor ran through her. She sucked my tongue in and bit it gently, then put both hands to my head and pulled back. I dragged my fingertips up the creases of her cunt again, found damp and heat and pressed gently at her clitoris. She shivered and grinned at me.

‘And now that you’ve found me,’ she repeated, eyes starting to defocus. ‘What?’

‘Now,’ I told her, ‘I want to find out if the muscles in those thighs are as strong as they look.’

Her eyes lit. The grin came back.

‘I’ll bruise you,’ she promised. ‘I’ll crack your spine.’

‘You’ll try, you mean.’

She made a small, hungry noise and bit my lower lip. I hooked an arm under one of her knees and lifted. She grabbed at my shoulders and wrapped the other leg around my waist, then reached down for my cock and pressed it hard into the folds of her cunt. In the moments of conversation, she’d softened and moistened to readiness. With my free hand, I spread her wider open and she sank onto me, gasping at the penetration and rocking back and forth against me from the waist up. Her thighs clamped around my waist with the promised bruising force. I swung us about to get a wall at my back and leaned against it. Got a measure of control.

It was short lived. Vidaura hooked her grip deeper into my shoulders and began working herself back and forth on my erection, breath coming in short grunts of effort that went up in pitch and rapidity as her orgasm built. Not far behind her, I could feel the tension in my cock gathering heat all the way back to the root. I could feel the rub of her insides over my glans. I lost whatever control I’d had, grabbed at her arse with both hands and rammed her harder onto me. Above my face, her closed eyes flew momentarily open and she grinned down at me. The tip of her tongue came out and touched her upper teeth. I laughed back, tight and locked up. Now it was a struggle, Vidaura arching her belly forward and hips back, working the head of my prick back to the mouth of her cunt and the tightly gathered nerve endings there, my hands ramming her back again and trying to bury myself in her to the hilt.

The fight dissolved in sensory avalanche.

Sweat building on our skin, slippery under our gripping hands—

Hard grins and kisses that were more like bites—

Breathing tipped frantically out of control—

My face, buried against the scant swelling of her breasts and the sweat-slick flat space between—

Her face rubbing sideways on the top of my head—

One agonising moment when she held herself off me with all her force—

A yell, maybe hers, maybe mine—

—and then the liquid gushing of release, and collapse, juddering and sliding down the wall in a heap of splayed limbs and spasming bodies.

Spent.

After a long moment, I propped myself up sideways, and my flaccid cock popped slickly out of her. She moved one leg and moaned faintly. I tried to shift us both into a slightly more tenable position. She opened one eye and grinned.

‘So, soldier. Wanted to do that for long, have you?’

I grinned back, weakly. ‘Only forever. You?’

‘The thought had crossed my mind once or twice, yeah.’ She pushed against the wall with the soles of both feet and sat up, leaning on her elbows. Her gaze flickered down the length of her body and then across at mine. ‘But I don’t fuck the recruits. Jesus, look at the mess we made.’

I reached a hand across to her sweat-smeared belly, trailed a finger down into the cleft at the start of her cunt. She twitched and I smiled.

‘Want a shower then?’

She grimaced. ‘Yeah, I think we’d better.’

We started to fuck again in the shower, but neither of us had the same manic strength that had imbued the first time and we couldn’t stay braced. I carried her out to the bedroom and laid her down soaking wet on the bed instead. I knelt by her head, turned it gently and guided her mouth to my prick. She sucked, lightly at first then with gathering force. I lay backward alongside her slim muscled body, turned my own head and opened her thighs with my hands. Then I slid an arm around her hips, drew her cunt to my face and went to work with my tongue. And the hunger came out all over again, like rage. The pit of my belly felt as if it was filled with sparking wires. Down the bed, she made muffled noises, rolled her weight over and crouched above me on elbows and spread knees. Her hips and thighs crushed down on me, her mouth worked the head of my prick and her hand pumped at the shaft.

It took a long, slow, delirious time. Chemically unaided, we didn’t know each other well enough for a truly synchronised orgasm, but the Envoy conditioning or maybe something else covered for the lack. When finally I came into the back of her throat, the force of it bent me up off the bed against her crouched body and in pure reflex I wrapped both arms tight around her hips. I dragged her down onto me, tongue frantic, so that she spat me out still spasming and leaking, and screamed with her own climax, and collapsed onto me shuddering.

But not long after, she rolled off, sat up cross-legged and looked seriously at me, as if I was a problem she couldn’t solve.

‘I think that’s probably enough,’ she said. ‘We’d better get back.’

And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.

I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I reentered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a co-ordination that spoke volumes.

‘You’ll get your money back, you know,’ I told him.

Brasil twitched impatiently. ‘I know that, Tak. I’m not concerned about the money. We would have cleared your debt with Segesvar as simple payment, if you’d asked. We still can - you could consider it a bounty for what you’ve brought us if you like.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said stiffly. ‘I’m considering it a loan. I’ll pay you back as soon as things have calmed down.’

A stifled snort from Sierra Tres. I turned on her.

‘Something amusing you?’

‘Yeah. The idea that things are going to calm down any time soon.’

We watched the creep of night, across the sea in front of us. At the darkened end of the horizon, Daikoku crept up to join Marikanon in the western sky. Further along the beach, the rest of Brasil’s crew were building a bonfire. Laughter cracked around the gathering pile of driftwood, and bodies clowned about in dim silhouette. In defiance of any misgivings either Tres or I might have, there was a deep calm soaking into the evening, as soft and cool as the sand underfoot. After the manic hours of the virtuality, there seemed nothing that really needed to be done or said until tomorrow. And right now tomorrow was still rolling round the other side of the planet, like a wave out deep and building force. I thought that if I were Koi, I’d believe I could feel the march of history holding its breath.

‘So I take it no one’s going to get an early night,’ I said, nodding at the preparations for the bonfire.

‘We could all be Really Dead in a couple of days,’ Tres said. ‘Get plenty of sleep then.’

Abruptly, she tugged her T-shirt cross-armed up over her head. Her breasts lifted and then swung disconcertingly as she completed the movement. Not what I needed right now. She dumped the T-shirt in the sand and started down the beach.

‘I’m going for a swim,’ she called back to us. ‘Anyone coming?’

I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.

I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen metres out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred metres from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s reef.

I angled right and set off along the beach towards the site of the bonfire. People nodded at me, some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.

‘Strong stuff,’ I wheezed and handed it back.

‘Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.’ He gestured muzzily. ‘Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.’

Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand amongst them. Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.

‘Just want to say,’ she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic, ‘thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.’

Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity. ‘That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.’

Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.

‘Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,’ said Hiro.

I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.

‘What’s she like?’ asked Andrea.

‘Uh.’ An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. ‘She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.’

Andrea nodded, smiling happily. ‘You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.’

‘You’ll get your chance, And.’ Daniel said, slurring a little. ‘Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.’

A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.

Hiro nodded grimly. ‘Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.’

‘It’ll be so good,’ said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. ‘To have someone again who knows what to do.’

PART FOUR

This Is All That Matters

‘This much must be understood: Revolution requires Sacrifice. ’

Sandor Spaventa
Tasks for the Quellist Vanguard

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

North-eastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Millsport Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, aeons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometres across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fuelled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast to other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation. Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plantlife. Later still, humans came and did the same.

At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendour. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometres in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.

‘I hate the fucking place,’ Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to-do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffee house called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. ‘Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.’

It was a standard rant - one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.

‘You grew up here, didn’t you?’

‘So?’ She swung a glare on me. ‘Does that mean I’ve got to like it?’

‘No, I guess not.’

We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbour quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafés. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death - others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets further down seemed to have been sanitised - there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbour was full of yachts.

In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun and inside the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workmanlike little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system. Millsport Sessions, Dream of Weed.

At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d greysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect and her eyes were dusted with some haemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked.

I smiled as I sat down. ‘We’re fashionably late, Isa. This is Mari. Mari, Isa. So how are we doing?’

Isa took a long, insolent moment to check out Mari, then turned her head and unjacked with an elegant, much practised gesture that showed off the nape of her neck.

‘We’re doing well. And we’re doing it silently. Nothing new on the Millsport PD net, and nothing from any of the private security outfits the First Families like to use. They don’t know you’re here.’

I nodded. Gratifying though the news was, it made sense. We’d hit Millsport across the earlier part of the week, split into half a dozen separate groups, arrivals co-ordinated days apart. Fake ID at Little Blue Bug standards of impenetrability and a variety of different transport options ranging from cheap speed-freighters to a Saffron Line luxury cruiser. With people streaming into Millsport from all over the planet for the Harlan’s Day festivities, it would have been either very bad luck or very bad operational management if any of us had been picked up.

But it was still good to know.

‘What about security up at the Crags?’

Isa shook her head. ‘Less noise out of there than a priest’s wife coming. If they knew what you had planned, there’d be a whole new protocol layer and there isn’t.’

‘Or you haven’t spotted it,’ said Mari.

Isa fixed her with another cool stare. ‘My dear, do you know anything at all about dataflow?’

‘I know what levels of encryption we’re dealing with.’

‘Yes, so do I. Tell me, how do you think I pay for my studies?’

Mari Ado examined her nails. ‘With petty crime, I assume.’

‘Charming.’ Isa shuttled her gaze in my direction. ‘Where did you get her, Tak? Madame Mi’s?’

‘Behave, Isa.’

She gusted a long-suffering teenage sigh. ‘Alright, Tak. For you. For you, I won’t rip this mouthy bitch’s hair out. And Mari, for your information, I am gainfully employed nights, under a pseudident, as a freelance security software scribe for more corporate names than you’ve probably given back-street blowjobs.’

She waited, tensed. Ado looked back at her with glittery eyes for a moment, then smiled and leaned forward slightly. Her voice rose no higher than a corrosive murmur.

‘Listen, you stupid little virgin, if you think you’re going to get a cat fight out of me, you’re badly mistaken. And lucky too. In the unlikely event that you could push my buttons sufficient to piss me off that far, you wouldn’t even see me coming. Now why don’t we discuss the business at hand, and then you can go back to playing at datacrime with your study partners and pretending you know something about the world.’

‘You fucking whor—’

‘Isa!’ I put a snap into my voice and a hand in front of her as she started to rise. ‘That’s enough. She’s right, she could kill you with her bare hands and not even break a sweat. Now behave, or I’m not going to pay you.’

Isa shot me a look of betrayal and sat back down. Under the harlequin face paint, it was hard to tell, but I thought she was flushing furiously. Maybe the crack about virginity had touched a nerve. Mari Ado had the good grace not to look pleased.

‘I didn’t have to help you,’ Isa said in a small voice. ‘I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.’

‘We won’t,’ I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. ‘Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?’

What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matt-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to-date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week. Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool. Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.

But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?

I certainly didn’t at her age.

If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—

Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it’s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.

Isa covered it well enough to deserve applause. Whatever misgivings she had, by the time we’d finished the handover, her ruffled feathers had smoothed and she had her laconic Millsport drawl back in place.

‘Did you find Natsume?’ I asked her.

‘Yeah, as it happens I did. But I’m not convinced you’ll want to talk to him.’

‘Why not?’

She grinned. ‘Because he got religion, Kovacs. Lives in a monastery now, over on Whaleback and Ninth.’

‘Whaleback? That the Renouncer place?’

‘Sure is.’ She struck an absurdly solemn, prayerful pose that didn’t match her hair and face. ‘Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware. Renounce henceforth all flesh, and the world.’

I felt my mouth twitch. Beside me, Mari Ado sat humourless as a ripwing.

‘I got no problem with those guys, Isa. They’re harmless. Way I see it, they’re stupid enough to shun female company, that’s their loss. But I’m surprised someone like Natsume’d buy into something like that.’

‘Ah, but you’ve been away. They take women too, these days.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, started way back, nearly a decade ago. What I heard, they found a couple of covert females in their midst. Been there for years. Figures, right? Anyone who’s re-sleeved could lie about their sex.’ Isa’s voice picked up a beat as she hit her home turf running. ‘No one outside of government’s got the money to run datachecks on stuff like that. If you’ve lived in a male sleeve for long enough, even psychosurgery has a hard time telling the difference. So anyway, back at the Brotherhood, it was either go the NewRev single-sleeve-and-you’re-out route, or come over all modern and desegregate. Lo and behold, the word from on high spake suddenly of change.’

‘Don’t suppose they changed the name too, did they?’

‘Don’t suppose they did. Still the Brotherhood. Brother embraces sister, apparently.’ A teenage shrug. ‘Not sure how the sisters feel about all that embracing, but that’s entry-level dues for you.’

‘Speaking of which,’ said Mari Ado. ‘Are we permitted entry?’

‘Yeah, they take visitors. You may have to wait for Natsume, but not so’s you’d notice. That’s the great thing about Renouncing the flesh, isn’t it.’ Isa grinned again. ‘No inconvenient things like Time and Space to worry about.’

‘Good work, Issy.’

She blew me a kiss.

But as we were getting up to leave, she frowned slightly and evidently came to a decision. She raised a hand and cupped her fingers to get us back closer.

‘Listen, guys. I don’t know exactly what you’re after up at Rila, and to be honest with you, I don’t want to know. But I can tell you this for nothing. Old Harlan won’t be coming out of the pod this time around.’

‘No?’ On his birthday, that was unusual.

‘That’s right. Bit of semi-covert court gossip I dipped yesterday. They lost another heirling down at Amami Sands. Hacked to death with a baling tine, apparently. They’re not making it public, but the MPD are a bit sloppy with their encryption these days. I was cruising for Harlan-related stuff so, like that. Picked it out of the flow. Anyway, with that and old Seichi getting toasted in his skimmer last week, they’re not taking any chances. They’ve called off half the family appearances altogether, and looks like even Mitzi Harlan’s getting a doubled Secret Service detachment. And Old Man Harlan stays unsleeved. That’s for definite. Think they’re planning to let him watch the celebrations through a virtual link-up. ’

I nodded slowly. ‘Thanks. That’s good to know.’

‘Yeah, sorry if it’s going to fuck up some spectacular assassination attempt for you. You didn’t ask, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’d hate for you to go all that way up there and find nothing to kill.’

Ado smiled thinly.

‘That’s not what we’re here for,’ I said quickly. ‘But thanks anyway. Listen Isa, you don’t remember a couple of weeks back, some other Harlan small-fry got himself killed in the wharf district?’

‘Yep. Marek Harlan-Tsuchiya. Methed out of his head, fell off Karlovy Dock, banged his head and drowned. Heartbreaking.’

Ado made an impatient gesture. I held up a hand to forestall her.

‘Any chance our boy Marek was helped over the edge, do you think?’

Isa pulled a face. ‘Could be, I guess. Karlovy’s not the safest of places after dark. But they’ll have re-sleeved him by now, and there’s been nothing in the air about it being a murder. Then again—’

‘Why should they let the general public in on it. Right.’ I could feel the Envoy intuition twitching, but it was too faint to make anything of. ‘Okay, Isa. Thanks for the newsflash. It doesn’t affect anything at our end, but keep your ears tuned anyway, huh?’

‘Always do, sam.’

We paid the tab and left her there, red-veined eyes and harlequin mask and the coil of light weaving at her elbow like some domesticated demon familiar. She waved as I looked back, and I felt a brief stab of affection for her that lasted me all the way out into the street.

‘Stupid little bitch,’ said Mari Ado as we headed down towards the waterfront. ‘I hate that fucking fake underclass thing.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, rebellion takes a lot of different forms.’

‘Yeah, and that back there was none of them.’

We took a real-keel ferry across the Reach to the platform suburb they’re calling East Akan, apparently in the hope that people who can’t afford the slopes of the Akan district itself will settle there instead. Ado went off to find some tea, and I stayed by the rail, watching the water traffic and the changing perspectives as the ferry sailed. There’s a magic to Millsport that’s easy to forget while you’re away, but get out on the waters of the Reach and the city seems to open to you. Wind in your face and the belaweed tang of the sea combine to scrub away the urban grimness, and you discover in its place a broad, seafarer’s optimism that can sometimes stay with you for hours after you step back on land.

Trying not to let it go to my head, I squinted south to the horizon. There, shrouded to fading in seamist thrown up by the maelstrom, Rila Crags brooded in stacked isolation. Not quite the furthest southerly outcrop of the archipelago, but near enough, twenty klicks of open water back north to the nearest other settled piece of land - the tail end of New Kanagawa - and at least half that to the nearest piece of rock you could even stand on. Most of the First Families had staked out high ground in Millsport early on, but Harlan had trumped them all. Rila, beautiful in glistening black volcanic stone, was a fortress in all but name. An elegant and powerful reminder to the whole city of who was in charge here. An eyrie to supplant those built by our Martian predecessors.

We docked at East Akan with a soft bump that was like waking up. I found Mari Ado again, down by the debarkation ramp, and we threaded our way through the rectilinear streets as rapidly as was conducive to checking we weren’t being followed. Ten minutes later, Virginia Vidaura was letting us into the as yet unfitted loft apartment space that Brasil had chosen as our base of operations. Her eyes passed across us like a clinical wipe.

‘Go okay?’

‘Yeah. Mari here didn’t make any new friends, but what can you do?’

Ado grunted and shouldered past me, then disappeared off into the interior of the warehouse. Vidaura closed the door and secured it while I told her about Natsume.

‘Jack’ll be disappointed,’ she said.

‘Yeah, not what I expected either. So much for legends, eh? You want to come across to Whaleback with me?’ I raised my eyebrows clownishly. ‘Virtual environment.’

‘I think that’s probably not a good idea.’

I sighed. ‘No, probably not.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The monastery on Whaleback and Ninth was a grim, blank-faced place. Whaleback islet, along with about a dozen other similar fragments of land and reclaimed reef, served as a commuting-distance settlement for workers in the docks and marine industries of New Kanagawa. Causeways and suspension spans provided ready access across the short expanse of water to Kanagawa itself, but the limited space on these satellite isles meant cramped, barracks-style apartments for the workforce. The Renouncers had simply acquired a hundred-metre frontage and nailed all the windows shut.

‘For security,’ the monk who let us in explained. ‘We run a skeleton crew here and there’s a lot of valuable equipment. You’ll have to hand over those weapons before we go any further.’

Beneath the simple grey coveralls of the order, he was sleeved in a basic, low-end Fabrikon synth that presumably ran built-in scanning gear. The voice was like a bad phone connection amplified and the silicoflesh face was set in a detached expression which may or may not have reflected how he felt about us - small muscle groups are never that great on the cheaper models. On the other hand, even cheap synths usually run machine levels of reflex and strength, and you could probably burn a blaster hole right through this one without doing much more than piss its wearer off.

‘Seems fair,’ I told him.

I dug out the GS Rapsodia and handed it over butt-first. Beside me, Sierra Tres did the same with a blunt-looking blaster. Brasil spread his arms agreeably and the synth nodded.

‘Good. I’ll return these when you leave.’

He led us through a gloomy evercrete entry hall whose obligatory statue of Konrad Harlan had been unflatteringly masked in plastic, then into what must once have been a ground-floor apartment. Two rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs, as basic as the attendant’s sleeve, were gathered facing a desk and a heavy steel door beyond. A second attendant was waiting for us behind the desk. Like her colleague, she was synth-sleeved and coveralled in grey, but her facial features seemed fractionally more animated. Maybe she was trying harder, working at full acceptance under the new unisex induction decrees.

‘How many of you are requesting audience?’ she asked, pleasantly enough given the limitations of her Fabrikon voice.

Jack Soul Brasil and I raised our hands, Sierra Tres stood pointedly to one side. The female attendant gestured to us to follow her and punched out a code on the steel door. It opened with an antique metallic grinding and we stepped into a grey-walled chamber fitted with a half dozen sagging couches and a virtual transfer system that looked like it might still run on silicon.

‘Please make yourselves comfortable in one of the couches and attach electrodes and hypnophones as in the instruction holo you will see at your right side.’

Make yourselves comfortable was an ambitious request - the couches were not automould and didn’t seem to have been made with comfort in mind. I was still trying to find a good posture when the attendant stepped across to the transfer control suite and powered us up. A sonocode murmured through the hypnophones.

‘Please turn your head to the right and watch the holoform until you lose consciousness.’

Transition, oddly enough, was a lot smoother than I’d expected from the surroundings. At the heart of the holosphere, an oscillating figure eight formed and began cycling through the colour spectrum. The sonocode droned counterpoint. In a few seconds the lightshow expanded to fill my vision, and the sound in my ears became a rushing of water. I felt myself tipping towards the oscillating figure, then falling through it. Bands of light flickered over my face, then shrivelled to white and the blending roar of the stream in my ears. There was a tilting of everything under me, a sense of the whole world being turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and suddenly I was deposited upright on a worn stone platform behind a waterfall in full flood. The remains of the oscillating spectrum showed up briefly as an edge of refracted light in faint mist, then faded like a dying note. Abruptly there were puddles around my feet, and cold, damp air on my face.

As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil. The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again. The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.

‘It’s this way, I think,’ I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.

We followed the steps round a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.

It rose among gently rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.

‘Well you can see why they went virtual,’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘It beats Whaleback and Ninth.’

Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have got over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.

We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.

‘May I help you?’ he asked gently.

Brasil nodded. ‘We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.’

‘Natsume.’ The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again. ‘He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.’

The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.

‘Nik?’ Brasil moved forward to meet him. ‘Is that you?’

‘Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.’ Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw. ‘Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.’

He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.’

‘You don’t know me at all,’ I reassured him.

‘Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.’

Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.

‘Jack Soul Brasil?’

‘Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?’

A brief smile. ‘Learning.’

‘What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.’

‘Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?’

Brasil shifted awkwardly. ‘Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—’

‘Oh, time here is.’ The smile again. ‘Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.’

We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation, and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him any more.

Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amidst the cobwebby grey scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimetres high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view, I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside of fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.

‘Very nice,’ said Brasil.

I nodded. ‘Yes. You must be very pleased with those.’

‘Only moderately.’ Natsume circled his shred-petalled charges with a critical eye. ‘In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.’

He looked expectantly up at us.

I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there.

‘Are they a bit short?’ I asked finally.

Natsume shook his head and chuckled. ‘No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And - I’m so sorry - I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanour. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.’

He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself. He gestured out at the plants.

‘They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matt. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.’

‘Nik . . .’

He looked at Brasil. ‘Yes.’

‘Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.’

I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.

‘Some stuff?’ Natsume nodded. ‘What stuff would that be, then?’

‘We.’ I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. ‘I need your help, Nik.’

‘Yes, clearly. But in what?’

‘It’s.’

Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.

‘Jack,’ he said. ‘This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?’

Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.

‘You’ve changed, Nik.’

‘Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?’ For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. ‘That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.’

‘That’s not—’

‘Of course I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?’

Brasil came down a step towards him, abruptly. ‘Oh, you think this is better?’

He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.

‘You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow flowers instead of living, and you’re going to accuse me of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.’

‘What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?’

‘I was standing on a ten-metre wall four days ago.’ Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. ‘That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.’

‘Is it?’ Natsume shrugged. ‘If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?’

‘That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—’

‘I don’t hate—’

‘Out there, actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.’

‘Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.’

‘My point?’ Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly. ‘None of this is fucking real, Nik.’

I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them, quite literally hovering. His feet were a clear thirty centimetres off the uneven paving.

‘Norikae-san?’ asked the other.

I shifted stance minutely, wondering idly if they were real inhabitants of the monastery or not, and if not what operating parameters they might have in circumstances like these. If the Renouncers ran internal security systems, our chances in a fight were zero. You don’t wander into someone else’s virtuality and brawl successfully unless they want you to.

‘It’s nothing, Katana-san.’ Natsume made a hurried and complicated motion with both hands. ‘A difference of perspective between friends.’

‘My apologies, then, for the intrusion.’ Katana bowed over fists gathered one into the other and the two newcomers withdrew into the arched tunnel. I didn’t see whether they walked away in real time or not.

‘Perhaps,’ began Natsume quietly, then stopped.

‘I’m sorry, Nik.’

‘No, you are right of course. None of this is real in the way we both used to understand it. But in here, I am more real than I ever was before. I define how I exist, and there is no harder challenge than that, believe me.’

Brasil said something inaudible. Natsume resumed his seat on the wooden steps. He looked back at Brasil, and after a moment the surfer seated himself a couple of steps higher up. Natsume nodded and stared at his garden.

‘There is a beach to the east,’ he said absently. ‘Mountains to the south. If I wish, they can be made to meet. I can climb any time I wish, swim any time I wish. Even surf, though I haven’t so far.

‘And in all of these things, I have choices to make. Choices of consequence. Bottlebacks in the ocean or not? Coral to scrape myself on and bleed, or not? Blood to bleed with, come to that? These are all matters requiring prior meditation. Full-effect gravity in the mountains? If I fall, will I allow it to kill me? And what will I allow that to mean?’ He looked at his hands as if they too were a choice of some sort. ‘If I break or tear something, will I allow it to hurt? If so, for how long? How long will I wait to heal? Will I allow myself to remember the pain properly afterwards? And then, from these questions, the secondary - some would say the primary - issues raise their heads from the swamp. Why am I really doing this? Do I want the pain? Why would that be? Do I want to fall? Why would that be? Does it matter to me to reach the top or simply to suffer on the way up? Who am I doing these things for? Who was I ever doing them for? Myself? My father? Lara, perhaps?’

He smiled out at the filigree poppies. ‘What do you think, Jack? Is it because of Lara?’

‘That wasn’t your fault, Nik.’

The smile went away. ‘In here, I study the only thing that scares me any more. Myself. And in that process, I harm no one else.’

‘And help no one else,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes. Axiomatic.’ He looked round at me. ‘Are you a revolutionary too, then? One of the neoQuellist faithful?’

‘Not as such.’

‘But you have little sympathy with Renouncing?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s harmless. As you say. And no one has to play who doesn’t want to. But you kind of assume the rest of us are going to provide the powered infrastructure for your way of life. Seems to me that’s a basic failure in Renouncing, all on its own.’

I got the smile back for that. ‘Yes, that is something of a test of faith for many of us. Of course, ultimately we believe all of humanity will follow us into virtual. We are merely preparing the way. Learning the path, you might say.’

‘Yeah,’ snapped Brasil. ‘And meanwhile, outside the world falls apart on the rest of us.’

‘It was always falling apart, Jack. Do you really think what I used to do out there, the little thefts and defiances, do you really think all that made any difference?’

‘We’re taking a team into Rila,’ said Brasil abruptly, decided. ‘That’s the difference we’re going to make, Nik. Right there.’

I cleared my throat. ‘With your help.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yeah, we need the route, Nik.’ Brasil got up and wandered off into a corner of the quadrangle, raising his voice as if, now the secret was out, he wanted even the volume of conversation to reflect his decision. ‘You feel like giving it to us? Say, for old times’ sake?’

Natsume got up and regarded me quizzically.

‘Have you climbed a sea cliff before?’

‘Not really. But the sleeve I’m wearing knows how to do it.’

For a moment he held my eye. It was as if he was processing what I’d just said and it wouldn’t load. Then, suddenly, he barked a laugh that didn’t belong inside the man we’d been talking to.

‘Your sleeve knows how?’ The laughter shook out to a more governed chuckling and then a hard-eyed gravity. ‘You’ll need more than that. You do know there are ripwing colonies on the top third of Rila Crags? Probably more now than there ever were when I went up. You do know there’s an overhanging flange that runs all the way round the lower battlements, and the Buddha alone knows how much updated anti-intrusion tech they’ve built into it since I climbed it. You do know the currents at the base of Rila will carry your broken body halfway up the Reach before they drop you anywhere.’

‘Well,’ I shrugged. ‘At least if I fall, I won’t get picked up for interrogation.’

Natsume glanced across at Brasil.

‘How old is he?’

‘Leave him alone, Nik. He’s wearing Eishundo custom, which he found, he tells me, whilst wandering around New Hokkaido killing mimints for a living. You do know what a mimint is, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Natsume was still looking at me. ‘We’ve heard the news about Mecsek in here.’

‘It’s not exactly news these days, Nik,’ Brasil told him, with evident glee.

‘You’re really wearing Eishundo?’

I nodded.

‘You know what that’s worth?’

‘I’ve had it demonstrated to me a couple of times, yeah.’

Brasil shifted impatiently on the stonework of the quadrangle. ‘Look, Nik, are you going to give us this route or not? Or are you just worried we’re going to beat your record?’

‘You’re going to get yourselves killed, stacks irretrievable, both of you. Why should I help you to do that?’

‘Hey, Nik - you’ve renounced the world and the flesh, remember. Why should how we end up in the real world bother you in here?’

‘It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.’

Brasil grinned, maybe at the obscenity he’d finally managed to elicit from his former hero. ‘Yeah, but at least we’re still in the game. And you know we’re going to do this anyway, with or without your help. So—’

‘Alright.’ Natsume held up his hands. ‘Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be real enough for you.’

Brasil just shrugged and grinned again.

‘What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?’

Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail - the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.

‘But the bad news cuts both ways,’ he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. ‘That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.’

I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know - that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.

‘Over in New Kanagawa,’ I said instead, ‘I heard they’re wiring ripwings with microcam systems. Training them too. Any truth in that?’

He snorted.

‘Yeah, they were saying the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago. It was paranoid crabshit then, and I guess it still is now. What’s the point of a microcam in a ripwing? They never go near human habitation if they can avoid it. And from what I recall of the studies done, they don’t domesticate or train easily. Plus more than likely the orbitals would spot the wiring and shoot them down on the wing.’ He gave me an unpleasant grin, not one from the Renouncer monk serenity suite. ‘Believe me, you’ve got quite enough to worry about climbing through a colony of wild ripwings, never mind some sort of domesticated cyborg variety.’

‘Right. Thanks. Any other helpful tips?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah. Don’t fall off.’

But there was a look in his eyes that belied the laconic detachment he affected and later, as he uploaded the data for outside collection, he was quiet in a tightened way that had none of his previous monkish calm to it. When he led us back down through the monastery, he didn’t speak at all. Brasil’s visit had ruffled him like spring breezes coming in across the carp lakes in Danchi. Now, beneath the rippled surface, powerful forms flexed restlessly back and forth. When we reached the entrance hall, he turned to Brasil and started speaking, awkwardly.

‘Listen, if you—’

Something screamed.

The Renouncer’s construct rendering was good - I felt the minute prickle across my palms as the Eishundo sleeve’s gekko reflexes got ready to grab rock and climb. Out of peripheral vision suddenly amped up, I saw Brasil tense - and behind him I saw the wall shudder.

‘Move,’ I yelled.

At first, it seemed to be a product of the doorkeeper tapestries, a bulging extrusion from the same fabric. Then I saw it was the stonework behind the cloth that was bulging inward, warped under forces the real world would not have permitted. The screaming might have been some construct analogue of the colossal strain the structure was under, or it might simply have been the voice of the thing that was trying to get in. There wasn’t time to know. Split seconds later the wall erupted inward with a sound like a huge melon cracking, the tapestry tore down the centre and an impossible ten-metre-tall figure stepped down into the hall.

It was as if a Renouncer monk had been pumped so full of high-grade lubricant that his body had ruptured at every joint to let the oil out. A grey-coveralled human form was vaguely recognisable at the centre of the mess, but all around it iridescent black liquid boiled out and hung on the air in viscous, reaching tendrils. The face of the thing was gone, eyes and nose and mouth ripped apart by the pressure of the extruding oil. The stuff that had done the damage pulsed out of every orifice and juncture of limb as if the heart within was still beating. The screaming emanated from the whole figure in time with each pulse, never quite dying away before the next blast of sound.

I found I’d dropped to a combat crouch that I knew was going to be worse than useless. All we could do now was run.

‘Norikae-san, Norikae-san. Please leave the area now.’

It was a chorus of cries, perfectly cadenced, as from the opposite wall a phalanx of doorkeepers threaded themselves out of the tapestries and arced gracefully over our heads towards the intruder, wielding curious, spiked clubs and lances. Their freshly assembled bodies were laced with an extrusion of their own that glowed with soft, cross-hatched golden light.

‘Please lead your guests to the exit immediately. We will deal with this.’

The structured gold threads touched the ruptured figure, and it recoiled. The screaming splintered and mounted in volume and pitch, stabbing at my eardrums. Natsume turned to us, shouting above the noise.

‘You heard them. There’s nothing you can do about this. Get out of here.’

‘Yeah, how do we do that?’ I shouted back.

‘Go back to—’ His words faded out as if he’d been turned down. Over his head, something punched a massive hole in the roof of the hall. Blocks of stone rained down, and the doorkeepers flinched about in the air, lashing out with golden light that disintegrated the debris before it could hit us. It cost two of them their existence as the black threaded intruder capitalised on their distraction, reached out with thick new tentacles, and tore them apart. I saw them bleed pale light as they died. Through the roof—

‘Oh, fuck.’

It was another oil-exploded figure, this one double the size of the previous arrival, reaching in with human arms that had sprouted huge liquid talons from out of the knuckles and under the nails of each hand. A ruptured head squeezed through and grinned blankly down at us. Globules of the black stuff cascaded down like drool from the thing’s torn mouth, splattering the floor and corroding it through to a fine silver filigree underlay. A droplet caught my cheek and scorched the skin. The splintered shrieking intensified.

‘Through the waterfall,’ Natsume bellowed in my ear. ‘Throw yourself into it. Go.’

Then the second intruder stamped down and the whole of the hall ceiling fell inward. I grabbed at Brasil, who was staring upward with numb awe, and dragged him in the direction of the wedged-open door. Around us, doorkeeper figures rallied and flung themselves upward to meet the new threat. I saw a fresh wave come out of the remaining tapestries, but half of them were grabbed up and shredded by the thing on the roof before they could finish assembling themselves. Light bled like rain onto the stone floor. Musical chords rang through the space of the hall and fractured apart on disharmonies. The black shredded things flailed about them.

We made it to the door with a couple more minor burns and I shoved Brasil through ahead of me. I turned back for a moment and wished I hadn’t. I saw Natsume touched by a misshapen tendril of black and somehow heard him scream across the general shrieking. For a scant second it was a human voice, then it was twisted out of pitch as if by an impatient hand on a set of sound controls, and Natsume seemed to somehow swim away from his own solidity, thrashing back and forth like a fish trapped between compressing sheets of glass, all the time melting and shrieking in eerie harmony with the swooping rage of the two intruders.

I got out.

We sprinted for the waterfall. One more backflung glance showed me the whole side of the monastery punched apart behind us and the two black tentacled figures growing in stature as they lashed at the doorkeepers swarming around them. The sky overhead was darkening as if for a storm and the air had turned suddenly chilled. An indescribable hissing ran through the grass on either side of the path, like torrential rain, like leaking highpressure gas. As we skidded down the winding path beside the waterfall, I saw savage interference patterns rip through the curtain of water and once, as we arrived on the platform behind the fall, the flow staggered altogether into a sudden bleakness of naked rock and open air, spluttered, then restarted.

I met Brasil’s eye. He didn’t look any happier than I felt.

‘You go first,’ I told him.

‘No, it’s okay. You—’

A shrill, pealing howl from up the path. I shoved him in the small of the back and, as he disappeared through the thundering veil of water, I dived after him. I felt the water pour down onto my arms and shoulders, felt myself tip and—

—Jerked upright on the battered couch.

It was an emergency transition. For a couple of seconds, I still felt wet from the waterfall, could have sworn my clothes were drenched and my hair plastered down around my face. I drew one soggy breath, and then real-world perception caught up. I was dry. I was safe. I was tearing off hypnophones and trodes, rolling off the couch, staring around me, heartbeat ripping belatedly upward as my physical body responded to signals from a consciousness that had only just slipped back into the adrenal driving seat.

Across the transfer chamber, Brasil was already on his feet, talking hastily to a grim-faced Sierra Tres who’d somehow reacquired both her own blaster and my Rapsodia. The room was full of a dusty-throated whoop from emergency sirens that hadn’t seen use in decades. Lights flickered uncertainly. I met the female receptionist halfway across the chamber, where she’d just abandoned an instrument panel gone colourfully insane. Even on the poorly muscled face of the Fabrikon sleeve, shocked anger glared out at me.

‘Did you bring it in?’ she shouted. ‘Did you contaminate us?’

‘No, of course not. Check your fucking instruments. Those things are still in there.’

‘What the fuck was that?’ asked Brasil.

‘At a guess, I’d say a sleeper virus.’ Absently, I took the Rapsodia from Tres and checked the load. ‘You saw the shape of it - part of those things used to be a monk, digitised human disguise wrapped around the offensive systems while they were dormant. Just waiting for the right trigger. The cover personality might not even have been aware what it was carrying until it blew.’

‘Yeah, but why?’

‘Natsume.’ I shrugged. ‘They’d probably been tagging him since—’

The attendant was gaping at us as if we’d started gibbering in machine code. Her colleague appeared behind her at the door to the transfer chamber and pushed his way past. There was a small beige datachip in his left hand and the cheap silicoflesh was stretched taut on his fingers where he gripped it. He brandished the chip at us and leaned in close to beat the noise of the sirens.

‘You must leave now,’ he said forcefully. ‘I am requested by Norikae-san to give you this, but you must get out immediately. You are no longer either welcome or safe here.’

‘Yeah, no shit.’ I took the offered chip. ‘If I were you, I’d come with us. Weld shut every dataport you’ve got into the monastery before you leave and then call a good viral clean-up crew. From what I saw back there, your doorkeepers are outclassed.’

The sirens whooped about us like methed-up partygoers. He shook his head, as if to clear it of noise. ‘No. If this is a test, we will meet it on Uploaded terms. We will not abandon our brothers.’

‘Or sisters. Well, suit yourself, that’s very noble. But personally I think anyone you send in there at the moment is going to come out with their subconscious flayed to the bone. You badly need some real-world support.’

He stared at me.

‘You do not understand,’ he yelled. ‘This is our domain, not the flesh. This is the destiny of the human race, to Upload. We are at our strongest there, we will triumph there.’

I gave up. I shouted back at him.

‘Fine. Great. You let me know how that turns out. Jack, Sierra. Let’s leave these idiots to kill themselves and get the fuck out of here.’

We abandoned the two of them in the transfer room. The last I saw of either was the male attendant laying himself on one of the couches, staring straight up while the woman attached the trodes. His face was shiny with sweat, but it was rapt too, locked in a paroxysm of will and emotion.

Out on Whaleback and Ninth, soft afternoon light was painting the blank-eyed walls of the monastery warm and orange, and the sounds of traffic hooting in the Reach drifted up with the smell of the sea. A light westerly breeze stirred dust and dried-out spindrizzle spores in the gutters. Up ahead, a couple of children ran across the street, making shooting noises and chasing a miniature robot toy made to resemble a karakuri. There was no one else about, and nothing in the scene to suggest the battle now raging back in the machine heart of the Renouncers’ construct. You could have been forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a dream.

But down at the lower limits of my neurachem hearing as we walked away, I could just make out the cry of ancient sirens, like a warning, feeble and faint, of the stirring forces and the chaos to come.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Harlan’s Day.

More correctly, Harlan’s Eve - technically, the festivities wouldn’t commence until midnight rolled around, and that was a solid four hours away. But even this early in the evening, with the last of the day’s light still high in the western sky, the proceedings had kicked off long since. Over in New Kanagawa and Danchi the downtown areas would already be a lurid parade of holodisplay and masked dance, and the bars would all be serving at state-subsidised birthday prices. Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters. Even those who hated them most would have had to admit that you couldn’t fault Harlan and his kind when it came to throwing a street party.

Down by the water in Tadaimako, the mood was more genteel but festive still. Work had ceased in the commercial harbour around lunchtime, and now small groups of dock workers sat on the high sides of real-keel freighters, sharing pipes and bottles and looking expectantly at the sky. In the marina, small parties were in progress on most of the yachts, one or two larger ones spilling out from vessels onto the jetties. A confused mish-mash of music splashed out everywhere, and as the evening light thickened you could see where decks and masts had been sprayed with illuminum powder in green and pink. Excess powder glimmered scummily in the water between hulls.

A couple of yachts across from the trimaran we were stealing, a minimally-clad blonde woman waved giddily at me. I lifted the Erkezes cigar, also stolen, in cautious salute, hoping she wouldn’t take it as an invitation to jump ship and come over. Isa had music she swore was fashionable thumping up from below decks, but it was a cover. The only thing going on to that beat was an intrusion run into the guts of the trimaran Boubin Islander’s onboard security systems. Uninvited guests trying to crash this particular party were going to meet Sierra Tres or Jack Soul Brasil and the business end of a Kalashnikov shard gun at the base of the companionway.

I knocked some ash off the cigar and wandered about in the yacht’s stern seating area, trying to look as if I belonged there. Vague tension eeled through my guts, more insistent than I’d usually expect before a gig. It didn’t take much imagination to work out why. An ache that I knew was psychosomatic twinged down the length of my left arm.

I very badly didn’t want to climb Rila Crags.

Fucking typical. The whole city’s partying, and I get to spend the night clinging to a two-hundred-metre sheer cliff face.

‘Hello there.’

I glanced up and saw the minimally-clad blonde woman standing at the gangplank and smiling brilliantly. She wobbled a little on exaggerated stiletto heels.

‘Hello,’ I said cautiously.

‘Don’t know your face,’ she said with inebriated directness. ‘I’d remember a hull this gorgeous. You don’t usually moor here, do you?’

‘No, that’s right.’ I slapped the rail. ‘First time she’s been to Millsport. Only got in a couple of days ago.’

For the Boubin Islander and her real owners at least, it was the truth. They were a pair of moneyed couples from the Ohrid Isles, rich by way of some state sell-off in local navigational systems, visiting Millsport for the first time in decades. An ideal choice, plucked out of the harbourmaster datastack by Isa along with everything else we needed to get aboard the thirty-metre trimaran. Both couples were unconscious in a Tadaimako hotel right now, and a couple of Brasil’s younger revolutionary enthusiasts would make sure they stayed that way for the next two days. Amidst the confusion of the Harlan’s Day celebrations, it was unlikely anyone was going to miss them.

‘Mind if I come aboard and take a look?’

‘Uh, well, that’d be fine except, thing is, we’re about to cast off. Couple more minutes, and we’re taking her out into the Reach for the fireworks.’

‘Oh, that’s fantastic. You know, I’d really love to do that.’ She flexed her body at me. ‘I go absolutely crazy for fireworks. They make me all, I don’t know—’

‘Hey, baby.’ An arm slipped around my waist and violent crimson hair tickled me under the jaw. Isa snuggling against me, stripped down to cutaway swimwear and some eye-opening embedded body jewellery. She glared balefully at the blonde woman. ‘Who’s your new friend?’

‘Oh, we haven’t, ah . . .’ I opened an inviting hand.

The blonde woman’s mouth tightened. Maybe it was a competitive thing, maybe it was Isa’s glittery, red-veined stare. Or maybe just healthy disgust at seeing a fifteen-year-old girl hanging off a man over twice her age. Re-sleeving can and does lead to some weird body options, but anyone with the money to run a boat like Boubin Islander doesn’t have to go through them if they don’t want to. If I was fucking someone who looked fifteen, either she was fifteen, or I wanted her to look like she was, which in the end comes to pretty much the same thing.

‘I think I’d better get back,’ she said, and turned unsteadily about. Listing slightly every few steps, she made as dignified a retreat as was possible on heels that stupid.

‘Yeah,’ Isa called after her. ‘Enjoy the party. See you around, maybe.’

‘Isa?’ I muttered.

She grinned up at me. ‘Yeah, what?’

‘Let go of me, and go put some fucking clothes back on.’

We cast off twenty minutes later, and cruised out of the harbour on a general guidance beam. Watching the fireworks from the Reach wasn’t a stunningly original idea, and we weren’t even close to the only yacht in Tadaimako harbour heading that way. For the time being, Isa kept watch from the belowdeck cockpit and let the marine traffic interface tug us along. There’d be time to break loose later, when the show started.

In the forward master cabin, Brasil and I broke out the gear. Stealth scuba suits, Anderson-rigged, courtesy of Sierra Tres and her haiduci friends, weaponry from the hundred personal arsenals on Vchira Beach. Isa’s customised software for the raid patched into the suits’ general-purpose processors, and overlaid with a scrambler-rigged comsystem she’d stolen fresh from the factory that afternoon. Like the Boubin Islander’s comatose owners, it wouldn’t be missed for a couple of days.

We stood and looked at the assembled hardware, the gleaming black of the powered-down suits, the variously scuffed and dented weapons. There was barely enough space on the mirrorwood floor for it all.

‘Just like old times, huh?’

Brasil shrugged. ‘No such thing as an old wave, Tak. Every time, it’s different. Looking back’s the biggest mistake you can make.’

Sarah.

‘Spare me the cheap fucking beach philosophy, Jack.’

I left him in the cabin and went aft to see how Isa and Sierra Tres were getting on at the con. I felt Brasil’s gaze follow me out, and the taint of my own flaring irritation stayed with me along the corridor and up the three steps into the storm cockpit.

‘Hey baby,’ said Isa, when she saw me.

‘Stop that.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She grinned unrepentantly and glanced across to where Sierra Tres was propped against the cockpit side panel. ‘You didn’t seem to mind so much earlier on.’

‘Earlier on there was a—’ I gave up. Gestured. ‘Suits are ready. Any word from the others?’

Sierra Tres shook her head slowly. Isa nodded at the comset datacoil.

‘They’re all online, look. Green glow, all the way across the board. For now, that’s all we need or want. Anything more, it just means things have fucked up. Believe me, right now, no news is good news.’

I twisted about awkwardly in the confined space.

‘Is it safe to go up on deck?’

‘Yeah, sure. This is a sweet ship, it runs weather exclusion screens from generators in the rigging, I’ve got them up on partial opaque for incoming. Anyone out there nosy enough to be looking, like your little blonde friend, say, your face is just going to be a blob in the scope.’

‘Good.’

I ducked out of the cockpit, moved to the stern and heaved myself into the seating area, then up onto the deck proper. This far north, the Reach was running light and the trimaran was almost steady on the swell. I picked my way forward to the fairweather cockpit, seated myself in one of the pilot chairs and dug out a fresh Erkezes cigar. There was a whole humicrate of them below, I figured the owners could spare more than a few. Revolutionary politics - we all have to make sacrifices. Around me, the yacht creaked a little. The sky had darkened, but Daikoku stood low over the spine of Tadaimako and painted the sea with a bluish glow. The running lights of other vessels sat about, neatly separated from each other by the traffic software. Bass lines thumped faintly across the water from the glimmering shore lights of New Kanagawa and Danchi. The party was in full swing.

Southward, Rila speared up out of the sea, distant enough to appear slim and weaponish - a dark, crooked blade, unlit but for the cluster of lights from the citadel at the top.

I looked at it and smoked in silence for a while.

He’s up there.

Or somewhere downtown, looking for you.

No, he’s there. Be realistic about this.

Alright, he’s there. And so is she. So for that matter is this Aiura, and a couple of hundred hand-picked Harlan family retainers. Worry about stuff like that when you get to the top.

A launch barge slid past in the moonlight, on its way out to a firing position further up the Reach. At the rear, the deck was piled high with tumbled packages, webbing and helium cylinders. The sawn-off forward superstructure thronged with figures at rails, waving and firing flares into the night. A sharp hooting lifted from the vessel as it passed, the Harlan birthday hymn picked out in harsh collision alert blasts.

Happy birthday, motherfucker.

‘Kovacs?’

It was Sierra Tres. She’d reached the cockpit without me noticing, which said either a lot for her stealth skills or as much for my lack of focus. I hoped it was the former.

‘You okay?’

I considered that for a moment. ‘Do I not look okay?’

She made a characteristically laconic gesture and seated herself in the other pilot chair. For quite a long time, she just looked at me.

‘So what’s going on with the kid?’ she asked finally. ‘You looking to recapture your long lost youth?’

‘No.’ I jerked a thumb southward. ‘My long lost fucking youth is out there somewhere, trying to kill me. There’s nothing going on with Isa. I’m not a fucking paedophile.’

Another long, quiet spell. The launch barge slipped away into the evening. Talking to Tres was always like this. Under normal circumstances, I’d have found it irritating, but now, caught in the calm before midnight, it was curiously restful.

‘How long do you think they had that viral stuff tagged to Natsume?’

I shrugged. ‘Hard to tell. You mean, was it long-term shadowing or a trap set specifically for us?’

‘If you like.’

I knocked ash off the cigar and stared at the ember beneath. ‘Natsume’s a legend. Granted a dimly remembered one, but I remember him. So will the copy of me the Harlans have hired. He probably also knows by now that I talked to people back in Tekitomura, and that I know they’re holding Sylvie at Rila. He knows what I’d do, given that information. A little Envoy intuition would do the rest. If he’s in tune, then yeah, maybe he had them clip some viral watchdogs to Natsume, waiting for me to show up. With the backing he’s got now, it wouldn’t be hard to write a couple of shell personalities, have them wired in with faked credentials from one of the other Renouncer monasteries.’

I drew on the cigar, felt the bite of the smoke and let it up again.

‘Then again, maybe the Harlan family had Natsume tagged from way back anyway. They’re not a forgiving lot, and him climbing Rila like that made them look stupid, even if wasn’t much more than a Quellboy poster stunt.’

Sierra was silent, staring ahead through the cockpit windscreen.

‘Comes to the same thing in the end,’ she said at last.

‘Yes, it does. They know we’re coming.’ Oddly enough, saying it made me smile. ‘They don’t know exactly when or exactly how, but they know.’

We watched the boats around us. I smoked the Erkezes down to a stub. Sierra Tres sat silent and motionless.

‘I guess Sanction IV was hard,’ she said later.

‘You guess right.’

For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.

‘Ado blames you,’ she told me. ‘So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.’

‘Well, I’m a likeable guy.’

A smile bent her mouth. ‘So it seems.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.

‘I saw you, Kovacs.’

‘Saw me where?’

‘Saw you with Vidaura.’

That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.

‘See anything you liked?’

‘I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.’

‘No.’ Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. ‘No, we weren’t.’

More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa. Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the north eastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.

‘Does Brasil know?’ I asked.

Now it was her turn to shrug. ‘I don’t know. Have you told him?’

‘No.’

‘Has she?’

And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.

This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.

I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amidst bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.

Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.

Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started. It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.

Hey, she was there too.

After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.

‘Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,’ she said cryptically, and wandered off towards the stern.

A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fairweather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock - from several of our nearest neighbours, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.

Boubin Islander bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.

Then the real fireworks began.

‘Look,’ Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of child-like excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. ‘There go the first ones. Lift-off.’

On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy, Boubin Islander had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy - you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.

‘And they’ve cut the ropes,’ the presenter informed us gaily. ‘The balloons are rising. I can see the—’

‘Do we have to have this on?’ I asked.

Brasil shrugged. ‘Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.’

The next moment, the sky cracked open.

Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-metre demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.

The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.

The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.

Even the radio commentator shut up.

From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again, night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colours again. The scorched air snarled.

Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien-built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-metre line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images. Radio reception died.

‘Time to go,’ said Brasil.

He was grinning.

So, I realised, was I.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from Boubin Islander’s dive steps, let go the rail and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of metres below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet and blew it clear of water.

Tres bobbed up, a few metres away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement. I cast about for Brasil.

‘Jack?’

His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.

‘Under you. Chilly, huh?’

‘Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Alright, then. You know what to do?’

I heard her sigh. ‘Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.’

‘Got it in one.’

I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colours were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.

There was a kind of comfort in that.

‘Alright then.’ I drew air, harder than necessary. ‘Let’s do this.’

I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over and began to swim.

Brasil had taken us as far south of the general traffic as was safe without attracting attention, but we were still a long way off the Crags. Under normal circumstances, getting there would have been a couple of hours’ hard work at least. Currents, sucked south through the Reach by the maelstrom, helped somewhat, but the only thing that really made the scuba approach viable was the modified buoyancy system. With electronic security in the archipelago effectively blinded and deafened by the orbital storm, no one was going to be able to pick up a one-man grav engine underwater. And with a carefully applied vector, the same power that maintained diver flotation would also drive us south at machine speed.

Like seawraiths out of the Ebisu daughter legend, we slid through the darkened water an arm’s reach apart, while above us the surface of the sea bloomed silently and repeatedly with reflected angelfire. The Anderson rig clicked and bubbled gently in my ears, electrolysing oxygen directly from the water around me, blending in helium from the ultracomp mini-tank on my back, feeding it to me, then patiently shredding and dispersing my exhaled breath in bubbles no larger than fish eggs. Distantly, the maelstrom growled a bass counterpoint.

It was very peaceful.

Yeah, this is the easy part.

A memory drifted by in the flashlit gloom. Night-diving off Hirata’s reef with a girl from the upscale end of Newpest. She’d blown into Watanabe’s one night with Segesvar and some of the other Reef Warriors, part of a mixed bag of slumming daddy’s girls and Stinktown hardboys. Eva? Irena? All I remembered was a gathered-up rope of dark honey hair, long sprawling limbs and shining green eyes. She was smoking seahemp roll-ups, badly, choking and wheezing on the rough blend with a frequency that made her harder-edged friends laugh out loud. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Making a - for me - rare effort, I peeled her away from Segesvar, who in any case seemed to be finding her a drag, parked us in a quiet corner of Watanabe’s near the kitchens, monopolised her all evening. She seemed to come from another planet entirely - a father who cared and worried about her with an attention I would have jeered at under different circumstances, a mother who worked part-time just so she doesn’t feel like a complete housewife, a home out of town that they owned, visits to Millsport and Erkezes every few months. An aunt who had gone offworld to work, they were all so proud of her, a brother who hoped to do the same. She talked about it all with the abandon of someone who believes these things to be entirely normal, and she coughed on the seahemp, and she smiled brilliantly at me, often.

So, she said on one of those occasions, what do you do for fun?

I, uh. I. Reef dive.

The smile became a laugh. Yeah, Reef Warriors, somehow I guessed. Go down much?

It was supposed to be my line, the line we all used on girls, and she’d stolen it out from under me. I didn’t even mind much.

Far side of Hirata, I blurted out. You want to try some time?

Sure, she matched me. Want to try right now?

It was deep summer in Kossuth, inland humidity had hit a hundred per cent weeks ago. The thought of getting into the water was like an infectious itch. We slipped out of Watanabe’s and I showed her how to read the autocab flows, pick out an unfared one and jump the roof. We rode it all the way across town, sweat cooling on our skin.

Hang on tight.

Yeah, I never would have thought of that, she yelled back, and laughed into my face in the slipstream.

The cab stopped for a fare near the Port Authority, and we tumbled off, scaring the prospective customers into a clutch of mannered yelps. Shock subsided into mutters and disapproving glares that sent us reeling off, stifling cackles. There was a hole in harbour security down at the eastern corner of the hoverloader docks - a blind spot torn by some pre-teen for-kicks hacker the previous year; he’d sold it to the Reef Warriors for holoporn. I got us through the gap, sneaked us down to one of the ’loader ramps and stole a real-keel tender. We poled and paddled our way silently out of the harbour, then started the motor and tore off in a wide, cream-waked arc for Hirata, whooping.

Later, sunk in the silence of the dive, I looked up at the Hotei-toned, rippling surface and saw her body above me, pale against the black straps of the buoyancy jacket and the ancient compressed-air rig. She was lost in the moment, drifting, maybe gazing at the towering wall of the reef beside us, maybe just luxuriating in the cool of the sea against her skin. For about a minute, I hung below her, enjoying the view and feeling myself grow hard in the water. I traced the outlines of her thighs and hips with my eyes, zeroed in on the shaved vertical bar of hair at the base of her belly and the glimpse of lips as her legs parted languidly to kick. I stared at the taut muscled belly emerging from the lower edge of the buoyancy jacket, the obvious swelling at her chest.

Then something happened. Maybe too much seahemp, it’s never a smart idea before a dive. Maybe just some fatherly echo from my own home life. The reef edged in from the side of my vision, and for one terrible moment it seemed to be tilting massively over, falling on us. The eroticism of the languid drift in her limbs shrivelled to sudden, cramping anxiety that she was dead or unconscious. I kicked myself upward in sudden panic, grabbed her shoulders with both hands and tilted her around in the water.

And she was fine.

Eyes widened a little in surprise behind the mask, hands touching me in return. A grin split her mouth and she let air bubble out through her teeth. Gestures, caresses. Her legs wrapped around me. She took out the regulator, gestured for me to do the same, and kissed me.

‘Tak?’

Afterwards, in the gear ’fab the Reef Warriors had blown and set atop the reef, lying with me on an improvised bed of musty winter wetsuits, she seemed surprised at how carefully I handled her.

You won’t break me, Tak. I’m a big girl.

And later, legs wrapped around me again, grinding against me, laughing delightedly.

Hang on tight!

I was too lost in her to steal her comeback from the roof of the autocab.

‘Tak, you hear me?’

Eva? Ariana?

‘Kovacs!’

I blinked. It was Brasil’s voice.

‘Yeah, sorry. What is it?’

‘Boat coming.’ On the heels of his words, I picked it up as well, the scraping whine of small screws in the water, sharp over the backdrop growl of the maelstrom. I checked my proximity system, found nothing on grav trace. Went to sonar and found it, south-west and coming fast up the Reach.

‘Real-keel,’ muttered Brasil. ‘Think we should worry?’

It was hard to believe the Harlan family would run real-keel patrol boats. Still—

‘Kill the drives.’ Sierra Tres said it for me. ‘Go to standby flotation. It’s not worth the risk.’

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Reluctantly, I found the buoyancy controls and shut down the grav support. Instantly, I felt myself starting to sink as the weight of my gear asserted itself. I prodded the emergency flotation dial and felt the standby chambers in the flotation jacket start to fill up. Cut it as soon as my descent stopped, and floated in the flashlit gloom, listening to the approaching whine of the boat.

Elena, maybe?

Green eyes shining

The reef tipping over onto us.

As another angelfire blast cut loose, I spotted the keel of the vessel overhead, big and sharkish, and hugely misshapen on one side. I narrowed my eyes and peered in the postblast gloom, cranking the neurachem. The boat seemed to be dragging something.

And the tension drained back out of me.

‘Charter boat, guys. They’re hauling a bottleback carcass.’

The boat laboured past and faded northward on a bored drone, listing awkwardly with the weight of its prize, not even that close to us in the end. Neurachem showed me the dead bottleback in silhouette against the blue-lit surface of the water, still trailing thin threads of blood into the water. The massive torpedo body rolled sluggishly against the bow wave, the flukes trailed like broken wings. Part of the dorsal flange had been ripped loose at some point and now it flogged back and forth in water, blurred at the edges with ragged lumps and tendrils of tissue. Loose cabling tangled alongside. Looked as if they’d harpooned it a few times - whoever had chartered the boat clearly wasn’t that great a fisherman.

When humans first arrived on Harlan’s World, the bottlebacks didn’t have any natural predators. They were the top of the food chain, magnificently adapted marine hunters and highly intelligent, social animals. Nothing the planet had evolved recently was up to killing them.

We soon changed that.

‘Hope that’s not an omen,’ murmured Sierra Tres unexpectedly.

Brasil made a noise in his throat. I vented the emergency chambers on the buoyancy jacket and snapped the grav system back on. The water seemed suddenly colder around me. Behind the automatic motions of course check and gear trim, I could feel a vague, undefined anger seeping in.

‘Let’s get this done, guys.’

But the mood was still with me twenty minutes later when we crept into the shallows at the base of Rila, pulsing at my temples and behind my eyes. And projected on the glass of my scuba mask, the pale red route-pointers from Natsume’s simulation software seemed to flare in time with the ratcheting of my own blood. The urge to do damage was a rising tide inside me, like wakefulness, like hilarity.

We found the channel Natsume had recommended, eased through with gloved hands braced against rock and coral outcrops to avoid snagging. Levered ourselves up out of the water onto a narrow ledge that the software had tinted and flagged with a slightly demonic smiling face. Entry level, Natsume had said, shedding his monkish demeanour for a fleeting moment. Knock, knock. I got myself braced and took stock. Faint silvery light from Daikoku touched the sea, but Hotei had still not risen and the spray from the maelstrom and nearby wavecrash fogged what light there was. The view was mostly gloom. Angelfire sent shadows scurrying past on the rocks as another firework package burst somewhere to the north. Thunder rippled across the sky. I scanned the cliff above for a moment, then the darkened sea we’d just climbed out of. No sign we’d been noticed. I detached the dive helmet’s frame from the mask and lifted it off. Shed my flippers and flexed the toes of the rubber boots underneath.

‘Everybody okay?’

Brasil grunted an affirmative. Tres nodded. I secured the helmet frame at my belt in the small of my back where it wouldn’t get in the way, stripped off my gloves and stowed them in a pouch. Settled the now lightweight mask a little more comfortably on my face, and checked that the datafeed was still securely jacked in. Tipping my head back, I saw Natsume’s route march off above us in clearly marked red hand- and footholds.

‘You all seeing this okay?’

‘Yeah.’ Brasil grinned. ‘Kind of spoils the fun, doesn’t it? Marking it out like that.’

‘You want to go first then?’

‘After you, Mister Eishundo.’

Without giving myself time to think about it, I reached up and grasped the first indicated hold, braced my feet and heaved myself onto the cliff. Swung up and found a grip with my other hand. The rock was wet with maelstrom mist, but the Eishundo grip held. I brought a leg across to fit against an angled ledge, swung again and grasped.

And left the ground behind.

Nothing to it.

The thought zipped through my mind after I’d gone about twenty metres, and left a slightly manic grin in its wake. Natsume had warned me that the early stages of the climb were deceptive. It’s apeman stuff, he said seriously. Lots of wide swings and grabs, big moves and your strength’s good at this stage. You’re going to feel good. Just remember it doesn’t last.

I pursed my lips, chimpanzee-like and hooted gently through them. Below me, the sea smashed and gnawed restlessly at rock. The sound and scent of it came bouncing up the cliff face and wrapped me in windings of chill and damp. I shrugged off a shudder.

Swing up. Grab.

Very slowly, it grew on me that the Envoy conditioning hadn’t yet come online against my vertigo. With the rock face less than half a metre in front of my face and the Eishundo muscle system thrumming on my bones, it was almost possible to forget that there was a drop below. The rock lost the coating of spray from the maelstrom as we climbed higher, the repeating roar of waves faded to distant white noise. The gekko grip on my hands made glassy, treacherous holds laughably comfortable. And more than all of these factors, or maybe the culminating Eishundo touch, what I’d told Natsume seemed to be true - the sleeve knew how to do this.

Then, as I reached a set of holds and ledges whose markers the mask display labelled with a restpoint symbol, I looked down to see how Brasil and Tres were doing, and ruined it all.

Sixty metres below - not even a third of the whole climb - the sea was a blackened fleece, touched with Daikoku silver where it rippled. The skirt of rocks at the base of Rila sat in the water like solid shadows. The two big ones that framed the channel where we’d come in now looked as if they’d fit into my hand. The back and forth sluice of water between them was hypnotic, pulling me downward. The view seemed to pivot dizzyingly.

The conditioning came on line, flattening the fear. Like airlock doors in my head. My gaze came up again to face the rock. Sierra Tres reached up and tapped my foot.

‘Okay?’

I realised I’d been frozen for the best part of a minute.

‘Just resting.’

The marked trail of holds leaned left, an upward diagonal around a broad buttress that Natsume had warned us was pretty much unclimbable. Instead he’d lain back and moved almost upside down under the chin of the buttress, feet jammed against minute folds and fissures in the stone, fingers pinching angles of rock that barely deserved the name hold, until he could finally get both hands on a series of sloped ledges at the far side and haul himself back into a nearly vertical position.

I gritted my teeth and started to do the same.

Halfway there, my foot slipped, swung my weight out and pulled my right hand off the rock. An involuntary grunt, and I was dangling left-handed, feet flailing for purchase far too low to find anything apart from empty air. I would have screamed but the barely recovering sinews in my left arm were doing it for me.

‘Fuck.’

Hang on tight.

The gekko grip held.

I curled upward from the waist, craning my neck to see the marked footholds in the glass of the mask. Short, panicky breaths. I got one foot lodged against a bubble of stone. Tiny increments of strain came off my left arm. Unable to see clearly with the mask, I reached up in the dark with my right hand and felt about on the rock for another hold.

Found it.

Moved my braced foot fractionally and jammed the other one in next to it.

Hung, panting.

No, don’t fucking stop!

It took all my willpower to move my right hand for the next hold. Two more moves, and it took the same sickening effort to look for the next. Three more moves, a fractionally improved angle, and I realised I was almost to the other side of the buttress. I reached up, found the first of the sloping ledges and dragged myself hyperventilating and cursing upright. A genuine, deeply grooved hold offered itself. I got my feet to the lowest ledge. Sagged with relief against the cool stone.

Get yourself up out of the fucking way, Tak. Don’t leave them hanging about down there.

I scrambled up the next set of holds until I was on top of the buttress. A broad shelf glowed red in the mask display, smiling face floating above it. Rest point. I waited there while Sierra Tres and then Brasil emerged from below and joined me. The big surfer was grinning like a kid.

‘Had me worried there, Tak.’

‘Just. Don’t. Fucking don’t, alright.’

We rested for about ten minutes. Over our heads, the battlement flange of the citadel was now clearly visible, clean cut edges emerging from the chaotic angles of the natural rock it jutted above. Brasil nodded upward.

‘Not far to go now, eh?’

‘Yeah, and only the ripwings to worry about.’ I dug out the repellent spray and squirted myself liberally with it all over. Tres and Brasil followed suit. It had a thin, faintly green odour that seemed stronger in the fitful darkness. It might not drive a ripwing away under all and any circumstances, but it would certainly put them off. And if that wasn’t enough . . .

I drew the Rapsodia from its holster on my lower ribs and pressed it to a utility patch on my chest. It clung there, easily to hand in fractions of a second, always assuming I could spare the hand to grab it in the first place. Faced with the prospect of meeting a cliff full of angry, startled ripwings with young to defend, I would have preferred the heavy-duty Sunjet blaster on my back, but there was no way I could wield it effectively. I grimaced, adjusted the mask and checked the datajack again. Drew a deep breath and reached for the next set of handholds.

Now the cliff face grew convex, bulging out and forcing us to climb at a sustained backward lean of twenty degrees. The path Natsume had taken wove back and forth across the rock, governed by the sparse availability of decent holds, and even then opportunities to rest were few and far between. By the time, the bulge faded back to a vertical, my arms were aching from shoulder to fingertip, and my throat was raw from panting.

Hang on tight.

I found a display-marked diagonal crack, moved up it to give the others space and jammed an arm in up to the elbow. Then I hung there limply, collecting breath.

The smell hit me about the same time as I saw the gossamer thin streamers of white dangling from above.

Oily, acidic.

Here we go.

I twisted my head and stared upward for confirmation. We were directly below the colony’s nesting band. The whole expanse of rock was thickly plastered with the creamy webbing secretion that ripwing embryos were birthed directly into and lived in for their four-month gestation. Evidently, somewhere just above me, mature hatchlings had torn their way free and either taken wing or tumbled incompetently to a Darwinian conclusion in the sea below.

Let’s not think about that right now, eh?

I cranked the neurachem vision, and scanned the colony. Dark shapes preened and flapped here and there on protruding crags in the mass of white, but there weren’t many of them. Ripwings, Natsume assured us, don’t spend a lot of time at the nests. No eggs to keep warm, and the embryos feed directly off the webbing. Like most hardcore climbers, he was a part-time expert on the creatures. You’re going to get a few sentinels, the odd birthing female and maybe some well-fed parents secreting more gunge onto their particular patch. If you go carefully, they may leave you alone.

I grimaced again, and began to work my way up the crack. The oily stink intensified, and shreds of torn webbing began to adhere to my suit. The chameleochrome system blanched to match wherever the stuff touched. I stopped breathing through my nose. A quick glance down past my boots showed me the others following, faces contorted with the smell.

And then, inevitably, the crack ran out and the display said that the next set of holds were buried beneath the webbing. I nodded drearily to myself and plunged a hand into the mess, wriggling fingers around until they found a spur of rock that resembled the red model in the display. It seemed pretty solid. A second plunge into the webbing gave me another, even better hold and I hacked sideways with one foot, looking for a ledge that was also covered in the stuff. Now, even breathing through my mouth, I could taste the oil at the back of my throat.

This was far worse than the climb over the bulge. The holds were good, but each time you had to force your hand or foot through the thick, clinging webs until it was secure. You had to watch out for the vague shadows of embryos hung up inside the stuff, because even embryonic they could bite, and the surge of fear hormones they’d release through the webbing if you touched them would hit the air like a chemical siren. The sentinels would be on us seconds after, and I didn’t rate our chances of fighting them off without falling.

Stick your hand in. Flex it about.

Get a grip. Move.

Pull clear and shake your hand free. Gag at the liberated stink. Stick your hand back in.

By now we were coated with clinging strands of the stuff and I was finding it hard to remember what climbing on clean rock had been like. At the edges of a nearly cleared patch, I passed a dead and rotting hatchling, caught upside down by the talons in a freak knot of webbing it hadn’t been strong enough to break before it starved to death. It added new, sickly-sweet layers of decay to the stink. Higher up, a nearly-grown embryo seemed to turn its beaked head to look at me as I reached gingerly into the gunge half a metre away.

I drew myself up over a ledge made rounded and sticky by webbing.

The ripwing lunged at me.

Probably, it was as startled as I was. Rising mist of repellent and the bulky black figure that came after, you could see how it would be. It went for my eyes with a repeated stabbing movement, punched the mask instead and jerked my head back. The beak made a skittering noise on the glass. I lost my left-hand grip, pivoted on the right. The ripwing croaked and hunched closer, stabbing at my throat. I felt the serrated edge of the beak gouge skin. Out of options, I dragged myself back hard against the ledge with my right hand. My left whiplashed out, neurachem-swift, and grabbed the fucking thing by the neck. I ripped it off the ledge and hurled it downward. There was another startled croak, then an explosion of leathery wings below me. Sierra Tres yelled.

I got another grip with my left hand and peered down. They were both still there. The ripwing was a retreating winged shadow, soaring away out to sea. I unlocked my breath again.

‘You okay?’

‘Can you please not do that again,’ gritted Brasil.

I didn’t have to. Natsume’s route took us through an area of torn and used-up webbing next, finally over a narrow band of thicker secretion and then we were clear. A dozen good holds after that and we were crouched on a worked stone platform under the main battlement flange of the Rila citadel.

Tight, traded grins. There was enough space on the platform to sit down. I tapped the induction mike.

‘Isa?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’ Her voice came through uncharacteristically high-pitched, hurried with tension. I grinned again.

‘We’re at the top. Better let the others know.’

‘Alright.’

I settled back against the stonework and breathed out loose lipped. Stared out at the horizon.

‘I do not want to have to do that again.’

‘Still this bit left,’ said Tres, jerking her thumb upward at the flange. I followed the motion and looked at the underside of the battlement.

Settlement-Years architecture. Natsume had been almost scornful. So fucking baroque, they might as well have built a ladder into it. And the glimmer of pride that all his time as a Renouncer didn’t seem to have taken away. ’course, they never expected anyone to get up there in the first place.

I examined the ranks of carving on the upward sloping underside of the flange. Mostly, it was the standard wing-and-wave motifs, but in places there were stylised faces representing Konrad Harlan and some of his more notable relatives from the Settlement era. Every ten square centimetres of stonework offered a decent hold. The distance out to the edge of the flange was less than three metres. I sighed and got back to my feet.

‘Okay then.’

Brasil braced himself next to me, peering up the angle of the stone. ‘Looks easy enough, eh? Think there are any sensors?’

I pressed the Rapsodia against my chest to make sure it was still secure. Loosened the blaster in its sheath on my back. Got back to my feet.

‘Who fucking cares.’

I reached up, stuck a fist in Konrad Harlan’s eye and dug in with my fingers. Then I climbed out over the drop before I could think about it. About thirty hanging seconds and I was onto the vertical wall. I found similar carvings to work with and seconds later was crouched on a three-metre-broad parapet, peering down into a cloister-lined, tear-shaped ornamental space of raked gravel and painstakingly aligned rocks. A small statue of Harlan stood near the centre, head bowed and hands folded meditatively, overshadowed at the rear by an idealised Martian whose wings were spread in protection and conferral of power. At the far end of the rounded space, a regal arch led away, I knew, to the shadowed courtyards and gardens of the citadel’s guest wing.

The perfume of herbs and ledgefruit blew past me, but there was no local noise beyond the breeze itself. The guests, it appeared were all across in the central complex, where lights blazed and the sounds of celebration came and went with the wind. I strained the neurachem and picked out cheers, elegant music that Isa would have hated, a voice raised in song that was quite beautiful.

I pulled the Sunjet from its sheath on my back and clicked the power on. Waiting there in the darkness on the edge of the party, hands full of death, I felt momentarily like some evil spirit out of legend. Brasil and Tres came up behind me and fanned out on the parapet. The big surfer had a heavy antique frag rifle cradled in his arms, Tres hefted her blaster left-handed to make room for the Kalashnikov solid-load in her right. There was a distant look on her face and she seemed to be weighing the two weapons for balance, or as if she might throw them. The night sky split with angelfire and lit us, bluish and unreal. Thunder rumbled like an incitement. Under it all, the maelstrom called.

‘Alright then,’ I said softly.

‘Yes, that’s probably far enough,’ said a woman’s voice from the garden-perfumed shadows. ‘Put down your weapons, please.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Figures, armed and armoured, stepped out of the cloistering. At least a dozen of them. Here and there, I could see a pale face, but most wore bulky enhanced-vision masks, and tactical marine-style helmets. Combat armour hugged their chests and limbs like extra muscle. The weaponry was equally heavy-duty. Shard blasters with gape-mouthed dispersal fittings, frag rifles about a century newer than the one Jack Soul Brasil had brought to the party. A couple of hip-mounted plasmaguns. No one up in the Harlan eyrie was taking any chances.

I lowered the barrel of the Sunjet gently to point at the stone parapet. Kept a loose grip on the butt. Peripheral vision told me Brasil had done the same with the frag rifle, and that Sierra Tres had her arms at her sides.

‘Yes, I really meant relinquish your weapons,’ said the same woman urbanely. ‘As in put them down altogether. Perhaps my Amanglic is not as idiomatic as it could be.’

I turned in the direction the voice came from.

‘That you, Aiura?’

There was a long pause, and then she stepped out of the archway at the end of the ornamental space. Another orbital discharge lit her for a moment, then the gloom sank back and I had to use neurachem to keep the detail. The Harlan security executive was the epitome of First Family beauty - elegant, almost ageless Eurasian features, jet-black hair sculpted back in a static field that seemed to both crown and frame the pale of her face. A mobile intelligence of lips and gaze, the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes to denote a life lived. A tall, slim frame wrapped in a simple quilted jacket in black and dark red with the high collar of office, matching slacks loose enough to appear a full-length court gown when she stood still. Flat-heeled shoes that she could run or fight in if she had to.

A shard pistol. Not aimed, not quite lowered.

She smiled in the dim light.

‘I am Aiura, yes.’

‘Got my fuckhead younger self there with you?’

Another smile. A flicker of eyebrows as she glanced sideways, back the way she’d come. He stepped out of the shadowed archway. There was a grin on his face, but it didn’t look very firmly anchored.

‘Here I am, old man. Got something to say to me?’

I eyed the tanned combat frame, the gathered stance and the bound back hair. Like some fucking bad guy from a cut-rate samurai flic.

‘Nothing you’d listen to,’ I told him. ‘I’m just trying to sort out the idiot count here.’

‘Yeah? Well I’m not the one who just climbed two hundred metres so he could walk into an ambush.’

I ignored the jibe, and looked back at Aiura, who was watching me with amused curiosity.

‘I’m here for Sylvie Oshima,’ I said quietly.

My younger self coughed laughter. Some of the armoured men and women took it up, but it didn’t last. They were too nervous, there were still too many guns in play. Aiura waited for the last guffaws to skitter out.

‘I think we’re all aware of that, Kovacs-san. But I fail to see how you’re going to accomplish your goal.’

‘Well, I’d like you to go and fetch her for me.’

More grating laughter. But the security exec’s smile had paled out and she gestured sharply for quiet.

‘Be serious, Kovacs-san. I don’t have unlimited patience.’

‘Believe me, nor do I. And I’m tired. So you’d better send a couple of your men down to get Sylvie Oshima from whatever interrogation chamber you’re holding her in, and you’d better hope she’s not been harmed in any way, because if she has, this negotiation is over.’

Now it had grown quiet again in the stone garden. There was no more laughter. Envoy conviction, the tone in my voice, the choice of words, the ease in my stance - these things told them to believe.

‘With what exactly are you negotiating, Kovacs-san?’

‘With the head of Mitzi Harlan,’ I said simply.

The quiet cranked tight. Aiura’s face might have been graven from stone for all the reaction it showed. But something in the way she stood changed and I knew I had her.

‘Aiura-san, I am not bluffing. Konrad Harlan’s favourite granddaughter was taken by a Quellist assault team in Danchi two minutes ago. Her Secret Service detachment is dead, as is anyone else who mistakenly tried to come to her aid. You have been focused in the wrong place. And you now have less than thirty minutes to render me Sylvie Oshima unharmed - after that, I have no influence over the outcomes. Kill us, take us prisoner. It won’t matter. None of it will make any difference. Mitzi Harlan will die in great pain.’

The moment pivoted. Up on the parapet, it was cool and quiet and I could hear the maelstrom faintly. It was a solid, carefully-engineered plan, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t get me killed. I wondered what would happen if someone shot me off the edge. If I’d be dead before I hit.

‘Crabshit!’ It was me. He’d stepped towards the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. ‘You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—’

I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathised - the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.

‘Wouldn’t I?’ I gestured, ‘You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there - they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.’

Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.

‘You’ll forgive me,’ she said politely, ‘if I don’t take this on trust.’

I nodded. ‘Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.’

It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed. She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.

‘How do you plan to leave?’ she asked me.

‘Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain a half dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.’

‘Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,’ drawled Kovacs. ‘Not a good time to be flying, tonight.’

I stared back at him with dislike. ‘I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.’

‘And Mitzi Harlan?’ The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. ‘What assurances do I have of her safety?’

Brasil stirred at my side, for the first time since the confrontation began.

‘We are not murderers.’

‘No?’ Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. ‘Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.’

For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. ‘Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—’

‘I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,’ I said loudly. ‘Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.’

Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.

I saw the decision take root in her.

‘Very well,’ she said briskly. ‘You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.’

I smeared her a brief smile. ‘Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?’

They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death-white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.

I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.

‘Is that her?’ asked Tres tautly.

I lifted my free hand. ‘Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?’

‘I would advise against overreaction.’ But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were. ‘The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.’

My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.

‘Have you fed her?’ I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.

‘Intravenously.’ Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. ‘You must understand that—’

‘We understand perfectly,’ said Brasil, ‘We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.’

He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle. Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.

‘No! Stand down. All of you.’

I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, ‘You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.’

A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced towards us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.

I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot, then she looked back at me and gestured an okay. I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.

‘Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her. Everybody else stays back.’

It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted round to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the grey-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.

And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoopcopter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer

‘You what?’

She leaned closer again. Spoke directly and sibilantly into my ear.

‘I said, you send her back to me whole, Kovacs. These joke revolutionaries, that’s a fight we can have another time. But they harm any part of Mitzi Harlan’s mind or body and I’ll spend the rest of my existence hunting you down.’

I grinned back at her in the noise. I raised my voice as she drew back.

‘You don’t frighten me, Aiura. I’ve been dealing with scum like you all my life. You’ll get Mitzi back because I said you would. But if you really care that much about her, you’d better start planning some lengthy holidays for her offworld. These guys aren’t fucking about.’

She looked down at Sylvie Oshima.

‘It isn’t her, you know,’ she shouted. ‘There’s no way for it to be her. Quellcrist Falconer is dead. Really dead.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. So if that’s the case, how come she’s got all you First Family fucks so bent out of shape?’

The security exec’s shout became genuinely agitated. ‘Why? Because, Kovacs, whoever this is - and it’s not Quell - whoever this is, she’s brought back a plague from the Uncleared. A whole new form of death. You ask her about the Qualgrist Protocol when she wakes up, and then ask yourself if what I’ve done here to stop her is so terrible.’

‘Hoy!’ It was my younger self, elbows crooked under Sylvie’s knees, hands spread expressively wide beneath. ‘Are we going to load this bitch, or are you going to stand there talking about it all night?’

I held his gaze for a long moment, then lifted Sylvie’s head and shoulders carefully up to where Sierra Tres waited in the swoopcopter’s cramped cabin. The other Kovacs shoved hard and the rest of her body slid in after. The move brought him up close beside me.

‘This isn’t over,’ he yelled in my ear. ‘You and I have some unfinished business.’

I levered one arm under Sylvie Oshima’s knee, and elbowed him back, away from her. Gazes locked.

‘Don’t fucking tempt me,’ I shouted. ‘You bought-and-paid-for little shit.’

He bristled. Brasil surged up close. Aiura laid a hand on my younger self’s arm, and spoke intently into his ear. He backed off. Raised one pistol finger and stabbed it at me. What he said was lost in the wash of the rotors. Then the Harlan security exec was shepherding him away, back along the parapet to a safe distance. I swung myself aboard the Dracul, made space beside me for Brasil and nodded at Sierra Tres. She spoke directly to the pilot and the swoopcopter loosened its hold on the parapet. I stared out at the other, younger Kovacs. Watched him stare back.

We lifted away.

Beside me, Brasil had a grin plastered across his face like the mask for some ceremony I hadn’t been invited to attend. I nodded back at him wearily. Suddenly, I was shattered, mind and body. The long swim, the unrelenting strain and near-death moments of the climb, the tightwired tension of the face-off - it all came crashing back down on me.

‘We did it, Tak,’ Brasil bellowed.

I shook my head. Mustered my voice

‘So far, so good,’ I countered.

‘Ah, don’t be like that.’

I shook my head again. Braced in the doorway, I leaned out of the swoopcopter and stared down at the rapidly shrinking array of lights from the Rila citadel. With unaided vision, I couldn’t see any of the figures in the stone garden any more, and I was too tired to crank up the neurachem. But even over the rapidly increasing space between us, I could still feel his stare, and the unforgiving rage kindled in it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

We picked up Boubin Islander exactly where she was supposed to be. Isa’s seamanship, via the trimaran’s pilot software, had been impeccable. Sierra Tres talked to the pilot, who seemed, on admittedly very brief acquaintance, to be a decent sort of guy. Given his status as a hostage, he’d shown little nervousness during the flight and once he said something to Sierra Tres that made her laugh out loud. Now he nodded laconically as she spoke into his ear, maxed up a couple of displays on his flight board and the swoopcopter fell away towards the yacht. I gestured for the spare comset again, and fitted it to my ear.

‘Still there, Aiura?’

Her voice came back, precise and terrifyingly polite. ‘I am still listening, Kovacs-san.’

‘Good. We’re about to set down. Your flyer here knows to back off rapidly, but just to underline the point, I want the sky clear in all directions—’

‘Kovacs-san, I do not have the authority to—’

‘Then get it. I don’t believe for a moment that Konrad Harlan can’t have the skies over the whole Millsport Archipelago emptied if he wants it, even if you can’t. So listen carefully. If I see a helicopter anywhere above our horizon for the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see an airborne trace on our radar any time in the next six hours, Mitzi Harlan is dead. If I see any vessel at all following us, Mitzi Harlan—’

‘You’ve made your point, Kovacs.’ The courtesy in her voice was fast evaporating. ‘You will not be followed.’

‘Thank you.’

I tossed the comset back onto the seat next to the pilot. Outside the swoopcopter, the rushing air was murky. There hadn’t been an orbital discharge since we took off, and it looked from the lack of fireworks to the north as if the light show was winding down. Thick cloud was drawing in from the west, smothering the rising edge of Hotei. Higher up, Daikoku was thinly veiled and Marikanon gone altogether. It looked as if it might rain.

The Dracul made a tight circle over the trimaran, and I saw a white-faced Isa on deck, waving one of Brasil’s antique frag rifles unconvincingly. A smile touched the corners of my mouth at the sight. We backed off on the turn and dropped to sea level, then sideslipped in towards the Boubin Islander. I stood in the doorway and waved slowly. Isa’s taut features collapsed in relief and she lowered the frag gun. The pilot perched his craft on the corner of Boubin Islander’s deck and shouted to us over his shoulder.

‘End of the ride, people.’

We jumped down, eased Sylvie’s still semi-conscious form out after us and lowered her carefully to the deck. Maelstrom mist coated us like the cold breath of sea sprites. I leaned back into the swoopcopter.

‘Thanks. Very smooth. You’d better get out of here.’

He nodded and I stepped back. The Dracul ungrabbed and lifted away. The nose turned and in seconds it was a hundred metres off, rising into the night sky on a muted chatter. As the noise faded, I turned my attention back to the woman at my feet. Brasil was bent over her, peeling back an eyelid.

‘Doesn’t seem to be in too bad shape,’ he muttered as I knelt beside him. ‘She’s running a light fever, but her breathing’s okay. I’ve got gear below I can check her out with better.’

I put the back of my hand against her cheek. Under the film of spray from the maelstrom, it was hot and papery, the way it had been back in the Uncleared. And for all Brasil’s informed medical opinion, her breathing didn’t sound all that good to me either.

Yeah, well, this is a man who favours recreational virals over drugs. Guess light fever’s a relative term, eh Micky?

Micky? What happened to Kovacs?

Kovacs is back there, crawling up Aiura Harlan’s crack. That’s what happened to Kovacs.

The bright anger, glinting.

‘How about we get her below,’ suggested Sierra Tres.

‘Yeah,’ said Isa unkindly. ‘She looks like shit, man.’

I held down a sudden, irrational flare of dislike. ‘Isa, what’s the news from Koi’s end?’

‘Uh.’ She shrugged. ‘Last time I checked, fine, they were moving—’

‘Last time you checked? What the fuck is that, Isa? How long ago was that?’

‘I don’t know, I was watching the radar for you!’ Her voice rose with hurt. ‘Saw you were coming in, I thought—’

‘How fucking long, Isa?’

She bit her lip and stared back at me. ‘Not long, alright!’

‘You st—’ I clenched a fist at my side. Summoned calm. It wasn’t her fault, none of this was her fault. ‘Isa, I need you to go down and get on the comset right now. Please. Call in, check with Koi that everything’s okay. Tell him we’re done here, we’re on our way out.’

‘Okay.’ The hurt was still in her face and tone. ‘I’m going.’

I watched her go, sighed and helped Brasil and Tres lift Sylvie Oshima’s limp, overheated body. Her head lolled back and I had to shift one hand up quickly to support it. The mane of grey hair seemed to twitch in places as it hung, damp with spray, but it was a feeble movement. I looked down into the pale and flushed face and felt my jaw tighten with frustration. Isa was right, she did look like shit. Not what you thought of when you imagined the flashing-eyed, lithe-limbed combat heroine of the Unsettlement. Not what you’d expect when men like Koi talked of a woken and vengeful ghost.

I don’t know, she’s well on her way to the ghost part.

Ha fucking ha.

Isa appeared at the top of the stern companion way, just as we got there. Wrapped up in my own sour thoughts, it took me a moment to look up at her face. And by then, it was too late.

‘Kovacs, I’m sorry,’ she pleaded.

The swoopcopter.

Faintly, the soft strop of rotors, rising out of the backdrop noise from the maelstrom. Death and fury approaching, on ninja wings.

‘They’re down,’ Isa cried. ‘First Family commandos tracked them. Ado’s hit, the rest of them are. Half of them are. They got Mitzi Harlan.’

‘Who did?’ Sierra Tres, eyes gone uncharacteristically wide. ‘Who’s got her now? Koi or—’

But I already knew the answer to that one.

‘Incoming!’

I screamed it. Was already trying to get Sylvie Oshima to the deck without dropping her. Brasil had the same idea, but he was moving in the wrong direction. Sylvie’s body tugged between us. Sierra Tres yelled. We all seemed to be moving in mud, gracelessly slow.

Like a million furious watersprites let loose, the hail of machine-gun fire ripped out of the ocean on our stern, then up across Boubin Islander’s lovingly finished deck. Eerily, it was silent. Water splashed and splattered, harmlessly quiet and playful. Wood and plastic leapt out of everything in splinters around us. Isa screamed.

I got Sylvie down in the stern seats. Landed on top of her. Out of the darkened sky, hard on the heels of its own silenced machine-gun fire, the Dracul machine came hammering across the water at strafing height. The guns started up again and I rolled off the seat, dragging Sylvie’s unresponsive form down with me. Something blunt smashed against my ribs as I hit the ground in the confined space. I felt the swoopcopter’s shadow pass across me and then it was gone, quietened motors muttering in its wake.

‘Kovacs?’ It was Brasil, from above on the deck.

‘Still here. You?’

‘He’s coming back.’

‘Of course he fucking is.’ I poked my head out of cover and saw the Dracul banking about in the mist-blurred air. The first run had been a stealth assault - he didn’t know we weren’t expecting him. Now it didn’t matter. He’d take his time, sit out at a distance and chew us to shreds.

Motherfucker.

It geysered out of me. All the stored-up fight that the stand-off with Aiura hadn’t allowed a discharge for. I flailed upright in the stern seats, got a grip on the companionway coaming and hauled myself onto the deck. Brasil was crouched there, frag rifle cradled in both arms. He nodded grimly forward. I followed the look and the rage took a new twist inside me. Sierra Tres lay with one leg smashed to red glinting fragments. Isa was down near her, drenched in blood. Her breath was coming in tight little gasps. A couple of metres off, the frag rifle she’d brought up on deck lay abandoned.

I ran to it, scooped it up like a loved child.

Brasil opened fire from the other side of the deck. His frag rifle went off with a ripping, cracking roar and muzzle flash stabbed out a metre from the end of the barrel. The swoopcopter swung in from the right, flinching upward as the pilot spotted the fire. More machine-gun slugs ripped across Boubin Islander’s masts with a pinging sound, too high to worry about. I braced myself against the gently pitching deck and put the stock to my shoulder. Lined up, and started shooting as the Dracul drifted back. The rifle roared in my ear. Not much hope of a hit, but standard frag load is proximity fused and maybe, just maybe—

Maybe he’ll slow down enough for you to get close? Come on, Micky.

For a moment, I remembered the Sunjet, dropped on the parapet as I lifted Sylvie Oshima. If I’d had it now I could have this motherfucker out of the sky as easy as spitting.

Yeah, instead, you’re stuck with one of Brasil’s museum pieces. Nice going, Micky. That mistake is about to kill you.

The second source of ground fire seemed to have rattled the pilot slightly, for all that nothing we were throwing into the sky had touched him. Maybe he wasn’t a military flyer. He passed over us again at a steep, side-slipping angle, almost snagging on the masts. He was low enough that I saw his masked face peering downward as he banked the machine. Teeth gritted in fury, face soaked with the upcast spray of the maelstrom, I followed him with frag fire, trying to keep him in the sight long enough to get a hit.

And then, in the midst of the gunsnarl and drifting mist, something exploded near the Dracul’s tail. One of us had managed to put a frag shell close enough for proximity fusing. The swoopcopter staggered and pivoted about. It seemed undamaged, but the near miss must have scared the pilot. He kicked his craft upward again, backing around us in a wide, rising arc. The silent machine-gun fire kicked in again, came ripping across the deck towards me. The magazine of the frag gun emptied, locked open. I threw myself sideways, hit the deck and slid towards the rail on spray-slick wood—

And the angelfire reached down.

Out of nowhere, a long probing finger of blue. It stabbed out of the clouds, sliced across the spray-soaked air and abruptly the swoopcopter was gone. No more machine-gun fire scuttling greedily at me, no explosion, no real noise outside the crackle of abused air molecules in the path of the beam. The sky where the Dracul had been caught fire, flared up and then faded into the glow of an afterimage on my retina.

—and I slammed into the rail.

For a long moment there was only the sound of the maelstrom and the slap of wavelets against the hull just below me. I craned my head up and stared. The sky remained stubbornly empty.

‘Got you, you motherfucker,’ I whispered to it.

Memory slotted. I got myself upright and ran to where Isa and Sierra Tres both lay in running swipes of spray-diluted blood. Tres had propped herself against the side of the fairweather cockpit, and was tying herself a tourniquet from shreds of blood-soaked cloth. Her teeth gritted as she pulled it tight - a single grunt of pain got past her. She caught my eye and nodded, then rolled her head to where Brasil crouched beside Isa, hands frantic over the teenager’s sprawled body. I came and peered over his shoulder.

She must have taken six or seven slugs through the stomach and legs. Below the chest, it looked as if she’d been savaged by a swamp panther. Her face was still now, and the panting breaths from before had slowed. Brasil looked up at me and shook his head.

‘Isa?’ I got on my knees beside her in her blood. ‘Isa, talk to me.’

‘Kovacs?’ She tried to roll her head towards me, but it barely moved. I leaned closer, put my face close to hers.

‘I’m here, Isa.’

‘I’m sorry Kovacs,’ she moaned. Her voice was a little girl’s, barely above a high whisper. ‘I didn’t think.’

I swallowed. ‘Isa—’

‘I’m sorry—’

And, abruptly, she stopped breathing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

At the heart of the maze-like group of islets and reefs wryly named Eltevedtem, there was once a tower over two kilometres high. The Martians built it directly up from the seabed, for reasons best known to themselves, and just short of half a million years ago, equally inexplicably, it fell into the ocean. Most of the wreckage ended up littered across the local seabed, but in places you can still find massive, shattered remnants on land. Over time, the ruins became part of the landscape of whichever islet or reef they had smashed down onto, but even this subliminal presence was enough to ensure that Eltevedtem remained largely unpeopled. The fishing villages on the northern arm of the Millsport Archipelago, at a couple of dozen kilometres distant, were the closest human habitation. Millsport itself lay over a hundred kilometres further south. And Eltevedtem (I’m lost in one of the pre-Settlement Magyar dialects) could have swallowed a whole flotilla of shallow-draught vessels, if said flotilla didn’t want to be found. There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.

It was a good place to hide.

From external pursuers, anyway.

I leaned on Boubin Islander’s rail and stared down into limpid waters. Five metres below the surface, a brightly-coloured mix of native and colonial fish nosed around the white spraycrete sarcophagus we’d buried Isa in. I had some vague idea about contacting her family once we got clear, to let them know where she was, but it seemed a pointless gesture. When a sleeve is dead, it’s dead. And Isa’s parents weren’t going to be any less sick with worry when a recovery team cracked open the spraycrete and found someone had carved the stack out of her spine.

It lay in my pocket now, Isa’s soul, for want of a better descriptor, and I could feel something changing in me with the solitary weight it made against my fingers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t dare leave it for anyone else to find either. Isa was solidly implicated in the Millsport raid, and that meant a virtual interrogation suite up at Rila Crags if she was ever retrieved. For now, I would have to carry her, the way I’d carried dead priests southward to punishment, the way I’d carried Yukio Hirayasu and his gangster colleague in case I needed them to bargain with.

I’d left the yakuza stacks buried in the sand under Brasil’s house on Vchira Beach, and I hadn’t expected the pocket to fill again so soon. Had even, on the voyage east to Millsport, caught myself taking occasional, momentary pleasure in the strange new lack of carriage, until the memories of Sarah and the habit of hatred came searing back.

Now the pocket was weighted again, like some fucked-up modern day variant on the Ebisu-cursed trawl net in the Tanaka legend, destined forever to bring up the bodies of drowned sailors and nothing much else.

There didn’t seem to be any way for it to stay empty, and I didn’t know what I felt any more.

For nearly two years, it hadn’t been that way. Certainty had coloured my existence a grained monochrome. I’d been able to reach into my pocket and weigh its varying contents in my palm with a dark, hardened satisfaction. There was a sense of slow accumulation, an assembly of tiny increments in the balance pan that sat opposite the colossal tonnage of Sarah Sachilowska’s extinction. For two years I’d needed no purpose other than that pocket and its handful of stolen souls. I’d needed no future, no outlook that didn’t revolve around feeding the pocket and the swamp-panther pens at Segesvar’s place out on the Expanse.

Really? So what happened at Tekitomura?

Movement on the rail. The cables thrummed and bounced gently. I looked up and saw Sierra Tres manoeuvring herself forward, braced on the rail with both arms and hopping on her uninjured leg. Her usually inexpressive face was taut with frustration. Under different circumstances, it might have been comical, but from the hacked-off trousers at mid-thigh, her other leg was encased in transparent plaster that laid bare the wounds beneath.

We’d been skulking in Eltevedtem for nearly three days now, and Brasil had used the time as well as the limited battlefield medical gear we had would allow. The flesh beneath Tres’s plaster was a black and purple swollen mess, punched through and torn by the swoopcopter’s machine gun fire, but the wounds had been cleaned and dusted. Blue and red tags marched down the damaged portions, marking the points at which Brasil had inserted rapid regrowth bios. A flex-alloy boot cushioned the bottom end of the cast against outside impact, but walking on it would have required more painkillers than Tres seemed prepared to take.

‘You should be lying down,’ I said as she joined me.

‘Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.’

‘Alright.’ I went back to staring into the water. ‘Any word yet?’

She shook her head. ‘Oshima’s awake, though. Asking for you.’

I lost focus on the fish below me for a moment. Got it back. Made no move to leave the rail or look up again.

‘Oshima? Or Makita?’

‘Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?’

I nodded greyly. ‘So she still thinks she’s—’

‘At the moment, yes.’

I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.

‘Kovacs.’

I looked back at Tres impatiently. ‘Yeah, what?’

‘Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.’

‘No. It isn’t.’

Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.

‘Hello there Micky Serendipity.’

‘Hello.’

‘I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.’ She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘I’m fine here.’

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 Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight. Some things leave the same teethmarks 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 afterwards, 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, vaporised. And there’s no evidence that a copy was made. No technical explanation for how a copy could have got 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, and 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 fossilised into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogues, 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 metres 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 defences. 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 metres 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 towards 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 digitised 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-metre 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 IV. 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-fulfilment 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 harbour and I looked around me, the sense of deja 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 harbour 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 ocean-going 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 to 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 hand-printed 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.’

She eyed me keenly. ‘Is that an oblique criticism?’

‘No, it’s not. If I’ve got something critical to say to you, you’ll hear it loud and clear.’

She matched my shrug. ‘Well, I look forward to that. But I suppose it’s safe to assume you are not a Quellist.’

I drew a hard breath.

‘Assume what you want. I’m going out.’

Down at the commercial end of the harbour, I wandered about until I found a bubblefab café serving cheap food and drink to the fishermen and wharf workers. I ordered a bowl of fish ramen, carried it to a window seat and worked my way through it, watching crewmen move about on the decks and outrigger gantries of the rayhunter. After a while, a lean-looking middle-aged local wandered across to my table with his tray.

‘Mind if I sit here. It’s kind of crowded.’

I glanced around the ’fab space. They were busy, but there were other seats. I shrugged ungraciously.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Thanks.’ He sat, lifted the lid on his bento box and started eating. For a while, we both fed in silence, then the inevitable happened. He caught my eye between mouthfuls. His weathered features creased in a grin.

‘Not from around here then?’

I felt a light tautening across my nerves. ‘Makes you say that?’

‘Ah, see.’ He grinned again. ‘If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.’

‘Good for you.’

‘Not off that rayhunter though, are you?’

I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. ‘What are you, a detective?’

‘No!’ He laughed delightedly. ‘What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green-painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t any more.’

‘So why’d you stay?’

‘Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.’

The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.

I made my voice work. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.’

‘What about your parents? See much of them?’

‘No, they’re dead.’ His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.

I sat and watched him carefully.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said finally.

He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.

‘Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.’ He drew breath as if it hurt him. ‘It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.’

‘Did they get the guy?’

‘No.’ Another painfully hitched breath. ‘No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.’

I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbour complex. I thought about giving him his chance.

‘No money for re-sleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?’

He gave me a hard look. ‘You know we don’t do that.’

‘Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.’

‘Yeah, but.’ He hesitated. Glanced around the ’fab, then back to me. His voice lowered. ‘Look, I came up with the Revelation. I don’t hold with everything the priests say, especially these days. But it’s a faith, it’s a way of life. Gives you something to hold onto, something to bring up your kids with.’

‘You got sons or daughters?’

‘Two daughters, three sons.’ He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. All that shit. You know, down past the point we’ve got a bathing beach. Most of the villages have got them, I remember when I was a kid we used to spend the whole summer in the water, all of us together. Parents would come down after work sometimes. Now, since things got serious, they’ve built a wall right into the sea there. If you go for the day, they’ve got officiators watching the whole time, and the women have to go in on the other side of the wall. So I can’t even enjoy a swim with my own wife and daughters. It’s fucking stupid, I know. Too extreme. But what are you going to do? We don’t have the money to move to Millsport, and I wouldn’t want my kids running around the streets down there anyway. I saw what it was like when I studied there. It’s a city full of fucking degenerates. No heart left in it, just mindless filth. At least the people around here still believe in something more than gratifying every animal desire whenever they feel like it. You know what, I wouldn’t want to live another life in another body, if that was all I was going to do with it.’

‘Well, lucky you don’t have the money for a re-sleeve then. It’d be a shame to get tempted, wouldn’t it.’

Shame to see your parents again, I didn’t add.

‘That’s right,’ he said, apparently oblivious to the irony. ‘That’s the point. Once you understand you’ve only got the one life, you try so much harder to do things right. You forget about all that material stuff, all that decadence. You worry about this life, not what you might be able to do in your next body. You focus on what matters. Family. Community. Friendship.’

‘And, of course, Observance.’ The mildness in my voice was oddly unfaked. We needed to keep a low profile for the next few hours, but it wasn’t that. I reached curiously inside me and I found I’d lost my grip on the customary contempt I summoned into situations like this. I looked across the table at him, and all I felt was tired. He hadn’t let Sarah and her daughter die for good, he maybe hadn’t even been born when it happened. Maybe, given the same situation, he’d take the same bleating-sheep option his parents had, but right now I couldn’t make that matter. I couldn’t hate him enough to take him into that alley, tell him the truth about who I was and give him his chance.

‘That’s right, Observance.’ His face lit up. ‘That’s the key, that’s what underwrites all the rest. See, science has betrayed us here, it’s got out of hand, got so we don’t control it any more. It’s made things too easy. Not ageing naturally, not having to die and account for ourselves before our Maker, that’s blinded us to the real values. We spend our whole lives scraping away trying to find the money for re-sleeving, and we waste the real time we have to live this life right. If people would only—’

‘Hey, Mikulas.’ I glanced up. Another man about the same age as my new companion was striding towards us, behind the cheerful yell. ‘You finished bending that poor guy’s ear or what? We’ve got hull to scrape, man.’

‘Yeah, just coming.’

‘Ignore him,’ said the newcomer with a wide grin. ‘Likes to think he knows everyone, and if your face doesn’t fit the list, he has to damn well find out who you are. Bet he’s done that already, right?’

I smiled. ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

‘Knew it. I’m Toyo.’ A thick, extended hand. ‘Welcome to Kuraminato. Maybe see you around town if you’re staying long.’

‘Yeah, thanks. That’d be good.’

‘Meantime, we’ve got to go. Nice talking to you.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Mikulas, getting to his feet. ‘Nice talking to you. You should think about what I was saying.’

‘Maybe I will.’ A final twist of caution made me stop him as he was turning away. ‘Tell me something. How come you knew I wasn’t off the rayhunter?’

‘Oh, that. Well, you were watching them like you were interested in what they were doing. No one watches their own ship in dock that closely. I was right, huh?’

‘Yeah. Good call.’ The tiny increment of relief soaked through me. ‘Maybe you should be a detective after all. New line for work for you. Doing the right thing. Catching bad guys.’

‘Hey, it’s a thought.’

‘Nah, he’d be way too nice to them once he’d caught them. Soft as shit, he is. Can’t even discipline his own wife.’

General laughter as they left. I joined in. Let it fade slowly out to a smile, and then nothing but the small relief inside.

I really wouldn’t have to follow him and kill him.

I gave it half an hour, then wandered out of the ’fab and onto the wharf. There were still figures on the decks and superstructure of the rayhunter. I stood and watched for a few minutes, and finally a crewmember came down the forward gangplank towards me. His face wasn’t friendly.

‘Something I can do for you?’

‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘Sing the hymn of dreams gone down from Alabardos’ sky. I’m Kovacs. The others are at the hotel. Tell your skipper. We’ll move as soon as it’s dark.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The rayhunter Angelfire Flirt, like most vessels of its type, cut a mean and rakish figure at sea. Part warship, part oversized racing skiff, combining a razor sharp real-keel centre of gravity and ludicrous quantities of grav lift in twin outrigger pods, it was built above all for reckless speed and piracy. Elephant rays and their smaller relatives are swift in the water, but more importantly their flesh tends to spoil if left untreated for any length of time. Freeze the bodies and you can sell the meat well enough, but get it back fast enough to the big fresh-catch auctions in centres of affluence like Millsport, and you can make a real killing. For that you need a fast boat. Shipyards all over Harlan’s World understand this and build accordingly. Tacitly understood in the same yards is the fact that some of the best elephant ray stock lives and breeds in waters set aside for the exclusive use of the First Families. Poaching there is a serious offence, and if you’re going to get away with it your fast boat also needs to present a low, hard-to-spot profile both visually and on radar.

If you’re going to run from Harlan’s World law enforcement, there are worse ways to do it than aboard a rayhunter.

On the second day out, secure in the knowledge we were so far from the Millsport Archipelago that no aircraft had the range to overfly us, I went up on deck and stood on the left-hand outrigger gantry, watching the ocean rip past underneath me. Spray on the wind, and the sense of events rushing towards me too fast to assimilate. The past and its cargo of dead, falling behind in our wake, taking with them options and solutions it was too late to try.

Envoys are supposed to be good at this shit.

Out of nowhere, I saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin new face. But this time there was no voice in my head, no instilled trainer confidence. I wasn’t getting any more help from that particular ghost, it seemed.

‘Do you mind if I join you?’

It was called out, over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, towards the centre deck and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver grey hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.

Another fucking ghost.

‘Sure. Why not?’

She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream. Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.

‘You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?’

Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d got wrecked on take with a virtual whore in a - failed - attempt to break the system’s desire fulfilment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d got equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.

‘Don’t read anything into it,’ I told her. ‘I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.’

She hesitated. ‘I’m remembering a lot of detail.’

I watched the sea. Said nothing.

‘We fucked, didn’t we?’

The ocean, pouring past beneath me. ‘Yeah. A couple of times.’

‘I remember—’ Another hovering pause. She looked away from me. ‘You held me. While I was sleeping.’

‘Yes.’ I made an impatient gesture. ‘This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?’

‘It’s. Difficult.’ She shivered. ‘There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.’

Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing, I felt like saying. It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.

‘Do you remember someone called Plex?’ I asked her instead.

‘Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.’

‘What do you remember about him?’

The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.

‘That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.’

‘Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court-level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.’

‘Am I supposed to feel bad about that?’

I shrugged. ‘Just putting you straight on the facts.’

‘Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.’

I looked sideways at her. ‘You been talking to the others?’

‘They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.’

I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. ‘I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction IV.’

‘Yes, they said.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalisation. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.’

‘I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?’

‘Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.’

‘You talk as if I had a choice.’

I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. ‘You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you. What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?’

The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. ‘Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?’

‘Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.’

‘Yes, well right now that’s not possible,’ she snapped. ‘Is it?’

I stared back at her. ‘I don’t know. Is it?’

‘You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.’ She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. ‘I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic. She’s the one who sent me back up when you came for us.’

‘Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come on!’

‘No. She is grieving.’

That stopped me.

‘Grieving what?’

‘What do you think? The fact that every member of her team died in Drava.’

‘That’s crabshit. She wasn’t in contact with them when they died. The net was down.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The woman in front of me drew a deep breath. Her voice lowered and paced out to explanatory calm. ‘The net was down, she couldn’t access it. She has told me this. But the receiving system stored every moment of their dying, and if she opens the wrong doors down there, it all comes screaming out. She’s in shock from the exposure to it. She knows that, and as long as it lasts she’s staying where it’s safe.’

‘She told you that?’

We were eye to eye, a scant half metre of seawind between us. ‘Yes, she told me that.’

‘I don’t fucking believe you.’

She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged. ‘What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change isn’t it?’

‘Oh, fuck off! You’re going to hand me that tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. ‘None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?’

‘Then,’ I said evenly, ‘you should have planned it better.’

‘Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.’

Silence.

I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and Angelfire Flirt flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost-aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.

But not about this conversation.

That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.

‘Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking funny,’ the woman at my side said sourly.

I shook my head. ‘Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshippers.’

‘Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.’

‘Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.’

She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:

They come to me with
>Progress Reports<
But all I see is change and bodies burnt;
They come to me with
>Targets Achieved<
But all I see is blood and chances lost;
They come to me with
Choral fucking approval of every thing I do
But all I see is cost.

Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily-blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer real death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.

‘So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,’ I said after a while. ‘This weapon you sold the yakuza.’

She twitched. Didn’t look at me. ‘You know about that, huh?’

‘I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?’

She stared down at the water for a while.

‘It’s taking a lot for granted,’ she said slowly. ‘Thinking I should trust you with this.’

‘Why? Is it reversible?’

She grew very still.

‘I don’t think so.’ I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. ‘I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.’

‘So what is it?’

Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.

‘It’s a genetic weapon,’ she said clearly. ‘In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones that survived, would pass it on to their children and those children would pass it on to theirs.’

‘Nice.’

‘It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?’

‘Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.’

‘Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?’

I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.

‘Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,’ I said flatly.

The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. ‘I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal make-up that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality - in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything to hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.’

‘Genetically encoded insurgency.’ I nodded to myself. A dreary kind of calm, descending. ‘Well, I suppose it’s a natural enough extension of the Quellcrist principle. Blow away and hide, come back a lifetime later. If that doesn’t work, co-opt your great-grand-children and they can come back to fight for you several generations down the line. Very committed. How come the Black Brigades never used it?’

‘I don’t know.’ She tugged morosely at the lapel of the jacket Tres had lent her. ‘Not many of us had the access codes. And it’d need a few generations before something like that would be worth triggering. Maybe nobody who knew survived that long. From what your friends have been telling me, most of the Brigade cadres were hunted down and exterminated after I . . . After it ended. Maybe no one was left.’

I nodded again. ‘Or maybe no one who was left and knew could bring themselves to do it. It’s a pretty fucking horrible idea, after all.’

She shot me a weary look.

‘It was a weapon, Kovacs. All weapons are horrible. You think targeting the Harlan family by blood is any worse than the nuclear blast they used against us at Matsue? Forty-five thousand people vaporised because there were Quellist safe houses in there somewhere. You want to talk about pretty fucking horrible? In New Hokkaido I saw whole towns levelled by flat-trajectory shelling from government forces. Political suspects executed in their hundreds with a blaster bolt through the stack. Is that any less horrible? Is the Qualgrist Protocol any less discriminating than the systems of economic oppression that dictate you’ll rot your feet in the belaweed farms or your lungs in the processing plants, scrabble for purchase on rotten rock and fall to your death trying to harvest ledgefruit, all because you were born poor.’

‘You’re talking about conditions that haven’t existed for three hundred years,’ I said mildly. ‘But that’s not the point. It’s not the Harlan family I feel bad about. It’s the poor fucks whose Black Brigade ancestors decided their political commitment at a cellular level generations before they were even born. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make my own decisions about who I murder and why.’ I held back a moment, then drove the blade home anyway. ‘And so, from what I’ve read, did Quellcrist Falconer.’

A kilometre of white-capped blue whipped past beneath us. Barely audible, the grav drive in the left-hand pod murmured to itself.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she whispered at last.

I shrugged. ‘You triggered this thing.’

‘It was a Quellist weapon.’ I thought I could hear an edge of desperation in her words. ‘It was all I had to work with. You think it’s worse than a conscript army? Worse than the clone-enhanced combat sleeves the Protectorate decants its soldiers into so they’ll kill without empathy or regret?’

‘No. But I think as a concept it contradicts the words I will not ask you to fight, to live or to die for a cause you have not first understood and embraced of your own free will.’

‘I know that!’ Now it was clearly audible, a jagged flawline running through her voice. ‘Don’t you think I know that? But what choice did I have? I was alone. Hallucinating half the time, dreaming Oshima’s life and . . .’ She shivered. ‘Other things. I was never sure when I’d next wake up and what I’d find around me when I did, not sure sometimes if I’d wake up again. I didn’t know how much time I had, sometimes, I didn’t even know if I was real. Do you have any idea what that’s like?’

I shook my head. Envoy deployments had put me through a variety of nightmarish experiences, but you never doubt at any moment that it’s absolutely real. The conditioning won’t let you.

Her hands were tight on the gantry rail again, knuckles whitening. She was looking out at the ocean, but I don’t think she could see it.

‘Why go back to war with the Harlan family?’ I asked her gently.

She jerked a glance at me. ‘You think this war ever stopped? You think just because we clawed some concessions from them three hundred years ago, these people ever stopped looking for ways to fuck us back into Settlement-Years poverty again. This isn’t an enemy that goes away.’

‘Yeah, this enemy you cannot kill. I read that speech back when I was a kid. The strange thing is, for someone who’s only been awake for a few weeks on and off, you’re remarkably well informed.’

‘That’s not what it’s like,’ she said, eyes on the hurrying sea again. ‘The first time I woke up for real, I’d already been dreaming Oshima for months. It was like being in a hospital bed, paralysed, watching someone you think might be your doctor on a badly-tuned monitor. I didn’t understand who she was, only that she was important to me. Half the time, I knew what she knew. Sometimes, it felt like I was floating up inside her. Like I could put my mouth on hers and speak through her.’

She wasn’t, I realised, talking to me any more, the words were just coming up out of her like lava, relieving a pressure inside whose form I could only make guesses at.

‘The first time I woke up for real, I thought I’d die from the shock. I was dreaming she was dreaming, something about a guy she’d slept with when she was younger. I opened my eyes on a bed in some shithole Tek’to flophouse and I could move. I had a hangover, but I was alive. I knew where I was, the street and the name of the place, but I didn’t know who I was. I went outside, I walked down to the waterfront in the sun and people were looking at me and I realised I was crying.’

‘What about the others? Orr and the rest of the team?’

She shook her head. ‘No, I’d left them somewhere at the other end of town. She’d left them, but I think I had something to do with it. I think she could feel me coming up and she went away to be alone while it happened. Or maybe I made her do it. I don’t know.’

A shudder ran through her.

‘When I talked to her. Down there in the cells, when I told her that, she called it seepage. I asked her if she lets me through sometimes, and she wouldn’t tell me. I. I know certain things unlock the bulkheads. Sex. Grief. Rage. But sometimes I just swim up for no reason and she gives me control.’ She paused, shook her head again. ‘Maybe we’re just negotiating.’

I nodded. ‘Which of you made the connection with Plex?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was looking at her hands, flexing and unflexing them like some mechanical system she hadn’t got the hang of yet. ‘I don’t remember. I think, yeah, it was her, I think she knew him already. Peripherally, part of the crimescape. Tek’to’s a small pond, and the deComs are always at the fringes of legal. Cheap black-market deCom gear’s a part of what Plex does up there. Don’t think they ever did business, but she knew his face, knew what he was. I dug him out of her memory when I knew I was going to activate the Qualgrist system.’

‘Do you remember Tanaseda?’

She nodded, more controlled now. ‘Yeah. High-level yak patriarch. They brought him in behind Yukio, when Plex told them the preliminary codes checked out. Yukio didn’t have enough seniority to swing what they needed.’

‘And what was that?’

A repeat of the searching gaze she’d fired at me when I first mentioned the weapon. I spread my arms in the whipping wind.

‘Come on, Nadia. I brought you a revolutionary army. I climbed Rila Crags to get you out. That’s got to buy something, right?’

Her gaze flinched away again. I waited.

‘It’s viral,’ she said finally. ‘High contagion, symptomless flu variant. Everyone catches it, everyone passes it on, but only the genetically modified react. It triggers a shift in the way their hormonal system responds to a match with Harlan pheromones. The carrier sleeves were buried in sealed storage at covert sites. In the event that they were to be triggered, an assigned group would dig up the storage facility, sleeve into one of the bodies and go walkabout. The virus would do the rest.’

Sleeve into one of the bodies. The words ticked in my head, like water trickling into a crack. The Envoy harbinger of understanding hovered just out of reach. Interlocking mechanisms of intuition spun tiny wheels in the build-up to knowledge.

‘These sites. Where were they?’

She shrugged. ‘Mainly in New Hokkaido, but there were some on the north end of the Saffron Archipelago too.’

‘And you took Tanaseda to?’

‘Sanshin Point.’

The mechanism locked solid, and doors opened. Recollection and understanding poured through the gap like morning light. Lazlo and Sylvie bickering as the Guns for Guevara slid into dock at Drava.

Bet you didn’t hear about that dredger they found ripped apart yesterday off Sanshin Point—

I did hear that one. Report said they ran aground on the point. You’re looking for conspiracy when all you’ve got is incompetence.

And my own conversation with Plex in Tokyo Crow the morning before. So how come they needed your de- and re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting set in town, surely.

Some kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.

Organised crime, huh.

‘Something amusing you, Kovacs?’

I shook my head. ‘Micky Serendipity. Think I’m going to have to keep that name.’

She gave me an odd look. I sighed.

‘Doesn’t matter. So what was Tanaseda’s end of this? What does he get out of a weapon like that?’

Her mouth crimped in one corner. Her eyes seemed to glitter in the light reflecting off the waves. ‘A criminal is a criminal, no matter what their political class. In the end, Tanaseda’s no different to some cut-rate wharf thug from Karlovy. And what have the yakuza always been good at? Blackmail. Influence. Leverage to get government concessions. Blind eyes turned to the right activities, shares in the right ongoing state enterprises. Collaboration at repression for a price. All very genteel.’

‘But you suckered them.’

She nodded bleakly. ‘I showed them the site, gave them the codes. Told them the virus transmitted sexually, so they’d think they had control. It does that too, in fact, and Plex was too sloppy with the biocodes to dig any deeper than he did. I knew I could trust him to screw up to that extent.’

I felt another faint smile flicker across my own face. ‘Yeah, he has a talent for that. Must be the aristo lineage.’

‘Must be.’

‘And with the grip the yakuza have on the sex industry in Millsport, you called it just right.’ The intrinsic joy of the scam sank into me like a shiver rush - there was a smooth, machined rightness to it worthy of Envoy planning. ‘You gave them a threat to hold over the Harlanites that they already had the perfect delivery system for.’

‘Yes, so it seems.’ Her voice was blurring again as she dropped away into her memories. ‘They were going to sleeve some yak soldier or other in one of the Sanshin bodies and take it to Millsport to demonstrate what they had. I don’t know if he ever got that far.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he did. The yakuza are pretty meticulous about their leverage schemes. Man, I’d have given a lot to see Tanaseda’s face when he showed up at Rila with that package and the Harlan gene specialists told him what he’d really got on his hands. I’m surprised Aiura didn’t have him executed on the spot. Shows remarkable restraint.’

‘Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it. By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.’ She shrugged. ‘You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.’

‘Yeah.’

Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked round at me again and her face was miserable with contained anger.

‘Alright, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?’

I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.

‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re right, I wasn’t there.’

And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.

Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.

Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.

I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.

‘Tres?’ he asked us quietly.

Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. ‘Still mending. We left her with. With Her.’

‘Right. Good.’

The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.

‘We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?’

Koi shook his head. ‘Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.’

‘Mari Ado?’

He closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Jack.’

The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all - they traded gruff arm’s-length grip-pings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off towards the harbour master’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.

‘They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances. Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.’

I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniperfire.

‘Can we trust these people?’

Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. ‘The very large majority, yes. Pictures is Drava-built, most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original co-operative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.’

‘Yeah? Sounds a little Utopian to me. What about casual crew?’

Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. ‘Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for. Pictures has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.’

Brasil cleared his throat. ‘How many of them know what’s going on?’

‘Know that we’re here? About a dozen. Know why we’re here? Two, both ex-Black Brigade.’ Koi looked up at the rayhunter, searchingly. ‘They’ll both want to be there for Ascertainment. We’ve got a safe house set up in the stern lowers where we can do it.’

‘Koi.’ I slotted myself into his field of vision. ‘We need to talk first. There are a couple of things you should know.’

He regarded me for a long moment, lined face unreadable. But there was a hunger in his eyes that I knew I wasn’t going to get past.

‘It’ll have to wait,’ he told me. ‘Our primary concern here is to confirm Her identity. I’d appreciate it if none of you call me by name until that’s done.’

‘Ascertain,’ I said sharply. The audible capitalisation of her was starting to piss me off. ‘You mean ascertain, right Koi?’

His gaze skipped off my shoulder and back to the rayhunter’s side.

‘Yes, that’s what I mean,’ he said.

A lot has been made of Quellism’s underclass roots, particularly over the centuries since its principal architect died and passed conveniently beyond the realm of political debate. The fact that Quellcrist Falconer chose to build a powerbase among the poorest of Harlan’s World’s labour force has led to a curious conviction among a lot of neoQuellists that the intention during the Unsettlement was to create a leadership drawn exclusively from this base. That Nadia Makita was herself the product of a relatively privileged middle class background goes carefully unremarked, and since she never rose to a position of political governance, the central issue of who’s going to run things after all this blows over never had to be faced. But the intrinsic contradiction at the heart of modern Quellist thought remains, and in neoQuellist company it’s not considered polite to draw attention to it.

So I didn’t remark on the fact that the safe house in the stern lowers of Pictures of the Floating World clearly didn’t belong to the elegantly spoken ex-Black Brigade man and woman who were waiting in it for us. Stern lowers is the cheapest, harshest neighbourhood on any urbraft or seafactory and no one who has a choice about it chooses to live there. I could feel the vibration from Floating World’s drives intensifying as we took a companionway down from the more desirable crew residences at superstructure levels over the stern, and by the time we got inside the apartment it was a constant background grind. Utilitarian furniture, scuffed and scraped walls and a minimum of decoration made it clear that whoever did quarter here didn’t spend much time at home.

‘Forgive the surroundings,’ said the woman urbanely, as she let us into the apartment. ‘It will only be for the night. And our proximity to the drives makes surveillance a near impossibility.’

Her partner ushered us to chairs set around a cheap plastic table laid with refreshments. Tea in a heated pot, assorted sushi. Very formal. He talked as he got us seated.

‘Yeah, we’re also less than a hundred metres from the nearest hull maintenance hatch, which is where you’ll all be collected from tomorrow morning. They’ll drive the skimmer right in under the load-bearing girders between keels six and seven. You can climb straight down.’ He gestured at Sierra Tres. ‘Even injured, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.’

There was a rehearsed competence to it all, but as he talked, his gaze kept creeping towards the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s body, then skidding abruptly away. Koi had been doing much the same thing since we brought her off the Angelfire Flirt. Only the female Brigade member seemed to have her eyes and hopes under real control.

‘So,’ she said smoothly. ‘I’m Sto Delia. This is Kiyoshi Tan. Shall we begin?’

Ascertainment.

In today’s society, it’s as common a ritual as parental acknowledgement parties to celebrate a birth, or reweddings to cement newly re-sleeved couples in their old relationship. Part stylised ceremony, part maudlin what about that time when session, Ascertainment varies in its form and formality from world to world and culture to culture. But on every planet I’ve ever been, it exists as a deeply respected underlying aspect of social relations. Outside of expensive hi-tech psychographic procedures, it’s the only way we have to prove to our friends and family that, regardless of what flesh we may be wearing, we are who we say we are. Ascertainment is the core social function that defines ongoing identity in the modern age, as vital to us now as primitive functions like signature and fingerprint databasing were to our pre-millennial ancestors.

And that’s where an ordinary citizen is concerned.

For semi-mythical heroic figures, back - perhaps - from the dead, it’s a hundred times more meaningful again. Soseki Koi was trembling visibly as he took his seat. His colleagues were both wearing younger sleeves and they showed it less, but if you looked with Envoy eyes, the same tension was there in unconfident, overdone gestures, laughter too readily coughed out, the occasional tremor in a voice as it started up again in a dried throat. These men and this woman, who had once belonged to the most feared counter-insurgency force in planetary history, had suddenly been granted a glimpse of hope among the ashes of their past. They faced the woman who claimed to be Nadia Makita with everything that had ever mattered to them hanging clearly visible in the balance behind their eyes.

‘It is an honour,’ Koi began, and then stopped to clear his throat. ‘It is an honour to speak of these things . . .’

Across the table, the woman in Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve looked back at him steadily as he spoke. She answered one of his oblique questions with crisp assent, ignored another. The other two Brigade members weighed in, and she turned slightly in her seat towards each of them, offered an antique gesture of inclusion each time. I felt myself receding to the status of spectator as the initial round of pleasantries peeled away and the Ascertainment gathered momentum. The conversation picked up, moved rapidly from matters of the last few days across a long and sombre political retrospective, and then into talk of the Unsettlement and the years that preceded it. The language shifted just as rapidly, from contemporary Amanglic into an unfamiliar old-time Japanese dialect with occasional gusts of Stripjap. I glanced across at Brasil and shrugged as subject matter and syntax both accelerated away from us.

It went on for hours. The labouring motors of the urbraft made dim thunder in the walls around us. Pictures of the Floating World ploughed on its way. We sat and listened.

‘. . . makes you think. A fall from any of those ledges and you’re offal splattered across >>the outgoing tide?<<. No recovery scheme, no re-sleeve policy, not even family death benefits. It’s a >>rage?<< that starts in your bones and . . .’

‘. . . remember when you first realised that was the case?’

‘... one of my father’s articles on colonial theory...’

‘. . . playing >>?????<< on the streets of Danchi. We all did. I remember one time the >>street police?<< tried to . . .’

‘. . . reaction?’

‘Family are like that - or at least my family were always >>?????ing<< in a slictopus >>plague?<< . . .’

‘. . . even when you were young, right?’

‘I wrote that stuff when I was barely out of my teens. Can’t believe they printed it. Can’t believe there were people who >>paid good money for/devoted seriousness to?<< so much >>?????<<.’

‘But—’

‘Is it?’ A shrug. ‘Didn’t feel that way when I >>looked back/ reconsidered?<< from the >>blood on my hands?<< basis in the >>?????<<.’

From time to time Brasil or I would rise and make fresh tea in the kitchen. The Black Brigade veterans barely noticed. They were locked on, lost in the wash and detail of a past made suddenly real again just across the table.

‘. . . recall whose decison that was?’

‘Obviously not - you guys didn’t have a >>chain of command/ respect?<< worth a fucking . . .’

Sudden, explosive laughter around the table. But you could see the tear sheen on their eyes.

‘. . . and it was getting too cold for a stealth campaign up there. Infrared would have shown us up like . . .’

‘Yes, it was almost . . .’

‘. . . Millsport . . .’

‘. . . better to lie to them that we had a good chance? I don’t think so.’

‘Would have been a hundred fucking kilometres before . . .’

‘. . . and supplies.’

‘. . . Odisej, as far as I remember. He would have run a >>?????<< stand-off right up to the . . .’

‘. . . about Alabardos?’

Long pause.

‘It’s not clear, it feels >>?????<<. I remember something about a helicopter? We were going to the helicopter?’

She was trembling slightly. Not for the first time, they sheared away from the subject matter like ripwings from a rifleshot.

‘. . . something about . . .’

‘. . . essentially a reactive theory . . .’

‘No, probably not. If I examined other >>models?<< . . .’

‘But isn’t it axiomatic that >>the struggle?<< for control of >>?????<< would cause . . .’

‘Is it? Who says that?’

‘Well.’ An embarrassed hesitation, glances exchanged. ‘You did. At least, you >>argued?/admitted?<< that . . .’

‘That’s crabshit! I never said convulsive policy shift was the >>key?<< to a better . . .’

‘But, Spaventa claims you advocated—’

‘Spaventa? That fucking fraud. Is he still breathing?’

‘. . . and your writings on demodynamics show . . .’

‘Look, I’m not a fucking ideologue, alright. We were faced with >>a bottleback in the surf?<< and we had to . . .’

‘So you’re saying >>?????<< isn’t the solution to >>?????<< and reducing >>poverty/ignorance?<< would mean . . .’

‘Of course it would. I never claimed anything different. What happened to Spaventa, anyway?’

‘Umm, well - he teaches at Millsport university these—’

‘Does he? The little fuck.’

‘Ahem. Perhaps we could discuss a >>version?/view?<< of those events which pivots less on >>?????<< than >>recoil?/slingshot?<< theories of . . .’

‘Very well, as far as it goes. But give me a single >>binding example?<< to support those claims.’

‘Ahhhhhh . . .’

‘Exactly. Demodynamics isn’t >>blood in the water?<<, it’s an attempt to . . .’

‘But—’

And on and on, until, in a clatter of cheap furniture, Koi was suddenly on his feet.

‘That’s enough,’ he said gruffly.

Glances flickered back and forth between the rest of us. Koi came round the side of the table and his old face was taut with emotion as he looked down at the woman sitting there. She looked back up at him without expression.

He offered her his hands.

‘I have,’ he swallowed, ‘concealed my identity from you until now, for the sake of. Our cause. Our common cause. But I am Soseki Koi, ninth Black Brigade command, Saffron theatre.’

The mask on Sylvie Oshima’s face melted away. Something like a grin took its place.

‘Koi? Shaky Koi?’

He nodded. His lips were clamped together.

She took his outstretched hands, and he lifted her to her feet beside him. He faced the table and looked at each of us in turn. You could see the tears in his eyes, hear them in his voice when he spoke.

‘This is Quellcrist Falconer,’ he said tightly. ‘In my mind there is no longer room for doubt.’

Then he turned and flung his arms around her. Sudden tear-ribbons glistened on his cheeks. His voice was hoarse.

‘We waited so long for you to come again,’ he wept. ‘We waited so long.’

PART FIVE

This Is The Storm To Come

‘No one heard Ebisu returning until it was too late and then what had been said could not be unsaid, deeds done could not be undone and all present must answer for themselves . . .’

Legends of the Seagod
Trad.

‘Unpredictable wind vectors and velocity . . . expect heavy weather . . .’

Kossuth Storm Management Net
Extreme Conditions Alert

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I woke to Kossuth-grade heat and low-angle sunlight, a mild hangover and the serrated sound of snarling. Out in the pens, someone was feeding the swamp panthers.

I glanced at my watch. It was very early.

I lay for a while in sheets tangled to my waist, listening to the animals and the harsh male whoops of the feeding crew on the gantries above them. Segesvar had taken me on a tour of the place two years previously, and I still remembered the awful power with which the panthers flailed up to catch chunks of fishsteak the size of a man’s torso. The feeding crew had yelled then as well, but the more you listened the more you realised that it was bravado to shore up courage against an instinctive terror. With the exception of one or two hardened swamp-game hunters, Segesvar recruited pretty exclusively from the wharf fronts and slums of Newpest, where the chances of any of the kids having seen a real panther were about even with them ever having been to Millsport.

A couple of centuries back, it was different - the Expanse was smaller then, not yet cleared all the way south to make way for the belaweed mono-cropping combines. In places, the swamp’s poisonously beautiful trees and float-foliage crept almost up to the city limits, and the inland harbour had to be redredged on a twice-yearly basis. It wasn’t unheard of for panthers to turn up basking on the loading ramps in the summer heat, the chameleon skin of mane and mantle shimmering to mimic the sun’s glare. Peculiar variations in the breeding cycles of their prey out on the Expanse sometimes drove them in to roam the streets closest to the swamplands, where they ripped open sealed refuse canisters with effortless savagery and occasionally, at night, took the homeless or the unwary drunk. Just as they would in their swamp environment, they sprawled prone in back alleys, body and limbs concealed beneath a mane and mantle that would camouflage to black in the darkness. To their victims, they would resemble nothing so much as a pool of deep shadow until it was too late, and they left nothing behind for the police but broad splashes of blood and the echo of screams in the night. By the time I was ten, I’d seen my share of the creatures in the flesh, had even myself once run screaming up a wharf-shed ladder with my friends when a sleepy panther rolled over at our step-freeze-step approach, flapped one corner of its sloppy, tendrilled mane at us and treated us to a gape-beaked yawn.

The terror, like much that you experience in childhood, was transient. Swamp panthers were scary, they were lethally dangerous if you encountered them under the wrong circumstances, but in the end they were a part of our world.

The snarling outside seemed to reach a crescendo.

To Segesvar’s crew, swamp panthers were the bad guys of a hundred cheap hologames and maybe a school biology class they hadn’t cut, made suddenly real. Monsters from another planet.

This one.

And maybe, inside some of the young thugs who worked for Segesvar until the lower-echelon haiduci lifestyle inevitably took them down, maybe these monsters awoke the shivery existential understanding of exactly how far from home we all really were.

Then again, maybe not.

Someone shifted in the bed beside me and groaned.

‘Don’t those fucking things ever shut up?’

Recollection arrived at the same moment as the shock, and they cancelled each other out. I rolled my head sideways and saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin features squashed up under a pillow she’d crushed to her own head. Her eyes were still closed.

‘Feeding time,’ I said, mouth sticky as I spoke.

‘Yeah, well I can’t make up my mind what’s pissing me off more. Them or the fucking idiots feeding them.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Good morning.’

‘And to you.’ Memory of her the night before, hunched forward astride me. Beneath the sheets, I was hardening with the thought. ‘I didn’t think this was ever going to happen in the real world.’

She looked back at me for a moment, then rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

‘No. Nor did I.’

The events of the previous day floated sluggishly to the surface. My first sight of Vidaura, poised in the snout of Segesvar’s low-profile skimmer as it held station on the roiled waters beneath the urbraft’s massive load-bearing supports. The dawn light from the opening at the stern had not reached this deep into the space between hulls and she was little more than a gun-handed, spike-haired silhouette as I came down through the maintenance hatch. There was a reassuring operational toughness to the figure she cut, but when torchglow fell briefly across her face as we boarded, I saw something else there that I couldn’t define. She met my eyes briefly, then looked away.

Nobody spoke much during the skimmer ride across the early morning waters of the Gulf. There was a solid wind out of the west and a cold gunmetal light across everything that didn’t encourage conversation. As we closed on the coast, Segesvar’s contraband driver called us all inside and a second hard-faced young haiduci swung himself up into the skimmer’s gun-turret. We sat in the cramped cabin in silence, listening to the engines change pitch as we slowed on approach to the beach. Vidaura took the seat beside Brasil, and down in the gloom where their thighs touched, I saw them clasp hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back in the comfortless metal and webbing seat, running the route behind my eyes for something to do.

Off the ocean, straight up some shabby, effluent-poisoned beach somewhere at the north end of Vchira, out of sight, but barely, of the Newpest suburb skyline whose shanties supplied the poison by piped outflow. No one stupid enough to come here to swim or fish, no one to see the blunt-nosed, heavy-skirted skimmer come brazening through. Across the oil-stained mudflats behind, through choked and dying float-foliage and then out onto the Expanse proper. Zigzag through the endless belaweed soup at standard traffic speeds to break the trail, three stops at different baling stations, each with haiduci-connected employees, and a change of heading after each one. Isolation and journey’s end at Segesvar’s home from home, the panther farm.

It took most of the day. I stood on the dock at the last baling station-stop and watched the sun go down behind clouds across the Expanse like wrappings of bloodstained gauze. Down on the deck of the skimmer, Brasil and Vidaura talked with quiet intensity. Sierra Tres was still inside, trading haiduci gossip with the vehicle’s two-man crew last time I checked. Koi was busy elsewhere, making calls. The woman in Oshima’s sleeve wandered round a bale of drying weed as tall as both of us and stopped beside me, following my gaze to the horizon.

‘Nice sky.’

I grunted.

‘It’s one of the things I remember about Kossuth. Evening skies on the Expanse. Back when I worked the weed harvests in ’69 and ’71.’ She slid down into a sitting position against the bale and looked at her hands as if examining them for traces of the labour she was describing. ‘Of course, they kept us working ’til dark most days, but when the light tipped over like this, you knew you were nearly done.’

I said nothing. She glanced up at me.

‘Still not convinced, huh?’

‘I don’t need to be convinced,’ I told her. ‘What I have to say doesn’t count for much around here. You did all the convincing you needed to back there aboard Floating World.’

‘Do you really think I would deceive these people deliberately?’

I thought about it for a moment. ‘No. I don’t think that’s it. But that doesn’t make you who you think you are.’

‘Then how do you explain what has happened?’

‘Like I said, I don’t have to. Call it the March of History if you like. Koi’s got what he wants.’

‘And you? You haven’t got what you want out of this?’

I looked bleakly out at the wounded sky. ‘I don’t need anything I don’t already have.’

‘Really? You’re very easily satisfied then.’ She gestured around her. ‘So, no hope for a better tomorrow than this? I can’t interest you in an equitable restructuring of social systems?’

‘You mean smash the oligarchy and the symbology they use to achieve dominance, hand power back to the people? That kind of thing?’

‘That kind of thing.’ It wasn’t clear if she was mimicking me or agreeing. ‘Would you mind sitting down, it’s making my neck ache talking to you like this.’

I hesitated. It seemed unnecessarily churlish to refuse. I joined her on the surface of the dock, put my back to the weed bale and settled, waiting. But then she was abruptly quiet. We sat shoulder to shoulder for a while. It felt oddly companionable.

‘You know,’ she said finally, ‘when I was a kid, my father got this assignment on biotech nanobes. You know, the tissue-repair systems, the immune-boosters? It was kind of a review article, looking at the nanotech since landfall and where it was going next. I remember he showed me some footage of the state-of-the-art stuff being put into a baby at birth. And I was horrified.’

A distant smile.

‘I can still remember looking at this baby and asking him how it was going to tell all those machines what to do. He tried to explain it to me, told me the baby didn’t have to tell them anything, they already knew what to do. They just had to be powered up.’

I nodded. ‘Nice analogy. I’m not—’

‘Just. Give me a moment, huh? Imagine.’ She lifted her hands as if framing something. ‘Imagine if some motherfucker deliberately didn’t enable most of those nanobes. Or enabled only the ones that dealt with brain and stomach functions, say. All the rest were just dead biotech, or worse still semi-dead, just sitting there consuming nutrients and not doing anything. Or programmed to do the wrong things. To destroy tissue instead of repairing it. To let in the wrong proteins, not to balance out the chemicals. Pretty soon that baby grows up and starts to have health problems. All the dangerous local organisms, the ones that belong here, that Earth’s never seen, they storm aboard and that kid is going to go down with every disease its ancestors on Earth never evolved defences for. So what happens then?’

I grimaced. ‘You bury it?’

‘Well, before that. The doctors will come in and they’ll advise surgery, maybe replacement organs or limbs—’

‘Nadia, you really have been gone a long time. Outside of battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—’

‘Kovacs, it’s an analogy, alright? The point is, you end up with a body that works badly, that needs constant conscious control from above and outside and why? Not because of some intrinsic failing but because the nanotech just isn’t being used. And that’s us. This society - every society in the Protectorate - is a body where ninety-five per cent of the nanotech has been switched off. People don’t do what they’re supposed to.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Run things, Kovacs. Take control. Look after social systems. Keep the streets safe, administer public health and education. Build stuff. Create wealth and organise data, and ensure they both flow where they’re needed. People will do all of this, the capacity is there, but it’s like the nanobes. They have to be switched on first, they have to be made aware. And in the end that’s all a Quellist society is - an aware populace. Demodynamic nanotech in action.’

‘Right - so the big bad oligarchs have switched off the nanotech. ’

She smiled again. ‘Not quite. The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor, they’re like a closed sub-routine that’s got out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They’re programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes. That’s why you have to take them down first.’

‘Yeah, I think I’ve heard this speech. Smash the ruling class and then everything’ll be fine, right?’

‘No, but it’s a necessary first step.’ Her animation was building visibly, she was talking faster. The setting sun painted her face with stained-glass light. ‘Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just re-emerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure—’

‘Whoa.’ I held up my hand. Most of this I’d heard from the Little Blue Bugs more than once in the past. I wasn’t going to sit through it again, nice sky or no nice sky. ‘Nadia, this has been tried before, and you know it. And from what I remember of my precolonial history, the empowered people you place so much faith in handed power right back to their oppressors, cheerfully, in return for not much more than holoporn and cheap fuel. Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe people would rather slobber over gossip and fleshshots of Josefina Hikari and Ryu Bartok than worry about who’s running the planet. Did you ever consider that? Maybe they’re happier that way.’

Scorn flickered on her face. ‘Yeah, maybe. Or just maybe that period you’re talking about was misrepresented. Maybe premillennial constitutional democracy wasn’t the failure the people who write the history books would like us to believe. Maybe, they just murdered it, took it away from us and lied to our children about it.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.’

‘Of course they have.’ It was almost a shout. ‘Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could walk and talk?’

‘But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?’

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. ‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.’

‘Yeah. Or maybe it’s just that you and your Quellist friends don’t want to see the limits of our evolved social biology.’ I could hear my voice starting to rise. I tried to hold it down and the words came out gritted. ‘That’s right. Bow down and fucking worship, do what the man with the beard or the suit tells you. Like I said, maybe people are happy like that. Maybe the ones like you and me are just some fucking irritant, some swamp bug swarm that won’t let them sleep.’

‘So, this is where you get off, is it?’ She opened her eyes at the sky and glanced slantwise at me without lowering her head. ‘Give up, let scum like the First Families have it all, let the rest of humanity slip into a coma. Cancel the fight.’

‘No, I suspect it’s already too late for that, Nadia.’ I found there was none of the grim satisfaction in saying it that I’d expected. All I felt was tired. ‘Men like Koi are hard to stop once they’re set in motion. I’ve seen a few. And for better or worse, we are in motion now. You’re going to get your new Unsettlement, I think. Whatever I say or do.’

The stare still pinned me. ‘And you think it’s all a waste of time.’

I sighed. ‘I think I’ve seen it go wrong too many times on too many different worlds to believe this is going to be very different. You’re going to get a lot of people slaughtered for at best not very much in the way of local concessions. At worst, you’ll bring the Envoys down on Harlan’s World, and believe me, that you do not want in your worst nightmares.’

‘Yes, Brasil told me. You used to be one of these stormtroopers.’

‘That’s right.’

We watched the sun dying for a while.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘I don’t pretend to know anything about what they did to you in this Envoy Corps, but I have met men like you before. Self-hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand. But it’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. At base, you don’t really want things to get any better because then you’d be out of targets. And if the external focus for your hate ran out, you’d have to face up to what’s inside you.’

I snorted. ‘And what is that?’

‘Exactly? I don’t know. But I can hazard a few guesses. An abusive parent. A life on the streets. A loss of some sort early in childhood. Betrayal of some kind. And sooner or later, Kovacs, you need to face the fact that you can never go back and do anything about that. Life has to be lived forward.’

‘Yeah,’ I said tonelessly. ‘In the service of the glorious Quellist revolution no doubt.’

She shrugged. ‘That’d have to be your choice.’

‘I’ve already made my choices.’

‘And yet you came to prise me free of the Harlan family. You mobilised Koi and the others.’

‘I came for Sylvie Oshima.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, that is so.’

There was another pause. Aboard the skimmer, Brasil disappeared into the cabin. I only caught the tail end of the motion, but it seemed abrupt and impatient. Tracking back, I saw Virginia Vidaura staring up at me.

‘Then,’ said the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita, ‘it would seem I’m wasting my time with you.’

‘Yeah. I would think you are.’

If it made her angry, she didn’t show it. She just shrugged again, got up and gave me a curious smile, then wandered away along the sunset-drenched dock, peering occasionally over the edge into the soupy water. Later, I saw her talking to Koi, but she left me alone for the duration of the ride to Segesvar’s place.

As a final destination, the farm was not impressive. It broke the surface of the Expanse resembling nothing so much as a collection of waterlogged helium blimps sunk among the ruins of yet another U-shaped baling station. In fact, before the advent of the combines, the place had seen service as an independent belaweed dock, but unlike the other stations we’d stopped at, it hadn’t sold to the incoming corporate players and was derelict within a generation. Radul Segesvar had inherited the bare bones as part-payment of a gambling debt and must not have been too happy when he saw what he’d won. But he put the space to work, refitted the decaying station in deliberately antique style and extended the whole installation across what was previously the commercial capacity harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. Now the complex boasted a small, exclusive brothel, elegant casino facilities and the blood-rich heart of it all, the thing that gave customers a frisson they couldn’t duplicate in more urban surroundings, the fight pits.

There was a party of sorts when we arrived. Haiduci pride themselves on their hospitality and Segesvar was no exception. He’d cleared a space on one of the covered docks at the end of the old station and laid on food and drink, muted music, fragrant real-wood torches and huge fans to shift the swampy air. Handsome men and women drawn either from the brothel downstairs or one of Segesvar’s Newpest holoporn studios circulated with heavily-laden trays and limited clothing. Their sweat was artfully beaded in patterns across their exposed flesh and scented with tampered pheromones, their pupils were blasted open on some euphoric or other, their availability subtly hinted at. It was perhaps not ideal for a gathering of neoQuell activists, but that may have been deliberate on Segesvar’s part. He’d never had much patience with politics.

In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.

Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger.

Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.

The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.

Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.

‘Did you kill her?’ I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter - cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.

He stared away across the dock. ‘Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.’

‘Real death?’

He nodded. ‘For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty-eight hours of her life.’

‘And the ones we lost?’

His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.

‘Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.’ He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. ‘I don’t know. Probably they got them.’

Neither of us needed to follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation. Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.

‘Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.’

‘Yes.’

I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.

‘Enjoying the party?’

‘Not yet.’ I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. ‘I’ll get there.’

He smiled faintly. ‘You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?’

‘Not right now.’

Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wet-maned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more. Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.

One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soaplike in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.

I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.

Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.

‘Okay, then. Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?’

I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar was working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.

‘Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.’

He shrugged. ‘Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.’

‘Like I said—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are, already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.’ He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. ‘Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.’

I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering. The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the take cookie, barely tasting it.

‘Well, you look like you’re having fun.’

‘Envoy camouflage,’ I said reflexively. ‘We’re trained to blend in.’

‘Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.’

I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand, I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.

‘Is one of those for me?’

‘If you like.’

I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier western rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.

‘I’m sorry about Ado,’ I said.

She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.

‘Not now, Tak.’

Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.

This, I remembered suddenly. This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived for.

And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime, why I had ever walked away.

It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning. Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the take and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.

Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.

‘You know,’ she said finally. ‘I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to be one of the Bugs.’

‘Maybe for her it wasn’t.’

I thought about Koi’s description of Mari Ado’s death, and I wondered if at the end she’d pulled the trigger to escape interrogation or simply a return to the family ties she’d spent her whole life trying to sever. I wondered if her aristo blood would have been enough to save her from Aiura’s wrath and what she would have had to do to walk away from the interrogation constructs in a fresh sleeve, what she would have had to buy back into to get out intact. I wondered if in the last few moments of dimming vision, she looked at the aristo blood from her own wounds, and hated it just enough.

‘Jack’s talking some shit about heroic sacrifice.’

‘Oh, I see.’

She swivelled her gaze down to my face. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

I said nothing. She went back to looking at the ceiling.

‘Oh shit, yes it is.’

We listened to the snarling and the shouts outside. Vidaura sighed and sat up. She jammed the heels of both hands against her eyes and shook her head.

‘Do you ever wonder,’ she asked me, ‘if we’re really human any more?’

‘As Envoys?’ I shrugged. ‘I try not to buy into the standard tremble-tremble-the-posthumans-are-coming crabshit, if that’s what you mean. Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head irritably. ‘Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, I know. But sometimes I talk to Jack and the others, and it’s like they’re a different fucking species to me. The things they believe. The level of belief they can bring to bear, with next to nothing to justify it.’

‘Ah. So you’re not convinced either.’

‘I don’t.’ Vidaura threw up one hand in exasperation. She twisted about in the bed to face me. ‘How can she be, right?’

‘Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one caught in that particular net. Welcome to the rational-thinking minority.’

‘Koi says she checks out. All the way down.’

‘Yeah. Koi wants this so badly he’d believe a fucking ripwing in a headscarf was Quellcrist Falconer. I was there for the Ascertainment, and they went easy on anything it looked like she was uncomfortable answering. Did anybody tell you about this genetic weapon she’s triggered?’

She looked away. ‘Yeah, I heard. Pretty extreme.’

‘Pretty much in complete defiance of every fucking thing Quellcrist Falconer ever believed, I think you mean.’

‘We none of us get to stay clean, Tak.’ A thin smile. ‘You know that. Under the circumstances—’

‘Virginia, you’re about to prove yourself a fully paid-up, lost-in-belief member of the old-style human race if you’re not careful. And you needn’t think I’ll still talk to you if you cross over to that shit.’

The smile powered up, became a laugh of sorts. She touched her upper lip with her tongue and glanced slantwise at me. It gave me an odd, electric sensation to watch.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s be inhumanly rational about this. But Jack says she remembers the assault on Millsport. Going for the copter at Alabardos.’

‘Yeah, which kind of sinks the copy stored in the heat of battle outside Drava theory, don’t you think? Since both those events postdate any presence she might have had in New Hok.’

Vidaura spread her hands. ‘It also sinks the idea she’s some kind of personality casing for a datamine. Same logic applies.’

‘Well. Yeah.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘You mean where does it leave Brasil and the Vchira gang?’ I asked nastily. ‘Easy. It leaves them scratching around desperately for some other crabshit theory that’ll hold enough water to let them go on believing. Which, for fully paid-up neoQuellists, is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.’

‘No, I mean us.’ Her eyes drilled me with the pronoun. ‘Where does it leave us?’

I covered for the tiny jolt in my stomach by rubbing at my eyes in an echo of the gesture she’d used earlier.

‘I’ve got an idea of sorts,’ I started. ‘Maybe an explanation.’

The door chimed.

Vidaura raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, and a guest list, looks like.’

I shot another glance at my watch, and shook my head. Outside the window, the snarling of the panthers seemed to have settled down to a low grumble and an occasional cracking sound as they ripped the cartilage in their food apart. I pulled on trousers, picked up the Rapsodia from the bedside table on an impulse and went through to open up.

The door flexed aside and gave me a view onto the quiet, dimly lit corridor outside. The woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve stood there, fully dressed, arms folded.

‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ she said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It was still early morning when we hit Vchira. The haiduci pilot Sierra Tres had got out of bed - her bed, in fact - was young and cocky, and the skimmer we lifted was the same contraband runner we’d come in on. No longer bound by the need to appear a standard, forgettable item of Expanse traffic and no doubt wanting to impress Tres as much as he impressed himself, the pilot opened his vessel up to the limit and we tore across to a mooring point called Sunshine Fun Jetties in less than two hours. Tres sat in the cockpit with him and made encouraging noises, while Vidaura and the woman who called herself Quell stayed below together. I sat alone on the forward deck for most of the trip, nursing my hangover in the cool flow of air from the slipstream.

As befitted the name, Sunshine Fun Jetties was a place frequented mostly by tour-bus skimmers from Newpest, and the odd rich kid’s garishly finned Expansemobile. At this time of day, there was a lot of mooring space to choose from. More importantly, it put us less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep at a pace that allowed for Sierra Tres and her limp. They were just opening when we arrived at the door.

‘I’m not sure,’ said the underling whose job it evidently was to get up earlier than any of the partners and man the offices until they arrived. ‘I’m not sure that—’

‘Yeah, well I am,’ Sierra Tres told him impatiently.

She’d belted on an ankle-length skirt to cover her rapidly healing leg, and there was no way of knowing from her voice and stance that she was still damaged. We’d left the pilot back at Sunshine Fun Jetties with the skimmer, but Tres didn’t need him. She played the haiduci arrogance card to perfection. The underling flinched.

‘Look,’ he began.

‘No, you look. We were in here less than two weeks ago. You know that. Now you want to call Tudjman, you can. But I doubt he’ll thank you for getting him out of bed at this time of the morning just to confirm we can have access to the same stuff we used last time we were here.’

In the end it took the call to Tudjman and some shouting to clear it, but we got what we wanted. They powered up the virtual systems and showed us to the couches. Sierra Tres and Virginia Vidaura stood by while the woman in Oshima’s sleeve attached the electrodes to herself. She held up the hypnophones to me.

‘What’s this meant to be?’

‘High-powered modern technology.’ I put on a grin I didn’t much feel. On top of my hangover, anticipation was building a queasy, not-quite-real sensation that I could have done without. ‘Only been around a couple of centuries. They activate like this. Makes the ride in easier.’

When Oshima was settled, I lay down in the couch next to her and fitted myself with phones and trodes. I glanced up at Tres.

‘So we’re all clear on what you do to pull me out if it starts to come apart?’

She nodded, expressionless. I still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d agreed to help us without running it by Koi or Brasil first. It seemed a little early in the scheme of things to be taking unqualified orders from the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

‘Alright then. Let’s get in the pipe.’

The sonocodes had a harder time than usual dragging me under, but finally I felt the couch chamber blur out and the walls of the off-the-rack hotel suite scribbled into painfully sharp focus in its place. Memory of Vidaura in the suite down the corridor pricked at me unexpectedly.

Get a grip, Tak.

At least the hangover was gone.

The construct had decanted me on my feet, over by a window that looked out onto unlikely vistas of rolling green pasture. At the other side of the room by the door, a sketch of a long-haired woman similarly upright sharpened into Oshima’s sleeve.

We stood looking at each other for a moment, then I nodded. Something about it must have rung false, because she frowned.

‘You’re sure about this? You don’t have to go through with it, you know.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I don’t expect—’

‘Nadia, it’s okay. I’m trained to arrive on alien planets in new sleeves and start slaughtering the natives immediately. How hard can this be?’

She shrugged. ‘Alright.’

‘Alright then.’

She crossed the room towards me and halted less than a metre away. Her head tipped so that the mane of silver grey slipped slowly forward and covered her face. The central cord skidded sideways down one side of her skull and hung like a stunted scorpion tail, cobwebbed with finer filaments. She looked in that moment like every archetype of haunting my ancestors had brought with them across the gulfs from Earth. She looked like a ghost.

Her posture locked up.

I drew a deep breath and reached out. My fingers parted the hair across her face like curtains.

Behind, there was nothing. No features, no structure, only a gap of dark warmth that seemed to expand out towards me like negative torchglow. I leaned closer and the darkness opened at her throat, peeling gently back along the vertical axis of her frozen figure. It split her to the crotch and then beyond, opening the same rent in the air between her legs. I could feel balance tipping away from me in tiny increments as it happened. The floor of the hotel room followed, then the room itself, shrivelling like a used wipe in a beach bonfire. The warmth came up around me, smelling faintly of static. Below was unrelieved black. The iron tresses in my left hand plaited about and thickened to a restless snakelike cable. I hung from it over the void.

Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.

I blinked, possibly in defiance, and stowed the recollection.

Grimaced and let go.

If it was falling, it didn’t feel like it.

There was no rush of air, and nothing lit to judge movement by. Even my own body was invisible. The cable seemed to have vanished as soon as I took my hand off it. I could have been floating motionless in a grav chamber no bigger than the spread of my arms, except that all around me, somehow, my senses signalled the existence of vast, unused space. It was like being a spindrizzle bug, drifting about in the air of one of the emptied warehouses on Belacotton Kohei Nine.

I cleared my throat.

Lightning flickered jaggedly above me, and stayed there. Reflexively, I reached up and my fingers brushed delicate filaments. Perspective slammed into place - the light wasn’t fire in a sky unfathomably high up, it was a tiny branching of twigs a handful of centimetres over my head. I took it gently in my hand and turned it over. The light smudged from it where my fingers pressed. I let go and it hung there, at chest height in front of me.

‘Sylvie? You there?’

That got me a surface under my feet and a bedroom steeped in late afternoon light. From the fittings, the place looked as if it might have belonged to a child of about ten. There were holos on the walls of Micky Nozawa, Rili Tsuchiya and a host of other pin-ups I didn’t recognise, a desk and datacoil under a window and a narrow bed. A mirrorwood panel on one wall made the limited space seem larger, a walk-in cupboard opposite opened onto a badly-hung mass of clothing that included court-style dressing-up gowns. There was a Renouncer creed tacked to the back of the door, but it was coming away at one corner.

I peered out of the window and saw a classic temperate latitudes small town sloping down to a harbour and the outlying arm of a bay. Tinge of belaweed in the water, crescent slices of Hotei and Daikoku thinly visible in a hard blue sky. Could have been anywhere. Boats and human figures moved about in dispersal patterns close to real.

I moved to the door with the poorly-attached creed and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but when I tried to step out into the corridor beyond, a teenage boy appeared in front of me and shoved me back.

‘Mum says you’ve to stay in your room,’ he said obnoxiously. ‘Mum says.’

The door slammed in my face.

I stared at it for a long moment, then opened it again.

‘Mum says you’ve—’

The punch broke his nose and knocked him back into the opposite wall. I held my fist loosely curled, waiting to see if he’d come back at me but he just slid down the wall, gaping and bleeding. His eyes glazed over with shock. I stepped carefully over his body and set off along the corridor.

Less than ten paces, and I felt her behind me.

It was minute and fundamental, a rustling in the texture of the construct, the scratch of crepe-edged shadows reaching along the walls at my back. I stopped dead and waited. Something curled like fingers over my head and around my neck.

‘Hello, Sylvie.’

Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whisky I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colours washed out to grey, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.

‘Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,’ Sylvie Oshima said evenly, ‘it seems to have fallen apart.’

‘It didn’t start here, Sylvie.’

She looked sideways at me. ‘Oh, I know. I said seems. But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.’

‘Not this me.’

‘No, so I understand.’ She lifted the whisky to her lips. ‘Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.’

She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.

Change the subject.

‘So what she hears up there filters down here?’

‘To an extent.’ The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct. First the reflected image, from top to bottom and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it sombrely. ‘But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.’

‘How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?’

‘I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.’

‘Is she real?’

A harsh laugh. ‘You’re asking me that? In here?’

‘Alright, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?’

‘She escaped.’ Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. ‘That’s what she kept saying, I escaped. Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.’

Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.

‘That was a holding cell?’

‘Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.’

‘It wasn’t very hard to get out of.’

‘Well, what language were you using?’

‘Uh - Amanglic.’

‘Yeah - in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.’

‘But did you really expect me to stay put?’

‘Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic.’

‘Alright, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?’

‘If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,’ she said, rather bitterly, ‘you would have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behaviour, they just recognise and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.’

‘So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old-time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?’

‘Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.’

‘And she’d have got out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.’

‘More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough . . .’

‘Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?’

A brief nod. ‘She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.’

‘Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?’

Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. ‘It’s hard to see how she could be.’

‘But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?’

Another shrug. ‘I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a virus for all you know.’

‘Yeah, well from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement? A viral poison in the body of society?’

‘I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.’

‘Nor am I.’ She tipped back her glass, emptied it again and set it down. ‘Look, Micky, I’m not an activist and I’m not a soldier. I’m strictly a datarat. Mimints and code, that’s me. Put me in New Hok with a crew and there’s no one to touch me. But that’s not where we are right now, and you and I both know I’m not going back to Drava any time soon. So, given the current climate, I think I’m going to bow out to this Nadia. Because whoever or whatever she really is, she stands a far better chance of navigating the waters than I do.’

She sat staring into her glass as it filled. I shook my head.

‘This isn’t you, Sylvie.’

‘Yes it is.’ Suddenly her tone was savage. ‘My friends are fucking dead or worse, Micky. I’ve got a whole planet of cops plus the Millsport yakuza looking to make me the same way. So don’t tell me this isn’t me. You don’t know what happens to me under those circumstances because you haven’t fucking seen it before, alright. Even I don’t fucking know what happens to me under those circumstances.’

‘Yeah, and instead of finding out, you’re going to stay in here like some fucking Renouncer dream of a good little girl your parents once had. Going to sit in here playing with your plug-in world, and hope someone on the outside takes care of business for you.’

She said nothing, just raised the newly-filled glass in my direction. I felt a sudden, constricting wave of shame pulse through me.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You should be. Would you like to live through what they did to Orr and the others? Because I’ve got it all on tap down here.’

‘Sylvie, you can’t—’

‘They died hard, Micky. Peeled back, all of them. At the end, Kiyoka was screaming like a baby for me to come and get her. You want to plug into that, carry that around with you for a while like I have to?’

I shivered, and it seemed to transmit itself to the whole construct. A small, cold thrum hung in the air around us.

‘No.’

We sat for a long time in silence after that. Tokyo Crow’s clientele came and went around us, wraithlike.

After a while, she gestured vaguely upwards.

‘You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.’

‘If you let it be.’

‘You called her a virus,’ she said pensively. ‘As a virus, she was very successful in here. She infiltrated my systems as if she was designed for it. Maybe she’ll be as successful out there in the shadow play.’

I closed my eyes. Pressed a hand to my face.

‘Something wrong, Micky?’

‘Please tell me you’re being metaphorical now. I don’t think I can cope with another hardwired believer at the moment.’

‘Hey, you don’t like the conversation, you can fuck off out of here, can’t you.’

The sudden edge on her voice kicked me back to New Hok and the seemingly endless deCom bickering. An unlooked-for smile tugged at my mouth with the memory. I opened my eyes and looked at her again. Placed both hands flat on the bar, sighed and let the smile come up.

‘I came to get you out, Sylvie.’

‘I know.’ She put her hand over one of mine. ‘But I’m fine here.’

‘I told Las I’d look after you.’

‘So look after her. That keeps me safe too.’

I hesitated, trying to frame it right. ‘I think she might be some kind of weapon, Sylvie.’

‘So? Aren’t we all?’

I looked around at the bar and its grey speed ghosts. The low murmur of amalgamated sound. ‘Is this really all you want?’

‘Right now, Micky, it’s all I can cope with.’

My drink stood untouched on the bar in front of me. I stood up. Picked it up.

‘Then I’d better be getting back.’

‘Sure. I’ll see you out.’

The whisky went down burning, cheap and rough, not what I’d been expecting.

She walked with me out onto the wharf. Here the dawn was already up, cold and pale grey, and there were no people, speeded pastiche or otherwise, anywhere in the unforgiving light. The sweeper station stood closed and deserted, the mooring points and the ocean beyond were both empty of traffic. There was a naked, stripped look to everything and the Andrassy Sea came in and slapped at the pilings with sullen force. Looking north, you could sense Drava crouched below the horizon in similar, abandoned quiet.

We stood under the crane where we’d first met, and it hit me then with palpable force that this was the last time I’d see her.

‘One question?’

She was staring out to sea. ‘Sure.’

‘Your preferred active agent up there says she recognised someone in the holding constructs. Grigori Ishii. That chime with you at all?’

A slight frown. ‘It sounds familiar, yes. I couldn’t tell you from where though. But I can’t see how a dh personality would have got down here.’

‘Well, quite.’

‘Did she say it was this Grigori?’

‘No. She said there was something down here that sounded like him. But when you flaked taking down the scorpion gun, afterwards when you were coming out of it in Drava you said it knew you, something knew you. Like an old friend.’

Sylvie shrugged. Most of her was still watching the northern horizon. ‘Then it could be something the mimints have evolved. A virus to trigger recognition routines in a human brain, makes you think you’re seeing or hearing something you already know. Each individual it hits would assign an appropriate fragment to fit.’

‘That doesn’t sound very likely. It’s not like the mimints have had much human interaction to work off recently. Mecsek’s only been in place what, three years?’

‘Four.’ A faint smile. ‘Micky, the mimints were designed to kill humans. That’s what they were for originally, three hundred years ago. There’s no telling if some piece of viral weaponry built along those lines has survived this long, maybe even sharpened itself a bit.’

‘Have you ever come across anything like that?’

‘No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.’

‘Or in here.’

‘Or in here,’ she agreed shortly. She wanted me gone.

‘Or it could just be another personality-casing bomb.’

‘It could be.’

‘Yeah.’ I looked around one more time. ‘Well. How do I get out of here?’

‘The crane.’ For a moment she came back to me. Her eyes switched in from the north and met mine. She nodded upward to where a steel ladder disappeared into the laced girderwork of the machine. ‘You just keep climbing up.’

Great.

‘You take care of yourself, Sylvie.’

‘I will.’

She kissed me briefly on the mouth. I nodded, clapped her on the shoulder and backed away a couple of steps. Then I turned for the ladder, laid hands on the cold metal of the rungs and started climbing.

It seemed solid enough. It beat ripwing infested seacliff and the underside of Martian architecture, anyway.

I was a couple of dozen metres into the girders when her voice floated up to join me.

‘Hey, Micky.’

I peered downward. She was standing inside the crane’s base, staring up at me. Her hands were cupped around her mouth. I unfastened one hand carefully and waved.

‘Yeah?’

‘Just remembered. Grigori Ishii. We learned about him in school.’

‘Learned what about him in school?’

She spread her arms.

‘No idea, sorry. Who remembers shit like that?’

‘Right.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

Good question. Envoy caution seemed like the obvious answer. But stubborn mistrust came in a close second. A refusal. I wasn’t buying the glorious return of Quell at the cut rates Koi and the Bugs seemed prepared to accept.

‘Maybe I will.’

‘Well.’ An arm lifted in farewell. ‘Scan up, Micky. Keep climbing, don’t look down.’

‘Yeah,’ I yelled it down. ‘You too, Sylvie.’

I climbed. The sweeper station shrank to the proportions of a child’s toy. The sea took on the texture of hammered grey metal welded to a tilting horizon. Sylvie was a dot facing north, then too small to make out at all. Maybe she wasn’t there any more. The girders around me lost any resemblance to the crane they had once been. The cold dawn light darkened to a flickery silver that danced in patterns on the metal that seemed maddeningly familiar. I didn’t seem to be tiring at all.

I stopped looking down.

CHAPTER FORTY

‘So?’ she asked finally.

I stared out of the window at Vchira Beach and the glitter of sunlight on the waves beyond. Both beach and water were beginning to fill up with tiny human figures intent on enjoying the weather. The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep were eminently environment-proofed, but you could almost feel the building heat, almost hear the rising chatter and squall of tourism that accompanied it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I came out of the construct.

‘So you were right.’ I spared a sideways glance for the woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s body, then went back to looking at the sea. The hangover was back in place, worse it seemed. ‘She’s not coming out. She’s fallen back on childhood Renouncer crabshit to cope with the grief, and she’s staying in there.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Yeah.’ I left the window alone, turned back to Tres and Vidaura. ‘We’re finished here.’

Nobody talked on the way back to the skimmer. We shouldered our way through brightly-garbed crowds, working against the flow in silence. A lot of the time, our faces opened passage for us - you could see it in the expressions of people stepping hurriedly aside. But in the sunny warmth and enthusiasm to get to the water, not everyone was running even a surface level of attention. Sierra Tres scowled as her leg took clouts from garishly-coloured plastic beach implements, badly carried, but either drugs or focus kept her mouth clamped shut over any pain she suffered. No one wanted to create a memorable scene. Only once she turned to look at a particularly clumsy offender, and he practically ran away.

Hey guys. The thought ran sourly through me. Don’t you recognise your political heroes when you see them? We’re coming to liberate you all.

At Sunshine Fun Jetties, the pilot was lying on the sloping flank of the skimmer, soaking up the sun like everybody else. He sat up blinking as we came aboard.

‘That was quick. You want to get back already?’

Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.

‘You see any reason to hang about?’

‘Hey, it’s not so bad. I get down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time. ’s a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.’

I looked up, surprised. ‘Yeah.’

‘Someone asking after you.’

I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation. The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.

‘What did they want?’

‘Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.’

I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.

‘So what’d you tell him?’

‘Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed-rack with livewire, soon as look at them.’

‘This guy young or old?’

‘Oh, young. Carried himself too, know what I mean?’

Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind. Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.

Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.

Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.

‘Tak—’

‘You go back with the others now,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ll take care of this.’

‘Tak, we need you to—’

I smiled at her. ‘Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything any more. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do any more.’

She looked steadily back at me.

‘It’ll be okay,’ I told her. ‘Rip out his throat and be right back.’

She shook her head.

‘Is this really all you want?’

The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.

‘What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia, you’ve done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.’

‘So what instead? This? More pointless slaughter?’

I shrugged. ‘Pointless slaughter is what I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. You made me good at it, Virginia.’

That took her like a slap across the face. She flinched. Sierra Tres and the pilot looked on, curious. The woman who called herself Quell, I noticed, had gone below to the cabin.

‘We both walked away from the Corps,’ Vidaura said finally. ‘Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution sub-routine? ’

I summoned a grin. ‘I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.’

‘But it doesn’t solve anything.’ Suddenly she was shouting. ‘It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?’

‘People are starting to stare,’ I said mildly.

‘I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?’

Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.

‘Only when I’m killing them.’

She nodded grimly. ‘Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.’

‘Maybe so.’ I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. ‘But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.’

She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.

She turned away without a word.

The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face, I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.

Sanctified solo assassins.

I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative - which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys - but they weren’t any kind of pushover either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark. They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.

So far.

I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins, you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to. You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matt, low-profile pirate skimmers amidst the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.

Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly-kept facades and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon. A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.

I found him well before evening.

It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defences of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board hire place called The Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.

‘Sure, he checked in about a week back,’ the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. ‘I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, got a real balance about him too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.’ She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound. ‘Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?’

‘Surfers everywhere,’ I agreed.

‘So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?’

‘Well.’ I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. ‘It’s actually some thing I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.’

That appealed to her. She grinned and got up. ‘Sure, we can do that.’

She left the boards and came round to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia and fished it out.

‘There you go.’

She took the little black device curiously. ‘That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?’

‘No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight. ’

‘Okay, if that’s what you want to do.’ A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amidst the dust on ledge 74.

‘Actually,’ I said with feigned abruptness. ‘Can I get a room?’

She turned back, surprised. ‘Well, uh, sure . . .’

‘Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.’

‘Sure, no problem.’ She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinised it for a moment and then gave me the grin again. ‘If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.’

‘That’s very kind,’ I said. ‘Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.’

Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.

‘So you don’t want me to give him this?’

‘Not any more thanks.’ I smiled at her. ‘I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.’

Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive-supplier warehouses.

The room beyond was cramped and basic. A capsule bathroom, a disposable mesh hammock to save on space and laundry, storage drawers moulded into the walls and a small plastic table and chair. A variable transparency window wired clumsily to the room’s climate control system - the priest had left it dimmed. I cast about for somewhere to hide myself in the gloom and was driven into the capsule for lack of alternatives. Sting of recent antibac spray in my nose as I stepped in - the clean cycle must have run not long ago. I shrugged, breathed through my mouth and searched the cabinets for painkillers to flatten the rolling wave of my hangover. In one, I found a foil of basic heatstroke pills for tourists. I dry-swallowed a couple and seated myself on the closed toilet unit to wait.

There’s something wrong here, the Envoy sense admonished me. Something doesn’t fit.

Maybe he’s not what you think.

Yeah, right - he’s a negotiator, come to talk you down. God’s changed his mind.

Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch.

These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.

Sarah seared across my mind. Momentarily, the world tilted around me with the depth of my fury. For the thousandth time I imagined the scene again, and there was a roaring in my ears like a distant crowd.

I drew the Tebbit knife and looked down at the dull, dark blade.

Slowly, with the sight, Envoy calm soaked back through me. I settled again in the small space of the capsule, letting it drench me to a chilled purpose. Fragments of Virginia Vidaura’s voice came with it.

Weapons are an extension. You are the killer and destroyer.

Kill quickly and be gone.

It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone.

I frowned a little at that one. It’s not good when your formative icons start getting inconsistent on you. When you find out they’re just as human as you.

The door wittered to itself and began to open.

Thought vanished like shreds in the slipstream of enabled force. I came out of the capsule, round the edge of its door and stood braced with the knife, ready to reach and stab.

He wasn’t what I’d imagined. The skimmer pilot and the girl downstairs had both remarked on his poise, and it showed in the way he spun at the tiny sounds of my clothing, the shift of air in the narrow room. But he was slim and slight, shaven skull delicate, beard an out-of-place idiocy on the fine features.

‘You looking for me, holy man?’

For a moment we locked gazes and the knife in my hand seemed to tremble of its own accord.

Then he reached up and tugged at his beard, and it came away with a short static crackle.

‘Of course I’m looking for you, Micky,’ said Jadwiga tiredly. ‘Been chasing you for nearly a month.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

‘You’re supposed to be dead.’

‘Yeah, twice at least.’ Jad picked morosely at the beard prosthesis in her hands. We sat together at the cheap plastic table, not looking at each other. ‘Only reason I’m here, I guess. They weren’t looking for me when they came for the others.’

I saw Drava again as she told it, a mind’s-eye view of swirling snow on night-time black, the frosted constellations of camp lights and infrequent figures moving between buildings, hunched up against the weather. They’d come the following evening, unannounced. It wasn’t clear if Kurumaya had been bought off, threatened with higher authority or simply murdered. Behind the funnelled force of Anton’s command software on max override, Kovacs and his team located Sylvie’s team by net signature. They kicked in doors, demanded submission.

Apparently didn’t get it.

‘I saw Orr take someone down,’ Jad went on, talking mechanically as she stared into her own memories. ‘Just the flash. He was yelling for everyone to get out. I was bringing carry-out back from the bar. I didn’t even.’

She stopped.

‘It’s okay,’ I told her.

‘No, it’s not fucking okay, Micky. I ran away.’

‘You’d be dead if you hadn’t. Really dead.’

‘I heard Kiyoka screaming.’ She swallowed. ‘I knew it was too late, but I.’

I hurried her past it. ‘Did anyone see you?’

A jerky nod. ‘Traded shots with a couple of them on the way across to the vehicle sheds. Fuckers were everywhere, seemed like. But they didn’t come after me. I think they thought I was just a stroppy bystander.’ She gestured at the Eishundo sleeve she wore. ‘No trace on the net search, see. Far as that fucker Anton’s concerned, I was invisible.’

She’d lifted one of the Dracul bugs, powered it up and driven right off the side of the dock.

‘Had a squabble with the autosub systems getting up the estuary,’ she said, and laughed mirthlessly. ‘You’re not supposed to do that, put vehicles in the water without authorisation. But the clear tags worked in the end.’

And out onto the Andrassy Sea.

I nodded mechanically, exact inverse of my near disbelief. She’d ridden the bug without resting, nearly a thousand kilometres back to Tekitomura and a quiet night-time landing in a cove out of town to the east.

She shrugged it off.

‘I had food and water in the panniers. Meth to stay awake. The Dracul’s got Nuhanovic guidance. Main thing I worried about was keeping low enough to the water to look like a boat not a flying machine, trying not to upset the angelfire.’

‘And you found me how?’

‘Yeah, that’s some weird shit.’ For the first time, something bloomed in her voice that wasn’t weariness and rancid rage. ‘I sold the bug for quick cash at Soroban wharf, I was walking back up towards Kompcho. Coming down from the meth. And it’s like I could smell you or something. Like the smell of this old family hammock we had when I was a kid. I just followed it, like I said I was coming down, running on autopilot. I saw you on the wharf, going aboard this piece-of-shit freighter. Haiduci’s Daughter.’

I nodded again, this time in sudden comprehension as large chunks of the puzzle fell into place. The dizzying, unaccustomed sense of family longing swam back over me. We were twins, after all. Close scions from the long-dead house of Eishundo.

‘You stowed away, then. It was you trying to get inside that pod when the storm hit.’

She grimaced. ‘Yeah, creeping around on deck’s fine when the sun’s shining. Not something you want to try when there’s heavy weather coming in. I should have guessed they’d have it alarmed up the arse. Fucking webjelly oil, you’d think it was Khumalo wetware the price they get for it.’

‘You stole the food out of communal storage too, second day out.’

‘Hey, your ride was flying departure lights when I saw you go aboard. Left inside an hour. Didn’t exactly leave me much time to go stock up on provisions. I went a day without food before I figured you weren’t getting off at Erkezes, you were in for the long haul. I was fucking hungry.’

‘You know there was a nearly a fight over that. One of your deCom colleagues wanted to brain someone for stealing it.’

‘Yeah, heard them talking. Fucking burnouts.’ Her voice took on a kind of automated distaste, a macro of opinion over old ground. ‘Kind of sad-case losers get the trade a bad name.’

‘So you tracked me across Newpest and the Expanse as well.’

Another humourless 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?’

‘Alright.’

‘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 some day. 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 post-op 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 towards fine. But all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to 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’s 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 clean-up 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 re-sleeving. 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 ochre surplice over her head. ‘Funny stuff, religion. No one wants to talk to a priest.’

‘Especially one that 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 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 stabilisers. 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 stabilisers. 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 ploughing towards us and might as well have had an illuminum sign pasted on its prow.

Pirate.

Not dissimilar to a compact ocean-going hoverloader, it ran no navigation lights at all. It sat long and low on the surface of the Expanse, but bulked with crude plate armouring 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 ’til 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 on 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 pre-colonial times. He was lanky and pale, wearing flesh like some cheap, young shaven-headed version of Jack Soul Brasil that 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 which 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 armoured skimmers would have needed to go around.

‘Got to,’ Vlad informed us succinctly as something crunched under the armoured 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 close-mouthed, 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 towards 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.

‘Let’s go then, come on.’ He hurried us off the bridge and back to the debarkation hatch, then through and out, flanked by an honour guard of two methed-up thugs even younger and twitchier than he was. Up the gangplank at a walk that wanted to be a run, across the dock. Abandoned cranes stood mossy with growth where the antibac had failed, chunks of seized and rusted machinery lay about, waiting to rip the unwary at shin and shoulder height. We negotiated the debris, and cut a final line for an open door at the base of a dockfront supervisor’s tower with polarised windows. Grubby metal stairs led up, two flights at opposed angles and a steel plate landing between that clanked and shifted alarmingly when we all trooped across it.

Soft light glowed from the room at the top. I went uneasily in the van with Vlad. No one had tried to take away our weapons, and Vlad’s cohorts were all armed with a massive lack of subtlety, but still . . .

I remembered the voyage aboard the Angelfire Flirt, the sense of onrushing events too fast to face effectively, and I twitched a little myself in the gloom. I stepped into the tower room as if I was going there to fight.

And then everything came tumbling down.

‘Hello Tak. How’s the vendetta business these days?’

Todor Murakami, lean and competent in stealth suit and combat jacket, hair cropped back to military standard, stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. There was a Kalashnikov interface gun at his hip, a killing knife in an inverted pull-down sheath on his left breast. A table between us held a muffled Angier torch, a portable datacoil and a map holo displaying the eastern fringes of the Weed Expanse. Everything from the hardware to the grin reeked of Envoy operations.

‘Didn’t see that one coming, huh?’ he added when I said nothing. He came around the table and stuck out his hand. I looked at it, then back at his face without moving.

‘What the fuck are you doing here, Tod?’

‘Bit of pro bono work, would you believe?’ He dropped the hand and glanced past my shoulder. ‘Vlad, take your pals and wait downstairs. The mimint kid there too.’

I felt Jad bristle at my back.

‘She stays, Tod. That, or we don’t have this conversation.’

He shrugged and nodded at my newly-acquired pirate friends. ‘Suit yourself. But if she hears the wrong thing, I may have to kill her for her own protection.’

It was a Corps joke, and it was hard not to mirror his grin as he said it. I felt, very faintly, the same nostalgic twinge I’d had taking Virginia Vidaura to my bed at Segesvar’s farm. The same faint wondering why I ever walked away.

‘That was a joke,’ he clarified for Jad, as the others clattered away down the stairs.

‘Yeah, I guessed.’ Jad wandered past me to the windows and peered out at the moored bulk of the Impaler. ‘So Micky, Tak, Kovacs, whoever the fuck you are at the moment. Want to introduce me to your friend?’

‘Uh, yeah. Tod, this is Jadwiga. As you obviously already know, she’s from deCom. Jad, Todor Murakami, colleague of mine from, uh, the old days.’

‘I’m an Envoy,’ Murakami supplied casually.

To her credit, Jad barely blinked. She took the hand he offered with a slightly incredulous smile, then propped herself against the outward lean of the tower windows and folded her arms.

Murakami took the hint.

‘So what’s all this about?’

I nodded. ‘We can start there.’

‘I think you can probably guess.’

‘I think you can probably drop the elicitation and just tell me.’

He grinned and touched a trigger finger to his temple. ‘Sorry, force of habit. Alright, look. Here’s my problem. According to sources, seems you’ve got a little revolutionary momentum up here, maybe enough to seriously rock the First Families’ boat.’

‘Sources?’

Another grin. No ground given up. ‘That’s right. Sources.’

‘I didn’t know you guys were deployed here.’

‘We’re not.’ A little of his Envoy cool slipped from him, as if by the admission he’d lost some kind of vital access to it. He scowled. ‘Like I said, this is pro bono. Damage limitation. You know as well as I do, we can’t afford a neoQuellist uprising.’

‘Yeah?’ This time, I was the one grinning. ‘Who’s we, Tod? The Protectorate? The Harlan family? Some other bunch of super-rich fucks?’

He gestured irritably. ‘I’m talking about all of us, Tak. You really think that’s what this planet needs, another Unsettlement. Another war?’

‘Takes two sides to run a war, Tod. If the First Families wanted to accept the neoQuellist agenda, institute reforms, well.’ I spread my hands. ‘Then I can’t see there’d be any need for an uprising at all. Maybe you should be talking to them.’

A frown. ‘Why are you talking like this, Tak? Don’t tell me you’re buying into this shit.’

I paused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? What kind of fucked political philosophy is that?’

‘It isn’t a philosophy at all, Tod. It’s just a feeling that maybe we’ve all had enough. That maybe it’s time to burn these motherfuckers down.’

He frowned. ‘I can’t allow that. Sorry.’

‘So why don’t you just call down the wrath of the Envoys and stop wasting time?’

‘Because I don’t fucking want the Corps here.’ There was a sudden, brief desperation in his face as he spoke. ‘I’m from here, Tak. This is my home. You think I want to see the World turned into another Adoracion? Another Sharya?’

‘Very noble of you.’ Jad shifted against the canted windows, came forward to the table and poked at the datacoil. Purple and red sparked around her fingers where they broke the field. ‘So what’s the battleplan, Mister Qualms?’

His eyes flickered between the two of us, came to rest on me. I shrugged.

‘It’s a fair question, Tod.’

He hesitated for a moment. It made me think of the moment I’d had to unpin my own numbed fingers from the cable beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura. He was letting go of a lifetime of Envoy commitment here, and my own lapsed membership of the Corps wasn’t much in the way of a justification.

Finally, he grunted and spread his hands.

‘Okay. Here’s the newsflash.’ He pointed at me. ‘Your pal Segesvar has sold you out.’

I blinked. Then:

‘No fucking way.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. Haiduci dues, right? He owes you. Thing is, Tak, you got to ask yourself which of you he thinks he owes.’

Oh shit

He saw it hit me and nodded again. ‘Yeah, I know all about that too. See, Takeshi Kovacs saved Segesvar’s life a couple of centuries ago, objective time. But that’s something both copies of you did. Old Radul’s got a debt alright, but he apparently sees no reason to discharge it more than the once. And your younger, fresher self has just cut a deal on that very basis. Segesvar’s men took most of your beach party revolutionaries early this morning. Would have got you, Vidaura and the deCom woman too, if you hadn’t all taken off on some crack-of-dawn errand to the Strip.’

‘And now?’ The last stubborn fragments of clinging hope. Scour them out, and face the facts with features carved out of stone. ‘They’ve got Vidaura and the others now?’

‘Yes, they took them on their return. They’re holding everyone until Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka can arrive with a clean-up squad. Had you gone back with the others, you’d be sharing a locked room with them now. So.’ A rapidly flexed smile, a raised brow. ‘Looks like you owe me a favour.’

I let the fury come aboard, like deep breath, like a swelling. Let it rage through me, then tamped it carefully down like a half-smoked seahemp cigar, saved for later. Lock it down, think.

‘How come you know all this, Tod?’

He gestured, self-deprecating. ‘Like I said, I live here. Pays to keep the wires humming. You know how it is.’

‘No, I don’t know how it is. Who’s your fucking source, Tod?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

I shrugged. ‘Then I can’t help you.’

‘You’re just going to let it all go? Segesvar sells you out, he gets to walk away? Your friends from the beach get to die? Come on, Tak.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m tired of fighting other people’s battles for them. Brasil and friends got themselves into this, they can get themselves out. And Segesvar will keep. I’ll get to him later.’

‘And Vidaura?’

‘What about her?’

‘She trained us, Tak.’

‘Yeah, us. Get on and save her yourself.’

If you weren’t an Envoy, you would have missed it. It was less than a flicker, some millimetric shift in stance, maybe not even that. But Murakami slumped.

‘I can’t do it on my own,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know the inside of Segesvar’s place, and without that I’d need an Envoy platoon to take it.’

‘Then call in the Corps.’

‘You know what that would do to—’

‘Then tell me who your fucking source is.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jad sardonically, in the quiet that followed. ‘Or just ask him to come in from next door.’

She caught my eye and nodded at a closed drop-hatch in the back of the tower room. I took a step towards it and Murakami could barely hold himself back from the blocking move he wanted to make. He glared at Jad.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and tapped her head with a forefinger. ‘Dataflow alert. Pretty standard wincefish hardware. Your friend in there is using a phone, and he’s moving about a lot. Pacing nervously would be my guess.’

I grinned at Murakami. ‘Well, Tod. Your call.’

The tension lasted a couple of seconds more, then he sighed and gestured me forward.

‘Go ahead. You would have worked it out sooner or later anyway.’

I went to the drop-hatch, found the panel and thumbed it. The machinery grumbled to itself somewhere deep in the building. The hatch cranked upward in juddery, hesitant increments. I leaned into the space it left.

‘Good evening. So which one of you’s the snitch?’

Four faces turned towards me, and as soon as I saw them, four severely dressed figures in black, the pieces thumped into place in my head like the sound of the drop-hatch reaching the end of its recess. Three were muscle, two men and and a woman and the skin on their faces all had a shiny plastic elasticity where their facial tattooing had been sprayed over. It was a short-term, daily option that wouldn’t stand much professional scrutiny. But deep as they were into haiduci turf, it probably would save them from having to fight pitched battles on every Newpest street corner.

The fourth, the one holding the phone, was older but unmistakable by demeanour alone. I nodded my understanding.

‘Tanaseda, I presume. Well, well.’

He bowed slightly. It went with the package, the same groomed, old-school manners and look. He wore no facial skin decoration because at the levels he’d attained, he would be a frequent visitor in First Family enclaves that would frown on it. But you could still see the honour scars where they had been removed without benefit of modern surgical technique. His grey-streaked black hair was bound back tightly in a short ponytail, the better to reveal the scarring across the forehead and accentuate the long bones of the face. The eyes beneath the brow were brown and hard like polished stones. The careful smile he gave me was the same one he would bestow upon death if and when it came for him.

‘Kovacs-san.’

‘So what’s your end of this, sam?’ The muscle bristled collectively at my disrespect. I ignored it, glanced back at Murakami instead. ‘I take it you know he wants me Really Dead, as slowly and unpleasantly as possible.’

Murakami locked gazes with the yakuza senior.

‘That can be resolved,’ he murmured. ‘Is this not so, Tanaseda-san? ’

Tanaseda bowed again. ‘It has come to my notice that though you were involved in the death of Hirayasu Yukio, you were not wholly to blame.’

‘So?’ I shrugged to displace the rising anger, because the only way he could have heard that little snippet was through virtual interrogation of Orr or Kiyoka or Lazlo, after my younger self helped him kill them. ‘Doesn’t usually cut much ice with you people, who’s really to blame or not.’

The woman in his entourage made a tiny growling sound deep in her throat. Tanaseda cut it with a tiny motion of his hand at his side, but the gaze he bent on me belied the calm in his tone.

‘It has also become clear to me that you are in possession of Hirayasu Yukio’s cortical storage device.’

‘Ah.’

‘Is this so?’

‘Well, if you think I’m going to let you search me for it, you can—’

‘Tak.’ Murakami’s voice came out lazy, but it wasn’t. ‘Behave. Do you have Hirayasu’s stack or not?’

I paused on the hinge of the moment, more than half of me hoping they might try to strongarm it. The man on Tanaseda’s left twitched and I smiled at him. But they were too well-trained.

‘Not on me,’ I said.

‘But you could deliver it to Tanaseda-san, could you not?’

‘If I had any incentive to, I suppose I could, yes.’

The soft-throated snarl again, back and forth among all three of the yakuza muscle this time.

‘Ronin,’ one of them spat.

I met his eye. ‘That’s right, sam. Masterless. So watch your step. There’s no one to call me to heel if I take a dislike to you.’

‘Nor anyone to back you up when you find yourself in a corner,’ observed Tanaseda. ‘May we please dispense with this childishness, Kovacs-san? You speak of incentives. Without the information I have supplied, you would now be captive with your colleagues, awaiting execution. And I have offered to revoke my own writ for your elimination. Is this not enough for the return of a cortical stack you have in any case no use for?’

I smiled. ‘You’re full of shit, Tanaseda. You’re not doing this for Hirayasu. He’s a fucking waste of good sea air, and you know it.’

The yakuza master seemed to coil tighter into himself as he stared at me. I still wasn’t sure why I was pushing him, what I was pushing for.

‘Hirayasu Yukio is my brother-in-law’s only son.’ Very quietly, barely a murmur across the space between us, but edged with contained fury. ‘There is giri here that I would not expect a southerner to understand.’

‘Motherfucker,’ said Jad wonderingly.

‘Ah, what do you expect, Jad?’ I made a noise in my throat. ‘In the end, he’s a criminal, no different than the fucking haiduci. Just a different mythology and the same crabshit delusions of ancient honour.’

‘Tak—’

‘Back off, Tod. Let’s get this out in the open where it belongs. This is politics, and nothing even remotely cleaner. Tanaseda here isn’t worried about his nephew once removed. That’s just a side bonus. He’s worried he’s losing his grip, he’s afraid of being punished for a fucked-up blackmail attempt. He’s watching Segesvar get ready to make friends with Aiura Harlan, and he’s terrified the haiduci are going to get cut in on some serious global action in return for their trouble. All of which his Millsport cousins are likely to lay pretty directly at his front door, along with a short sword and a set of instructions that read insert here and slice sideways. Right, Tan?’

The muscle on the left lost it, as I suspected he might. A needle-thin blade dropped from his sleeve into his right hand. Tanaseda snapped something at him and he froze. His eyes blazed at me and his knuckles whitened around the hilt of the knife.

‘See,’ I told him. ‘Masterless samurai don’t have this problem. There’s no leash. If you’re ronin, you don’t have to watch honour sold out for political expediency.’

‘Tak, will you just fucking shut up,’ groaned Murakami.

Tanaseda stepped past the taut, rippling tension on the furious bodyguard. He watched me through narrowed eyes, as if I was some kind of poisonous insect he needed to examine more closely.

‘Tell me, Kovacs-san,’ he said quietly. ‘Is it your wish to die at the hands of my organisation after all? Are you looking for death?’

I held his eye for a few seconds, then made a tiny spitting sound.

‘You couldn’t even begin to understand what I’m looking for, Tanaseda. You wouldn’t recognise it if it bit your dick off. And if you did stumble on it by accident, you’d just find some way to sell it.’

I looked across to Murakami, whose hand rested still on the butt of the Kalashnikov at his waist. I nodded.

‘Alright, Tod. I’ve seen your snitch. I’m in.’

‘Then we have an agreement?’ Tanaseda asked.

I compressed a breath and turned back to face him. ‘Just tell me this. How long ago did Segesvar cut his deal with the other copy of me?’

‘Oh, not recently.’ I couldn’t tell if there was any satisfaction in his voice. ‘I believe he has known that you both exist for some weeks now. Your copied self has been most active in tracing old connections.’

I thought back to Segesvar’s appearance at the inland harbour. His voice over the phone. We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake and a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed. I wondered if, even then, he’d already been making a decision, savouring the curious circumstance of being able to choose a place for his indebtedness to reside.

If so, I hadn’t done myself any favours in the competition with my younger self. And Segesvar had made it plain, the previous night, almost come out and said it to my face.

Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that any time in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.

Like I said—

Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.

Had he been saying goodbye?

You’re a hard man to please, Tak.

Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?

For just a second, an old, small sadness welled up in me.

The anger trampled it down. I looked up at Tanaseda and nodded.

‘Your nephew is buried under a beach house south of Kem Point. I’ll draw you a map. Now give me what you’ve got.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

’Why did you do that, Tak?’

‘Do what?’

I stood with Murakami under Angier glow from Impaler’s directional spotlights, watching the yakuza depart in an elegant black Expansemobile that Tanaseda had called in by phone. They ploughed away southward, leaving a broad, churned wake the colour of milky vomit.

‘Why did you push him like that?’

I stared after the receding skimmer. ‘Because he’s scum. Because he’s a fucking criminal, and he won’t admit it.’

‘Getting a little judgmental in your old age, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just the southern outlook. You’re from Millsport, Tod, maybe you’re just standing too close to see it.’

He chuckled. ‘Okay. So what’s the view like from down here?’

‘Same as it’s always been. The yakuza handing out their ancient-tradition-of-honour line to anyone who’ll listen, and meantime doing what? Working the same crabshit criminality as everybody else, but cosied up with the First Families into the bargain.’

‘Not so much any more, looks like.’

‘Ah, come on Tod. You know better than that. These guys have been in bed with Harlan and the rest of them since we fucking got here. Tanaseda might have to pay for this Qualgrist fuck-up he’s perpetrated, but the others will just make the right polite noises of regret and slide out from under. Back to the same illicit goods and genteel extortion line they’ve always trawled. And the First Families will welcome it with open arms because it’s one more thread in the net they’ve thrown over us all.’

‘You know.’ The laughter was still in his voice. ‘You’re beginning to sound like her.’

I looked round at him.

‘Like who?’

‘Like Quell, man. You sound like Quellcrist fucking Falconer.’

That sat between us for a couple of seconds. I turned away and stared out into the darkness over the Expanse. Perhaps recognising the unresolved tensions in the air between myself and Murakami, Jad had opted to leave us alone on the dock while the yakuza were still preparing to depart. The last I saw of her, she was boarding the Impaler with Vlad and the honour guard. Something about getting whisky coffee.

‘Alright, then, Tod,’ I said evenly. ‘How about you answer me this? Why did Tanaseda come running to you to put his life right?’

He pulled a face.

‘You said it yourself, I’m Millsport born and bred. And the yak like to be plugged in at high level. They’ve been all over me since I came home on my first Corps furlough a hundred and whatever years ago. They think we’re old friends.’

‘And are you?’

I felt the stare. Ignored it.

‘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 host 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’s 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.

CHAPTER 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 hoverloader’s stability. Once or twice, crewmembers 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 the 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 unaccountable 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 Protectorate deteriorated. Kasengo, for reasons best known to the locals, had stellar-range hypercast capacity, and the government of Nkrumah’s Land were worried that the UN military might like access to that capacity.

They were right to worry.

We’d come in quietly at hypercast stations around the globe over the previous six months, while everyone was still pretending that diplomacy was a viable option. By the time Envoy Command ordered the strike on Kasengo, we were as adjusted to Nkrumah’s Land as any of its hundred million fifth generation colonists. While our deep-cover teams fomented riots on the streets of cities in the north, Murakami and I gathered a small tactical squad and disappeared south. The idea was to eliminate the garrison while they slept and seize the needlecast facilities the following morning. Something went wrong, information leaked, and we arrived to find the hypercast station heavily defended.

There was no time to draw fresh plans. The same leak that had alerted the Kasengo garrison meant that reinforcements would be on their way. In the midst of a freezing rainstorm, we hit the station in stealth suits and grav packs, sewing the sky around us with tinsel to simulate massive numbers. In the confusion of the storm, the ruse worked like a dream. The garrison were largely conscripted youngsters with a few seasoned NCOs riding herd. Ten minutes into the firefight, they broke and scattered through the rain-slashed streets in frantic, retreating knots. We chased, isolated, mopped them up. Some few went down fighting, most were taken alive and locked up.

Later, we used their bodies to sleeve the first wave of Envoy heavy assault.

I closed my eyes.

‘Micky?’ Jad’s voice from the bunk above.

‘Takeshi.’

‘Whatever. Let’s stick with Micky, huh?’

‘Alright.’

‘You think that fuck Anton’s going to be there today?’

I levered my eyes open again. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. Tanaseda seemed to think so. Looks like Kovacs is still using him anyway, maybe as a safeguard. If no one’s sure what to expect from Sylvie or the thing she’s carrying, might be comforting to have another command head around.’

‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ She paused. Then, just as my eyes were sliding closed once more. ‘It doesn’t bother you, talking about yourself that way. Knowing he’s out there?’

‘Of course it bothers me.’ I yawned cavernously. ‘I’m going to kill the little fuck.’

Silence. I let my eyelids shutter themselves.

‘So Micky.’

‘What?’

‘If Anton is there?’

I rolled my eyes at the bunk above me. ‘Yes?’

‘If he’s there, I want that motherfucker. You have to shoot him, you wreck his legs or something. He’s mine.’

‘Fine.’

‘I mean it, Micky.’

‘So do I,’ I mumbled, tilting ponderously away under the weight of deferred sleep. ‘Kill whoever you fucking like, Jad.’

Kill whoever you fucking like.

It could have been a mission statement for the raid.

We hit the farm at ramming speed. Garbled distress broadcasts got us close enough that any long-range weaponry Segesvar had would be useless. Vlad’s helmsman ran a vector that looked like driven before the storm but was actually a high-speed controlled swerve. By the time the haiduci realised what was going on, Impaler was upon them. She smashed in through the panther pens, crushing webbing barriers and the old wooden jetties of the original baling station, unstoppable, ripping loose the planking, demolishing decayed antique walls, carrying the growing mass of piled-up wreckage forward on her armoured nose.

Look, I told Murakami and Vlad the night before, there is no subtle way to do this. And Vlad’s eyes lit up with meth-fired enthusiasm.

Impaler ploughed to a clanking, grinding halt amidst the half submerged wet-bunker modules. Her decks were canted steeply to the right, and down on the debarkation level, a dozen collision alerts shrilled hysterically in my ears as the hatches on that side blew wide open on explosive bolts. Boarding ramps dropped like bombs, livewire security lines at their tips, writhing and shredding into evercrete for purchase. Dully through the hull, I heard the clang and whirr of the major grapple lines firing. Impaler caught and clung fast.

It was a system once designed only for emergency use, but the pirates had rewired every aspect of their vessel for fast assault, boarding and battery. Only the machine mind that ran it all had been left out of the loop, and still thought we were a ship in crisis.

The weather met us on the ramp. Rain and wind rushed me, slapped at my face, shoved at me from odd angles. Vlad’s assault team ran bellowing into the midst of it. I glanced once at Murakami, shook my head, and then followed. Maybe they had the right idea - with Impaler snagged fast amidst the damage she’d just created, there was no way back for anybody that didn’t involve either winning or dying.

Gunfire started in the grey swirl of the storm. Hiss, sizzle of beam weapons, the boom and bark of slug guns. The beams showed pale blue and yellow in the murk. A distant ripple of thunder across the sky and pale lightning seemed to respond. Someone screamed and fell somewhere up ahead. Indistinct yelling. I cleared the end of the ramp, skidded on the bulge of a wet-bunker module, gained balance with the Eishundo sleeve and leapt forward. Down into the shallow slosh of water between modules, up the bubbled slope of the next. The surface was gritty and gave good purchase. Peripheral vision told me I was the apex of a wedge, Jad on my left flank, Murakami on my right with a plasmafrag gun.

I cranked the neurachem and spotted a maintenance ladder ahead, three of Vlad’s pirates pinned down at the base by gunfire from the dockside above. The sprawled body of a comrade floated against the nearest wet-bunker module, still steaming from face and chest where the blaster fire had scorched the life from its owner.

I flung myself towards the ladder with wincefish abandon.

‘Jad!’

‘Yeah -go!’

Like being back in the Uncleared. Vestiges of Slipin attunement, maybe some twin-like affinity, care of Eishundo. I sprinted flat out. Behind me the shard blaster spoke - spiteful rushing whine in the rain and the edge of the dock exploded in a hail of fragments. More screams. I reached the ladder about the same moment the pirates realised they were no longer pinned down. Stamped my way hurriedly up it, Rapsodia stowed.

At the top, there were bodies, torn and bloodied from the shard fire, and one of Segesvar’s men, injured but still on his feet. He spat and lurched at me with a knife. I twisted aside, locked out the knife arm and threw him off the dock. Short scream, lost in the storm.

Crouch and search, Rapsodia out and sweeping in the poor visibility, while the others came up behind me. Rain smashed down and made a million little geysers back off the evercrete surface. I blinked it out of my eyes.

The dock was clear.

Murakami clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, not bad for a retired man.’

I snorted. ‘Someone’s got to show you how. Come on, this way.’

We stalked along the dock in the rain, found the entrance I wanted and slipped inside, one at a time. The sudden relief from the force of the storm was shocking, almost like silence. We stood dripping water on the plastic floor of a short corridor set with familiar, heavy, portholed metal doors. Thunder growled outside. I peered through the glass of a door just to be sure, and saw a room of blank-faced metal cabinets. Cold storage for the panther feed and, occasionally, the corpses of Segesvar’s enemies. At the end of the corridor, a narrow stairwell led down to the crude re-sleeving unit and veterinary section for the panthers.

I nodded to the stairs.

‘Down there. Three levels and we’re in the wet-bunker complex. ’

The pirates went in the van, noisy and enthusiastic. Meth-wired as they were, and not a little pissed off with having to follow me up the ladder, it would have been hard to dissuade them. Murakami shrugged and didn’t try. They clattered down the stairwell at speed, and ran straight into an ambush at the bottom.

We were a flight of stairs behind, moving with undrugged caution, and even there I felt the splashback from the blasters scorch my face and hands. Cacophony of high, sudden shrieks as the pirates caught fire and died as human torches. One of them made three blundering steps back up out of the inferno, flame-winged arms raised imploringly towards us. His melted face was less than a metre from mine when he collapsed, hissing and smoking, on the cold steel stairs below.

Murakami hurled an ultravibe grenade down the well and it bounced once metallically before the familiar chittering scream kicked in. In the confined space it was deafening. We slapped palms to ears in unison. If anybody down there screamed when it killed them, their deaths were inaudible.

We waited for a second after the grenade died, then Murakami fired the plasmafrag rifle downward. There was no reaction. I crept down past the blackened, cooling corpses of the pirates, gagging at the stench. Peered past the inward-curled, despairing limbs of the one who’d met the brunt of the fire, and saw an empty corridor. Yellow cream walls, floor and ceiling, brilliantly lit with overhead strips of inlaid illuminum. Close to the foot of the stairwell, everything was painted with broad swathes of blood and clotted tissue.

‘Clear.’

We picked our way through the gore and moved cautiously up the corridor, into the heart of the wet-bunker’s base levels. Tanaseda hadn’t known where exactly the captives would be held - the haiduci were twitchy and aggressive about allowing the yakuza a presence in Kossuth in the first place. Precarious in his new role of penitent failed blackmailer, Tanaseda had still insisted, on his own admission because he’d hoped to retrieve the whereabouts of Yukio Hirayasu’s stack from me by torture or extortion and thus cut his loss of face, at least among his own colleagues. Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka, for some byzantine reason or other, agreed and in the end, it was her pressure on Segesvar that forged the diplomatic co-operation between yakuza and haiduci. Tanaseda had been welcomed formally by Segesvar himself, and then been told in no uncertain terms that he’d best find himself accommodation in Newpest or Sourcetown, stay away from the farm unless specifically summoned and keep his men on a tight leash. He’d certainly not been given a tour of the premises.

But really, there was only one secure place in the complex for people you didn’t want dead yet. I’d seen it a couple of times on previous visits, had once even watched some doomed gambling junkie conveyed there while Segesvar thought about how exactly to make an example of him. If you wanted to lock a man up on the farm, you put him where even a monster couldn’t break free. You locked him in the panther cells.

We paused at a crossways, where ventilation systems gaped open above us. Faintly, down the conduits, came the sounds of ongoing battle. I gestured left, murmuring.

‘Down there. The panther cells are all on the right at the next turn, they open onto tunnels that lead directly into the pens. Segesvar converted a couple of them for human holding. Got to be one of those.’

‘Alright, then.’

We picked up the pace again, took the right turn, and then I heard the smooth, solid hum of one of the doors on the cells sliding down into the floor. Footsteps and urgent voices beyond. Segesvar and Aiura, and a third voice I’d heard before but couldn’t place. I clamped down on the savage spurt of joy, flattened myself to the wall and waved Jad and Murakami back.

Aiura, compressed rage as I tuned in.

‘. . . really expect me to be impressed by this?’

‘Don’t you hand me that shit,’ snapped Segesvar. ‘This is that slant-eyed yak fuck you insisted on bringing aboard. I told you—’

‘Somehow, Segesvar-san, I do not think—’

‘And don’t fucking call me that either. This is Kossuth, not the fucking north. Have a bit of cultural sensitivity, why don’t you. Anton, you sure there’s no intrusion ’cast going down?’

And the third voice slotted into place. The tall, garish-haired command head from Drava. Software attack dog for Kovacs Version Two.

‘Nothing. This is strictly—’

I should have seen it coming.

I was going to wait another couple of seconds. Let them walk out into the wide, brightly-lit space of the corridor, then spring the trap. Instead—

Jad surged past me like a trawler cable snapping. Her voice seemed to strike echoes off the walls of the whole complex.

‘Anton, you motherless fuck!’

I came off the wall, spinning to cover them all with the Rapsodia.

Too late.

I took in a glimpse of the three of them, gaping in shock. Segesvar met my eyes and flinched. Jad stood braced, shard gun riding her hip, levelled. Anton saw and reacted, deCom swift. He seized Aiura Harlan-Tsuruoka by the shoulders and hurled her in front of him. The shard gun coughed. The Harlan security exec screa—

—and came apart from shoulders to waist as the monomol swarm ripped through her. Blood and tissue exploded through the air around us, splattered me, blinded me—

In the time it took me to wipe my eyes, they were both gone. Back through the cell they’d come out of, and the tunnel beyond. What remained of Aiura lay on the floor in three pieces and puddles of gore.

‘Jad, what the fuck are you playing at?’ I yelled.

She wiped her face, smearing blood. ‘Told you I’d get him.’

I grabbed at calm. Stabbed a finger at the carnage around our feet. ‘You didn’t get him, Jad. He’s gone.’ Calm failed me, collapsed catastrophically before focusless fury. ‘How could you be so fucking stupid? He’s fucking gone.’

‘Then I’ll fucking catch him up.’

‘No, we nee—’

But she was already moving again, across the opened cell at a fast deCom lope. Ducking into the tunnel.

‘Nice going, Tak,’ said Murakami sardonically. ‘Command presence. I like that.’

‘Shut up, Tod. Just find the monitor room, check the cells. They’re all around here somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

I was backing off, moving before I finished speaking. Sprinting again, after Jad, after Segesvar.

After something.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The tunnel came out in a fight pit. Steep, sloping evercrete sides, ten metres tall and torn ragged for half their height by decades of swamp panthers trying to claw their way out. Railed spectator space around the top, all open to a sky clogged with a fast-moving stampede of greenish cloud cover. It was impossible to look directly up in the rain. Thirty centimetres of thick mud in the bottom of the pit, now pounded into brown sludge by the downpour. The drainage vents in the walls couldn’t keep up.

I squinted through the water in the air and on my face, spotted Jad halfway up the narrow maintenance ladder cut into one corner of the pit. Bawled at her over the sound of the storm.

‘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 blasterfire somewhere above.

When I got to the top, a hand came down and grasped my wrist. I jolted with shock and 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 criss-crossed the fight pits. Thick curtains of rain skirled across the view. At more than ten metres, visibility faded to grey, 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. ‘Alright, 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 dialled 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 metres, the armourer 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 metre. 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 metres 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 criss-crossed 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 bar the cleaning up anyway.’

‘Really? Not got much faith in yourself, have you? He’s over on the new dock side 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. Blasterfire and the odd agonised scream. Impossible to know how it was going for anyone, but my own misgivings about Vlad and his meth-head 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 favourite 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 metre at a time through the hammering rain and three centimetres 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 dialled 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 round the oval walkway of the fight pit. No time for better aim, just have 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 round 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 metres 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 metres out from the end of the walkway when the bolts tore all the way out. Eishundo 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 gekko 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 sell-out 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 windchimes. 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 gekko 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 got 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 round the calf as it swung back from the kick. Blood gouted from my nose. The gekko 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 metre. 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 shardblast 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 any more. 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 gekko 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 grey 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, hooked 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.

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 any more about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt. We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously levelled.

I found the others a half dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor, the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognised but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amidst the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped round, levelled the blaster and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head round the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

‘Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.’

‘What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?’

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.

‘Beats me. Looks like we got here too late. You know them?’

‘Where’s Murakami?’

He gestured back the way he’d come. ‘Over the far side, up on the parking dock. He sent me to find you, case you needed help. Fighting’s mostly done, you know. Just mopping up and some good old piracy to do now.’ He grinned again. ‘Time to get paid. Come on, this way.’

Numbly, I followed him. We crossed the wet bunker, through corridors marked with the signs of recent battle, blaster-charred walls and ugly splashes of shattered human tissue, the odd sprawled corpse and once an absurdly well-dressed middle-aged man sitting on the floor staring in catatonic disbelief at his shattered legs sticking straight out in front of him. He must have been flushed from the casino or the brothel when the raid started, must have fled down into the bunker complex and got caught in the crossfire. As we reached him, he raised both arms weakly towards us, and Vlad shot him with the plasmafrag. We left him with steam curling up from the massive hole through his chest and climbed up an access ladder into the body of the old baling station.

Out on the parking dock, there was similar carnage. Crumpled bodies were strewn across the wharf and in amongst the moored skimmers. Here and there, small flames burned where blasterfire had found something more readily flammable than human flesh and bone. Smoke drifted through the rain. The wind was definitely dying down.

Murakami was by the water, knelt beside a slumped Virginia Vidaura and talking urgently to her. One hand cradled the side of her face. A couple of Vlad’s pirates stood around, arguing amiably, with their weapons slung over their shoulders. They were all drenched, but apparently unharmed.

Across the forward carapace of a green-painted Expansemobile moored nearby, Anton’s body.

He lay head down, eyes frozen open, rainbow command-head hair trailing down almost to the water. There was a hole you could have put your head through where his chest and stomach had been. It looked as if Jad had got him dead centre from behind with the shard blaster’s focus dialled up to tight. The blaster itself lay discarded on the dock amidst pools of blood. Of Jad, there was no sign.

Murakami saw us coming and let go of Vidaura’s face. He picked up the shard blaster and held it out to me in both hands. The magazine was ejected, the breech clear. It had been fired empty, then discarded. He shook his head.

‘We’ve looked for her, but there’s nothing. Col here says he thinks he saw her go into the water. Shot from the wall up there. Could be she was only winged but in this shit.’ He gestured at the weather. ‘No way to tell ’til we sweep for bodies. Storm’s moving out westward, dying off. We can look then.’

I stared down at Virginia Vidaura. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but she looked to be semi-conscious, head lolling. I turned back to Murakami.

‘What the fuck is—’

And the shard blaster butt came up and hit me in the head.

White fire, disbelief. A brand new nosebleed.

Wha—

I staggered, gaped, fell down.

Murakami stood over me. He tossed the shard blaster away and pulled a neat little stunner from his belt.

‘Sorry, Tak.’

Shot me with it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

At the end of a very long, darkened corridor, there’s a woman waiting for me. I’m trying to hurry, but my clothes are waterlogged and heavy, and the corridor itself is canted at an angle and almost knee-deep in viscous stuff that I’d think was congealing blood except it stinks of belaweed. I flounder forward on the submerged, tilted floor, but the open doorway doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Got a problem, sam?

I crank the neurachem, but something’s wrong with the bioware because what I can see is like an ultradistant sniperscope image. I only have to twitch and it dances about all over the place, hurting my eyes when they try to keep focus. Half the time the woman is Vlad’s well-endowed pirate comrade, stripped to the waist and bent over the modules of unfamiliar equipment on the floor of her cabin. Long, large breasts hanging like fruit - I can feel the roof of my mouth aching to suck in one of the blunt, darkened nipples. Then, just when I think I’ve got a grip on the view, it slides away and becomes a tiny kitchen with handpainted blinds that block out the Kossuth sunlight. There’s a woman there too, also stripped to the waist, but it isn’t the same one because I know her.

The scope wobbles again. My eyes stray to the hardware on the floor. Matt grey impact-resistant casings, lustrous black discs where datacoils will spring up when activated. The logo on each module is inscribed in ideographic characters that I recognise, though I don’t currently have a reading knowledge of either Hun Home or Earth Chinese. Tseng Psychographics. It’s a name I’ve seen around battlefields and psychosurgical recovery units in the recent past, a new name. A new star in the rarefied constellation of military brand names, a name and a brand that only very well-funded organisations can afford.

What you got there?

Kalashnikov electromag. One of the guys down the corridor lent it to me.

Wonder where he stole it from.

Who says it had to be stolen?

I do. These guys are pirates.

Abruptly, my palm is full of the rounded, voluptuous weight of the Kalashnikov butt. It gleams up at me in the low light of the corridor, and it’s begging to be squeezed.

Seven hundred dollars, UN, minimum. No meth-head pirate is going to spend that kind of money on a hushgun.

I thrash forward another couple of steps, as an awful sense of my own failure to grasp the facts soaks into me. It’s as if I’m sucking up the viscous stuff in the corridor through tap roots in my legs and waterlogged boots, and I know that when I’m full it’s going to clog me to a violent stop.

And then I’ll swell and explode with it, like a bag of blood squeezed too hard.

You come in here again, boy, and I’ll crush you ’til you fucking pop.

I feel my own eyes widen with shock. I peer through the sniperscope again and this time it’s not the woman with the hardware, and it’s not the cabin aboard Impaler.

It’s the kitchen.

And it’s my mother.

She’s standing, one foot in a bowl of soapy water, and leaning over to swab her leg with a blob of cheap farm-cultured hygisponge. She’s wearing a thigh-length wrap-around weed-gatherer’s skirt that’s split down one side and she’s naked to the waist, and she’s young, younger than I can normally remember her. Her breasts hang long and smooth, like fruit, and my mouth aches with a trace memory of tasting them. She looks sideways and down at me then, and smiles.

And he slams into the room from another door that fleeting recall tells me leads out onto the wharf. Slams into the room, and slams into her like something elemental.

You cunt, you conniving fucking cunt.

With the shock of it, again, my eyes crank, and I’m suddenly standing at the threshold. The sniperscope veil is gone, this is now and real. It takes me the first three blows to move. Backhander with full swing, it’s a blow we’ve all had from him at one time or another, but this time he’s really letting go - she’s catapulted back across the kitchen into the table and falls, she gets up and he punches her down again and there’s blood, bright from her nose in a stray beam of sunlight through the blind, she struggles to get up, from the floor this time, and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me, over the threshold, over my bare feet, and then it’s as if a ghost of myself stays at the door while the rest of me runs into the room and tries to get between them.

I’m small, probably not much more than five, and he’s drunk so the blow falls inaccurately. But it’s enough to knock me back out the door. Then he comes and stands over me, hands braced clumsily on his knees, breathing heavily through a slack mouth.

You come in here again boy, and I’ll crush you ’til you fucking pop.

He doesn’t even bother to close the door as he goes back to her.

But as I sit there in a useless heap, beginning to cry, she reaches out across the floor and shoves at the doorjamb with her hand, so it swings closed on what’s about to happen.

Then only the sound of blows, and the closed door receding.

I flounder through the canted corridor, chasing the door as the last light squeezes through the crack, and the weeping in my throat modulates upward towards a ripwing scream. A tidal rage is rising in me, and I’m growing with it, I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door, I’ll get there before he finally walks out on us all, disappears out of our lives and I’ll make him disappear, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons, and the viscous slop is draining away and I hit the door like a swamp panther, but it makes no difference, it’s been closed too long, it’s solid and the impact reverberates through me like a stunblast and—

Oh, yeah. Stunblast.

So it’s not a door it’s—

—the dockside, and my face was crushed against it, sticky in a little pool of spittle and blood where I’d apparently bitten my tongue as I went down. It’s not an uncommon outcome with stunners.

I coughed and choked on a throatful of mucus. Spat it out, took a rapid damage inventory and wished I hadn’t. My whole body was a jarring assemblage of trembling and ache from the stunblast. Nausea clawed at my bowels and the pit of my stomach, my head felt light and filled with starry air. The side of my face throbbed where the rifle butt had hit me. I lay for a moment getting it all back under some kind of control, then peeled my face away from the dock and heaved my neck up like a seal. It was a short, abortive movement. My hands were locked behind my back with some kind of webbing, and I couldn’t see much above ankle height. Warm throb of active bioweld around my wrists. It gave so as not to maim hands held cuffed for long periods, it would dissolve like warm wax when you poured the right enzyme on it, but you could no more wriggle out of it than you could pull your own fingers off.

Pressure on my pocket brought home an expected truth. They’d taken the Tebbit knife. I was unarmed.

I retched and brought up the thin leavings of an empty stomach. Fell back and tried hard not to get my face in it. I could hear blaster fire from a long way off, and, faintly, what sounded like laughter.

A pair of boots splashed past in the wet. Stopped and came back.

‘He’s coming right back round,’ someone said, and whistled. ‘Tough little motherfucker. Hey, Vidaura, did you say you trained this guy?’

No reply. I heaved up again and succeeded in rolling onto my side. Blinked dazedly up at the form standing over me. Vlad Tepes looked down out of a clearing sky that had almost given up on rain. The look on his face was serious and admiring, and he stood absolutely still as he watched me. No trace of his former meth-head twitchiness to be seen.

‘Good performance,’ I croaked at him.

‘Liked it, huh?’ He grinned. ‘Had you fooled, right?’

I ran my tongue around my teeth and spat out some blood mingled with vomit. ‘Yeah, I thought Murakami had to be fucking cracked to use you. So what happened to the original Vlad?’

‘Ah, well.’ He made a wry face. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Yeah, I know. How many more of you are there? Apart from your gorgeous-breasted psychosurgical specialist, that is.’

He laughed easily. ‘Yeah, she said she caught you looking. Beautiful piece of meat, isn’t it. You know, the last thing Liebeck wore before that was a Limon cable athlete’s sleeve. Flat as a board. A year down the line and she still can’t make up her mind if she’s pleased or pissed off about the change.’

‘Limon, huh? Limon, Latimer.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Home of cutting-edge deCom.’

He grinned. ‘All starting to make sense, is it?’

It isn’t easy to shrug when you’re cuffed behind your back and flat to the floor. I did my best. ‘I saw the Tseng gear in her cabin.’

‘Damn, so you weren’t looking at her tits.’

‘No, I was,’ I admitted. ‘But you know how it is. Nothing peripheral is ever lost.’

‘That is the fucking truth.’

‘Mallory.’

We both looked towards the shout. Todor Murakami was striding along the dock from the direction of the wet bunker. He was unarmed apart from the Kalashnikov at his hip and the knife on his chest. Soft rain fell around him with a sparkle in it from the brightening sky.

‘Our renegade’s sitting up and spitting,’ said Mallory, gesturing at me.

‘Good. Now, since you’re the only one who can get that crew of yours to do anything in a co-ordinated fashion, why don’t you go and sort them out. There are still bodies at the brothel end with stacks intact, I saw them on my way through. There may even be living witnesses hiding down there for all I know. I want a final sweep, no one left alive, and I want every stack melted to slag.’ Murakami gestured disgustedly. ‘Jesus fuck, they’re pirates, you’d think they could manage that. Instead of which, most of them are playing at setting the panthers loose and using them for target practice. Just listen to it.’

The blasterfire was still in the air, long, undisciplined bursts laced with excited shouting and laughter. Mallory shrugged.

‘So where’s Tomaselli?’

‘Still setting up the gear with Liebeck. And Wang’s waiting for you on the bridge, trying to make sure no one gets eaten by accident. It’s your boat, Vlad. Go get them to stop fucking about, and when they’ve finished the sweep, bring Impaler round to this side for loading.’

‘Alright.’ Like a ripple over water, Mallory adopted the Vlad persona and started to pick twitchily at his acne scars. He nodded down at me. ‘See you soon as I see you, eh, Kovacs. Soon as.’

I watched him to the corner of the station wall and round it, out of sight. Flicked my gaze back to Murakami, who was still staring away towards the sounds of the post-op merriment.

‘Fucking amateurs,’ he muttered, and shook his head.

‘So,’ I said bleakly. ‘You’re deployed after all.’

‘Got it in one.’ As he spoke, Murakami crouched and hauled me up into an ungainly sitting position with a grunt. ‘Don’t hold it against me, huh? Not like I could have told you last night and appealed to your sense of nostalgia for help, is it?’

I looked around from my new vantage point and saw Virginia Vidaura, slumped against a mooring post, arms bound back. There was a long darkening bruise across her face, and her eye had swollen. She looked dully at me, and then away. There were tears smeared in the dirt and sweat on her face. No sign of Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve, dead or alive.

‘So instead you played me for a sucker.’

He shrugged. ‘Work with the tools to hand, you know.’

‘How many of you are there? Not the whole crew, apparently.’

‘No,’ he smiled faintly. ‘Just five. Mallory there, Liebeck, who I understand you’ve met, sort of. Two others, Tomaselli and Wang, and me.’

I nodded. ‘Covert deployment strength. I should have known there was no way you’d be just hanging around Millsport on furlough. How long have you been on the ground?’

‘Four years, near enough. That’s me and Mallory. We came in before the others. We bagged Vlad a couple of years ago, been watching him for a while. Then Mallory brought the others in as new recruits.’

‘Must have been awkward. Stepping into Vlad’s shoes like that.’

‘Not really.’ Murakami sat back on his heels in the gentle rain. He seemed to have all the time in the world to talk. ‘They’re not overly perceptive, these meth-head guys, and they don’t really forge meaningful relationships. There were only a couple of them really close enough to Vlad to be a problem when Mallory stepped in, and I took them out ahead of time. Sniperscope and plasmafrag. ’ He mimed the act of tracking and shooting. ‘Bye bye head, bye bye stack. We tumbled Vlad the week after. Mallory’d been sitting on him for the best part of two years, playing pirate groupie, sucking his dick, sharing pipes and bottles with him. Then, one deep dark night in Sourcetown, bop!’ Murakami slapped fist into palm. ‘That portable Tseng stuff is beautiful. You can do a de- and re-sleeve in a hotel bathroom.’

Sourcetown.

‘You’ve been watching Brasil all this time?’

‘Among others.’ Another shrug. ‘The whole Strip, really. It’s the only place on the World there’s any serious insurgency spirit left. Up north, even in most of Newpest, it’s just crime, and you know how conservative criminals are.’

‘Hence Tanaseda.’

‘Hence Tanaseda. We like the yakuza, they just want to snuggle up to the powers that be. And the haiduci, well, despite their much-vaunted populist roots, they’re really just a cut-rate notable-manners version of the same disease. By the way, did you get your pal Segesvar? Forgot to ask before I dented you out there.’

‘Yeah, I did. Swamp panther ate him.’

Murakami chuckled. ‘Outstanding. Why the hell did you ever quit, Tak?’

I closed my eyes. The stunblast hangover seemed to be getting worse. ‘What about you? Did you solve my double-sleeving problem for me?’

‘Ah - no, not yet.’

I opened my eyes again, surprised.

‘He’s still walking around somewhere?’

Murakami made an embarrassed gesture. ‘Apparently. Looks like you were hard to kill, even at that age. We’ll get him, though.’

‘Will you,’ I said sombrely.

‘Yeah, we will. With Aiura down, he’s got no handler, nowhere to run. And sure as fucking lightspeed no one else in the First Families is going to want to pick up where she left off. Not if they want the Protectorate to stay home and let them keep their oligarch toys.’

‘Or,’ I said casually, ‘you could just kill me now you’ve got me, then let him come in and cut a deal.’

Murakami frowned. ‘That’s not funny, Tak.’

‘Wasn’t meant to be. He’s still calling himself an Envoy, you know. He’d probably jump at the chance to get back in the Corps if you offered.’

‘I don’t fucking care.’ There was anger in his tone now. ‘I don’t know the little fucker, and he’s going down.’

‘Okay, okay. Cool off. Just trying to make your life easier.’

‘My life’s easy enough,’ he growled. ‘Double-sleeving an Envoy, even an ex-Envoy, is pretty much irrevocable political suicide. Konrad Harlan is going to shit when I turn up in Millsport with Aiura’s head and a report on all this. Best thing he can hope to do is deny knowledge of everything and pray I let it go at that.’

‘You get a stack out of Aiura?’

‘Yeah, head and shoulders pretty much intact. We’ll interrogate her, but it’s a formality. We won’t use what she knows directly. In situations like this, we tend to let the local presidential scum keep their deniability intact. You remember the drill: minimise local disruption, maintain a seamless authority front with the Protectorate, hang onto the data for future leverage.’

‘Yeah, I remember.’ I tried to swallow some moisture back into my mouth. ‘You know Aiura might not crack. Family retainer, she’ll have some pretty heavy loyalty conditioning.’

He grinned unpleasantly. ‘Everybody cracks in the end, Tak. You know that. Virtual interrogation, it’s crack or go insane, and these days we can even bring them back from that.’ The grin faded out to something harder and no less unpleasant. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Our beloved leader-in-perpetuity Konrad will never know what we do or don’t get out of her. He’ll just assume the worst and cringe to heel. Or I’ll call in an assault force, torch Rila Crags around him and then feed him and his whole fucking family to the EMP.’

I nodded, looking out across the Expanse with what felt like half a smile on my mouth. ‘You sound almost like a Quellist. That’s what they’d like to do too, near enough. Seems a shame you can’t come to some arrangement with them. But then, that’s not really what you’re here for.’ Abruptly, I switched my gaze back to his face. ‘Is it?’

‘Sorry?’ But he wasn’t really trying, and the grin lurked in the corner of his mouth.

‘Come on, Tod. You turn up with state-of-the-art psychographics gear, your pal Liebeck was last deployed on Latimer. You’ve taken Oshima away somewhere. And you say this gig has been running for about four years, which ties in rather too neatly with the start of the Mecsek initiative. You’re not here for the Quellists, you’re here to keep an eye on the deCom technology.’

The grin crept out. ‘Very sharp. Actually though, you’re wrong. We’re here to do both. It’s the juxtaposition of cutting edge deCom and a residual Quellist presence that’s got the Protectorate really shitting their knickers. That, and the orbitals of course.’

‘The orbitals?’ I blinked at him. ‘What have the orbitals got to do with it?’

‘At the moment, nothing. And that’s the way we’d like it to stay. But with deCom tech, there’s just no way to be sure of that any more.’

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the numbness. ‘Wha—? Why?’

‘Because,’ he said seriously. ‘The fucking stuff appears to work.’

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

They brought Sylvie Oshima’s body out of the baling station on a bulky grey grav sled with Tseng markings and a curving plastic shield to keep the rain off. Liebeck steered the sled with a hand-held remote, and another woman I assumed was Tomaselli brought up the rear with a shoulder-borne monitor system, also Tseng-logo’d. I’d managed to lever myself to my feet as they came out, and oddly Murakami seemed content to let me stay that way. We stood side by side in silence, like mourners at some premillennial funeral procession, watching the grav bed and its burden arrive. Looking down at Oshima’s face, I remembered the ornate stone garden at the top of Rila Crags, the stretcher there, and it struck me that, for the crucible of a new revolutionary era, this woman was spending a lot of time strapped unconscious to conveyances for invalids. This time, under the transparent cover, her eyes were open but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. If it hadn’t been for the vital signs display on a built-in screen beside her head, you could have believed you were looking at a corpse.

You are, Tak. You’re looking at the corpse of the Quellist revolution there. This was all they had, and with Koi and the others gone, there’s no one going to bring it back to life.

It wasn’t really a shock that Murakami had executed Koi, Brasil and Tres, I’d been expecting it at some level from the moment I woke up. I’d seen it in Virginia Vidaura’s face as she slumped against the mooring post; when she spat out the words, it was no more than confirmation. And when Murakami nodded matter-of-factly and showed me the fistful of freshly excised cortical stacks, all I had was the sickening sensation of staring into a mirror at some kind of terminal damage to myself.

‘Come on, Tak.’ He’d stuffed the stacks back in a pocket of his stealth suit and wiped his hands together dismissively, grimacing. ‘I had no choice, you can see that. I already told you we can’t afford a rerun of the Unsettlement. Not least because these guys were always going to lose, and then the Protectorate boot comes down, and who wants that?’

Virginia Vidaura spat at him. It was a good effort, considering she was still slumped against the mooring post three or four metres away. Murakami sighed.

‘Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if it takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.’

‘Yeah,’ she snapped. ‘And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.’

Murakami shrugged again. ‘I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.’

‘And why is it gone?’ Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. ‘You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.’

Murakami made an exasperated gesture. ‘Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.’

‘That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.’ But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. ‘Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.’

Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.

‘Yeah, thing is, Virginia,’ he said when she’d finished, ‘they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me - you trained me, in fact - to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.’

Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.

‘Fucking Mecsek,’ Murakami said irritably, nodding at the prone figure in the grav bed. ‘If it was my call, there’s no way local government would have had access to this stuff at all, let alone a mandate to license it out to a bunch of drugged-up bounty-hunter dysfunctionals. We could have had an Envoy specialist team deployed to clean up New Hok, and none of this would ever have happened.’

‘Yeah, but it would have cost too much, remember?’

He nodded glumly. ‘Yeah. Same fucking reason the Protectorate leased the stuff out to everybody in the first place. Percentage return on investment. Everything’s about fucking money. No one wants to make history any more, they just want to make a pile.’

‘Thought that was what you wanted,’ Virginia Vidaura said faintly. ‘Everyone scrabbling for cash. Oligarchical caretakers. Piss-easy control system. Now you’re going to fucking complain about it?’

He shot her a weary sideways look and shook his head. Liebeck and Tomaselli wandered off to share a seahemp spliff until Vlad/ Mallory showed up with Impaler. Downtime. The grav sled bobbed unattended, a metre from me. Rain fell softly on the transparent plastic covering and trickled down the curve. The wind had dropped to a hesitant breeze and the blasterfire from the far side of the farm had long ago fallen silent. I stood in a crystalline moment of quiet and stared down at Sylvie Oshima’s frozen eyes. Whispering scraps of intuition scratched around at the barriers of my conscious understanding, seeking entry.

‘What’s this about making history, Tod?’ I asked tonelessly. ‘What’s going on with deCom?’

He turned to me and there was a look on his face I’d never seen before. He smiled uncertainly. It made him look very young.

‘What’s going on? Like I said before, what’s going on is that it works. They’re getting results back at Latimer, Tak. Contact with the Martian AIs. Datasystem compatibility, for the first time in nearly six hundred years of trying. Their machines are talking to ours, and it’s this system that bridged the gap. We’ve cracked the interface.’

Cold-taloned claws walked briefly up my spine. I remembered Latimer and Sanction IV, and some of the things I’d seen and done there. I think I’d always known it would be pivotal. I just never believed it would come back to claim me.

‘Keeping it kind of quiet, aren’t they,’ I said mildly.

‘Wouldn’t you be?’ Murakami stabbed a finger at the supine figure on the grav sled. ‘What that woman’s got wired into her head will talk to the machines the Martians left behind. In time it might be able to tell us where they’ve gone, it might even lead us to them.’ He choked a laugh. ‘And the joke is she’s not an archaeologue, she’s not a trained Envoy systems officer or a Martian specialist. No. She’s a fucking bounty hunter, Tak, a borderline psychotic mercenary machine-killer. And there are fuck knows how many more like her, all wandering around with this stuff active in their heads. Do you get any sense of how badly the Protectorate has fucked up this time? You were up there in New Hok. Can you imagine the consequences if our first contact with a hyper-advanced alien culture happens through these people? We’ll be lucky if the Martians don’t come back and sterilise every planet we’ve colonised, just to be on the safe side.’

I felt suddenly like sitting down again. The trembling from the stunblast came rolling back over me, up from the guts and through my head, leaving it light. I swallowed the nausea and tried to think straight over a clamour of suddenly recalled detail. Sylvie’s Slipins in laconic, murderous action against the scorpion gun cluster.

Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.

Yeah. And besides which, we want the fucking land.

Orr and his wrecking bar, stood over the dysfunctional karakuri in the tunnel under Drava. So we going to switch it off or what?

DeCom bravado aboard Guns for Guevara, vaguely amusing for its ludicrous presumption, until you gave it a context that might mean something.

Any time you come up with a way to deCom an orbital, Las, just let us know.

Yeah, count me in. Bring down an orbital, they’d make Mitzi Harlan give you head every morning for the rest of your life.

Oh fuck.

‘You really think she could do that,’ I asked numbly. ‘You think she’s capable of talking to the orbitals?’

He bared his teeth. It was anything but a grin. ‘Tak, for all I know she already has been talking to them. We’ve got her sedated right now, and the Tseng gear is monitoring her for transmissions, that’s part of the brief, but there’s no telling what she’s already done.’

‘And if she starts?’

He shrugged and looked away. ‘Then I’ve got my orders.’

‘Oh, great. Very constructive.’

‘Tak, what fucking choice do we have?’ Desperation edged his voice. ‘You know the weird shit that’s been going down in New Hok. Mimints doing things they’re not supposed to, mimints built to specs no one remembers from the Unsettlement. Everyone thinks that’s some kind of machine evolution, basic nanotech all grown up, but what if it’s not? What if it’s deCom that’s triggering this? What if the orbitals are waking up because they’ve got a whiff of the command software, and they’re doing something to the mimints in response? That stuff was designed to appeal to Martian machine systems, as near as we understand them, and the word out of Latimer is that it works. So why wouldn’t it work here?’

I stared at Sylvie Oshima and Jad’s voice echoed back through my head.

—all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon—

—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—

My mind went spinning off down the avenues Murakami’s own Envoy intuition had opened for me. What if they hadn’t been fighting each other? Or what if—

Sylvie, semi-conscious on a bunk in Drava, muttering. It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—

The woman who called herself Nadia Makita, lying in another bunk aboard Boubin Islander.

Grigori. There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.

‘Those people you’ve got in your pocket,’ I said quietly to Murakami. ‘The ones you murdered for the sake of a more stable tomorrow for us all. They all believed this was Quellcrist Falconer.’

‘Well, belief is a funny thing, Tak.’ He was staring away past the grav sled and there was no humour in his tone at all. ‘You’re an Envoy, you know that.’

‘Yeah. So what do you believe?’

For a couple of moments he was silent. Then he shook his head and looked at me directly.

‘What do I believe, Tak? I believe that if we’re about to decode the keys to Martian civilisation, then the Really Dead coming back to life is going to seem like a small and relatively unremarkable event.’

‘You think it’s her?’

‘I don’t care if it’s her. It doesn’t change a thing.’

A shout from Tomaselli. Impaler came forging round the side of Segesvar’s devastated farm like some huge thuggish cyborg elephant ray. At the risk of throwing up again, I worked the neurachem gingerly and made out Mallory standing in the conning tower with his coms officer and a couple of other pirates I didn’t recognise. I stood closer to Murakami.

‘I’ve got one other question, Tod. What are you planning to do with us? Virginia and me?’

‘Well.’ He rubbed vigorously at his cropped hair so fine spray flew out of it. The hint of a grin surfaced, as if the return to practical topics of conversation was some kind of reunion with an old friend. ‘That’s a little problematic, but we’ll sort something out. Way things are these days back on Earth, they’d probably want me to bring you both in, or wipe you both out. Renegade Envoys don’t profile well under the current administration.’

I nodded wearily. ‘And so?’

The grin powered up. ‘And so fuck ’em. You’re an Envoy, Tak. So is she. Just because you lost your clubhouse privileges, doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Just walking away from the Corps doesn’t change what you are. You think I’m going to write that off because a greasy little gang of Earth politicians are looking for scapegoats.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s your employers you’re talking about there, Tod.’

‘Fuck that. I answer to Envoy Command. We don’t EMP our own people.’ He caught his lower lip in his teeth, glanced at Virginia Vidaura and then back at me. His voice dropped to a mutter. ‘But I’m going to need some co-operation to swing this, Tak. She’s taking the whole thing too hard. I can’t turn her loose with that attitude. Not least because she’s likely to put a plasmafrag bolt through the back of my head as soon as I turn around.’

Impaler drifted in sideways towards an unused section of the dock. Her grapples fired and chewed holes in the evercrete. A couple of them hit rotten patches and tugged loose as soon as they started to crank taut. The hoverloader backed off slightly in a mound of stirred-up water and shredded belaweed. The grapples wound back and fired again.

Something behind me wailed.

At first, some stupid part of me thought it was Virginia Vidaura finally venting her pent-up grief. A fraction of a second later I caught up with the machine tone of the sound and identified it for what it was - an alarm.

Time seemed to slam to a halt. Seconds turned into ponderous slabs of perception, everything moved with the lazy calm of motion underwater.

—Liebeck, spinning away from the water’s edge, lit spliff tumbling from her open mouth, bouncing off the upper slope of her breast in a brief splutter of embers—

—Murakami, yelling at my ear, moving past me towards the grav sled—

—The monitor system built into the sled screaming, a whole rack of datacoil systems flaring to life like candles along one side of Sylvie Oshima’s suddenly twitching body—

—Sylvie’s eyes, wide open and fixed on mine as the gravity of her stare drags my own gaze in—

—The alarm, unfamiliar as the new Tseng hardware, but only one possible meaning behind it—

—And Murakami’s arm, raised, hand filled with the Kalashnikov as he clears it from his belt—

—My own yell, stretching out and blending with his as I throw myself forward to block him, hands still bound, hopelessly slow—

And then the clouds ripped open in the east, and vomited angelfire.

And the dock lit up with light and fury.

And the sky fell in.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Afterwards, it took me a while to realise I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colours seemed bleached out of the surroundings. The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic, it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few metres out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames. Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look round.

It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelt scorched.

I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.

‘Grigori fucking Ishii,’ she said, still without looking at me.

‘Sylvie?’

Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.

‘This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths she came in on too once I started looking.’ She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. ‘I opened the way.’

‘You’re losing me. Who is Grigori Ishii?’

‘You really don’t remember? Kid’s history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?’

‘My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.’

‘Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fall-back detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.’

‘Then . . .’

‘Yeah.’ She laughed, barely, a single small sound. ‘She is who she says she is.’

‘Did?’ I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. ‘Did she do this?’

‘No, I did.’ A shrugged correction. ‘They did, I asked them to.’

‘You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?’

A smile drifted across her face, but it seemed to catch on something painful as it passed. ‘Yeah. All that crabshit we used to talk, and I’m really the one that swings it. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?’

I pressed a hand hard against my face. ‘Sylvie, you’re going to have to slow down. What happened to Ishii’s jetcopter?’

‘Nothing. I mean, everything, exactly what you read about in school. The angelfire got it, just like they tell you when you’re a kid. Just like the story.’ She was talking more to herself than to me, still staring away into the mist the orbital strike had created when it vaporised Impaler and the four metres of water beneath. ‘It’s not the way we thought, Micky. The angelfire. It’s a blast beam, but it’s more than that. It’s a recording device too. A recording angel. It destroys everything it touches, but everything it touches has a modifying effect on the energy in the beam as well. Every single molecule, every single subatomic particle changes the beam’s energy state fractionally, and when it’s done, it carries a perfect image of whatever it’s destroyed. And it stores the images afterwards. Nothing’s ever lost.’

I coughed, laughter and disbelief. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re telling me Quellcrist Falconer has spent the last three hundred years inside a fucking Martian database?’

‘She was lost at first,’ she murmured. ‘She wandered for such a long time among the wings. She didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t know she’d been transcribed. She had to be so fucking strong.’

I tried to imagine what that might be like, a virtual existence in a system built by alien minds, and couldn’t. It made my skin crawl.

‘So how did she get out?’

Sylvie looked at me with a curious gleam in her eyes. ‘The orbital sent her.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘No, it’s.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the protocols, only what happened. It saw something in me, or in the combination of me and the command software, maybe. Some kind of analogy, something it thought it understood. I was the perfect template for this consciousness, apparently. I think the whole orbital net is an integrated system, and I think it’s been trying to do this for some time. All that modified mimint behaviour in New Hok. I think the system’s been trying to download the human personalities it has stored, all the people the orbitals have burnt out of the sky over the past four centuries, or whatever’s left of them. Up to now, it’s been cramming them into mimint minds. Poor Grigori Ishii - he was part of the scorpion gun we took down.’

‘Yeah, you said you knew it. When you were delirious in Drava.’

‘Not me. She knew it, she recognised something about him. I don’t think there was much left of Ishii’s personality.’ She shivered. ‘There’s certainly not much left of him down in the holding cells, it’s a shell at best by now, and it’s not sane. But something tripped her memories of him and she flooded the system trying to get out and deal with it. It’s why the engagement fell apart. I couldn’t cope, she came storming up out of the deep capacity like a fucking bomb blast.’

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to assimilate.

‘But why would the orbitals do that? Why start downloading?’

‘I told you, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know what to do with human personality forms. It can’t be what they were designed for. Maybe they put up with it for a century or so, and then started looking for a place to put the garbage. The mimints have had New Hok to themselves for the last three hundred years, that’s most of our whole history here. Maybe this has been going on all the time, there’s no reason we’d know about it before the Mecsek Initiative.’

I wondered distantly how many people had lost their lives to the angelfire over the four hundred years since Harlan’s World was settled. Accidental victims of pilot error, political prisoners cut loose on grav harnesses from Rila Crags and a dozen other such execution spots around the globe, the few odd deaths where the orbitals had acted out of character and destroyed outwith their normal parameters. I wondered how many dissolved into screaming insanity inside the Martian orbital databases, how many more went the same way as they were stuffed unceremoniously into mimint minds in New Hok. I wondered how many were left.

Pilot error?

‘Sylvie?’

‘What?’ She’d gone back to staring out over the Expanse.

‘Were you aware when we pulled you out of Rila? Did you know what was going on around you?’

‘Millsport? Not really. Some of it. Why?’

‘There was a firefight with a swoopcopter, and the orbitals got it. I thought at the time the pilot miscalculated his rate of rise or something, or the orbitals were twitchy from the fireworks. But you would have died if he’d kept strafing us. You think . . . ?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not a reliable link.’ She gestured around her and laughed, a little unsteadily. ‘I can’t do this sort of thing at will, you know. Like I said, I had to ask nicely.’

Todor Murakami, vaporised. Tomaselli and Liebeck, Vlad/ Mallory and his whole crew, the entire armoured body of the Impaler and the hundreds of cubic metres of water she floated on, even - I looked at my wrists and saw a tiny burn on each - the bioweld cuffs from my and Virginia’s hands. All gone in the microsecond unleashing of a minutely controlled wrath from the sky.

I thought about the precision of understanding necessary for a machine to achieve all that from five hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet, the idea that there could be an afterlife and its guardians circling up there, and then I remembered the tidy little bedroom in the virtuality, the Renouncer tract peeling away at one corner from the back of the door. I looked at Sylvie again and I understood some of what must be happening inside her.

‘What does it feel like?’ I asked her gently. ‘Talking to them?’

She snorted. ‘What do you think? It feels like religion, like all my mother’s crabshit pontifications suddenly coming home to roost. It’s not talking, it’s like.’ She gestured. ‘Like sharing, like melting down the delineation that makes you who you are. I don’t know. Like sex, maybe, like good sex. But not the . . . Ah fuck it, I can’t describe it to you, Micky. I barely believe it happened at all. Yeah.’ She grinned sourly. ‘Union with the Godhead. Except people like my mother would have run screaming out of the upload centre rather than really face something like that. It’s a dark path, Micky, I opened the door and the software knew what to do next, it wanted to take me there, it’s what it’s for. But it’s dark and it’s cold, it leaves you. Naked. Stripped down. There are things like wings to cover you, but they’re cold, Micky. Cold and rough and they smell of cherries and mustard.’

‘But is it the orbital talking to you? Or do you think there are Martians in there, running it?’

Out of somewhere, she came up with another crooked grin. ‘That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Solving the great mystery of our time. Where are the Martians, where have they all gone?’

For a long moment, I let the image soak through me. Our bat-winged raptor predecessors hurling themselves into the sky by the thousand and waiting for the angelfire to flash down and transfigure them, burn them to ash and virtual rebirth above the clouds. Coming, maybe, from every other world in their hegemony in pilgrimage, gathering for their moment of irrevocable transcendence.

I shook my head. Borrowed imagery from the Renouncer school, and some trace element of perverse Christian sacrifice myth. It’s the first thing they teach cub archaeologues. Don’t try to transfer your anthropomorphic baggage onto what is nothing like human.

‘Too easy,’ I said.

‘Yeah. What I thought. Anyway, it’s the orbital that’s talking, it feels like a machine the same way the mimints do, the same way the software does. But yes, there are still Martians in there. Grigori Ishii, what’s left of him, gibbers about them when you can get any verbal sense out of him at all. And I think Nadia’s going to remember something similar when she gets enough distance on it. I think when she does that, when she finally remembers how she walked out of their database and into my head, she’s going to be able to really talk to them. And it’s going to make the link I’ve got look like Morse code on tom-toms by comparison.’

‘I thought she didn’t know how to use the command software.’

‘She doesn’t. Not yet. But I can teach her, Micky.’

There was a peculiar tranquillity on Sylvie Oshima’s face as she spoke. It was something I’d never seen there before, in all the time we spent together in the Uncleared and after. It reminded me of Nikolai Natsume’s face in the Renouncer monastery, before we came and spoilt it all for him - sense of purpose, confirmed beyond human doubt. A belonging to what you did that I hadn’t known since Innenin, and that I didn’t expect to feel again. I felt a wry envy curl through me instead.

‘Going to be a deCom sensei, Sylvie? That the plan?’

She gestured impatiently. ‘I’m not talking about teaching in the real world, I’m talking about her. Down in the capacity vault, I can crank up the real-time ratio so we get months out of every minute, and I can show her how to do this. It’s not like hunting the mimints, that’s not what this stuff is for. It’s only now I realise that. All the time I spent in the Uncleared, it feels like I was half-asleep by comparison with this. This, it feels like I was born for.’

‘That’s the software talking, Sylvie.’

‘Yeah, maybe. So what?’

I couldn’t think of any answer to that. Instead, I looked across at the grav sled where Virginia Vidaura lay in place of Sylvie. I moved closer, and it felt like something was tugging me there by a cable wired into my guts.

‘She going to be okay?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’ Sylvie pushed herself wearily off the mooring post. ‘Friend of yours, huh?’

‘Er - something like that.’

‘Yeah, well, that bruising on her face looks bad. Think the bone might be cracked. I stuck her in there as gently as I could, kicked the system on, but all it’s done so far is sedate her, on general principles I think. Haven’t got a diagnosis out of it yet. It’ll need re—’

‘Hmm?’

I turned to prompt her and saw the grey-cased canister at the top of its arc. There was no time to get to Sylvie, no time to do anything except fling myself, tumbling over the grav sled and into the scant shadow its covered length offered. Tseng military custom - at a minimum it had to be battlefield-hardened. I hit the ground on the other side and flattened myself to the dock, arms wrapped over my head.

The grenade blew with a curiously muffled crump, and something in my head screamed with the sound. A muted shockwave slapped me, dented my hearing. I was on my feet in the blurred humming it left, no time to check for shrapnel injuries, snarling, spinning to face him as he climbed out of the water at the edge of the dock. I had no weapons, but I came round the end of the grav sled as if my hands were filled with them.

‘That was fast,’ he called. ‘Thought I’d get you both there.’

His clothes were drenched from his swim, and there was a long gash across his forehead that the water had leached pink and bloodless, but the poise in the amber-skinned sleeve hadn’t gone anywhere. The black hair was still long, tangled messily to his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be armed, but he grinned at me just the same.

Sylvie lay crumpled, halfway between the water and the sled. I couldn’t see her face.

‘I’m going to fucking kill you now,’ I said coldly.

‘Yeah, you’re going to try, old man.’

‘Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any fucking idea who you just killed?’

He shook his head, mock-sorrowful. ‘You really are getting past your sell-by date, aren’t you? You think I’m going to go back to the Harlan family with a corpse when I can take a live sleeve. That’s not what I’m getting paid for. That was a stun grenade, my last one unfortunately. Didn’t you hear it crack? Kind of hard to mistake if you’ve been anywhere near a battlefield recently. Ah, but then maybe you haven’t. Shockwave knock-out and inhaled molecular shrapnel to keep everyone that way. She’ll be out all day.’

‘Don’t lecture me on battlefield weaponry, Kovacs. I fucking was you, and I gave it up to do something more interesting.’

‘Really?’ The anger sparked in the startling blue eyes. ‘What was that, then? Low grade criminality or failed revolutionary politics? They tell me you’ve had a crack at both.’

I stalked forward a step, and watched him draw into a combat guard.

‘Whatever they tell you, I have seen a century more sunrises than you. And now I’m going to take them all away from you.’

‘Yeah?’ He made a disgusted sound in his throat. ‘Well if they’re all leading up to what you are now, you’d be doing me a favour. Because whatever else happens to me, the one thing I never want to be is you. I’d rather blow my own stack out the back of my head than end up standing where you are now.’

‘Then why don’t you do that. It’ll save me the trouble.’

He laughed. It was meant to be contemptuous, I think, but didn’t quite make it. There was a nervousness to it, and too much emotion. He made a displacement gesture.

‘Man, I’m almost tempted to let you walk away, I feel so sorry for you.’

I shook my head. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m not going to let you take her back to Harlan again. This is over.’

‘It certainly fucking is. I can’t believe how totally you’ve fucked up your life. Just fucking look at you.’

‘You look at me. It’s the last face you’re ever going to see, you stupid little fuck.’

‘Don’t get melodramatic on me, old man.’

‘Oh, you think this is melodrama?’

‘No.’ This time he got the edge on the contempt about right. ‘It’s too fucking pitiful even for that. It’s wildlife. You’re like some lame old wolf that can’t keep up with the pack any more, has to hang around on the fringes and hope it can grab some meat no one else wants. I can’t believe you fucking quit the Corps, man. I can’t fucking believe it.’

‘Yeah, well you weren’t fucking there,’ I snapped.

‘Yeah, because if I had been, it never would have happened. You think I would have let it all go down the drain like that? Just fucking walked away, like Dad did?’

‘Hey, fuck you!’

‘You left them just the same, you fuck. You walked out on the Corps and you walked out of their lives.’

‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. They needed me in their lives like a fucking webjelly in a swimming pool. I was a criminal.’

‘That’s right, you were. What do you want, a fucking medal for it?’

‘Oh what would you have done? You’re an ex-Envoy. You know what that means? Barred from holding public office, military rank or any corporate post above menial level. No access to legal credit facilities. You’re so fucking smart, what would you have done with that hand?’

‘I wouldn’t have quit in the first place.’

‘You weren’t fucking there.’

‘Oh, okay. What would I have done as an ex-Envoy? I don’t know. But what I do fucking know is that I wouldn’t have ended up like you after nearly two hundred years. Alone, broke and dependent on Radul Segesvar and a bunch of fucking surfers. You know I tracked you to Rad before you got here yourself. Did you know that?’

‘Of course I did.’

He stumbled for a moment. Not much Envoy poise in his voice, he was too angry.

‘Yeah, and did you know we’ve plotted just about every move you’ve made since Tekitomura? Did you know I set up the ambush at Rila?’

‘Yes, that bit seemed to go especially well.’

A new increment of rage twisted his face. ‘It didn’t fucking matter, because we had Rad anyway. We were covered from the start. Why do you think you got away so fucking easily?’

‘Uh, because the orbitals shot down your swoopcopter, and the rest of you were too fucking incompetent to track us into the Northern arm perhaps?’

‘Fuck you. You think we looked hard for you? We knew where you were going, man, right from the start. We’ve been on you right from the fucking start.’

Enough. It was a hard pellet of decision in the centre of my chest, and it drove me forward, hands raised.

‘Well then,’ I said softly. ‘All you’ve got to do now is finish it. Think you can manage that all on your own?’

There was a long moment when we stared at each other, and the inevitability of the fight dripped down behind our eyes. Then he rushed me.

Shattering blows to throat and groin, unwrapping from a tightly gathered line of attack that drove me back a full two metres before I could contain it. I turned the groin strike on a sweeping block downward with one arm and dropped low enough to take the throat chop on the forehead. My own counter exploded at the same time, directly up and into the base of his chest. He staggered, tried to hook my arm with a favourite aikido move I recognised so well that I nearly laughed. I broke free of it and stabbed at his eyes with stiffened fingers. He swept a tight, graceful circle out of reach and unleashed a side kick into my ribs. It was too high, and it wasn’t fast enough. I grabbed the foot and twisted savagely. He rolled with it, took the fall and kicked for my head with his other foot as momentum rolled him through the air. His instep cracked me across the face - I was already backing off, rapidly to avoid the full force of the kick. I lost my hold on his foot and my vision flew briefly apart. I staggered back against the grav sled as he hit the ground. It bobbed on its fields and held me up. I shook my head to get the airy lightness out of it.

It wasn’t quite as savage as it should have been. We were both tired and relying inevitably on the conditioned systems in the sleeves we wore. We were both making mistakes that under other circumstances might have been lethal. And, perhaps, we were neither of us really sure what we were doing here in the quiet, mist-tinged unreality of the empty dock.

The aspirants believe . . .

Sylvie’s voice, brooding in the capacity vault.

Everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it.

That’s comforting, isn’t it.

I spat and drew breath. Got off the curve of the grav sled cover. If you let it be.

Across the dock, he climbed back to his feet. I got in fast, while he was still recovering, summoned everything I had left. He saw it coming and twisted to meet me. Kick turned off a raised and crooked leg, fists brushed aside on a pivoting double handed block across his head and chest. I lunged past on deflected momentum and he followed me round, elbow hooking into the back of my head. I went down before he could do more damage, rolled and flailed in an attempt to knock his feet out from under him. He danced aside, took the time to snarl a grin, and came back in, stamping.

For the second time that morning, my time sense dissolved. Combat conditioning and the jacked-up Eishundo nervous system slowed everything to a crawl, blurry motion scrawled around the approaching strike and behind it the bared teeth of his grin.

Stop laughing, you fuck.

Segesvar’s face, long decades of bitterness contorting to rage and then despair as my taunts sheared through the armour of illusions he’d built up for himself over a lifetime of violence.

Murakami, fistful of bloody excised stacks, shrugging back at me like a mirror.

Mother, and the dream and—

—and he stamps with a booted foot on her stomach, she convulses and rolls on her side, the bowl goes over and soapy water laps out towards me—

—tidal rage, rising—

—I’m older with every passing second, soon I’ll be old enough and I’ll reach the door—

—I’ll kill him with my bare hands, there are weapons in my hands, my hands are weapons—

—a shadow play—

His foot came down. It seemed to take forever. I rolled at the last moment, into him. Committed, he had nowhere to go. The blow landed on my upturned shoulder and unbalanced him. I kept rolling and he stumbled. Luck put one of his heels against something lying on the dock. Sylvie’s motionless form. He toppled backwards over her.

I came upright, hurdled Sylvie’s body and this time I caught him before he could regain his feet. I put a brutal kick into the side of his head. Blood jumped in the air as his scalp tore. Another, before he could roll. His mouth tore, and spilt more blood. He slumped, propped himself groggily up and I landed hard on his right arm and chest with all my weight. He grunted and I thought I felt the arm snap. I lashed down with open palm to his temple. His head rolled, his eyes fluttered. I drew up for the chop to the throat that would crush his larynx.

—a shadow play—

Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand.

It’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.

I stared down at him. He was barely moving, he’d be easy to kill.

I stared at him.

Self hatred—

Shadow play—

Mother—

Out of nowhere, an image of hanging beneath the Martian eyrie at Tekitomura from a grip welded shut. Paralysed and suspended. I saw my hand clamped on the cable, holding me up. Keeping me alive.

Locking me in place.

I saw myself unhinge the grip, one numbed finger at a time, and move.

I got up.

I got off him and stepped back. Stood staring, trying to work out what I’d just done. He blinked up at me.

‘You know,’ I said, and my voice jammed rustily. I had to start again, quietly, wearily. ‘You know, fuck you. You weren’t at Innenin, you weren’t on Loyko, you weren’t at Sanction IV or Hun Home. You’ve never even been to Earth. What the fuck do you know?’

He spat out blood. Sat up and wiped his smashed mouth. I laughed mirthlessly and shook my head.

‘You know what, let’s see you do it better. Think you can sidestep all my fuck-ups? Go on then. Fucking try.’ I moved aside and waved at the moored ranks of skimmers by the dock. ‘Got to be a few of those that weren’t shot up all that badly. Choose your own ride out of here. No one’s going to be looking for you, get moving while you’re ahead.’

He picked himself up a fraction at a time. His eyes never left mine, his hands trembled with tension, floating at guard. Maybe I hadn’t broke his arm after all. I laughed again, and it felt better this time.

‘I mean it. Let’s see you steer my fucking life better than I have. Let’s see you not end up like I have. Go on.’

He stepped past me, still wary, face grim.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how I could do much worse.’

‘Then fucking go. Get the fuck out of here.’ I grabbed at the fresh anger, the urge to knock him down again and finish it. I cranked it back down. It took surprisingly little effort. My voice came out even again. ‘Don’t fucking stand here bitching to me about it, let’s see you do better.’

He gave me one more guarded look, and then he walked away, to the edge of the dock and towards the less damaged skimmers.

I watched him go.

A dozen metres away, he paused and turned back. I thought he started to lift one hand.

And a liquid gout of blasterfire splashed out from across the dock. It caught him in the head and chest and torched away everything in its path. He stood for a moment, gone from the chest up, and then the smoking ruins of his body collapsed sideways, over the edge of the dock, bounced off the nose carapace of the nearest skimmer and slid into the water with a flat splash.

Something tiny stabbed up under my ribs. A small noise came seeping up through me and I locked it down behind my teeth. I spun, weaponless in the direction the blast had come from.

Jadwiga stepped out of a doorway in the baling station. From somewhere she’d got hold of Murakami’s plasmafrag rifle, or one very like it. She held it propped upright on her hip. The heat haze still shimmered around the muzzle.

‘I take it you’ve not got a problem with that,’ she called across the breeze and the dead quiet between us.

I closed my eyes and stood there, just breathing.

It didn’t help.

EPILOGUE

From the deck of Haiduci’s Daughter, the coastline of Kossuth fades to a low charcoal line astern. Tall, ugly clouds are still just visible further south where the storm blunders about the western end of the Expanse, losing force in the shallow waters and dying. The forecasts are for calm seas and sunshine all the way north. Japaridze reckons he could get us to Tekitomura in record time, and he’d happily do it for the money we’ve paid him. But a sudden sprint north from an ageing freight hoverloader would probably just get us noticed, and that’s not what we need right now. The slow, commonplace commercial rhythm of the stopping route up the western coast of the Saffron Archipelago makes a far better cover. And timing is the key.

Somewhere, I know, there’s an investigation ripping through the corridors of power in Millsport. The Envoy ops auditors have been needlecast in and are picking over the scant debris of Murakami’s covert operation. But like the fading storm on the Expanse, it isn’t going to touch us. We’ve got time, if we’re lucky all the time we need. The Qualgrist virus is creeping steadily through the global population and the threat it poses will drive the Harlan family out of their aristo flesh and back into the datastacks with their ancestors. The power vacuum their withdrawal creates at the centre of things will suck the rest of the First Families oligarchy into a political maelstrom that they’ll handle badly, and then things will begin to fall apart. The yakuza, the haiduci and the Protectorate will circle like bottlebacks around a weakened elephant ray, waiting for outcome and watching each other. But they won’t move yet, any of them.

That’s what Quellcrist Falconer believes, and though sometimes it sounds a little too slick, like Soseki Koi’s march-of-history rhetoric, I’m inclined to agree with her. I’ve seen this process on other worlds, in some places I’ve worked to bring it about, and there’s the ring of truth to her projections. Plus she was there for the Unsettlement and that makes her a bigger expert on political change on Harlan’s World than any of us.

It’s strange, being around her. Bad enough that you know you’re talking to a centuries-old historical legend - that knowledge is a fluctuating thing, sometimes vague, sometimes eerily immediate. But beyond it, there’s the increasing fluidity with which she comes and goes, switching places with Sylvie Oshima the way Japaridze changes watch on the bridge with his first officer. Sometimes you’ll see it happen, and it’s like a flash of static across her face - then she blinks it away and you’re dealing with a different woman. At other times, I have moments when I’m not sure which of them I’m talking to. I have to watch the way the face moves, listen to the cadences of the voice again.

I wonder if, in the decades to come, this slippery new kind of identity is going to become a common human reality. From what Sylvie tells me when she’s up, there’s no reason why not. The potential in the deCom systems is almost unlimited. It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.

I try not to think too much about Segesvar and the others. Especially the other Kovacs. Slowly, I’m talking to Jad again because in the end I can’t blame her for what she did. And Virginia Vidaura, the night we pulled out of Newpest harbour aboard Haiduci’s Daughter, gave me an object lesson in learning to let these things go. We fucked, gently, careful of her slowly healing face, and then she wept and talked to me about Jack Soul Brasil all night. I listened and soaked it up, the way she trained me a century ago. And in the morning, she took my waking erection in her hand, pumped it and mouthed it and slid it inside herself and we fucked again, and then got up to face the day. She hasn’t mentioned Brasil since, and when I did, inadvertently, she blinked and smiled, and the tears never made it out of her eyes onto her face.

We are all learning to put these things away, to live with our losses and to worry instead about something we can change.

Oishii Eminescu once told me there was no point in toppling the First Families because it would only bring the Protectorate and the Envoys down on Harlan’s World. He thought Quellism would have failed if the Envoys had existed during the Unsettlement. I think he was probably right, and even Quell herself has a hard time arguing it any other way, though when the sun is going down over a burnished evening ocean and we sit on deck with tumblers of whisky, she likes to try.

It doesn’t really matter. Because down in the capacity vault, stretching minutes into months, Sylvie and Quell are learning to talk to the orbitals. By the time we get to Tekitomura, Sylvie at least thinks they’ll have it down. And from there she thinks they can teach the same trick to Oishii and maybe some other like-minded deComs.

And then we’ll be ready.

The mood aboard Haiduci’s Daughter is quiet and grim, but there’s an undercurrent of hope to it whose unfamiliar edges I’m still feeling my way around. It isn’t going to be glorious, it isn’t going to be bloodless. But I’m beginning to think it can be done. I think, given the circumstances and a little angelfire, we may be able to bring down the First Families, chase out the yakuza and the haiduci or at least bring them to heel. I think we may be able to warn off the Protectorate and the Envoys, and then, if there’s anything left, we’ll maybe give Quell’s demodynamic nanotech a shot.

And I can’t help believing - hoping, maybe - that an orbital platform that can reach down and wipe out at one and the same time a hoverloader full of people and the minute bindings on two individual humans’ hands, that can destroy and record at the same time, that can decant whole minds back into datasystems on the ground - I can’t help believing that the same system may be able some day to look down at the fringes of the Nurimono Ocean and find a pair of decades-abandoned weed-grown cortical stacks.

And bring back to life what they hold.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of this book I just went ahead and made up. In the few places where that wasn’t possible, I’m indebted to the following people for their help:

Dave Clare provided invaluable climbing advice and expertise, both on the page and on the rock. Kem Nunn’s excellent novel Tapping the Source and Jay Caselberg’s emails both offered valuable insight into the world of surfing. And Bernard at Diving Fornells taught me to exist safely underwater. Anything I got wrong was me, not them.

Special thanks also to Simon Spanton and Carolyn Whitaker, who waited with endless patience, and never even hinted at deadlines.

Market Forces

RICHARD MORGAN

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

FILE#1: - Initial Investment

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FILE#2: - Account Adjustment

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

FILE#3: - Foreign Aid

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

FILE#4: - Capital Volatility

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

FILE#5: - Final Audit

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Acknowledgements

BOOKS CONSULTED

Market Forces is dedicated, with love, to my earliest fan, my sister Caroline - because she’s waited long enough.

It’s also dedicated to all those, globally, whose lives have been wrecked or snuffed out by the Great Neoliberal Dream and Slash-and-Burn Globalisation.

I know - that the cannibals wear smart suits and ties
And I know - they arm-wrestle on the altar
And I say - don’t leave your heart in a hard place

Midnight Oil - Sometimes

If (I asked) the commercial banks, the official creditors, the Bank, the IMF, the TNCs, the money managers and the global elites were happy, who were we to complain?

Susan George - The Lugano Report

PROLOGUE

Checkout.

The shiny black plastic swipes through.

Nothing.

The machine fails in its habitual insectile chittering and the screen blinks, as if outraged at what it has been fed. The checkout girl looks up at the woman who has handed her the card and smiles a little too widely. It’s a smile that contains as much genuine emotion as there is fruit juice in a carton of Five Fruit D-Lish.

‘Are you sure you want to use this card?’

Up to her arms in bagged shopping, the woman sets down the two-year-old she has been propping against the checkout flange and looks back to where her husband is still unloading the last of the brightly coloured tins and bags from the trolley.

‘Martin?’

‘Yeah, what?’ Voice irritable with the household task they’ve just completed.

‘The card doesn’t . . .’

‘Doesn’t what?’ He meets her eyes and reads the distress there, then switches to the checkout girl. His voice comes out tight. ‘Run it again, please. Must have glitched.’

The girl shrugs and swipes the card a second time. The screen flickers with the same disdain.

TRANSACTION DENIED.

The girl takes the card and hands it back to the woman. A small pocket of quiet expands around the action, bubbling out past the conveyor belt to the boy at the next checkout unit and to the three customers waiting behind Martin. In a few more seconds it will dissolve into the slither of whispering.

‘Would you like to try another card.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ snaps Martin. ‘That account had funds as of the first of the month. I’ve just been paid.’

‘I can run the card a third time,’ offers the girl with studied indifference.

‘No.’ The woman’s knuckles have gone white around the small piece of black plastic. ‘Martin, try the Intex.’

‘Helen, there’s money in that acc—’

‘Some problem?’ asks the man behind him, tapping his own plastic significantly against the pile of shopping he has assembled so close to the Next Customer divider that it’s in danger of tumbling over into Martin’s space.

Martin’s mouth shuts like a trap.

‘No problem.’

He hands over the blue flecked Intex card and watches at least as intently as the people behind him as the checkout girl swipes it.

The machine chews it over for a couple of moments,

And spits it out.

The girl hands it back and shakes her head. Her smooth, plastic politeness is beginning to degrade.

‘Card’s blocked,’ she says dismissively. ‘Terminal audit.’

‘What?’

‘Terminal audit. I’m going to have to ask you to put those purchases back on the far side of the counter and leave the store.’

‘Run the card again.’

The girl sighed. ‘I don’t have to run the card again, sir. I have all the information I need right here. Your rating is invalidated.’

‘Martin,’ Helen presses forward at his side. ‘Leave it, we’ll come back when it’s cleared u—’

‘No, goddamn it.’ Martin shrugs her off and leans over the counter, into the checkout girl’s face. ‘There is money in that account. Now swipe the card again.’

‘Better do as she says,’ says the pushy customer behind him.

Martin swings on him, tensed.

‘This got something to do with you?’

‘I am waiting.’

‘Well, wait some fucking more.’ He snaps his fingers in the man’s face, dismissing him, and the pushy customer flinches back. Martin turns back to the checkout girl. ‘Now, you—’

The prod hits him in the side like a rude elbow. A heartbeat later the charge shocks him off the counter and into a seemingly immense clear space. He hits the floor, smelling burnt fabric.

He hears Helen shriek. Sees confusedly from floor level. Boots in front of him and a voice that sounds like tearing cardboard at a great height.

‘I think you’d better leave the store, sir.’

The security guard hauls him to his feet and props him against the counter again. A big man, swelling at the waist but watchful and hard around the eyes. He’s been doing this for a long time, probably cut his teeth on cordoned zone clubs before he got this gig. He’s shocked men before and Martin is out of office clothes at four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, casual in faded jeans and a well-worn crew-neck pullover that doesn’t show what it was once worth. The security guard thinks he has the measure of this one. He doesn’t know, can’t know.

Martin comes off the counter.

The palm heel strike smashes the guard’s nose flat. The knee goes in at groin level. As the guard falls, Martin drives into the base of his skull with one clenched fist.

The guard hits the ground a dead weight.

‘Stand where you are!’

Martin reels around and comes face to face with the guard’s smaller, female partner just as she clears a pistol from her holster. Still scrambled from the cattle prod, he lurches the wrong way, towards her, and the guard blows his brains out all over his wife and son and the checkout and the checkout girl and all the shiny packaged items on the belt that they can no longer afford.

FILE#1:

Initial Investment

CHAPTER ONE

Awake.

Jackknifed there in sweat.

Fragments of the dream still pinning his breath in his throat and his face into the pillow, mind reeling in the darkened room . . .

Reality settled over him like a fresh sheet. He was home.

He heaved a shuddering sigh and groped for the glass of water beside the bed. In the dream he’d been falling to, and then through, the tiles of the supermarket floor.

On the other side of the bed Carla stirred and laid a hand on him.

‘Chris?’

‘ ’sokay. Dream.’ He gulped from the glass. ‘Bad dream, s’all.’

‘Murcheson again?’

He paused, peculiarly unwilling to correct her assumption. He didn’t dream about Murcheson’s screaming death much any more. He shivered a little. Carla sighed and pulled herself closer to him. She took his hand and pressed it onto one full breast.

‘My father would just love this. Deep stirrings of conscience.

He’s always said you haven’t got one.’

‘Right.’ Chris lifted the alarm clock and focused on it. Three-twenty. Just perfect. He knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep for a while. Just fucking perfect. He flopped back, immobile. ‘Your father has convenient amnesia when it comes to clearing the rent.’

‘Money talks. Why’d you think I married you?’

He rolled his head and butted her gently on the nose. ‘Are you taking the piss out of me?’

For answer she reached down for his prick and rolled it through her fingers.

‘No. I’m winding you up,’ she whispered.

As they drew together he felt the hot gust of desire for her blowing out the dream, but he was slow to harden under her hand. It was only in the final throes of climax that he finally let go.

Falling.

It was raining when the alarm sounded. Soft hiss outside the open window like an untuned TV at very low volume. He snapped off the bleeper, lay listening to the rain for a few moments and then slid out of the bed without waking Carla.

In the kitchen he set up the coffee machine, ducked into the shower and got out in time to steam milk for Carla’s cappuccino. He delivered it to her bedside, kissed her awake and pointed it out. She’d probably drift off to sleep again and drink it cold when she finally got up. He lifted clothes from the wardrobe - plain white shirt, one of the dark Italian suits, the Argentine leather shoes. He took them downstairs.

Dressed but untied, he carried his own double espresso into the living room with a slice of toast to watch the seven o’clock bulletins. There was, as usual, a lot of detailed foreign commentary and it was time to go before the Promotions & Appointments spot rolled around. He shrugged, killed the TV and only remembered to knot his tie when he caught himself in the hall mirror. Carla was just making waking noises as he slipped out of the front door and disabled the alarms on the Saab.

He stood in the light rain for a long moment, looking at the car. Soft beads of water glistening on the cold grey metal. Finally, he grinned.

‘Conflict Investment, here we come,’ he muttered, and got in.

He got the bulletins on the radio. They started Promotions & Appointments as he hit the Elsenham junction ramp. Liz Linshaw’s husky tones, just a touch of the cordoned zones to roughen up the otherwise cultured voice. On TV she dressed like a cross between a government arbitrator and a catered-party exotic dancer, and in the last two years she had graced the pages of every men’s lifestyle magazine on the rack. The discerning exec’s wet dream, and by popular acclaim the AM ratings queen of the nation.

‘—very few challenges on the roads this week,’ she told him huskily. ‘The Congo bid play-off we’ve all been waiting on is postponed till next week. You can blame the weather forecasts for that, though it looks from my window as if those guys have blown it again. There’s less rain coming down than we had for Saunders/ Nakamura. Still nothing on the no-name orbital call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates. Don’t know where you’ve got to Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you. And so to new appointments this week - Jeremy Tealby makes partner at Collister Maclean; I think we’ve all seen that coming for a long time now; and Carol Dexter upgrades to senior market overseer for Mariner Sketch, following her spectacular performance last week against Roger Inglis. Now back to Shorn again for word of a strong newcomer in the Conflict Investment division—’

Chris’s eyes flickered from the road to the radio. He touched up the volume a notch.

‘—Christopher Faulkner, headhunted from investment giants Hammett McColl where he’s already made a name for himself in Emerging Markets. Regular Prom & App followers may recall Chris’s remarkable string of successes at Hammett McColl, commencing with the swift elimination of rival Edward Quain, an exec some twenty years his senior at the time. Vindication of the move came rapidly when—’ Excitement ran an abrupt slice into her voice, ‘Oh, and this just in from our helicopter team. The no-name call out on Mike Bryant has broken, with two of the challengers down past junction twenty-two and the third signalling a withdrawal. Bryant’s vehicle has apparently sustained minimal damage and he’s on his way in now. We’ll have in-depth coverage and an exclusive interview for the lunchtime edition. Looks like the start of a good week for Shorn Associates then, and I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for this morning, so back to the Current Affairs desk. Paul.’

‘Thank you, Liz. First up, the falling rates of production in the manufacturing sector threaten a further ten thousand jobs across the NAFTA territories, according to an analysis by the Glasgow-based Independent News Group. A Trade and Finance Commission spokesman has called the report ‘‘subversively negative’’. More on the—’

Chris tuned it out, vaguely annoyed that Bryant’s no-name scuffle had knocked his name off Liz Linshaw’s crimson lips. The rain had stopped and his wipers were beginning to squeak. He switched them off and shot a glance at the dashboard clock. He was still running early.

The proximity alarm chimed.

He caught the accelerating shape in the otherwise deserted rearview and slewed reflexively right. Into the next lane, brake back. As the other vehicle drew level, he relaxed. The car was battered and primer-painted in mottled tan, custom-built like his own but not by anyone who had any clue about road-raging. Heavy steel barbs welded onto the front fenders, bulky external armouring folded around the front wheels and jutting back to the doors. The rear wheels were broad-tyred to provide some manoeuvring stability but it was still clear from the way the car moved that it was carrying far too much weight.

No-namer.

Like fifteen-year-old cordoned zone thugs, they were often the most dangerous because they had the most to prove, the least to lose. The other driver was hidden behind a slat-protected side window, but Chris could see movement. He thought he made out the glimmer of a pale face. Along the car’s flank was flashed the driver number in luminous yellow paint. He sighed and reached for the comset.

‘Driver Control,’ said an anonymous male voice.

‘This is Chris Faulkner of Shorn Associates, driver clearance 260B354R, inbound on M11 past junction ten. I have a possible no-name challenger number X23657.’

‘Checking. A moment please.’

Chris began to build his speed, gradually so that the no-namer would soak up the acceleration without tripping into fight mode. By the time the controller came back on, they were pacing each other at about one hundred and forty kilometres an hour.

‘That’s confirmed, Faulkner. Your challenger is Simon Fletcher, freelance legal analyst.’

Chris grunted. Unemployed lawyer.

‘Challenge filed at 8.04. There’s a bulk transporter in the slow lane passing junction eight, automated. Heavy load. Otherwise no traffic. You are cleared to proceed.’

Chris floored it.

He made a full car length and slewed back in front of the other vehicle, forcing Fletcher to a split-second decision. Ram or brake. The tan car dropped away and Chris smiled a little. The brake reflex was instinctive. You had to have a whole different set of responses drilled into you before you could switch it off. After all, Fletcher should have wanted to ram him. It was a standard duel tactic. Instead, his instincts had got the better of him.

This isn’t going to last long.

The lawyer accelerated again, closing. Chris let him get within about three feet of his rear fender, then hauled out and braked. The other car shot ahead and Chris tucked in behind.

Junction eight flashed past. Inside the London orbital now, almost into the zones. Chris calculated the distance to the underpass, nudged forward and tapped at Fletcher’s rear. The lawyer shot away from the contact. Chris checked his speed display and upped it. Another tap. Another forward flinch. The automated haulage transport appeared like a monstrous metal caterpillar, ballooned in the slow lane and then dropped behind just as rapidly. The underpass came into sight. Concrete yellowed with age, stained with faded graffiti that pre-dated the five-metre exclusion fencing. The fence stuck up over the parapet, topped with springy rolls of razor wire. Chris had heard it carried killing voltage.

He gave Fletcher another shove and then slowed to let him dive into the tunnel like a spooked rabbit. A couple of seconds of gentle braking, then accelerate again and in after him.

Shutdown time.

Beneath the weight of the tunnel’s roof, things were different. Yellow lights above, two tip-to-tail rows of them like tracer fire along the ceiling. Ghostly white ‘emergency exit’ signs at intervals along the walls. No breakdown lane, just a scuffed and broken line to mark the edge of the metalled road and a thin concrete path for maintenance workers. A sudden first-person-viewpoint arcade game. Enhanced sense of speed, fear of wall impact and dark.

Chris found Fletcher and closed. The lawyer was rattled - telegraphed clear in the jerky way the car was handling. Chris took a wide swing out into the other lanes so that he’d disappear from Fletcher’s rearview mirror and matched velocities dead level. One hundred and forty on the speedo again - both cars were running dead level and the underpass was only five miles long. Make it quick. Chris closed the gap between the two cars by a yard, flicked on his interior light and, leaning across to the passenger side window, raised one hand in stiff farewell. With the light on, Fletcher couldn’t fail to see it. He held the pose for a long moment, then snapped the hand into a closed fist with the thumb pointing down. At the same time, he slewed the car one-handed across the intervening lane.

The results were gratifying.

Fletcher must have been watching the farewell gesture, not the road ahead and he forgot where he was. He jerked his car aside, pulled too far and broadsided the wall in a shower of sparks. The primer-painted car staggered drunkenly, raked fire off the concrete once more and bounced away in Chris’s wake, tyres shrieking. Chris watched in the mirror as the lawyer braked his vehicle to a sprawling halt, sideways across two lanes. He grinned and slowed to about fifty, waiting to see if Fletcher would pick up the challenge again. The other car showed no sign of restarting. It was still stationary when he hit the upward incline at the far end of the underpass and lost sight of it.

‘Wise man,’ he murmured to himself.

He emerged from the tunnel into an unexpected patch of sunlight. The road vaulted, climbing onto a long raised curve that swept in over the expanses of zoneland and angled towards the cluster of towers at the heart of the city. Sunlight struck down in selective rays. The towers gleamed.

Chris accelerated into the curve.

CHAPTER TWO

The light in the washroom was subdued, filtering down from high windows set in the sloping roof. Chris rinsed his hands in the onyx basin and stared at himself in the big circular mirror. The Saab-grey eyes that looked back at him were clear and steady. The bar-code tattoos over his cheekbones picked up the colour and mixed it with threads of lighter blue. Lower still, the blue repeated in the weave of his suit and on one of the twisted lines in his Susana Ingram tie. The shirt shone white against his tan and, when he grinned, the silver tooth caught the light in the room like an audible chime.

Good enough.

The sound of splashing water ran on after he killed the tap. He glanced sideways to see another man washing his hands two basins down. The new arrival was big, the length of limb and bulk of trunk habitually used to model suits, and with long fair hair tied back in a ponytail. An Armani-suited Viking. Chris almost looked for a double-bladed battle axe resting against the basin at the man’s side.

Instead, one of the hands emerged from the basin and he saw, with a sudden, visceral shock, that it was liberally stained with blood. The other man looked up and met his gaze.

‘Something I can help you with?’

Chris shook his head and turned to the hand-dryer on the wall. Behind him, he heard the water stop in the basin and the other man joined him at the dryer. Chris acknowledged the arrival and gave a little space, rubbing away the last traces of moisture on his hands. The dryer ran on. The other man was looking at him closely.

‘Hey, you must be the new guy.’

He snapped his fingers wetly. There was still some blood on them, Chris saw, tiny flecks and some in the lines of his palm.

‘Chris something, right?’

‘Faulkner.’

‘Yeah, Faulkner, that’s it.’ He put his hands under the flow of air. ‘Just come in from Hammett McColl?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m Mike Bryant.’ A hand offered sideways. Chris hesitated briefly, eyeing the blood. Bryant picked up on it. ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was just in a no-namer, and Shorn policy is you’ve got to recover their plastic as proof of the kill. It can get messy.’

‘Had a no-namer myself this morning,’ said Chris reflexively.

‘Yeah? Where was that?’

‘M11, around junction eight.’

‘The underpass. You take him down in there?’

Chris nodded, deciding on the spur of the moment not to mention the inconclusive nature of the engagement.

‘Nice. I mean, no-namers don’t get you anywhere much, but it’s all rep, I guess.’

‘I guess.’

‘You’re up for Conflict Investment, aren’t you? Louise Hewitt’s section. I’m up there on the fifty-third myself. She was batting your résumé about a few weeks back. That stuff you did at Hammett McColl way back was some serious shit. Welcome aboard.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll walk you up there if you like. Going that way myself.’

‘Great.’

They stepped out into the broad curve of the corridor and a glass-wall view of the financial district from twenty floors up. Bryant seemed to drink it in for a moment before he turned up the corridor, still scratching at a persistent speck of blood on his hand.

‘They give you a car yet?’

‘Got my own. Customised. My wife’s a mechanic.’

Bryant stopped and looked at him. ‘No shit?’

‘No shit.’ Chris held up his left hand, the dull metal band on the ring finger. Bryant examined it with interest.

‘What’s that, steel?’ He caught on and grinned suddenly. ‘Out of an engine, right? I’ve read about this stuff.’

‘Titanium. Got it off an old Saab venting chamber. Had to resize it, but apart from that—’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The other man’s enthusiasm was almost child-like. ‘Did you do it over an engine block, like that guy in Milan last year?’ The finger snap again. ‘What was his name, Bonocello or something?’

‘Bonicelli. Yeah, like that, pretty much.’ Chris tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice. His engine-block altar marriage pre-dated the Italian driver’s by some five years, but had gone almost unnoticed in the driving press. Bonicelli’s ran for weeks, in full colour. Maybe something to do with the fact that Silvio Bonicelli was the hellraising younger son of a big Florentine driving family, maybe just that he had married not a mechanic but an ex-porn star and blossoming manufactured pop singer. Maybe also the fact Chris and Carla had done it with a minimum of fuss in the backyard at Mel’s AutoFix, and Silvio Bonicelli had invited the crowned heads of corporate Europe to a ceremony on a cleared shop floor at the new Lancia works in Milan. That was the trick with the twenty-first century’s corporate nobility. Family contacts.

‘Marry your mechanic.’ Bryant was grinning again. ‘Man, I can see where that would be useful, but I’ve got to tell you, I admire your courage.’

‘It wasn’t really a courage thing,’ said Chris mildly. ‘I was in love. You married?’

‘Yeah.’ He saw Chris looking at his ring. ‘Oh. Platinum. Suki’s a bond trader for Costerman’s. Mostly works from home these days, and she’s probably going to quit if we have another kid.’

‘You got kids?’

‘Yeah, just the one. Ariana.’ They reached the end of the corridor and a battery of lifts. Bryant dug in his jacket pocket while they waited and produced a wallet. He flipped it open to reveal an impressive rack of credit cards and a photo of an attractive auburn-haired woman holding a pixie-faced child. ‘Look. We took that on her birthday. She was one. Nearly a year ago already. They grow up fast. You got kids?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Well, all I can tell you is don’t wait too long.’ Bryant flipped the wallet closed as the lift arrived and they rode up in companionable silence. The lift announced each floor in a chatty tone and gave them brief outlines of current Shorn development projects. After a while Chris spoke, more to drown out the earnest synthetic voice than anything else.

‘This place have its own combat classes?’

‘What, hand to hand?’ Bryant grinned. ‘Look at that number, Chris. Forty-one. Up here, you don’t go hand-to-hand for promotion. Louise Hewitt’d consider that the height of bad taste.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Yeah, but you never know. Saved my life once.’

‘Hey, I’m kidding.’ Bryant patted him on the arm. ‘They’ve got a couple of corporate instructors down in the gym, sure. Shotokan and Tae kwon do, I think. I do some Shotokan myself sometimes, just to stay in shape, plus you never know when you might wind up in the cordoned zones.’ He winked. ‘Know what I mean? But anyway, like one of my instructors says, learning a martial art won’t teach you to fight. You want to learn that shit, go to the street and get in some fights. That’s how you really learn.’ A grin. ‘Least, that’s what they tell me.’

The lift bounced to a halt. ‘Fifty-third floor,’ it said brightly. ‘Conflict Investment division. Please ensure you have a code seven clearance for this level. Have a nice day.’

They stepped out into a small antechamber where a well-groomed security officer nodded to Bryant and asked Chris for ID. Chris found the bar-coded strip they’d given him at ground-floor reception and waited while it was scanned.

‘Look, Chris, I’ve got to run.’ Bryant nodded at the right hand corridor. ‘Some greasy little dictator’s uplinking in for a budget review at ten and I’m still trying to remember the name of his defence minister. You know how it is. I’ll catch you at the quarterly review on Friday. We usually go out after.’

‘Sure. See you later.’

Chris watched him out of sight with apparent casualness. Beneath was the same caution he’d applied to the no-name challenger that morning. Bryant seemed friendly enough, but almost everyone did under the right circumstances. Even Carla’s father could seem like a reasonable man in the right conversational light. And anyone who washed blood off their hands the way Mike Bryant did was not someone Chris wanted at his back.

The security guard handed back his pass and pointed to the twin doors straight ahead.

‘Conference room,’ she said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

The last time Chris had been face to face with a senior partner was to hand in his resignation at Hammett McColl. Vincent McColl had a high windowed room, panelled in dark wood and lined along one wall with books that looked a hundred years old. There were portraits of illustrious partners from the firm’s eighty-year history on the other walls, and on the desk a framed photo of his father shaking hands with Margaret Thatcher. The floor was waxed wood, overlaid with a two-hundred-year-old Turkish carpet. McColl himself had silvery hair, buttoned his slim frame into suits a generation out of date and refused to have a videophone in his office. The whole place was a shrine to hallowed tradition, an odd thing in itself for a man whose primary responsibility was a division called Emerging Markets.

Jack Notley, Shorn Associates’ ranking senior in Conflict Investment, could not have been less like McColl if he’d been on secondment from an inverted parallel universe. He was a stocky, powerful-looking man with close and not especially well-cropped black hair that was just beginning to show a seasoning of grey. His hands were ruddy and blunt fingered, his suit was a Susana Ingram original that had probably cost as much as the Saab’s whole original chassis, and the body it clothed looked fit for a boxing ring. His features were rough-hewn and there was a long jagged scar under his right eye. The eyes were keen and bright. Only the fine web of lines around them gave any indication of Notley’s forty-seven years. Chris thought he looked like a troll on holiday in Elfland as he moved across the light-filled pastel-shaded reception chamber.

His handshake, predictably, was a bonecrusher.

‘Chris. Great to have you aboard at last. Come on in. I’d like you to meet some people.’

Chris disentangled his fingers and followed the troll’s broad back across the room to where a lower central level housed a wide coffee table, a pair of right-angled sofas and a conspicuously unique meeting leader’s armchair. Seated at either end of one sofa were a man and a woman, both younger than Notley. Chris’s eyes focused automatically on the woman, a second before Notley spoke and gestured at her.

‘This is Louise Hewitt, divisional manager and executive partner. She’s the real brains behind what we’re doing here.’

Hewitt unfolded herself from the sofa and leaned across to take his hand. She was a good-looking, voluptuous woman in her late thirties, working hard at not showing it. Her suit looked Daisuke Todoroki - severe black, vented driver’s skirt to the knees and square-cut jacket. Her shoes had no appreciable heel. She wore long dark hair gathered back in a knot from pale features and minimal make-up. Her handshake wasn’t trying to prove anything.

‘And this is Philip Hamilton, junior partner for the division.’

Chris turned to face the deceptively soft-looking man at the other end of the sofa. Hamilton had a weak chin and a fat bulk that made him untidy, even in his own charcoal Ingram, but his pale blue eyes missed absolutely nothing. He stayed seated, but offered up a damp hand and a murmured greeting. There was, Chris thought, a guarded dislike in his voice.

‘Well now,’ said Notley, in jovial tones. ‘I’m not really much more than a figurehead around here so I’ll hand over to Louise for the moment. Let’s all take a seat and, would you like a drink?’

‘Green tea, if you’ve got it.’

‘Certainly. I think a pot would be in order. Jiang estate okay?’

Chris nodded, impressed. Notley walked up to the large desk near one of the windows and prodded a phone. Louise Hewitt seated herself with immaculate poise and looked across at Chris.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Faulkner,’ she said neutrally.

‘Great.’

Still neutral. ‘Not entirely, as it happens. There are one or two items I’d like to clear up, if you don’t mind.’

Chris spread his hands. ‘Go ahead. I work here now.’

‘Yes.’ The thin smile told him she hadn’t missed the counter-blow. ‘Well, perhaps we could start with your vehicle. I understand you’ve turned down the company car. Do you have something against the house of BMW?’

‘Well, I think they have a tendency to overarmour. Apart from that, no. It was a very generous offer. But I have my own vehicle and I’d rather stick with what I know, if it’s all the same to you. I’ll feel more comfortable.’

‘Customised,’ said Hamilton, as if naming a psychological dysfunction.

‘What’s that?’ Notley was back, settling predictably into the armchair. ‘Ah, your wheels, Chris. Yes, I heard you’re married to the woman who put it together. That is right, isn’t it.’

‘That’s right.’ Chris took a flickered inventory of the expressions around him. In Notley he seemed to read an avuncular tolerance, in Hamilton distaste, and in Louise Hewitt nothing at all.

‘That must give you quite a bond,’ Notley mused, almost to himself.

‘Uh, yes. Yes, it does.’

‘I’d like to talk about the Bennett incident,’ said Louise Hewitt loudly.

Chris locked gazes with her for a beat, then sighed. ‘The details are pretty much as I filed them. You must have read about it at the time. Bennett was up for the same analyst’s post as me. Fight lasted to that raised section on the M40 inflow. I swiped her off the road on a bend and she stuck on the edge. Weight of the car would have pulled her over sooner or later; she was running a reconditioned Jag Mentor.’

Notley grunted, a used-to-run-one-myself sort of noise.

‘Anyway, I stopped and managed to pull her out. The car went over a couple of minutes later. She was semi-conscious when I got her to the hospital. I think she hit her head on the steering wheel.’

‘The hospital?’ Hamilton’s voice was politely disbelieving. ‘Excuse me. You took her to the hospital?’

Chris stared at him.

‘Yeah. I took her to the hospital. Is there a problem with that?’

‘Well,’ Hamilton laughed. ‘Let’s just say people around here might have seen it that way.’

‘What if Bennett had decided to have another crack at the post?’ asked Hewitt gravely, detached counterpoint to her junior partner’s hilarity. Chris thought it rang rehearsed. He shrugged.

‘What, with cracked ribs, a broken right arm and head injuries? The way I remember it, she was in no condition to do anything but some heavy breathing.’

‘But she did recover, right?’ Hamilton asked slyly. ‘She’s still working. Still in London.’

‘Back at Hammett McColl,’ Hewitt confirmed, still detached. The jab, Chris knew, was going to come from Hamilton’s corner.

‘That why you left, Chris?’ The junior partner was right on cue, voice still tinged lightly with derision. ‘No stomach to finish the job?’

‘What I think Louise and Philip are trying to say,’ Notley interposed, the kindly uncle at a birthday-party dispute, ‘is that you didn’t resolve matters. Would that be a fair summary, Louise?’

Hewitt nodded curtly. ‘It would.’

‘I stayed at HM two years after Bennett,’ said Chris, keeping his temper. He hadn’t expected this so early. ‘She honoured her defeat as expected. The matter was resolved to my satisfaction, and to the firm’s.’

Notley made soothing gestures. ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps, then, this is more a question of corporate culture than blame. What we value here at Shorn is, how shall I put it? Well, yes. Resolution, I suppose. We don’t like loose ends. They can trip you, and us, up at a later date. As you see with the embarrassment the Bennett incident is causing us all here and now. We are left in, shall we say, an ambiguous situation. Now that couldn’t have happened had you resolved the matter in a terminal fashion. It’s the kind of ambiguity we like to avoid at Shorn Associates. It doesn’t fit our image, especially in a field as competitive as Conflict Investment. I’m sure you understand.’

Chris looked around at the three faces, counting the friends and enemies he appeared to have already made. He manufactured a smile.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes ambiguity.’

CHAPTER THREE

The gun sat, unambiguously, in the middle of the desk, begging to be picked up. Chris put his hands in his pockets and looked at it with wary dislike.

‘This mine?’

‘Heckler and Koch Nemesis Ten.’ Hewitt strode past him and filled her hand with the black rubber butt. ‘The Nemex. Semiautomatic, double action hesitation lock, no safety necessary. Just pull it out and start shooting. Standard Shorn issue. Comes with a shoulder holster, so you can wear it under a suit. You never know when you’ll have to give a coup de grâce.’

He fought down a smirk. Maybe she saw it.

‘We’ve got a way of doing things here, Faulkner. If you call someone out, you don’t take them to the hospital afterwards. You go in and you finish the job. With this if necessary.’ She pointed the pistol one-handed at the datadown unit built into the desk. There was a dry click as she pulled the trigger. ‘If you can, you bring back their plastic. Speaking of which.’ She reached inside her jacket pocket with her free hand and produced a small grey rectangle. Light flashed on the entwined red S and A of a Shorn Associates holologo. She tossed the card onto the table and laid the gun down beside it. ‘There you are. Don’t get separated from either. You never know when you’ll need firepower.’

Chris picked up the card and tapped it thoughtfully on the desktop. He left the gun where it was.

‘Clips are in the top drawer of your desk. It’s a jacketed load, should go through the engine block of a bulk transporter. You actually used to drive one of those things, didn’t you? Mobile Arbitrage or something.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris pulled out his wallet and racked the card. He looked back up at Hewitt expectantly. ‘So?’

‘No, nothing.’ Hewitt walked past him to the window and looked out at the world below. ‘I think it was an inspired idea, selling commodities from a haulage base. But it’s not quite the same thing as driving for an investment bank, is it?’

Chris smiled a little and seated himself on the corner of the desk, back to the window and his new boss.

‘You don’t like me very much, do you Hewitt?’

‘This isn’t about like, Faulkner. I don’t think you belong here.’

‘Well someone evidently does.’

He heard her coming back to the desk and turned his head casually towards her as she arrived. Behind her, he suddenly noticed how bleak the undecorated office was.

‘Well, look at that,’ she said softly. ‘Got me back here, didn’t you? Is that the kind of powerplay you’re used to? You won’t cut it here, Faulkner. I’ve seen your résumé. Big kill eight years back with Quain, nothing much since. You got lucky, that’s all.’

Chris kept his voice mild. ‘So did Hammett McColl. They saved about fifteen mil in bonus payments when Quain went down. And I haven’t needed to do much killing since. Sometimes it’s just enough to do the work. You don’t have to be proving yourself all the time.’

‘Here you do. You’ll find that out.’

‘Really.’ Chris pulled out the top drawer and looked in at the contents as if they interested him marginally more than the woman in front of him. ‘You got some toy boy lined up to call me out for this office?’

For just a moment he had her. He caught it in the way her frame stiffened at the upper edges of his peripheral vision. Then she drew a long breath, as if Chris was a new flower she liked the scent of. As he looked up, she smiled.

‘Cute,’ she said. ‘Oh, you’re cute. Notley likes you, you know that? That’s why you’re here. You remind him of him, back when he was young. He came out of nowhere just like you, riding one big kill. He had a tattoo, just like you. Stream of currency signs, like tears down from one eye. Very classy.’ Her lip curled. ‘He even dated his mechanic for about five years. Little zone girl, with a smudge of grease across her nose. They say she even turned up to a quarterly dinner once with that smudge. Yeah, Notley likes you, but you notice something about that tattoo? It’s gone now. Just like that little zone girl. See, Notley gets sentiment attacks sometimes, but he’s a professional and he won’t let it get in the way. Hold that thought, because you’re going to disappoint him, Faulkner. You don’t have the grit.’

‘Welcome aboard.’

Hewitt looked at him blankly. Chris gestured with one open hand.

‘I thought one of us should say it.’

‘Hey.’ She shrugged and turned to leave. ‘Prove me wrong.’

Chris watched her go, face unreadable. As the door closed, his eyes fell on the matt black Nemex pistol on the desk and his own lip twisted derisively.

‘Fucking cowboys.’

He swept the gun ceremonially away with the clips and slammed the drawer closed.

There was a list of induction suggestions on the datadown: people to call, when to call them, and where they could be found. Procedures to implement, the best time to access the areas of the Shorn datastack necessary for each procedure. A selected overview of his caseload for the next two months, flags to indicate which needed attention first. The p.a. package had phased everything into a suggested convenience sequence which got the work done as efficiently as possible and told him he would find it most convenient to go home at about eight-thirty that evening.

He toyed briefly with the idea of loading up the Nemex with its jacketed ammunition and repeating Hewitt’s target practice on the datadown.

Instead, he punched the phone.

‘Carla, this is Chris. I’m going to be late tonight, so don’t wait up. There’s still some chilli in the fridge, try not to eat it all, it’ll give you the shits and I’d like some myself when I get in. Oh, by the way, I’m in love.’

He put down the receiver and looked at the datadown screen. After a long pause, he prodded the bright orange triangle marked Conflict Investment and watched as it maximised like an opening flower.

The backglow lit his face.

It was past eleven by the time he got home. He killed his lights at the first bend in the drive, though he knew that the crunch of his wheels on the gravel would probably wake Carla as surely as the play of high beams across the front of the house. Sometimes she seemed to know he was home more by intuition than anything else. He parked beside the battered and patched Land Rover she ran, turned off his engine and yawned. For a moment he sat in the still and the darkness, listening to the cooling tick of the engine.

Home for six hours’ sleep. Why the fuck did we move this far out?

But he knew the answer to that.

This place is no different to HM. Live at work, sleep at home, forget you ever had a relationship. Same shit, different logo.

Well, that’s where all the money comes from.

He let himself into the house as quietly as he could and found Carla in the lounge, watching a TV screen tuned to the soft blue light of an empty channel. Ice clicked in her glass as she lifted it to her lips.

‘You’re awake,’ he said, and then saw how far down the bottle she was. ‘You’re drunk.’

‘Isn’t that meant to be my line?’

‘Not tonight, it isn’t. I was wired to the fucking datadown until quarter to ten.’ He bent to kiss her. ‘Rough day?’

‘Not really. Same old shit.’

‘Yeah, done some of that myself.’ He sank into the chair beside her. She handed him the whisky glass just a fraction of a second before he reached out for it. ‘What you watching?’

‘Dex and Seth, ’til the jamming got it.’

He grinned. ‘You’re going to get us arrested.’

‘Not in this postcode.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He glanced across at the phone deck. ‘Did we get any this morning?’

‘Any what?’

‘Any mail?’

‘Bills. Mortgage repayment went through.’

‘Already? They just took it.’

‘No, that was last month. We’re over the line on a couple of cards as well.’

Chris drank some of the peat-flavoured Islay whisky, tutting learnedly over the sacrilege of ice in a glass of single malt. Carla gave him a murderous look. He handed her back the glass and frowned at the TV screen. ‘How’d we manage that?

‘We spent the money, Chris.’

‘Well.’ He stretched his suited legs out in front of him and yawned again. ‘That’s what we earn it for, I guess. So what same old shit did you do today?’

‘Salvage. Some arms supply company just moved into premises out on the northern verge lost a dozen of their brand new Mercedes Ramjets to vandals. Whole lot written off.’

Chris sat up. ‘A dozen? What did they do, park them in the open?’

‘No. Someone dropped a couple of homemade shrapnel bombs through a vent into their executive garages. Boom! Corrosives and fast-moving metal in all directions. Mel got a contract to assess the damage and haul every write-off away gratis. Paid to clear it, and he gets to keep whatever salvage we can strip out of the wrecks. And here’s the good bit. Some of these Mercs are barely scratched. Mel’s still out celebrating. Says if the corporates are going to insist on this urban regeneration shit, we could have a lot more work like that. He must have put a good metre of NAME powder up his nose tonight.’

‘Shrapnel bombs, huh?’

‘Yeah, ingenious what kids can wire together out of scrap these days. I don’t know, maybe Mel even set them up to do it. Connections he’s got in the zones. Jackers, drugs. Gangwit stuff.’

‘Fuckers,’ said Chris vaguely.

‘Yeah, well.’ An edge crept into Carla’s voice. ‘Amazing what you’ll get up to when you’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to do but stand at the razor wire and watch the wealth roll by.’

Chris sighed. ‘Carla, could we have this argument some other time, please? Because I haven’t rehearsed in a while.’

‘You got something else you want to do?’

‘Well, we could fuck by the light of the TV screen.’

‘We could,’ she agreed seriously. ‘Except that I always end up on top and I’ve still got carpet burns on my knees from the last time you had that bright idea. You want to fuck, you take me to a bed.’

‘Deal.’

After, as they lay like spoons in the disordered bed, Carla curled around his back and murmured into his ear.

‘By the way, I’m in love.’

‘Me too.’ He leaned back and rubbed the back of his head against her breasts. She shuddered at the touch of the close cropped hair and reached instinctively for his shrunken prick. He grinned and slapped her hand away.

‘Hoy, that’s your lot. Go to sleep, nympho.’

‘So! You just want to fuck me and leave me. Is that it?’

‘I’m,’ said Chris, already sliding headlong into sleep, ‘not going anywhere.’

‘Just use me, and then when you’ve used me you go to sleep. Talk to me, you bastard.’

A grunt.

‘You haven’t even told me how it went today.’

Carla propped herself up on one arm and prodded at the springy muscle in Chris’s stomach. ‘I’m serious. What’s Conflict Investment like?’

Chris took her arm, folded the offending finger around his own and tugged Carla back into the spoon configuration.

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward at a global level,’ he said.

‘Is that right?’

‘It’s what the Shorn datadown says.’

‘Oh, it must be true then.’

He smiled reflexively at the scorn in her voice and began to drift away again. Just before he slept, Carla thought she heard him speak again. She lifted her head.

‘What?’

He didn’t respond, and she realised he was muttering in his sleep. Carla leaned over him, straining to catch something. She gave up after a couple of minutes. The only sense she succeeded in straining out of the soup of mumbling was a single, repeated word.

checkout

It took a long time to find sleep for herself.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Conflict Investment is the way forward!’

Applause rose, and clattered at the glass roofing like the wings of pigeons startled into flight. Around the lecture theatre, men and women came to their feet, hands pumping together. The entire CI contingent of Shorn Associates were gathered in the room. The youngest, Chris noticed, were the most fervent. Faces gashed open with enthusiasm, teeth and eyes gleaming in the late afternoon sun from roof and picture window. They looked ready to go on applauding ’til their hands bled. Sown in amongst this crop of pure conviction, older colleagues clapped to a slower, more measured rhythm and nodded approval, leaning their heads together to make comments under the din of the applause. Louise Hewitt paused and leaned on the lectern, waiting for the noise to ebb.

Behind his hand, Chris yawned cavernously.

‘Yes, yes,’ Hewitt made damping motions. The room settled. ‘We’ve heard it called risky, we’ve heard it called impractical and we’ve heard it called immoral. In short, we’ve heard the same carping voices that free-market economics has had to drag with it like a ball and chain from its very inception. But we have learnt to ignore those voices. We have learnt, and we have gone on learning, piling lesson upon lesson, vision upon vision, success upon success. And what every success has taught us, and continues to teach us, again and again, is a very simple truth. Who has the finance.’ A dramatic pause, one slim black clad arm holding a clenched fist aloft. ‘Has the power.’

Chris stifled another yawn.

‘Human beings have been fighting wars as long as history recalls. It is in our nature, it is in our genes. In the last half of the last century the peacemakers, the governments of this world, did not end war. They simply managed it, and they managed it badly. They poured money, without thought of return, into conflicts and guerrilla armies abroad, and then into tortuous peace processes that more often than not left the situation no better. They were partisan, dogmatic and inefficient. Billions wasted in poorly assessed wars that no sane investor would have looked at twice. Huge, unwieldy national armies and clumsy international alliances; in short a huge public-sector drain on our economic systems. Hundreds of thousands of young men killed in parts of the world they could not even pronounce properly. Decisions based on political dogma and doctrine alone. Well, this model is no more.’

Hewitt paused again. This time there was a charged quiet that carried with it the foretaste of applause, the same way a thick heat carries with it the knowledge of the storm to come. In the closing moments of the address, Hewitt’s voice had sunk close to normal conversational tones. Her delivery slowed and grew almost musing.

‘All over the world, men and women still find causes worth killing and dying for. And who are we to argue with them? Have we lived in their circumstances? Have we felt what they feel? No. It is not our place to say if they are right or wrong. It is not for us to pass judgment or to interfere. At Shorn Conflict Investment, we are concerned with only two things. Will they win? And will it pay? As in all other spheres, Shorn will invest the capital it is entrusted with only where we are sure of a good return. We do not judge. We do not moralise. We do not waste. Instead, we assess, we invest. And we prosper. That is what it means to be a part of Shorn Conflict Investment.’

The lecture theatre erupted once more.

‘Nice speech,’ said Notley, pouring champagne into the ring of glasses with an adept arm. ‘And press coverage too, thanks to Philip here. Should profile us nicely for license review on the eighteenth.’

‘Glad you liked it.’ Hewitt lifted her filled glass away from the ring and looked round at the gathered partners. Excluding Philip Hamilton at her side, the five men and three women watching her accounted for fifty-seven per cent of Shorn Associates’ capital wealth. Each one of them could afford to acquire a private jet with less thought than she gave to shopping for shoes. Between the eight of them, there was no manufactured object on the planet that they could not own. It was wealth she could taste, just out of reach, like bacon frying in someone else’s kitchen. Wealth she wanted like sex. Wanted with a desire that ached in her gums and the pit of her stomach.

Notley finished pouring and raised his own glass. ‘Well, here’s to small wars everywhere. Long may they smoulder. And congratulations on a great quarterly result, Louise. Small wars.’

‘Small wars!’

‘Small wars.’ Hewitt echoed the toast and sipped at her drink. She surfed the polite conversation on autopilot and gradually the other partners began to drift back to the main body of the hotel bar, seeking out their own divisional acolytes. Hamilton caught her eye and she nodded almost imperceptibly. He slipped away with a murmured excuse, leaving her with Notley.

‘You know,’ she said quietly, ‘I could have done without Faulkner falling asleep in the front row. He’s too impressed with himself, Jack.’

‘Of course, you never were at his age.’

‘He’s only five years younger than me. And anyway, I’ve always had these.’ Hewitt set her glass aside on the mantelpiece and cupped her breasts as if offering them. ‘Nothing like a cleavage for reducing professional respect.’

Notley looked embarrassed and then away.

‘Oh, come on Louise. Don’t give me that tired old feminist rap agai—’

‘Being a woman around here makes you tough, Jack.’ Hewitt let her hands fall again. ‘You know that’s true. I had to claw my way up every centimetre of the way to partnership. Compared to that, Faulkner got it handed to him on a plate. One big kill, catch the imagination of App and Prom and he’s made. Just look at him. He didn’t even shave this morning.’

She gestured across the bar to where Chris appeared to be deep in conversation with a group of men and women his own age. Even at this distance, the dusting of stubble on his face was visible. As they watched, he masked another yawn with his glass.

‘Give him a break, Louise.’ Notley took her shoulder and turned her away again. ‘If he can do for us what he did for Hammett McColl, I’ll forgive him not shaving occasionally.’

‘And if he can’t?’

Notley shrugged and tipped back his champagne. ‘Then he won’t last long, will he.’

He put down the glass, patted her on the shoulder again and walked off into the press of suited bodies. Hewitt stayed where she was until Hamilton appeared noiselessly at her side.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ask.’

On the other side of the room, Chris was in fact deep in nothing other than the classic party nightmare. He was becalmed at the edges of a group he had only passing acquaintance with, listening politely to conversations he had no interest in about people and places he did not know. His jaws ached from trying not to yawn and he wanted nothing more than to bow out quietly and go home.

Five days into the new job? I don’t think so, pal.

Out of boredom he went to the bar for a refill he didn’t want. As he was waiting, someone nudged him. He glanced round. Mike Bryant, grin on full beam, with a Liz Linshaw clone in tow and a tray full of drinks in his hands.

‘Hey, Chris.’ Bryant had to raise his voice above the crowd. ‘How did you like Hewitt? Talks up a storm, doesn’t she?’

Chris nodded noncommittally. ‘Yeah, very inspiring.’

‘You’re not kidding. Really gets you in the guts. First time I heard her speak, I thought I’d been personally selected to lead a holy fucking crusade for global investment. Simeon Sands for the finance sector.’ Mike did a passable burlesque of the satellite-syndicated demagogue. ‘Hallelujah, I believe! I have faith! Seriously, you look at the productivity graphs following each quarterly address she gives. Spikes through the roof, man.’

‘Right.’

‘Hey, you want to join us? We’re sitting back on the window flange there, see. Got some of the meanest analysts in creation gathered round those tables. Isn’t that right, Liz?’

The woman at Bryant’s side chuckled. Shooting a glance at her, Chris suddenly realised this was no clone.

‘Oh, yeah, sorry. Liz Linshaw, Chris Faulkner. Chris, you know Liz, I guess. Either that or you don’t have a TV.’

‘Ms Linshaw.’ Chris stuck out his hand.

Liz Linshaw laughed and leaned forward to kiss him on both cheeks. ‘Call me Liz,’ she said. ‘I recognise you now. From the App and Prom sheets this week. You’re the one that took down Edward Quain in ’41 aren’t you.’

‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Before my time. I was just a stringer on a pirate satellite ’cast in those days. Quite a kill. I don’t think there’s been one like it in the last eight years.’

‘Stop it, you’re making me feel old.’

‘Will you two stop flirting and grab some of these drinks,’ demanded Bryant. ‘I’ve got a dozen thirsty animals back there to water. What do you want in that, Chris?’

‘Uh, Laphroaig. No ice.’

‘Yyyeurgh.’

They carried the glasses over to the tables between the three of them and unloaded. Bryant pushed and shoved at people, joking and cajoling and bullying until he had space for Chris and Liz to sit at his table. He raised his glass.

‘Small wars,’ he said. ‘Long may they smoulder.’

Approval, choral in volume.

Chris found himself squeezed in next to a tall, slim executive with steel-rimmed glasses and the air of a scientist peering down a microscope lens at everything. Chris felt a ripple of irritation. Affected eyeware had always been one of Carla’s pet hates. Fucking poverty chic, she invariably snarled when she saw the ads. Fake fucking human imperfection. It’ll be cool to ride around in a fucking wheelchair next. It’s fucking offensive. Chris tended to agree. Sure, you could run a datadown uplink projected onto the inside of the lenses, but that wasn’t it. Carla was right, it was zone chic. And why the fuck pretend you couldn’t afford corrective surgery when everything else you were wearing screamed the opposite.

‘Nick Makin,’ said the narrow face behind the lenses, extending a long arm sideways across his body. The grip belied his slender frame. ‘You ah Faulkner, ahn’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

Mike Bryant leaned across the table towards them. ‘Nick was our top commission analyst last year. Predicted that turnaround in Guatemala over the summer. Went against all the models for guerrilla conflict that we had. It was a real coup for Shorn.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Chris.

‘Ah.’ Makin waved it off. ‘That was last season. Can’t live off things like that indefinitely. It’s a whole new quarter. Time for fesh meat. Another new appoach. Speaking of which, Chris, ahn’t you the guy that let a pomotion challenger off the hook at Hammett McColl last year?’

Probably imagination, the way the whole table was suddenly listening to this sharkish young man with the carefully masked speech impediment. Probably. Chris’s eyes flickered to Bryant. The big blond was watching.

‘You heard about that, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ Makin smiled. ‘It seemed kind of. Odd, you know?’

‘Well,’ Chris made a stiff smile of his own. ‘You weren’t there.’

‘No. Lucky for Elysia Bennett that I wasn’t, I’d say. Isn’t she still awound somewhere?’

‘I assume so. You know, Nick, I tend not to worry too much about the past. Like you said, it’s a whole new quarter. Bennett was two years ago.’

‘Still.’ Makin looked around the table, apparently to enlist some support. ‘An attitude like that must make for a lot of challengahs. Shit, I’d dive against you myself just for the expewience if I thought you’d have a sentiment attack like that after the event. If I lost, that is.’

Chris realised abruptly that Makin was drunk, alcohol-fuelled aggressive and waiting. He looked at his glass on the table.

‘You would lose,’ he said quietly.

By now it wasn’t his imagination. The buzz of conversation was definitely weakening as the executives lost interest in what they were discussing and became spectators.

‘Big words.’ Makin had lost his smile. ‘Fom a man who hasn’t made a kill in nearly four years.’

Chris shrugged, one eye on Makin’s left hand where it rested on the table top. He mapped options. Reach down and pinion the arm. Snap the little finger of that hand, take it from there.

‘Actually,’ said a husky voice. ‘I think they’re quite small words from the man who took down Edward Quain.’

The focus of attention leapt away across the table. Liz Linshaw sat with one long-fingered hand propping her tousled blonde head away from the back of her seat. The other hand gestured with a cigarette.

‘Now that,’ she continued, ‘was the mother of all exemplary kills. No one ever thought Eddie Quain was coming back to work. Except maybe as lubricant.’

Somebody laughed. Nervous laughter. Someone else took it up, more certainly and the sound built around the table. Bryant joined in. The moment passed. Chris gave Makin one more hard look and then started laughing himself.

The evening spread its wings under him.

CHAPTER FIVE

An unclear space of time later, he was relieving himself in a scarred porcelain urinal that reeked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a week. Yellowed plaster walls crowded round him. Sullen, gouged graffiti ranged from brutal to incomprehensible and back.

PLAISTOW GANGWITS IN YER SOUP
YOUR RAGS SUIT THEM
FUCK OFF MARKEY CUNT
MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO BROWN
EMMA SUCKED MY PRICK HERE
U SUCKED IT USELF
ZEK TIV SHIT
BRING THE OMBUDSMEN
FUCK THE U.N.
PISS ON YOU TOO
MEAT THE RICH

It wasn’t always clear where one message ended and the other began. Either that or he was very drunk.

He was very drunk.

Bryant’s idea, as numbers in the hotel bar began thinning; carry the party over into the cordoned zones.

‘They may be shit-poor over there,’ voice blurred as he leaned across the table. ‘But they know how to have a good time. There’s a couple of places I know you can buy all sorts of interesting substances over the counter, and they’ve got floor shows you wouldn’t believe.’

Liz Linshaw wrinkled her sculpted features. ‘Sounds strictly for the boys,’ she said. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m for a cab.’

She kissed Bryant on the lips, causing a small storm of whoops and yells, and left with a sideways grin at Chris. A couple of other women excused themselves from the group in her wake and Mike’s expedition began to look in danger of fizzling out.

‘Oh, come on, you bunch of pussies,’ he slurred. ‘What are you afraid of? We’ve got guns.’ He yanked out his Nemex and brandished it. ‘We’ve got money, we’ve got this city by the balls. What the fuck kind of life is it when we own the fucking streets they walk on and the blocks they live in and we’re still fucking scared to go there? We’re supposed to be in charge of this society, not in hiding from it.’

It wasn’t speech-making of Louise Hewitt’s calibre, but Mike managed to rope in a half dozen of the younger men round the table and a couple of the harder-drinking women. Ten minutes later, Chris was in the passenger seat of Bryant’s BMW, watching the emptied streets of the financial district roll by. In the back seat sat a nameless young male executive and an older woman called Julie Pinion - macho sales talk snarled back and forth between them. In the wing mirror, the following lights of two other cars. Shorn was descending on the cordoned zones in force.

‘Okay, you two keep it down,’ said Mike over his shoulder as they turned a corner. Up ahead the lights of a zone checkpoint frosted the night sky. ‘They won’t let us through here if they think there’s going to be trouble.’

He brought the BMW to a remarkably smooth halt at the barrier and leaned out as the guard approached. He was, Chris noticed, chewing gum to mask the alcohol on his breath.

‘Just going down to the Falkland,’ Bryant called cheerfully, waving his Shorn Associates plastic. ‘Take in the late show.’

The guard was in his fifties, with a spreading paunch beneath his grey uniform and broken veins across his nose and cheeks. Chris saw the cloud of vapour he made when he sighed.

‘Have to scan that, sir.’

‘ ’course.’ Bryant handed over the card and waited while the guard ran it through his hipswipe remote and handed it back. The unit chimed melodically, and the guard nodded. He seemed tired.

‘You armed?’

Bryant turned back into the car. ‘Show the man your peacemakers, guys.’

Chris slid the Nemex out of its shoulder holster and displayed it. Behind him he heard the two backseat disputants doing the same. The guard flashed his torch in the windows and nodded slowly.

‘Want to be careful, sir,’ he told Bryant. ‘There’s been layoffs at Pattons and Greengauge this week. Lot of angry people out getting drunk tonight.’

‘Well, we’ll stay out of their way,’ said Bryant easily. ‘Don’t want any trouble. Just want to see the show.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ The guard turned back to the checkpoint cabin and gestured to whoever was inside. The barrier began to rise. ‘I’ve got to check your friends as well. You want to park just past the gate till we clear them?’

‘Be glad to.’ Mike beamed and drove the BMW through.

The second car passed muster but with the third there was some trouble. They peered back and saw the guard shaking his head while suited forms craned from the windows front and back, gesturing.

‘The fuck is going on back there?’ muttered Julie Pinion. ‘Couldn’t they even act sober for a couple of minutes.’

‘Stay here,’ Bryant said, and climbed out into the night air. They watched him walk back to the third car, lean down and say something to those leaning out. The heads disappeared back into the vehicle, as if on wires. Bryant put his hand on the guard’s shoulder and dug in his pocket. Something passed between them. The guard said something to the driver of the third car. A clearly audible whoop of delight bounced out of the windows. Bryant came back, grinning.

‘Gratuities,’ he said as he got into the car again. ‘Ought to be compulsory, the shit they pay those guys.’

‘How much did you give him?’ asked Pinion.

‘Hundred.’

‘A hundred! Jesus.’

‘Ah, come on Julie. I’ve tipped waiters better than that. And he’s going to take a lot more heat than a waiter if this dinner party goes awry.’

The little convoy pressed on into the cordoned zone.

It was an abrupt transition. In the financial district, street lighting was a flood of halogen, chasing out shadows from every corner. Here, the street lamps were isolated sentinels, spilling a scant pool of radiance at their feet every twenty metres of darkened street. In some places, they were out, lamps either fused or smashed. Elsewhere they had been destroyed more unambiguously, rendered down to jagged concrete stumps still attached to their trunks by a riot of cables and metal bands.

‘Look at that,’ said Pinion disgustedly. ‘What a bunch of fucking animals. It’s no wonder nobody wants to spend money fixing these places up. They’d just tear it all down again.’

Even the street beneath their wheels changed. Within a hundred metres of the checkpoint the ride turned bumpy and Bryant had to slow down and negotiate rain-filled potholes the size of small garden ponds. On either side, the houses huddled. Here and there, for no visible reason, one had been taken down, sprawling smashed brick and spilled interior in the space in which it had stood. There were no other vehicles on the streets, moving or parked. A few figures moved on the pavements on foot, but they grew immobile as the twilight-blue armoured saloons with their Shorn Associates logos rolled by. Most turned up their collars or simply sank back into the shadows.

‘Fucking creepy,’ said the young executive behind Chris. ‘I mean, I knew it was bad out here but—’

‘Bad,’ Julie Pinion coughed laughter at him. ‘You think this is bad? Mike, you remember the suburbs in that shithole we got seconded to for Christmas last year.’

‘Muong Khong, yeah.’ Bryant looked in the rearview. ‘Gives you a whole new perspective on what real poverty is, man. Chris, you ever been on secondment? With Emerging Markets, I mean?’

‘Couple of times, yeah.’

‘Pretty awful, huh?’

Chris remembered the call of a muezzin in the warm evening air, smells of cooking and a small child prodding three goats home-wards. Later, he’d been walking past a stone-and-thatch dwelling when a young girl of about fourteen came out and offered him fruit from their dinner table because he was a guest in the village. The unlooked-for kindness, with its hints of an antique and alien culture, had pricked tears out on the underside of his eyes.

He never told anyone.

‘It wasn’t somewhere I would have wanted to live,’ he said.

Pinion smirked. ‘No shit,’ she agreed.

The Falkland - a squat brick building at the intersection of two streets still boasting a picturesque scattering of car wrecks. The vehicles looked old enough to have burnt leaded fuel when they were alive. Mike Bryant’s little convoy swept to a disdainful halt and disgorged suits.

‘No cars,’ said the young executive, wonderingly. ‘I only just noticed.’

‘Of course, no cars,’ said Pinion, rolling her eyes in Chris’s direction. ‘Who, outside of criminals, do you suppose can afford a tank of fuel around here? Or a licence, come to that?’

‘Price of the green agenda,’ said Mike as he alarmed the car. ‘You guys coming or what?’

The door of the Falkland was beaten steel. Two black men in coveralls stood outside, one dangling a sawn-off shotgun negligently from his left hand, the other, older, watching the street, arms folded impassively across his chest. When he spotted Mike Bryant, he unwrapped and his face split into a huge grin. Mike lifted a hand in greeting as he crossed the street.

‘Hey, Troy. What’re you doing on the fucking door, man?’

‘Protectin’ my investment.’ The rich treacle of a Jamaican accent. ‘Bein’ seen. It’s more than I can say for you, Mike. ’Ave not seen you in a fuckin’ long time. What’s the matter? Suki not let you out to play any more?’

‘That’s right.’ Mike winked. ‘Chopped it off and locked it in the bedroom dresser. That way she can take it out and play with it while I’m at work. Which, by the way, is all the fucking time.’

‘That is the motherfuckin’ truth.’ He looked at the entourage Bryant had brought to the bar. ‘These are friends of yours?’

‘Yep. Julie, Chris. Meet Troy Morris. He owns this shithole. Among others. Troy, Julie Pinion, Chris Faulkner. The rest I don’t remember.’ Bryant waved back at the entourage he was trailing. ‘Just sycophants, you know how it is when you’re an important man.’

The Jamaican reeled off a deep chuckle. ‘Faulkner,’ he rumbled. ‘No relation of William, right?’

Chris blinked, confused. Before he could ask, Mike Bryant broke in again.

‘They’re all carrying, Troy. Left mine in the car, but these guys are new and they don’t know the rules. Bear with us. You got a bag for the hardware?’

With the dozen-odd pistols dumped into a greasy holdall clearly reserved for this specific purpose, they pushed inside. Quiet slammed down through the smoke-hung bar. Even the girl on the stage stopped in mid writhe, one doped boa constrictor gripped in each fist. Music thumped on behind her, suddenly unchallenged by voices. Mike nodded to himself, took a chair to the centre of the bar and climbed onto it.

‘As you may have noticed,’ he said, pitching his voice above the music. ‘We are zek-tivs. I know that may pass for a crime around here, but we don’t want any trouble. All we want is to buy a drink for everyone in the house, and have a few ourselves. Anyone who has a problem with that can come and have a word with me, or my friend Troy Morris, and we’ll sort your problem out. Otherwise, it’s open bar for the next ten minutes and the drinks are on me.’ He turned to the girl on the stage. ‘Please. The show must go on. It looks like we got here just in time.’

He climbed down and went to talk to the barman. Conversations resumed slowly. The dancer went back, a little stiffly, to what she was doing with the two boas. People drifted to the bar, a few at first, then the bulk of those present. Bryant appeared to know a couple of them. Chris was introduced, promptly forgot names and cornered Mike.

‘What did Troy mean about being related to William?’

Bryant shrugged. ‘Search me. Troy knows a lot of people. What are you drinking?’

And so it went on, the night swelling with noise and hilarity for a while, and then paring down again as people left. Chris’s high began to flatten into something more reflective. Julie Pinion went home in a cab, the young executive she’d been arguing with in smug tow. The driver of one of the other cars announced his imminent departure around three a.m. and most of the remaining Shorn crew went with him. By four the party was down to one table - Chris and Mike, an off-duty Troy Morris and a couple of the floorshow dancers, now dressed and divested of most of their garish make-up. One introduced herself as Emma and, lurching into the toilets, Chris had to wonder if she was the object of the fellatio-inspired graffiti gouged there amidst the political commentary.

When he got back to the table, Emma had gone and Troy was leaving with her colleague. The gun bag from his doorman duties was dumped on the table, the sawn-off and Chris’s Nemex nestling together in the canvas folds. Chris joined in the round of farewells and there was much drunken promising to keep in contact. ‘Yeah,’ said Troy, pointing at Chris. ‘You should write, Faulkner.’

He left, chortling inexplicably, with the shotgun slung over one shoulder and his other arm around the dancer’s waist. At that moment Chris found himself possessed of a powerful desire to be Troy Morris, walking out of the Falkland into an entirely simpler and, to judge by the black man’s laughter, more joyous existence.

He slumped into the chair opposite Bryant.

‘I,’ he pronounced carefully, ‘have drunk far too much.’

‘Well, it’s Friday.’ Bryant’s attention was focused on heating a stained glass pipe. ‘Switch horses, try some of this.’

Chris’s eyes tightened on what the other man was doing.

‘Is that—’

Bryant’s eyes shuttled sideways above the pipe and lighter. Narrowed irritably. ‘Ah, come on, man. Lighten up. Just a little drive-right.’

The contents of the pipe smouldered and Mike inhaled convulsively. A shudder ran through his suited form. He made a deep grunting sound and his voice came out squeaky as he offered the pipe.

‘So. How does it feel?’

Chris frowned, confused. ‘What?’

‘Conflict Investment, a week in. Go on, take it. How’s it feel?’

Chris waved the pipe away. ‘No thanks.’

‘Pussy.’ Bryant grinned to defuse the insult, and drummed impatiently on the table. ‘So tell me. How’s it feel?’

‘What?’

‘Conflict fucking Investment!’

‘Oh.’ Chris marshalled his sludgy thoughts. ‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant seemed disappointed. ‘That all?’

‘It’s not so different to Emerging Markets, Mike.’ Trying to think was hard work. Chris began to wonder if he should have accepted the pipe. ‘Longer-term outlook, but basically the same stuff. Yeah, I like it. Apart from that bitch Hewitt.’

‘Ah. I wondered how that was going. Had a run-in, have we?’

‘You could say that.’

Bryant shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t let it get you down. Hewitt’s been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always been harder to cut it as a woman in this field, so they come out twice as tough. They have to. See, these days Hewitt practically is Conflict Investment. Big reorganisation about five years back, austerity measures. Division got cut to the bone. There’s a lot of pressure to make good, and most of that pressure falls on Hewitt’s shoulders.’

‘Notley’s senior partner.’

‘Notley?’ Bryant piped more smoulder. ‘Nah, it was his baby in the beginning, but once he went senior he downloaded everything onto Hewitt and Hamilton. There was another guy, Page, but Hewitt called him out just before profit share last year. Rammed him right off the Gullet. Believe that?

‘The Gullet?’

‘Yeah, you know. Last section as you come up over the zones on the M11. The two-lane narrows. Where you took out that no-namer, well, just after, after the underpass. Where it goes elevated. Hewitt let Page get ahead there, knew he’d have to either slow down or turn around to face her. No chance of just being first to work these days, you’ve got to turn up with blood on your wheels or not at all. So yeah, she lets him go, waits, he’s not good enough to make the 180 turn on a piece of road that narrow, so he slows up, tries for a side-to-side, she won’t let him, just rams him off on a corner. Bam!’ Bryant gripped the pipe in his teeth and slammed fist into open palm. ‘Page goes through the barrier, falls right into a low-rise, goes through seven levels of zone housing like they were paper. Gas supply ripped open somewhere in one of the flats on the way down. Boom. Adios muchachos, everybody in black.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, pretty fucking impressive, huh.’ Mike squinted at the pipe, tried the lighter again. ‘See, now what Hewitt did, that’s okay, but now she’s got to prove that she doesn’t need two junior partners to help her run CI. If she can’t, it means she made a bad call. Pure greed call. No one round here minds greed, just so long as it’s good for the company as well. If it works out for Hewitt, she’s saved Shorn the expense of a junior partner, and she and Hamilton get bigger equity. It’s the free-market trade-off. Something for us, something for them. But if it doesn’t work out, she’s dead in the water and she knows it.’

‘Well, Ms Conflict Investment doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence in me,’ said Chris gloomily. ‘Not bloody enough for her, apparently.’

‘That what she said?’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Shit, after what you did to Quain? That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Well, let’s just say that not all my challenges have been that uncompromising. This kill-or-be-killed stuff is strictly for the movie-makers. It’s crude, man. You don’t always need a kill. That’s crude.’ Chris leaned forward as his enthusiasm kindled. ‘You ever see any of those old samurai movies?’

‘Bruce Lee? Shit like that?’

‘No, no. Not those. This is other stuff. Older. More subtle. See, these two guys, they’re about to have a duel. So they both stand there, swords out.’ Chris thrust with an imaginary sword and Bryant jerked back in reflex. His eyes narrowed momentarily, and then he laughed.

‘Whoops. Scared me there.’

‘Sorry. Wasn’t intentional. So yeah, the two of them stand there, and they stare into each other’s eyes.’

He locked gazes with Bryant, who emitted another snort of laughter.

‘They just stare. Because they both know that the one who blinks or looks away first, that’s the one who would have lost that fight.’

Bryant’s laughter dried up without fuss. He set the pipe aside. Both men were leaning on the table now, drilling their gazes into each other’s eyes with chemically altered concentration. The shared stillness of the moment stretched. The sounds of the bar receded into a backdrop, surf on a distant beach. Time ran on like a train they had both just missed. The pipe smouldered quietly to itself on the scarred wooden table. Vision wired their stares over it, eyeball to eyeball. From somewhere, an internal silence leaked into the world.

Mike Bryant blinked.

Mike Bryant laughed and looked away.

The moment blew away like an autumn leaf and Chris sat back with a look of tipsy fulfilment on his face. Bryant grinned, a little intensely. Chris was too drunk to catch the upped voltage. Bryant made a pistol of thumb and forefinger. He pointed at Chris’s face.

‘Bang!’

The laughter bubbled up again, this time from both men. Bryant made a sound between a snort and a sigh.

‘There you are. You stared me out.’

Chris nodded.

‘But I blew your fucking head off.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris leaned back across the table. Enthused. Oblivious to the edge sheathed in the other man’s voice. ‘But you see, there was no need for that. We’d already established the winner. You blinked. I would have won.’

‘Bullshit. Maybe I had a hair in my eye. Maybe all these samurai guys walked away from fights they could have won just because they had a jumpy eye muscle that day. Where’d you read all this shit, anyway?’

‘Mike, you’re missing the point. It’s about total control. It’s a duel between two whole people, not just two sets of skills. We could have a fist fight and you could turn up with a gun. We could have a gun fight and you could come with an armoured car and a flame-thrower. That’s not what a duel’s about.’

Bryant picked up the pipe again. ‘Duel’s about winning, Chris,’ he said.

Chris wasn’t listening.

‘Look at China, a couple of centuries ago. There were cases there where two warlords sat down on the battlefield and played chess to decide the outcome of a battle. Chess, Michael. No death, no slaughter, just a game of chess. And they honoured it.’

Bryant looked sceptical. ‘Chess?’

‘Just a game of chess.’ Chris was staring off into a corner. ‘You imagine that?’

‘Not really, no.’ Bryant stuffed the pipe into a pocket and started to get up. ‘But it makes a good story, I’ll give you that. Now, how about we get the car and get out of here before the sun comes up? Because Suki’s going to fucking take me apart if I don’t get back soon. And she’s not into chess.’

CHAPTER SIX

They came out of the Falkland through a side door and onto a different street. Cold night air like a slap in the face, and for a couple of moments Chris reeled. He wondered how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.

‘Where’s the fucking car?’

‘This way.’

Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him round the corner and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.

‘Ooops,’ he said softly.

The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.

None of them looked over eighteen.

They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.

‘You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,’ Chris sniggered, still drunk. ‘Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ hissed Bryant.

The female contingent of the car-jackers levered herself off the hood of the BMW with sinuous grace.

‘Nice car, Mister Zek-tiv,’ she said solemnly. ‘Got the keys?’

Bryant clutched automatically at his pocket. The woman’s eyes flickered to the move and locked on. She nodded in satisfaction.

‘Get off my fucking car!’ Bryant barked.

The remaining four jackers obeyed in unison, arms spread and hands holding their makeshift weapons. Chris glanced sideways at his companion.

‘Bad move, Mike. You carrying?’

Bryant shook his head almost imperceptibly.

‘In the car, remember. You?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris paused, embarrassed. ‘But it’s not loaded.’

‘What? ’

‘I don’t like guns.’

‘See, it’s like this.’ The woman’s voice jerked Chris back from the disbelieving expression on Bryant’s face. ‘Either you can give us the keys. And your wallets. And your watches. Or we can take them from you. That’s our best offer.’

She lifted thumb and little finger solemnly to ear and mouth, making a child’s telephone.

‘Sell, sell, sell.’

Bryant muttered something out of the corner of his mouth.

‘What?’ Chris muttered back.

‘I said, back the way we came and fucking run!!!’

Then he was gone, sprinting flat out for the corner they had just rounded. Chris went after him, flailing to stay upright in the Argentine leather shoes. Behind him, the incentive - sounds of yells and booted pursuit. He levelled with Bryant and found, incredibly, that the other man was grinning.

‘All part of a night out in the zones,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Try to keep up.’

Behind them, someone ran a metal wrecking bar along a concrete wall. It made a sound like a gigantic dentist’s drill.

They looked at each other and put on speed.

Three streets away from the Falkland, the neighbourhood plunged from run-down to rotted-through. The houses were suddenly derelict, unglassed windows gaping out at the street and tiny gardens full of rubble and other detritus. Chris, brain abruptly adrenalin-flushed and working, grabbed Bryant and yanked him sideways into one of the gardens. Over piles of junk, scrambling. In past a front door that someone had kicked in long ago. Weeds grew up waist-high in the gap it had left. Beyond, a narrow, darkened hallway ran parallel to a staircase with half the banisters torn out. At the end, a tiled room that breathed stench like a diseased mouth.

Chris leaned cautiously against the staircase and listened to the yells of the car-jackers as they ran past and down an adjacent street.

Bryant was bent over, hands braced on his knees, panting.

‘You mind telling me,’ he managed hoarsely after a while. ‘Why you’re carrying an unloaded gun around with you?’

‘I told you. I don’t like guns. I don’t like Louise Hewitt telling me what to do.’

‘Man, after five days that’s a bad attitude to have. I wouldn’t go telling anybody things like that, if I were you.’

‘Why not? I told you, didn’t I?’

Bryant straightened up and looked hard at him.

‘Anyway, where’s your gun, hotshot?’

‘At least it’s loaded.’

‘Alright, old piece of folk wisdom coming up.’ Chris gulped his breath back under control. ‘A gun in the hand is worth half a fucking million locked in the car.’

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Bryant’s grin flashed in the gloom. ‘But I wasn’t expecting this kind of trouble. We’re only a couple of klicks inside the zones. Those guys are out of their territory.’

‘You think they know that?’ Chris nodded out towards the street, where voices were coming back. Some of the jacker gang, at least, were retracing their steps. He jabbed an urgent finger upward and Bryant took the creaking stairs into the darkness at the top. Chris slid back along the hallway towards the tiled room and sank into the shadows there. The stench enveloped him. The floor was slimy underfoot. He tried not to breathe.

A moment later two of the jackers were standing where he had just been. Both were armed with long crowbars.

‘I don’t see why we need the keys anyway. Why not just smash the fucking window.’

‘Because, moron, this is a BMW Omega series.’ The other jacker cast a doubtful glance up the stairs. ‘State-of-the-fucking-art corporate jam-jar. These mothers have alarms, engine immobilisation locks and a broadcast scream to the nearest retrieval centre. You’d never move it a hundred metres down the fucking street before they got you.’

‘We could still smash it, anyway. Rip it up.’

‘Ruf, you got no fucking ambition, man. If it weren’t for Molly, you’d still be smashing up telephone points and throwing stones at cabs. You got to think bigger than that. Come on. I don’t think they came in here. Too much chance of getting their suits dirty. Let’s—’

Chris’s foot slipped. Knocked against something that rolled on the tiled floor. Clink of glass. Chris gritted his teeth and inched one hand down to the butt of his empty gun. The two jackers had frozen by the door.

‘Hear that?’ It was the ambitious member of the duo. Chris saw a silhouetted wrecking bar raised in the faint light from the doorway. ‘Okay, Mister Zek-tiv. Game over. Come out, give us your fucking keys, and maybe we’ll leave you some teeth.’

The two jackers advanced down the hall. They were about halfway when Mike Bryant dropped through a gap in the banister rail above. He landed feet first on the head of the gangwit bringing up the rear. The two of them tumbled to the floor. The lead jacker whipped round at the noise and Chris exploded from his hiding place. He punched hard, driving high for the face and low for the guts. The jacker turned back too late. Chris’s high punch broke his nose and then he folded as the solid right hook sank into his midriff. Chris grabbed the gangwit’s shoulders and ran his shaven head sideways into the staircase wall. Up ahead, he saw Bryant reel to his feet and stamp down hard on the other jacker’s unprotected stomach. The gangwit moaned and curled up. Bryant kicked him again, in the head.

‘Mother fucker! Touch my car, you fucking piece of shit !’

Chris laid a hand on his shoulder. Bryant hooked round, face taut.

‘Whoa, it’s all over.’ Chris stood back, hands raised. ‘Game over, Mike. Come on. There’s only three left now. Let’s try for the car again.’

Bryant’s face cleared of its fury.

‘Yeah, good. Let’s do it.’

The street outside was quiet. They checked both ways, then slipped out and loped back towards the Falkland, Bryant navigating. Less than five minutes to relocate the corner pub, and the BMW sat gleaming pristinely under the street lamp as if nothing had happened.

They circled the vehicle warily. Nothing.

Bryant produced his keys and pressed a button. The alarm disarmed with a subdued squawk. He was about to open the door when the shaven-headed woman stepped out of the shadows of a doorway less than five metres away, a piece of iron railing raised in ironic greeting. She put her fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly. Another jacker, similarly armed, stepped out of another doorway up the street and ambled down to meet them. The woman smiled at Bryant.

‘Thought you’d be back. Now, you want to throw me those keys?’

In the moment that her eyes were fixed on Bryant, Chris produced his empty gun and levelled it at her.

‘Alright, that’s enough,’ he snapped. ‘Back off.’

The other jacker took a step forward and Chris swung the gun to cover him, willing him to believe.

‘You too. Back off, or you’re dead. Michael, get in the car.’

Bryant opened the door. Chris was feeling for the door handle on the other side when the woman spoke.

‘I don’t think that gun’s loaded.’

She took a step forward, followed by her companion. Chris brandished the Nemex.

‘I said, back off.’

‘Nah, you would have shot us by now. You’re bluffing, Mr Zek.’

She raised her piece of railing, took another step forward and Mike Bryant stood up from his side of the car, Nemex in hand.

‘I’m not bluffing,’ he said mildly and shot her three times in the chest and stomach.

Boom, boom, boom.

The sound of the gun in the quiet street. Echoes off houses.

Chris saw and heard it in fragments.

The woman, kicked back two metres before she dropped. The railing, out of her hand and flying, clattering and rolling across the camber of the street into the gutter.

The other jacker, hands raised, placatory, backing away.

Face implacable, Bryant put the next three shots into him.

Boom, boom, boom.

He reeled and spun like a marionette, crashed into the wall and slid down it, leaving gouts of blood on the brickwork.

‘Mike—’

The sound of pounding feet.

The final member of the gang, summoned by the gunshots, sprinting across the street towards the fallen bodies. He seemed oblivious to the two men in suits. He hit the ground on his knees next to the woman, disbelieving.

‘Molly! Molly!’

Chris looked across at Bryant. ‘Mike, let’s—’

Bryant made a sideways hushing gesture with his free hand and lowered his aim.

Boom, BOOM.

The kneeling boy jolted as if electrocuted, and then keeled slowly over on the woman on the ground. Blood ran out over the street and trickled down to join the crowbar in the gutter.

The echoes rolled away into the predawn gloom like reluctant applause.

They drove back to the checkpoint in silence, Chris wrapped in numb disbelief. The guard let them through with a cursory glance. If he smelled the cordite from Mike’s gun, he said nothing. Bryant waved him a cheerful goodnight and accelerated the big car away into the well-lit canyons of the financial district. He was humming quietly to himself.

He glanced across at Chris as they were approaching the Shorn block.

‘You want to sleep over at my place? Plenty of space.’

The thought of the hour-long drive back home was abruptly unbearable. Chris mustered a dried-out voice.

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

‘Good.’ Bryant speeded up and cornered west.

Chris watched the towering blocks begin to thin out around them. As the BMW picked up the main feeder lane for the London orbital, he turned slightly in his seat to face Bryant.

‘You didn’t have to kill them all, Mike.’

‘Yeah, I did.’ There was no animosity in Bryant’s voice. ‘What else was I supposed to do? Fire warning shots? This symbolism of combat shit you talk about doesn’t work with people like that. They’re gangwit scum, Chris. They don’t know how to lose gracefully.’

‘They’d already lost. And they were kids. They would have run away.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Until the next time. Look, Chris. People like that, civilised rules don’t apply. Violence is the only thing they understand.’

Outside the hurrying car, the sky was brightening in the east. Chris’s head was beginning to ache.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chris awoke with the horrified conviction that he had been unfaithful to Carla. Liz Linshaw was sitting up in bed beside him, buttering a piece of toast and wiping the knife casually on the sheets.

‘Breakfast in bed,’ she was saying authoritatively, ‘is so sexy.’

Chris looked down at the stains she was making and felt a hot lump of mingled guilt and sadness swelling in the base of his throat. There was no way he could hide this from Carla.

He opened his eyes with a jolt. Daylight strained through chintz curtains just above his head. For a moment the chintz hammered home the dream - Carla hated the stuff with a passion. He really had gone home with Liz Linshaw, then. He turned on his side with the blockage of unshed tears still jammed in his throat and—

He was in a single bed.

He propped himself up, confused. Matching chintz quilt and pillowcase, massive hangover. Close behind this sensory surge, the events of the previous evening crashed in on him. The street. The jackers. Bryant’s gun in the quiet night. The relief made him forget the pain in his head for a couple of moments. Liz Linshaw was a dream.

He hauled up his wrist and looked at his watch which he had evidently been in no state to remove the previous night. Quarter past twelve. He spotted his clothes hanging on the door of the tiny guest room and groped his way out of bed towards them. The door was open a crack - beyond, he could hear kitchen sounds. The smell of coffee and toast wafted under his nose.

He dressed hurriedly, stuffed his tie in his jacket pocket and picked up his shoes. Outside the guest room, a white-painted corridor hung with innocuous landscapes led to a wide, curving staircase. Halfway down, he met a woman coming up. Auburn hair, light eyes. He made the match with Michael’s wallet photo. Suki.

Suki had a cup of coffee, complete with saucer, in her hand and there was a tolerant smile on her perfectly made-up face.

‘Good morning. It’s Chris, isn’t it? I’m Suki.’ She offered one slim, gold-braceleted arm. ‘Nice to meet you at last. I was just bringing you this up. Michael said you’d want to be woken. He’s in the kitchen, talking to work, I think.’

Chris took the coffee, balancing it awkwardly in his free hand. His head was beginning to pulse alarmingly.

‘Thanks, uh. Thanks.’

Suki’s smile brightened. Chris had the disturbing impression that his hands and face could have been painted with blood and she would have smiled the same way.

‘Had fun last night, did you?’ she asked maternally.

‘Uh, something like that. Would you excuse me?’

He slipped past her and found his way down into the kitchen. It was a large, comfortable room with wooden furniture, and tall windows along one wall letting in the sun. The scrubbed wooden table was laid for three and covered with an assortment of edible breakfast items. At the far end a two-year-old child sat in a high chair, belabouring a plate of unidentifiable sludge with a plastic spoon. Over by the window, and well out of splash range, Mike Bryant watched her with a tender expression on his face and drank coffee out of a mug. There was a mobile pinned between his ear and shoulder and he appeared to be listening intently. He nodded and waved as Chris came in.

‘They certainly were. What, you think I imagined it? Who says that? Right, get him on the line.’

Bryant cupped a hand over the phone.

‘Chris, call your wife at work. She’s been screaming down the Shorn switchboard since eight this morning. You sleep well?’

He pointed at a videophone hung on the wall near the door. Chris put down his coffee, picked the phone up and dialled from memory. He waved at Ariana, who regarded him in silence for a moment and then grinned and started bashing her breakfast again. Bryant went back to his conversation.

‘Yes, this is Michael Bryant. No I’m not, I’m at home, which is where I’m likely to stay until you can promise a little more safety on the streets. I don’t care, we don’t pay you people to stand around scratching your balls. We were less than three, don’t shout me down detective, three klicks inside the cordon. Yes, you’re fucking right I shot them.’

The screen in front of Chris lit up with a grimy, gum-chewing face.

‘Yeah, Mel’s AutoFix.’ He caught sight of Chris. ‘Need a tow?’

‘No,’ Chris cleared his throat. ‘Could I speak to Carla Nyquist please.’

‘Sure. Be a moment.’

Behind him, Bryant went on with his tirade. ‘They were just about to take me and my colleague to pieces with machetes. What? Well, I’m not surprised. Probably got scavenged by someone last night. Listen, there were five of them to two of us. Hardcore gangwits. Now if I can’t claim that as self defence then—’

Carla appeared, knuckling grease across her nose. There was a fairly obvious scowl under the black marks. ‘What happened to you, then?’

‘Uh, I stayed over at Mike’s place. There was some, uh.’ He glanced at Bryant who was listening to the other end of his own call with a face like thunder. ‘Trouble.’

‘Trouble? Are you—?’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Chris forced a grin. ‘Just a headache.’

‘Well, why didn’t you call me? I was worried sick.’

‘I didn’t want to worry you. It was late, and I was going to call first thing this morning. Must have overslept. Look,’ he turned to Bryant again. ‘Mike, are you going in to Shorn today?’

Bryant nodded glumly, covering the phone mouthpiece again. ‘Looks like it. I’ve got to fill out half a hundred fucking incident reports, apparently. Say an hour?’

Chris turned back to Carla’s waiting face. ‘I’m going in to pick up the car with Mike in about an hour. I’ll pick you up from the garage and tell you all about it then. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ It was grudging. ‘But this had better be a fucking good story.’

‘Deal. By the way, I’m in love.’

Mike Bryant shot him a peculiar glance across the kitchen.

On screen, Carla kept her scowl. ‘Yeah, yeah. Me too. See you at four. And don’t be late.’

She reached for the phone and the image faded. Chris turned just in time to catch the last of Bryant’s call.

‘Yes, I am aware of that, detective. Well next time I’m attacked on the street, I’ll be sure and remember it. Goodbye.’

He snapped the phone shut angrily.

‘Asshole. Get this, the corporate police, our fucking police want to conduct an investigation into whether this was an unlawful shooting. I mean.’ He gestured helplessly, lost for words. ‘Defend yourself, and you’re fucking breaking the law. Meanwhile, some piece of shit gangwit cracks a fingernail in a back alley and you’ve got Citizens’ Rights activists screaming for someone’s neck. What about us citizens? Who’s looking out for us? What about our rights?’

‘Michael!’ Suki appeared in the kitchen doorway, a coffee cup in each hand. ‘How many times have I told you, don’t use that language in front of Ariana. She just comes right out with it at the playgroup, and I get dirty looks from the other mothers.’ She put the coffee cups on the table and went to clean some of the surplus food from around her daughter’s mouth. Ariana made half-hearted protests, all the time squinting shyly at Chris. ‘That’s right, don’t you listen to Daddy when he talks like that.’ She turned a fraction of her multi-tasked attention in the same direction as her daughter. ‘Take no notice, Chris. He’s always moaning about citizens’ rights. This’ll be the second time he’s been in trouble, there, is that better darling, the second time he’s been in trouble with the police this year. Use of undue force. Yes, who’s a clean girl? I think he just likes living dangerously.’

Bryant made a disgusted noise. Suki went to him and put an arm round his waist. She kissed him under the chin.

‘Maybe that’s what I see in him. You’re married, aren’t you Chris? Was that her on the vid?’

‘Yeah.’ To Chris, his own voice sounded unfairly defensive. ‘She’s a mechanic. Got to work most Saturdays.’

He sipped his coffee and watched for a reaction, but Suki either didn’t care one way or the other or had been trained to black belt in social graces. She smiled as she unfastened Ariana from the high chair.

‘Yes, Michael said. You know, one of the Shorn partners had a girlfriend who worked in auto reclaim. Now what was his name?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘I met him at the Christmas bash.’

‘Notley,’ said Bryant.

‘That’s it, Notley. Jack Notley. Well, you must both come over for dinner, Chris. What’s your wife’s name?’

‘Carla.’

‘Carla. Lovely name. Like that Italian holoporn star Mike gets so turned on over.’ She put a playful hand over Bryant’s mouth as he protested. ‘Yes, ask her to come over. In fact, why don’t you come over tonight? We’ve got no plans, have we, Mike?’

Bryant shook his head.

‘Well, then. I’ll cook sukiyaki. You’re not vegetarian, either of you?’

‘No.’ Chris hesitated. There had been some notion of going to visit Carla’s father today, and in the whirl of the week just gone, he wasn’t sure quite how solidified the plan was. ‘Uh, I’m not sure if—’

‘Not to be missed, that sukiyaki,’ said Michael, draining his coffee and setting down the mug. ‘Beef direct from the Sutherland Croft Association herds. Hey, you reckon Carla’d like a look at the BMW? Seeing as she’s a mechanic and all. That’s the new Omega Injection series under the bonnet. State of the art, not even on general release outside Germany yet. I bet she’d love to watch it turn over.’

Chris, aware suddenly of the exact depth to which he did not want to visit his father-in-law, made a decision.

‘Yeah, she’d like that,’ he said.

‘Good, that’s settled then,’ said Suki brightly. ‘I’ll get the beef this afternoon. Shall we say about eight-thirty?’

Mike insisted on dropping Chris right beside his car. The underground parking decks beneath the Shorn block were largely deserted and the level Chris had parked on showed only three other vehicles. Bryant slewed to a halt across the battery of empty spaces opposite, killed the engine and got out.

‘Hewitt’s,’ he said, nodding at the nearest of the isolated vehicles. ‘Audi built it for her to spec when she made partner. Fancy seeing that coming up in your rearview?’

Chris looked at it. Broad black windscreen, heavy impact collision bars that jutted from the end of the raked hood.

‘Not much,’ he admitted. ‘But I thought Hewitt was a BMW fan.’

Mike snorted. ‘Hewitt’s a fan of money. Back when she made partner, Shorn had this deal with Audi. They supplied all our company cars and hardware, and the partners got special edition battlewagons thrown in for free. Two years ago BMW made Shorn a better offer and they went with it. As a partner, Hewitt can opt for any vehicle she likes but when this baby gets written off or superseded, you can bet she’ll just take a top-of-the-line Omega with all the armour options, free to partners of BMW clients. To her, it’s all just a cost-benefit analysis.’

‘So what does Notley think of all this?’

‘Notley’s a patriot.’ Mike grinned. ‘I mean, in the real, uncut sense of the word. Last of the diehard anti-Europeans. Anti-American too, come to that. He actually believes in the cultural superiority of England over other nations. Shit like that. I mean, you’d think he’d be able to see a little more clearly from the fiftieth floor, wouldn’t you. Anyway, when he made partner, he didn’t want to know about the German makes. He had Land Rover build him a customised battlewagon from scratch. And he’s still driving it ten years later. Fucking thing looks like a tank but it’ll do nearly two hundred kilometres an hour. Except he won’t use metric, so that’d be . . . what, about a hundred and twenty-something? Miles an hour? Whatever. That’s what his speedo reads in.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘No, really. He made them fit an imperial speedo. Miles per hour. Ask him to let you look at the dashboard some time.’

‘He’s not here today?’

‘No way. You won’t catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.’ Bryant’s eyes flicked away with recollection. ‘I remember one quarterly do, I ran into him in the men’s room, we were both pretty pissed and I was asking him if being a partner was really worth all the extra shit, the weekend work, the all-nighters and he looked at me like I was insane. Then he says, still treating me like I’m a headcase, talking very slowly, you know, he says, Mike, if you make partner and you’re still working weekends then there’s something wrong somewhere. You make partner so they can’t tell you to do that shit any more. Otherwise, what’s the point? You believe that?’

‘Sounds like a decent philosophy.’

‘Yeah, not like the rest of these fucking wannabes.’ Mike gestured around dismissively. He wandered across to Chris’s car. ‘So what have we got here? This looks Scandinavian to me.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris laid a proprietorial hand on the car’s flank. ‘Saab combat chassis. Carla’s family are Norwegian, but she did her apprenticeship in Stockholm. Been around Saabs and Volvos all her life. She says the Swedes were building cars for road-raging decades before anybody even thought of it.’

Bryant nodded. ‘It looks pretty mean. But I reckon you’d still lose on speed to an Omega.’

‘She’s faster than she looks, Mike. A lot of that bulk’s Volvo spaced armouring. Strut-braced stuff. It isn’t solid, and the slip-stream channels through flues on the outer edges for stability, but by Christ you’d still know if it hit you. Volvo’ve crash-tested the struts at aeroplane speeds, and they hold.’

‘Spaced armouring, huh?’ Bryant looked thoughtful for a couple of moments, and Chris had the unsettling sensation that he had given something important away to the big man. Then another grin swept the calculating expression out of his eyes. He clapped Chris on the shoulder. ‘Remind me to divorce Suki and get a Swedish mechanic to shack up with.’

The parking deck was filled with a soft chime. The Shorn elevator voice announced two o’clock for the whole building. Mike glanced reflexively at his watch.

‘That’s me,’ he said sourly. ‘Look, Chris, I’d better run. Corporate police can be a real drag when they’re determined to do something by the book. See you tonight, alright?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris watched him stride away towards the double doors that led upwards into the Shorn tower. ‘Hey, Mike.’

‘Yo.’

‘Good luck.’

Bryant raised a hand and waved it sideways. ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. Piece of piss. Be out of here by three. See you tonight.’

‘He said what?’

Carla paused in the act of fastening one earring and stared disbelievingly at Chris in the mirror. Chris looked back at her, confused.

‘He said it’d be a piece of piss and they’d—’

‘No, before that. That stuff about divorcing Suki.’

‘He said to remind him to get a divorce so he could shack up with a Swedish mechanic.’ Chris saw the look on her face and sighed, feeling the edge of the row they were teetering on. ‘He’s just trying to be friendly, Carla. It’s a kind of compliment, you know.’

‘It’s a load of sexist shit is what it is. Anyway,’ Carla finished with the earring and came away from the mirror, ‘that’s not the point.’

‘No? Then what is the point, Carla?’

This time it was Carla who sighed. ‘The point,’ she said heavily, ‘is that I’m not some curiosity for you to show off. This is my wife, by the way she’s a mechanic. I’m sure it’s fun to say. The shock value. The looks you get. I know you get a kick out of taking me to these corporate functions, showing everyone what a rebel you are.’

Chris stared at her.

‘No, it’s because I love you.’

‘I—’ She’d been about to raise her voice. Something broke in the effort. ‘Chris, I know that. I know. You just, you don’t have to prove it against overwhelming odds all the time. It’s not a - a battle or a quest. It’s just, living.’ She saw the pain flit across his face and went to him. Her hands, scrubbed clean with aromatic oil, cupped his downturned face. ‘I know you love me, but I’m not here just to be loved. You can’t use me as a statement of how strongly you feel about everything, how loyal you are.’

He tried to turn his head away. She held it in place.

‘Look at me, Chris. This is me. I’m your wife. Mechanic is just a job, just a statement of financial disadvantage. I don’t let it define me, and I don’t want you doing it behind my back. We’re more than what we do.’

‘Now you sound like your father.’

She paused for a moment, then nodded and let go of his head. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ She touched her throat. ‘Should be fucking miked up, huh? And that reminds me, you said we’d go and see him this weekend. Whatever happened to that promise?’

‘I didn’t think we’d—’

‘Oh, forget it. I don’t really want to go anyway. I don’t feel up to the refereeing. Once you two get at each other’s throats . . .’ She sighed again. ‘Look, Chris, about this mechanic thing. How would you like it if I dragged you over to see Mel and Jess and said you’d just love to have a look at their tax returns.’

Chris’s eyes widened with outrage. ‘I’m not a fucking accountant.’

Carla grinned and dropped into a defensive boxing stance. ‘Want to bet? Want to fight about it?’

The bravado ended in a shriek as Chris hurled himself at her and rugby-tackled her back onto the bed. The brief tussle ended with Chris straddling Carla’s body and struggling to hold her flailing arms at bay. He could feel the strength leaking out of his grip in giggle increments.

‘Sssh, sssh, stop it, stop it, behave yourself. We’re going out.’

‘Fucking let go of me, you piece of shit.’ She was laughing as well, breathlessly. ‘I’ll claw your fucking eyes out.’

‘Carla,’ Chris said patiently. ‘That’s not really an incentive. You’ve got to learn the art of negotiation. Now—’

An incoherent squeal. Carla tumbled him. They grappled at each other across the bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Out, driving through Hawkspur Green in the waning light of evening, while Carla tried to do something with her dishevelled hair. The sex had taken half an hour, and it still lurked in the grins at the corners of their mouths.

‘We’re going to be late,’ said Chris severely.

‘Ah, bollocks.’ Carla gave up on her hair and settled for pinning it untidily up. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this anyway. Going out to dinner with some guy you’re going to wreck in a couple of years’ time. It doesn’t really make sense, does it?’

Chris glanced across at her, the implied confidence in the remark warming him inside. There was always an intimacy to the conversations they had while driving, maybe born out of the secure knowledge that the car was clean. Carla swept for bugs on a regular basis, and her knowledge of the Saab meant they were sure of their privacy in a way they never quite could be at home.

‘You know it might not come to that,’ Chris said, feeling his way through his own thoughts. ‘A wreck. We don’t have to run for the same promotions.’

‘No, but you will. Like at Hammett McColl. It always works out that way.’

‘I don’t know, Carla. It’s strange. It’s like he’s just decided he’s going to be my friend and that’s it. I mean, there’s a lot about him I don’t like. That stuff in the zones was pretty extreme—’

‘No shit. The man sounds like a fucking crackhead psycho to me, Chris. Whatever you say.’

Without actually lying to his wife about anything specific, Chris had somehow managed to omit Bryant’s execution-style dispatch of Molly and her jacker colleagues. The way it came out, it really had been self defence against armed and violent attackers. In retrospect, Chris was almost starting to believe it himself. The gangwits had wrecking bars. Not much doubt they would have used them if Chris’s unloaded gun had given them the chance. Carla remained unimpressed.

‘He’s just like a lot of the guys at Shorn—’

‘Well, I certainly believe that.’

Chris shot her an irritated glance. ‘He’s worked hard for what he’s got, Carla. He just got angry because someone was trying to take it away from him. That’s a natural reaction, isn’t it? How do you think Mel’d react if someone turned up and tried to trash the workshop.’

‘Mel doesn’t make his money the way you people do,’ Carla muttered.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Forget it.’

‘Mel doesn’t make his money like me and Mike Bryant?’

‘I said, forget it, Chris.’

‘That’s right, he doesn’t, does he? Mel doesn’t do what we do. He just makes a living fixing our cars for us, so we can go out and do it again. Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you take the high moral ground with me, Carla, because—’

‘Alright.’ Her voice caught on the second syllable. ‘I said forget it. I’m sorry I said it, so just forget it.’

The air between the two front seats frosted with silence. Finally, Chris reached across the chill and took Carla’s hand.

‘Look,’ he said wearily. ‘In the First World War fighter pilots used to toast each other with champagne before they went out and tried to shoot each other out of the sky. Did you know that? And the winners used to drop wreaths on their enemies’ airfields to commemorate the men they’d just killed. That make any sense to you? And we’re talking about less than a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘That was war.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris made his voice stay calm. ‘A war for what? Lines drawn on a map. Can you honestly say that those men were fighting for anything that made any kind of sense? Anything that makes more sense than a competitive tender or a promotion duel?’

‘They had no choice, Chris. If they laid wreaths it was because they hated what they had to do. This is different.’

He felt his anger twist and jump like a fish in a net: this time it was an effort to hold it down. It looked as if Carla was going to pull her favourite trick and they were going to arrive at the Bryants’ front door in the brittle silence of an interrupted row.

‘You think we have any more of a choice than they did? You think I like what I do for a living?’

‘I don’t think you dislike it as much as you say.’ Carla was digging in her bag for cigarettes, a bad sign on the row barometer. ‘And if you do, there are other jobs. Other companies. Chris, you could go and work for the fucking ombudsmen with what you know. They’d take you. UNECT, or one of the others. The regulatory bodies are screaming for people with real commercial experience.’

‘Oh, great. You think I want to be a fucking bureaucrat. Playing at international social democracy with a fucking placard and a zone-level salary.’

‘Ombudsmen make a lot of money, Chris.’

‘Says who?’

‘My mother used to know some of the guys from UNECT in Oslo. Their field agents pull down near two hundred grand a year.’

Chris snorted. ‘Not bad for fucking socialists.’

‘Alright, Chris.’ It was cold and even, a flip side of her anger he hated worse than the shouting. ‘Forget the fucking ombudsmen. You could get a job with any other investment firm in the city.’

‘Not any more.’ He hunched his shoulders as he said it. ‘Have you got any idea how much Shorn paid to get me out of Hammett McColl? Any idea what they’ll do to protect that investment?’

‘Break your legs, will they?’

The sneer hurt, not least because it sounded like something Mel might have said in workshop banter. Jealousy flared. He hid it and worked at calm.

‘Not mine, no. But the word will be out there, Carla. Every executive search company in London will have been warned off me. Anyone who chooses to ignore it, they’ll find strung up under Blackfriars Bridge.’

She exploded smoke across the car. ‘Come off it.’

‘No? You don’t remember Justin Gray, then?’

‘That was petrol-mafia stuff.’

‘Yeah, right. A recruitment consultant with a flat in Knights-bridge and a house in St Albans is really going to get mixed up with those clowns. Everybody believed that one.’

‘Wearing a suit doesn’t make you smart, Chris. It just makes you greedy.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it.’

‘Look. Two weeks before he died, Gray was instrumental in moving two senior cutting-edge technologies execs out of Shorn and into Calders UK. He told the police he’d been receiving death threats throughout the run-up to that deal. Conveniently enough, they failed to investigate.’

‘I think you’re talking wine-bar dramatics and a coincidence, Chris.’

‘Suit yourself. Gray’s not the only one. There was that guy they found floating in his swimming pool in Biarritz last year. Another one a couple of years before that in a car smash. Mistaken duel call-out, they said, like that happens all the time. Both chasing candidates at Shorn. Coincidence? I don’t think so, Carla. Over the last five years, there’ve been at least a dozen executive search personnel who’ve ended up dead or damaged while, coincidentally, they were trying to prise candidates away from Shorn.’

‘So why’d you go to work for them?’ she snapped.

Chris shrugged. ‘It was a lot of money. Remember?’

‘We didn’t need it.’

‘We didn’t need it, right then. These days, that means nothing. You can’t ever be backed up too much. Besides, Shorn aren’t the only ones to play rough with the reckies.’ He found he was smiling faintly. ‘They’re just better at it than most. More prepared to go to the asphalt, quicker to floor it when they do. Just a harder crew, that’s all.’

‘Yes, and that’s really it, isn’t it Chris.’ There was ice in her voice - she’d caught the smile. ‘It wasn’t the money, it was the rep. You couldn’t wait to get in the running with the hard crew, could you? Couldn’t wait to test yourself against them.’

‘All I’m saying is when you talk about choices, face the facts. Be realistic. Realistically, what choice do I have?’

‘You always have a choice, Chris. Everyone does.’

‘Yeah?’ Finally, his anger slipped its leash. ‘Have you listened to any fucking thing I’ve said, Carla? What fucking choice do I have?’

‘You could resign.’

‘Oh, good idea.’ This time there was a break in his voice that he couldn’t iron out. ‘And then we could go and live in the zones. And when your father gets threatened with eviction again, instead of paying off what he owes, we could just be poor and helpless, and maybe go and help him pick his possessions up off the street where they throw them. Maybe you’d like that better.’

Carla flicked ash off her cigarette and stared out of the side window. ‘I’d like it better than waiting to see this car on fire on the six o’clock news.’

‘That isn’t going to happen.’ He said it reflexively.

‘Isn’t it?’ Now he could hear the unshed tears in her throat. She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Isn’t it? Why is that, Chris?’

Silence. And the sound of the Saab engine.

Mike grinned. Laughter erupted around the table.

Two hours earlier, Chris would have been willing to bet that he wouldn’t hear Carla or himself laugh for the whole weekend. But here he was, seated in soft candlelight, watching across a food-laden, black wood table top as his wife broke up in peals of genuine hilarity. Against all the odds, the evening with the Bryants had taken off like a deregulation share issue.

‘No, really.’ Suki fought her own laughter down to a smirk. ‘He actually said that. Can you believe it? Would you have gone out with a man who said that to you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Carla was still laughing, but her answer was absolutely serious.

‘Oh,’ Suki reached across the table and took her husband’s hand. ‘I’m being horrible, aren’t I. Tell us how you met Chris, Carla.’

Carla shrugged. ‘He came in to get his car fixed.’

The laughter rekindled. Chris leaned forward.

‘No, it’s true. You know, she was standing there, in this. T-shirt.’ He made vague female body gestures with both hands. ‘With a spanner in her hand, grease on her nose. And she says, I can give you the best road holding in Europe. And that was it. I was gone. Falling.’

Carla lost a little of her mirth. ‘Yeah, what he doesn’t tell you is, he was beaten up from some fucking stupid competitive tender. He was falling. He could barely stand. Torn suit, blood on his hands. Down his face. Trying all the time to make believe he wasn’t hurt.’

‘Mmm,’ Suki grinned. ‘Gorgeous.’

Carla’s smile faded slightly. ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh come on, Carla. I bet that’s when you fell for him as well. Noble savage and all that caveman stuff. Just like that Tony Carpenter flick, you know, the one where he fights off all those motorcycle thugs. What’s it called, Michael? I can never remember the names of these things.’

‘Graduate Intake,’ said Mike Bryant, eyes intent on Carla’s face.

Chris nodded. ‘Seen it. Great movie.’

‘That kind of macho shit doesn’t turn me on,’ Carla said flatly. ‘I see too much of the results, working salvage. See, they haven’t always finished pulling the bodies out by the time we get there.’

‘Carla’s boss spends a lot of time separating losers from their vehicles,’ said Chris, miming a pair of salvage shears. ‘Literally.’

‘Chris!’ Suki laughed again, then put one elegantly varnished set of fingernails over her mouth in mock mortification as if she’d just realised what she was laughing at. ‘Please.’

‘Okay, here’s a joke.’ Chris ignored the look Carla was giving him. ‘Who are the lowest-paid headhunters in the city?’

‘Oh, I know this one.’ Suki wagged a finger at them. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. The guys at Costermans were telling this a couple of months ago. Ohhh, I can’t remember, Chris. Go on, then.’

‘Paramedic crews on the orbital after the New Year playoffs.’

Suki’s brow creased in fake pain. ‘Oh, that’s awful.’ She sniggered, winding up to another full-blown laugh. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Isn’t it just?’ said Carla unsmilingly, staring across the table at her husband.

Mike Bryant coughed. ‘Ah. Would you like to see that Omega now, Carla? It’s just through the kitchen to the garage. Bring your glass if you like.’

He got up and flashed a glance at Suki, who nodded on cue.

‘Yes, go on. I’ll clear these away.’

‘I’ll help you,’ said Chris, standing automatically.

‘No, it’s just loading the machine. You can help me make the coffee later. Go on, I don’t know the first thing about engines. Michael’s been dying to show it off to someone who understands what he’s talking about.’ Suki reached across and kissed Bryant. ‘Isn’t that right, darling?’

‘Well, if you’re sure—’ Chris broke off as Carla tugged at his sleeve, and the three of them trooped out after Bryant, leaving Suki at the table. They crossed the kitchen space and Bryant threw open a door that let in a wave of cold air and a view of a wide, concrete-floored garage. The BMW stood gleaming in the light from overhead neon tubes. They filed through the door and stood around the hood end of the vehicle while Mike Bryant reached in and popped the locks. Then he set aside his wineglass on a workbench and lifted up the hood. Service lights sprang up in the engine space and the Omega Injection was revealed in all its matt grey glory.

‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight?’ Bryant burlesqued, some mutilated sub-Simeon Sands idea of an American accent.

‘Very nice.’ Carla walked around the engine, peering down into the clearance on either side. She pressed down hard with one hand on the engine block and nodded to herself. She looked up at Bryant. ‘Cantilevered support?’

‘Got it in one.’

‘Looks like they’ve mounted the weight a long way back this time.’

‘Yeah, well, you probably remember the Gammas.’ Bryant came to lean into the engine beside her, leaving Chris feeling suddenly unreasonably isolated. ‘Never drove one myself, but that was the big complaint, wasn’t it? All that nose armour and the engine too.’

Carla grunted agreement, still groping around down the side of the engine. ‘Yep. Handled like a pig. This one doesn’t, I imagine.’

Bryant grinned. ‘You want to take it for a spin, Carla? Put her through it?’

‘Well, I . . .’ Carla was clearly taken aback. She was saved an answer by Suki, who appeared in the door with her hostess smile and a silver foil packet in one hand.

‘How many for coffee, then?’

‘Leave it, Suki.’ Bryant went to her and took the packet away. ‘We’re all going to go for a ride.’

‘Oh no, Michael.’ For the first time that Chris could detect, he saw a crack in Suki’s social armour. ‘You’ve drunk too much, you’re just going to get someone killed.’

‘No, Carla’s going to drive.’

‘Oh, I’ll believe that when I see it. Carla, honestly, the number of times he’s let me behind the wheel, then yanked me out again at the first serious sign of—’

‘Don’t listen to her, Carla. Suki, it’s the weekend, it’s nearly midnight, there’s nothing on the roads. Just out on the orbital, as far as the M11 hook up. Carla drives there, I’ll drive back. C’mon, it’ll be fun.’

True to Mike’s prediction, the orbital was a ghost highway. Nothing more substantial than waste paper stirred beneath the march of gull-winged sodium lamps. There was no sound other than the rush of their tyres on the asphalt and the comfortable growl of the Omega Injection engine. Carla drove with a rapt expression on her face at a rock-steady hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, occasionally swerving from lane to lane as chunks of decaying surfacing flashed towards them. A faint rain fell on the big oval windscreen, cleaned off meticulously by the gapped speed wipers.

‘Crawler,’ said Mike Bryant from the passenger seat, as the tail lights of a transporter appeared on the sweep of motorway ahead of them. ‘Looks like it’s automated; only a machine drives in the slow lane with this much road to play with. Pass him close, see if you can trip the collision systems.’

Next to Chris in the back, Suki sighed. ‘You are such a child, Michael. Carla, just ignore him.’

The BMW flashed past the transporter, giving it a wide berth. Mike sighed and shrugged. Up ahead, the lights of a junction glowed like a UFO landing site. A massive metal sign announced the M11 ramp. Carla pulled across into the filter lane and eased off the accelerator, letting the BMW’s speed bleed away on the approach slope. They cruised to a gentle halt at the summit, just short of the roundabout. Carla sat for a moment, listening to the engine run, then nodded.

‘Very smooth,’ she said, almost to herself.

‘Isn’t it.’ Mike Bryant cracked open his door. ‘Swap places. There’s a couple of things I want to show you.’

Carla met Chris’s eyes in the rearview mirror for a moment, then she got out and walked round the front of the car, passing Bryant halfway. Bryant high-fived her, came round and fastened himself into the driving seat with a broad grin. He waited until Carla had also belted herself in, then dropped the car into gear and revved hard against the parking brake. Chris heard the wheels spin and shriek for a moment as the BMW held position, then Bryant knocked off the brake and they leapt forward.

‘Always forget that bit.’ Bryant shouted above the engine and he grinned in the mirror. The car plunged down the ramp opposite, gathering speed and hit the main carriageway of the orbital at nearly a hundred and twenty. Bryant let them cover about half a kilometre, then slapped his forehead.

‘Wait! This isn’t the way home!’

He grinned again, then hauled on the wheel. Chris heard his feet hit the pedals at the same moment and was just too late to brace himself and Suki as the BMW executed a perfect U-turn dead stop in the centre lane.

‘Michael,’ said Suki severely. ‘Stop it.’

‘Let’s try that again,’ said Bryant and kicked the BMW into another wheel-spinning takeoff. They flashed back towards the intersection, swerving into the slow lane on the slight incline under the bridge. Bryant turned round to look at Chris and Suki.

‘Now, you know that—’

They trampled him down with their voices.

‘Michael!’

‘Look at the fucking r—’

‘Don’t tur—’

In the time it all took to begin saying, Bryant had turned back to a more conventional driver’s posture and they were under the bridge and climbing the incline up on the other side.

‘Shit, sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just going to say, you know that truck we passed a couple of klicks back—’

The interior of the car flooded with light as the automated transporter cleared the crest of the rise ahead and bore down on them. Suki, Chris and Carla uttered another multiple yell and this time Bryant yelled with them, louder than anyone. The transporter’s robot brain blasted them with an outraged hoot from the collision alert system and bands of orange hazard-warning lights lit up on the cab. Mike’s burlesque Sands accent reappeared, cut with wide-eyed, breathless psycho.

‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I. Just shouldna. Taken all those drugs.’

He laughed maniacally and, at the last moment, he yanked the wheel and the BMW swung violently to the left. They slid out of the path of the oncoming juggernaut and past the high side of the transporter’s wagon, so close that through the side window Chris saw individual dents in the metal surface of the freight container. He heard the hissing explosion of brakes across the night air, and knew that Bryant had just gone ahead and done what he’d asked Carla to do earlier. He’d deliberately tripped the transporter’s collision systems. He’d been playing chicken with the machine’s reflexes. For fun.

Much later, back in his own car, he watched the same stretch of road again while Carla drove them home. Had he been a little more aware of his immediate surroundings, he would have seen Carla open her mouth to speak several times before she finally made up her mind.

‘I’m sorry, that was my fault. I didn’t—’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘I didn’t think he’d force it like—’

‘He was just making things clear,’ said Chris distantly.

They rode in silence.

‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ said Carla after a while.

Chris nodded wordlessly.

‘Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.’ She laughed without humour. ‘And to think I said you were going to wreck him in a couple of years’ time. Jesus, irony or wha—’

‘Carla, I’d really prefer not to talk about it, alright.’

Carla looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed, but if she’d planned to be angry, what she saw in his face drained the anger out of her. Instead, she reached across to take his hand in hers.

‘Sure,’ she said very quietly.

Chris took up the offered clasp, squeezing her fingers tightly. A faint smile twitched at his mouth, but his eyes never left the road ahead.

CHAPTER NINE

In architectural echo of service pyramid theory, the Shorn block had rented out its bottom two levels to a series of shopping and eating units that collectively went under the name Basecamp. According to the Shorn promotional literature that Chris had read, Basecamp provided employment for over six hundred people and, together with the Shorn-owned vehicle repair shops in the basement, was a working embodiment of the virtues of trickle-down wealth creation. Prosperity spread out from the foundations of the Shorn block like vegetation from an aquifer, said the literature warmly, though the metaphor that occurred to Chris was water leaking from the cracked base of an old clay flowerpot. Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.

On the street opposite the Shorn complex the prosperity had blossomed - or leaked - into the form of a tiny corner restaurant called Louie Louie’s. Originally set up in the previous century to serve the butcher’s market that had once stood where the Shorn complex now loomed, the place had closed down briefly during the domino recessions and then reopened under new management, supplying coffee and snacks to the post-recessional influx of workers in Basecamp. This much Chris had gleaned from Mike Bryant when they went across for coffee one morning. What he noticed on his own was that the place never seemed to close and that, whether through inverted snobbery or genuine quality, the execs in the Shorn tower sent out to Louie Louie’s in preference to almost any other eating establishment in the district.

The coffee, Chris was forced to admit, was the best he’d had in the UK, and he derived a further, ridiculously childish, satisfaction from drinking it out of the tall styrofoam canister while he stood by the window of his office and gazed down fifty-odd floors to the dimly illuminated frontage of the place it had been made. He was doing exactly that, and bluffing his way through an audiophone local-agent call from Panama, when Mike Bryant came to call.

‘Well, you go and tell El Commandante that if he wants his Panthers of Justice to have bandages and mobile cover next month he’d better reconsider that stance. All the phones—’

He broke off as someone banged on the half-open door. Turning from the window, he saw Bryant shouldering his way into the office. In the big man’s arms were two packages wrapped in fancy black and gold paper. The bottom package was wide and flat and about the width of Bryant’s shoulders, the top one about the size and shape of two hardcopy dictionaries taped together. Both looked to be heavy.

‘I’ll call you back,’ Chris said and clicked the audiophone off.

‘Hi, Chris.’ Bryant grinned. ‘Got something for you. Where do you want it?’

‘Over there.’ Chris gestured at a small table in the corner of the still minimally furnished office space. ‘What is it?

‘Show you.’

Bryant put down the packages and ripped back the wrapping on the flat package to reveal the chequered surface of a marbled chess board. He grinned up at Chris again, freed the board from the wrapping entirely and set it straight on the table.

‘Chess?’ Chris asked stupidly.

‘Chess,’ agreed Bryant, working on the wrapping of the other box. It came loose and he tipped the box sideways, spilling carved onyx pieces across the board.

‘You know how to set this up?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’ Chris came forward and picked up some of the pieces, weighing them in his hand. ‘This is good stuff. Where’d you get it?’

‘Place in Basecamp. They were having a sale. Two for the price of one. I’ve got the other one set up in my office. Here, give me the white ones. You do the black. Who was that on the phone?’

‘Fucking Harris in Panama. Got problems with the Nicaraguan insurgents again, and of course Harris won’t take a fucking decision on his own because he’s five hundred klicks off the action. He’s not sure of the angles.’

Bryant paused in mid-action. ‘He said that?’

‘More or less.’

‘So he called someone who’s five thousand klicks off to decide for him? You ought to call in the audit on that guy. What’s he on anyway, three per cent of gross?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Audit the fucker. No, better yet, call a retender. Let’s see him fight for his fucking three per cent like we have to.’

Chris shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like out there.’

‘What, better the scumbag that you know?’

‘You got it.’ Chris put the final black pawn in place and stood back. ‘Very nice. Now what?’

Bryant reached out to the white files.

‘Well, I don’t know much about this game, but apparently this is a fairly good way to start.’

He moved the white king’s pawn forward two squares and flashed another grin.

‘Your move.’

‘Do I have to decide now?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Call me with it. That’s the idea. Oh, and listen. That thing with Harris. I had the exact same shit with him over Honduras last year. Wish I’d called the retender then, but it was a sensitive time. Is this a sensitive time?’

Chris thought about it for a moment.

‘No. They’re plugged up in the jungle somewhere, nothing going to happen till the rain stops.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Call the retender,’ he said, pointing a cocked finger pistol downward, execution-style. ‘I would. Get that motherfucker Harris either dead or jacked up and working properly for you. You ever been to Panama?’

‘No. Emerging Markets stuff was all further south. Hammett McColl were into Venezuela, the NAME, bits of Brazil.’

‘Yeah, well, let me tell you about Panama.’ Bryant offered his grin again. ‘Just for your information. The place is stuffed full of agents who’ll do Harris’s job twice as well for half the money. You offer one and a half, maybe two per cent of total, they’ll rip his fucking heart out and eat it. Down there they do the tendering in converted bullrings, gladiator-style.’ The American burlesque came on full. ‘Real messy.’

‘Delightful,’ muttered Chris.

‘Fuck it, Chris, he deserves it.’ Bryant’s brow creased with good-humoured exasperation. He held out his hands, palms up. ‘That’s our investment he’s fucking with. If he can’t cut it, well, get someone who can. Anyway, not my account, not my call. Speaking of which, I’ve got some calls to make. You coming out to play tonight? Up for the Falkland again?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Promised Carla we’d eat out in the village. Maybe some other time.’

‘Okay. What about cutting work early, coming down to the firing range with me. Just for an hour or so, before you go home. Get the feel of that Nemex, in case you ever decide to put bullets in it.’

Chris grinned reluctantly. ‘That’s not fair. At least I was carrying mine. Alright, alright. I’ll come down and play in the arcade for an hour. But that’s all. After that, I’m off. Meet you down there at six, say.’

‘Done.’ Bryant shot him with the finger pistol and left.

Chris stood and looked at the chessboard for a while, then he moved the black king’s pawn hesitantly out two spaces, so it was faced off against its white counterpart. He frowned over the move, shifted the piece back a space, hesitated some more then pulled an irritated face and restored the pawn to the face off position. He went back to his desk and stabbed rapidly through a number from memory.

‘Panama Trade and Investment Commission,’ said a Hispanic woman’s voice in English. The speaker swam into focus on the screen and recognised him.

‘Señor Faulkner, how can we help you?’

‘Get me Tendering,’ said Chris.

‘I don’t know,’ he told Carla that evening over margaritas and fajitas in the village Tex-Mex. ‘I thought after that shit on the orbital last week, the battle lines were drawn. I felt like a fucking idiot for all that stuff I’d been saying to you about us staying friends. But I was right. He wants to be my friend.’

‘Or he’s scared of you.’

‘Same difference. I seem to remember someone telling me once that same-sex friendships are just a way of negating competition. Now who was that?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said that’s what Mel thinks. I didn’t say I agreed with him.’

Chris grinned. ‘Well, he’d know about same-sex friendships, I suppose. From a real in-depth point of view.’

‘Don’t be a wanker, Chris.’

‘Hey, come on. It was a joke.’ Chris hung onto his smile, but there was a tiny feeling of slippage somewhere inside him. There had been a time, he was sure, when Carla could read him better than this. ‘You know I’ve got nothing against Mel or Jess. A whole stack of the people I worked with at HM were gay. Jesus Carla, before I met you I was sharing a flat with two gay guys.’

‘Yeah, and you used to make jokes about them.’

‘I—’ But the oozing sense of unfairness was already setting in, like cold mud, chilling his mood and tugging his smile away. ‘Carla, they used to make jokes about me too. They called me the household het, for fuck’s sake. It was all part of the banter. I’m not homophobic. You know that.’

Carla looked at her food, then up at him.

‘Yeah, I know.’ She mustered a small smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just tired.’

‘Who fucking isn’t?’ Chris took an overly large pull at his margarita and said nothing more for a while.

Fajitas are not a dish to be eaten in resentful silence, and neither of them did much more than pick at the food. When the waiter stopped by he sensed the mood radiating out from the little table and took the cooling dishes away without comment.

‘Any dessert?’ he asked carefully when he returned.

Carla shook her head, mute. Chris drew a deep breath.

‘No thanks.’ He made a sudden decision. ‘But you can bring me another margarita. In fact, make it another pitcher.’

‘I don’t want any more, Chris,’ said Carla sharply.

He looked at her with a blank expression he knew would hurt her. ‘Who asked you? Pitcher’s for me.’ He nodded at the waiter, who withdrew with obvious relief. Carla put on her disdainful face.

‘You’re going to get drunk?’

‘Well, looking at the logistics, I would think so. Yes.’

‘I didn’t come here to get drunk.’

‘I didn’t ask you to.’

‘Chris ...’

He waited, going nowhere near the opening the forlorn fade in her voice had left him. Her shoulders slumped.

‘I’m going home,’ she said.

‘Okay. Want them to call you a cab?’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said coldly. ‘It isn’t far.’

‘Fine.’ He buried himself in the margarita glass as she got up. She hesitated towards him for just a second, barely leaning, and then something stiffened in her carriage and she walked away from the table. Chris very carefully did not look round to watch her leave and when she stalked past the window of the restaurant, he busied himself with his drink again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she did not look in at him.

He worried for a while about her walking home alone, but then stopped himself, recognising the feeling for guilt over the fight. Hawkspur Green was a hamlet, made ludicrously prosperous by the influx of driver-class professionals and their families. It had crime levels appropriate to a playgroup, nothing beyond occasional vandalism and even that mostly graffiti tagging. Plus Carla could look after herself and the house was barely fifteen minutes away. He was just manufacturing excuses to go after her.

Fuck that.

The pitcher came.

He drank it.

CHAPTER TEN

South-west zone. The Brundtland.

The decaying concrete bones of the estate squatted mostly in darkness. A handful of unsmashed lights cast sporadic stains of sodium orange on walkways and stairstacks. Isolated lit windows stamped the darkened bulk of buildings in black and yellow code. Child-sized shadows scurried away from Carla’s headlights as she parked the Land Rover. Once outside the protection of the vehicle, it was worse. She could feel professional eyes watching her set the anti-theft systems, professional ears listening to the quick, escalating whine of the contact stunner charging from the battery. She walked as rapidly as she could without showing fear, away from the vehicle and into the lobby.

Miraculously, the lifts appeared to be working.

She had stabbed at the button more to vent frustration than anything else, and was almost alarmed when the lights above the battered metal doors blinked and the downward arrow illuminated. She blinked a little herself, wiped angrily at a tear that had leaked out from under one eyelid, and waited for the lift to arrive. Her right hand was wrapped tightly around the stungun Chris had bought for her and there was a can of Mace in her left. The lobby at her back was coldly lit by grating-protected halogen bulbs and starkly empty, but the wired glass portals she’d come through were cracked and pushed in at a height suggesting kicks, and the damage looked recent.

FUCK YOU ZEK-TIV CUNTS said a wall to her left in daubed red lettering. Pointless rage; no self-respecting executive was going to be seen dead in the Brundtland.

The lift arrived, but when the doors opened the stench of urine was so thick she gagged. She deliberated for a moment, then compressed her lips and headed for the dimly-lit stairwell to her right. Holding the Mace, hand extended, and keeping the stungun hidden behind her back, she climbed the five double flights of stairs and marched down the corridor with steps intended to convey to anyone who might hear her that she was at home in this stinking pit.

She stopped at number fifty-seven and hammered on the door with the bottom of the Mace can. There was the sound of slow, slurred movement inside and a light sprang up under the door.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Dad, it’s Carla.’ She tried to keep her voice even, partly out of pride, but more out of a desire not to alarm. Only a year ago, her father had told her, one of the local edge gangs on the estate had forced an elderly woman to open her door by holding a gun to her daughter’s head on the doorstep. Once in, they’d ransacked the flat, raped the daughter while her aged mother was forced to watch and then beaten both women into unconsciousness. Apparently, they hadn’t bothered to kill either of their victims. They knew there was no need. The police attitude to the zones was containment, not law enforcement. Raids were infrequent and unrelated to actual crimes committed. The estate was gangwit-run. Rape and burglary were not considered transgressions of gang law.

‘Carla?’ There was the snap of the lock being unfastened, the solid thunk as the security-bolt system she and Chris had paid to have installed was disengaged, and then the door was thrown wide. Her father stood in the doorway, a pool cue hefted in his right hand.

‘Carla, what are you doing here at this time of night?’ He switched to Norwegian. ‘And where’s Chris? You didn’t come up here alone, did you? For Christ’s sake, Carla.’

‘Hello, Dad,’ she managed.

He ushered her inside, slammed the door shut and engaged the bolt system again. Only then did he relinquish his grip on the cue, dropping the makeshift weapon into an umbrella stand by the door and opening his arms to hug her.

‘It’s good to see you, Carla. Even if it is half past midnight. What the fuck happened? Oh, don’t tell me.’ He nodded as the repressed tears began to leak out and she trembled against him. ‘Not another fight? Is he downstairs?’

She shook her head against his shoulder.

‘Good. I won’t have to be diplomatic then.’ Erik Nyquist stepped back from his daughter a little and took hold of her chin. ‘Why don’t you come and have a whisky coffee with me and we can bitch about him in his absence.’

She choked a laugh. He echoed her with a gentle smile.

‘That’s better,’ he said.

So they sat in front of an antique electric fire in the threadbare living room with mugs of cheap coffee and cheaper whisky steaming in their fists and Erik stared into the reddish glow of the heating element while his daughter talked. The tears were under control now, and Carla’s voice was firm, an analytical tool sifting through the settled sediment, first of the last few hours, then of the last few weeks, finally of the last few years.

‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we didn’t always used to fight this much. Did we? You must remember.’

‘Well, you never drove across the cordoned zones in the middle of the night alone because you’d been fighting,’ Erik admitted. ‘That’s a first, at least. But if I’m honest? I think you’ve been having rows with Chris about as long as you’ve known him to any appreciable depth. Certainly as long as you’ve been married. I couldn’t say if you have more now than you used to, but that’s not really the point.’

Carla looked up, surprised. ‘It isn’t?’

‘No, it isn’t. Carla, marriage is an artificial state. Invented by the patriarchy to ensure that fathers know who their children are. It’s been going on for thousands of years but that doesn’t make it right. Human beings were never designed to live like that.’

‘I think I’ve read this somewhere before, Dad.’

‘The fact that it was written by your mother,’ said Erik severely, ‘does not invalidate the argument. We are tribal, not matrimonial.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Let’s see if I remember how it went. The basic human social unit would have been a matriarchal tribe; a female, child-rearing and knowledge-keeping centre with a protective outer shell of warrior males. Uh, how does it go, children held in common by the tribe, reproduction only understood by the females and—’

‘The point is, Carla, exclusive pairing is unnatural. Two people were never meant to be so exclusively much to each other.’

‘That’s a pretty fucking poor excuse,’ she said, then bit her lip.

Erik gave her a reproachful look. ‘That isn’t what I meant. Look, even in the recent past you had extended families to soak up some of the strain. Now we live in isolated couples or nuclear families, and either both partners are working so hard they never see each other, or they’re not working and the stress of living on the poverty line tears them apart.’

‘That’s a simplification, Dad.’

‘Is it?’ Erik cradled his mug in both hands and looked back into the red glow from the bar fire. ‘Look at where you live, Carla. A village neither of you knew the name of three years ago. No friends living close, no family, not even a workplace social life unless you’re prepared to drive for an hour and a half at the end of the evening. All these things put a huge strain on you both, and rows are the result. The natural result. It wouldn’t be natural not to fight with someone you share your whole sleeping and waking life with. It’s healthy, it provides release, and if you don’t hold grudges it shouldn’t damage the relationship.’

Carla shivered despite the fire.

‘This is damaging us,’ she said.

Erik sighed.

‘You know what your mother said to me before she went back to Tromsö?’

‘Fuck you and that English bitch?’ She regretted it as soon as the words left her mouth, surprised that the anger was still there on tap nearly two decades later. But Erik only smiled wryly and if there was pain behind that, it didn’t show. She reached across to him with one hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’ The smile flickered but held. ‘You’re right, she did say that. More than once. But she also said that it was high time, that she wasn’t really surprised because we didn’t have fun together any more. She said that. We have no fun any more, Erik.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘No, she was right, Carla.’ He looked across at her and this time there was pain in his face. ‘Your mother was usually right about these things. I was always too busy being political and angry to spot the emotional truths. She hit the nail on the head. We didn’t have fun any more. We hadn’t had any real fun for years. That’s why I ended up with Karen in the first place. She was fun, and that was something your mother and I’d stopped trying to do years ago.’

‘Chris and I still have fun,’ Carla said quickly.

Erik Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed again. ‘Then you hold onto him,’ he said. ‘Because if that’s true, if it’s really true, then what you’ve got is worth any amount of fights.’

Carla shot him a surprised glance, caught by the sudden gust of emotion in his voice.

‘I thought you didn’t like Chris.’

Erik chuckled. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘What’s that got to do with it? I’m not sleeping with him.’

She smiled wanly and went back to watching the fire.

‘I don’t know, Dad. It’s just.’

He waited while she assembled her feelings into a coherent shape.

‘Just since he went to work at Shorn.’ She shook her head wearily. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, Dad. He’s making more money than he ever has, the hours aren’t so different to what he used to clock at Hammett McColl. Fuck it, we ought to be happy. We’ve got all the props for it. Why are we falling out more now?’

‘Shorn Associates. And is he still in Emerging Markets?’

She shook her head. ‘Conflict Investment.’

‘Conflict Investment.’ Erik smacked his lips, then got up and went to the bookcase set against the wall opposite the fire. He dragged a finger across the tightly packed spines of the books on a lower shelf, found what he was looking for and tugged the volume out. Flicking through the pages, he came back to the fire and handed it to her.

‘Read that,’ he said. ‘That page.’

She looked at the book, turned it to see the title. ‘The Socialist Legacy. Miguel Benito. Dad, I’m not in the mood. This isn’t about politics.’

‘Everything is about politics, Carla. Politics is everything. Everything in human society anyway. Just read the passage in highlighter.’

She sighed and set down her coffee mug at her feet. Clearing her throat, she picked up the line with one finger and read aloud. ‘ ‘‘Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware’’?’

‘Yes. That one.’

‘ ‘‘Revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century had always been aware that in order to bring about a convulsive political change’’.’

‘Actually, I meant, read it to yourself.’

She ignored him, ploughing on with the edge of singsong emerging in her voice. ‘ ‘‘In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society. In populist recog—’’ Dad is there a point somewhere in all this bullshit?’

‘Just finish it, will you.’

She pulled a glum face. ‘ ‘‘In populist recognition of this underlying truth, the cry during the latter half of the the last century became if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’’ Aaaagh, new paragraph. ‘‘What any survivor of late Marxist ideology would be forced to recognise in the politics of the twenty-first century is that the contradictions are now so heavily disguised that it would be the work of decades simply to reveal them, let alone sharpen them into anything resembling a point.’’ A bit like this prose style, huh? Alright, alright, nearly there. ‘‘An overall problem is now no longer perceived, therefore an overall solution no longer sought. Any distasteful elements within the world economic order are now considered either candidates for longer term fine tuning or worse still an irrevocable by-product of economic laws supposedly as set in stone as the laws of quantum physics. So long as this is believed by the vast majority of the populace in the developed world, the contradictions identified by Marxism will remain hidden and each individual member of society will be left to resolve for themselves the vaguely felt tensions at an internal level. Any effort to externalise this unease will be disdained by the prevailing political climate as discredited socialist utopianism or simply, as was seen in chapter three, the politics of envy.’’ ’ She laid down the book. ‘Yeah, so what?’

‘That’s your problem, Carla.’ Erik had not sat down while she was reading. He stood with his back to the fire and looked down at her as if she were one of his students. She felt suddenly fifteen years old again. ‘Unresolved contradictions. Chris may still be the man you married but he’s also a soldier for the new economic order. A corporate samurai, if you want to adopt their own imagery.’

‘I know that, Dad. That’s nothing new. I know what he does, I know how his world works. I help build and repair the vehicles they use to kill each other, in case you’d forgotten. I’m just as involved in it all, Dad. What?’

He was shaking his head. He crouched to her level and took both her hands gently in his own.

‘Carla, this isn’t about you and Chris. It’s barely about you at all. Benito’s talking about internal contradictions. Living with what you are, with what your society is. At Hammett McColl, Chris could do that because there was a thin veneer of respectability over it all. At Shorn, there isn’t.’

‘Oh, bullshit. You’ve read what these people are like. Dad, you used to write about what they were like, back when there was anyone with the guts to publish it. The only difference between Conflict Investment and Emerging Markets is the level of risk. In Emerging Markets, they don’t like conflict or instability. The guys in CI thrive on it. But it’s the same principle.’

‘Hmm.’ Erik smiled and let go of her hands. ‘That sounds to me like Chris talking. And he’s probably even right. But that’s not the point.’

‘You keep saying that, Dad.’

Erik shrugged and seated himself again. ‘That’s because you keep missing it, Carla. You think this is about a rift between you and Chris, and I’m telling you it’s not, it’s about a rift inside Chris. Now you’re saying there’s no difference in what he used to do and what he’s doing now, and aside from a few semantic quibbles that may be true. But Chris hasn’t just changed what he does. He’s changed where he does it, and who he does it for, and that’s what counts. Along with Nakamura and Lloyd Paul, Shorn Associates is the most aggressive player in the investment field. That applies to their Arbitrage and Emerging Markets divisions just as much as to Conflict Investment. They’re the original hard-faced firm. No gloss, no moral rationalisations. They do what they do, they’re the best at it. That’s what they sell on. You go to Shorn because they’re mean motherfuckers, and they’ll make money for you, come hell or high water. Fuck ethical investment, just give me a fat fucking return and don’t tell me too much about how you got it.’

‘You’re making speeches, Dad.’

There was a taut silence. Carla stared into the fire, wondering why she found it so easy to sink these barbs into her father. Then Erik Nyquist chuckled and nodded.

‘You’re right, I am,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Sorry about that. I miss seeing myself in print so much, it all just balls up inside me. Comes out whenever I have someone to talk to.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said distantly. ‘I just wish . . .’

‘Wish what?’

She had a vivid flash of recall, toothpaste-white. She would have been about six or seven at the time, staying with grandparents in Tromsö and cocooned in the cold outside/warm inside security the visits there always brought. She remembered Erik and Kirsti Nyquist on skis, propped against each other for support on the hill behind Kirsti’s parents’ house and laughing into each other’s faces. Having fun in the definitive Nyquist fashion that she, as a child, had always imagined would characterise her future married life, the way it would always characterise her parents’.

The flash faded, into the dull red glow of the electric fire. She reached for her father’s hand.

‘Nothing.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘Drink?’

Mike Bryant shook his head. ‘Still dealing with a hangover, thanks, Louise. Just water, if you’ve got it.’

‘Of course.’ Louise Hewitt closed the steel-panelled door of the office drinks cabinet and hefted a blue two-litre bottle from the table beside it instead. ‘Sit down, Mike. Drinking - or whatever - mid week, that can be a pretty lethal mistake.’

‘Not lethal,’ said Bryant, massaging his temples a little as he sank onto the sofa. ‘But definitely a mistake at my age.’

‘Yeah, must be hell being thirty-four. I remember it vaguely.’ Hewitt poured water into two glasses and sat on the edge of the sofa opposite. She looked at him speculatively. ‘Well, I won’t toast you with water, but congratulations do seem to be in order. I just got off the phone to Bangkok. That sketch on Cambodia you dropped last time you were out there finally landed on the right guerrilla head.’

Bryant sat up straighter, and forgot his hangover.

‘Cambodia? The smack-war thing?’

Hewitt nodded. ‘The smack-war thing, as you so elegantly define it. We’ve got a guerrilla coalition leader willing to deal. Khieu Sary. Sound familiar?’

Bryant drank from his water glass and nodded. ‘Yeah, I remember him. Arrogant motherfucker. Had ancestors in the original Khmer Rouge or something.’

‘Yeah.’ There was the slightest hint of mockery in Hewitt’s echo of the grunted syllable. ‘Well, it looks like this Sary needs arms and cash to hold the coalition together. The Cambodian government’s on the edge of offering an amnesty to any of the heroin rebels who want to come in and disarm. If that happens, the coalition’s gone and Sary loses his powerbase. But if he can hang on, our sources in Bangkok reckon he’s in line to march on Phnom Penh inside two years.’

‘Optimistic.’

‘Local agents always are. You know how it is, they pitch rosy so you’ll bite. But this guy’s been on the money in the past. I’m inclined to go with it. So you’d better break out your copy of Reed and Mason, because this one’s yours, Mike.’

Mike Bryant’s eyes widened. ‘Mine?’

‘All yours.’ Hewitt shrugged. ‘You made it happen, you’ve got the executive experience to cover it. Like I said, congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’

‘The proposal is not uncontested,’ said Hewitt casually.

Bryant grinned. ‘What a surprise. Nakamura?’

‘Nakamura and Acropolitic both. Nakamura must have parallel information on Sary, they’re offering him essentially the same deal you put together in Bangkok, and the bastard’s smart enough to know that forcing us all to tender will bring the prices down.’

‘And Acro?’

‘They’ve got the status quo mandate. Official economic advisers to the Cambodian regime. They’re in it to squash the proposal before it gets off the ground. It’s all already cleared with Trade and Finance.’

‘What’s the ground?’

‘North. Three-hundred-kilometre duel envelope, contracts to be signed in conference auditorium six at the Tebbit Centre. Turn up with blood on your wheels or don’t turn up. The word is Nakamura have pulled Mitsue Jones for this one. Flying her in to head up the UK team. Acropolitic don’t have anyone in her league, but they’ll no doubt be sending their finest. Against all of that, you get a team of three including you. Suggestions?’

‘Nick Makin. Chris Faulkner.’ There was no hesitation in Bryant’s voice.

Hewitt looked dubious. ‘Your chess pal, huh?’

‘He’s good.’

‘You don’t let personal feelings get in the way of professional judgment around here, Mike. You know that. It’s bad for business.’

‘That’s right, I know that. And I want Faulkner. You said this was mine, Louise. If you don’t—’

‘Makin doesn’t like Faulkner,’ said Hewitt sharply.

‘Makin doesn’t like anyone. That’s his secret. The problem here, Louise, is that you don’t like Faulkner. And it isn’t much of a secret, either.’

‘May I remind you that you’re speaking to the executive partner of this division.’ Hewitt’s voice stayed level, just a shade cooler all of a sudden. She poured herself more water while she talked. ‘For your information, Mike, personal feelings have nothing to do with this. I don’t think Faulkner is up to a tender of this magnitude. I also think that you’re letting a friendship cloud your professional judgment and I’m going on record with that. This is going to go badly wrong if you’re not careful.’

‘Louise, this is going to go like a dream.’ Bryant grinned wolfishly. ‘Makin and Faulkner are both proven hard men on the road and as far as I’m concerned that’s the bottom line. We don’t have anybody better and you know it.’

There was a pause in which the loudest sound was Louise Hewitt swallowing water. Finally she shrugged.

‘Alright, Mike, it’s your call. But I’m still going on record against it. And that makes Faulkner one hundred per cent your responsibility. If he fucks up—’

‘If he fucks up, Louise, you can fire him and I’ll hold the door open.’ Bryant flashed the grin again. ‘Or the window.’

Hewitt took a disc out of her pocket and tossed it onto the table between them.

‘If he fucks up, you’ll all be dead,’ she said shortly. ‘And Shorn’ll be out of a medium-term CI contract worth billions. That’s the briefing. Route blow-ups, road-surface commentaries. Make sure they both get copies. Make sure Faulkner understands what he’s got to do. Blood on the wheels, Mike, or there’s no deal.’

‘I remember a time,’ Bryant let just a hint of his American burlesque tinge the words, ‘used to be enough just to get there first.’

Hewitt smiled despite herself. ‘Bullshit, you do. You just heard Notley and the others talk about it. And even they barely remember when it was that cuddly. Now get out of here, and don’t disappoint me.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Bryant picked up the disc and got up to go. At the door, he paused and looked back to where she was still sitting at the desk, sipping her water.

‘Louise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks for giving me this.’

‘Don’t mention it. Like I said, don’t let me down.’

‘No, I won’t.’ Bryant hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘You know, Louise, you go on record against Faulkner now and you run the risk of looking very silly when he works out.’

Hewitt gave him an icy, executive-partner smile.

‘I’ll run that risk, thank you, Michael. Now, was there any other advice you’d like to give me on running the division?’

Bryant shook his head wordlessly and left.

He stopped by Chris’s office and found the other man standing at the window, staring out at the hail. Winter was hanging on unseasonably long in London and the skies had been gusting fistfuls of the stuff for weeks.

‘ ’s happening?’ he asked as he stuck his head around the door.

Chris jerked visibly as Bryant spoke. Clearly he’d been a long way off. Coming across the office to the window, Bryant was hard put to see anywhere visibly more attractive than the fifty-third floor of the Shorn tower, and was forced to conclude that Chris had been daydreaming.

‘Mike.’ Chris turned away from the view to face his visitor. His eyes were red-rimmed and angry with something not in the immediate vicinity. Bryant backed up a step.

‘Whoa, Chris. You’ve got to lay off the crystal edge.’ It was only half a joke, he admitted to himself. Chris looked like shit. ‘Remember Rancid Neagan. Just say No, not ’til the weekend.’

Chris smiled, a forced bending of the lips, as he rolled out the time-honoured Dex and Seth comeback.

‘Hey, I don’t do that shit no more.’

‘What, weekends?’

Reluctantly, the smile became a grin. ‘You come up with a move or what?’

‘Not yet. But don’t worry, the turnaround is in sight.’

This time they both grinned. The match, currently their fifth, was well into the endgame, and, barring a brain haemorrhage, Chris couldn’t lose. Which would make it four to one against Bryant, a score that the big man didn’t seem to mind as much as Chris had thought he might. Bryant played a flamboyant, queen-centred game and when Chris inevitably worked out a fork and took that piece away from him, Bryant’s strategy usually went to pieces. Chris’s cautious defensive earthworks stood him in good stead every time and Bryant continued to be perplexed when his assaults broke on the battlements of pawns while a pair or a trio of innocuous pieces chased his exposed king around the board and pinned it to an ignominious checkmate. But he was learning, and seemed content to pay the price of that process in defeats. His calls at weekends came far faster than they had in the beginning, and Chris was taking longer to respond each time. This last match, at over two weeks, had already lasted twice as long as the preceding games. Chris thought it might be time to go up in the loft and bring down some of the battered strategy books his father’s brother had given him as a child. He needed to sand off the rust if he was going to hold his lead.

Maybe in return, Mike was teaching him to shoot. They were down to the Shorn armoury a couple of times a week now, firing off Nemex rounds at the holotargets until Chris’s gun hand was numb with the repeated kick of the big gun. To his own surprise, he was turning out to have some natural aptitude. He hit things more often than he missed, and if he didn’t yet have Mike’s casual precision with the Nemex, he was certainly making, in the midst of the crashing thunder on the firing range, a quiet kind of progress.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

‘Got something for you,’ said Bryant, producing the briefing disc from his pocket with a conjuror’s flourish. He held it up between index and ring fingers. The light caught it and opened up a rainbow-sheened wedge on the bright silver circle. Chris looked at the colours curiously.

‘And that is?’

‘Work, my friend. And this season’s shot at the big time. TV fame, as many drive-site groupies as you can handle.’

Chris ran the disc at home.

‘Look it over,’ Bryant told him. ‘Kick back and relax, take off your tie and shoes, pour yourself a shot of that iodine-flavoured shit you drink and just let it wash over you. I’m not looking for feedback for at least forty-eight hours.’

‘Why can’t I just run it now?’ Chris wanted to know.

‘Because,’ leaning closer, with a secret-of-my-success type air, ‘that way you’re keyed up with anticipation and you eat it up at a deeper level. Your brain really sucks it in, just like the forty-eight-hour wait after gives it time to really stew, and by the time we meet to talk about it, you’re ready to boil over with insight.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Old consultancy trick from way back.’

‘This just you and me?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Three-man team. You, me, Nick Makin.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is there a problem with that?’ Bryant’s eyes narrowed. ‘Something I should know about?’

‘No, no.’

Watching the closing sequences of the briefing disc, Chris turned it over in his head and tried to work out why he did feel there was a problem with Nick Makin. Makin hadn’t exactly come across as friendly, but neither had Hewitt, or Hamilton for that matter, and a lot of Shorn execs had probably heard the story of Elysia Bennett and Chris Faulkner’s sentiment attack.

The disc ended with the Shorn Associates logo engraved into a metallic finish on the screen, then clicked off. Chris shelved his thoughts, picked up his drink and went to look for his wife.

He thought for a moment she’d gone to bed with a book, but as he passed the kitchen he saw that the connecting door to the garage was open and the lights were on. Led by the clinking sounds of tools, he walked through, and around the bulk of the Saab, which was jacked up on one side. Carla’s coverall-clad legs and hips protruded from under the car beside an unrolled oilskin cloth full of spanners. As he watched she must have stretched out to one side for something, because the angle of her hips shifted and the plain of her stomach changed shape beneath the coveralls. He felt the customary twinge of arousal that her more sinuous movements still fired through him.

‘Hey,’ he kicked one of her feet. ‘What’re you doing?’

She stayed beneath the car. ‘What does it look like I’m doing. I’m checking your undercarriage.’

‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

There was no response other than the creak of something metallic being tightened.

‘I said I thought you’d gone to bed.’

‘Yeah, I heard you.’

‘Oh. You just didn’t think it was worth answering me.’

From the stillness he knew she had stopped work. He didn’t hear the sigh, but he could have cued it, accurate to milliseconds.

‘Chris, you’re looking at my legs. Obviously I haven’t gone to bed.’

‘Just making conversation.’

‘Well, it’s not the most engaging conversational gambit I’ve ever heard, Chris. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up on it.’

‘Jesus! Carla, sometimes you can be so—’ Anger and dismay at the idea of having a row with his wife’s feet gave ground in a single jolt to mirth. It was such a ludicrous image that he suddenly found himself smirking and trying to stifle a snort of laughter.

She heard it and slid out from under the car as if spring-loaded there. One hand knuckled across her nose and left streaks of grease.

‘What’s so funny?’

For some reason, the irritation in her voice combined with her rapid ejection from under the car and the grease on her nose drove the final nail into the coffin of Chris’s seriousness. He began to cackle uncontrollably. Carla sat up and watched curiously as he leaned back on the wall and laughed.

‘I said what’s so . . .’

Chris slid down the wall, spluttering. Carla gave up as a reflexive smile fought its way onto her face.

‘What?’ she asked, more softly.

‘It was just,’ Chris was forcing the words out between giggles and snorts. ‘Just your legs, you know.’

‘Something funny about my legs?’

‘Well, your feet really.’ Chris put his glass down and wiped at his eyes. ‘I, just.’ He shook his head and waved a hand with minimal descriptive effect. ‘Just thought it was funny, talking to them, you know. Your feet.’ He snorted again. ‘It’s. Doesn’t matter.’

She got up from the floor with an accustomed flexing motion and went to crouch beside him. Turning her hand to present the ungrimed back, she brushed it against his cheek.

‘Chris . . .’

‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said suddenly.

She held up her hands. ‘I’ve got to wash up. In fact, I need a shower.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

In the shower, he stood behind her and ran soaped hands over her breasts, down across her belly and into the V of her thighs. She chuckled deep in her throat and reached back for his erection, hands still gritty with the last of the engine grime. For a while it was enough to lean in the corner of the shower stall together, locked in an unhurried kiss, rubbing at each other languidly in the steam and pummelling jets of hot water. When the last of the dirt and soap had cascaded off them and swirled away, Carla swung herself up and braced her upper body in the corner while her thighs gripped Chris around the waist and her hips ground against this.

It was an inconclusive coupling, so Chris shut off the water and staggered with Carla’s arms and thighs still locked around him into the bedroom, where they collapsed giggling onto the bed and set about running through every posture in the manual.

Later, they lay on soaked sheets with their limbs hooked around each other and faces angled together. Moonlight fell in through the window and whitened the bed.

‘Don’t go,’ she said suddenly.

‘Go?’ Chris looked down in puzzlement. He had slid out of her some time ago. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here in this bed with you. Forever.’

‘Forever?’

‘Well, till about six-thirty anyway.’

‘I’m serious, Chris.’ She lifted herself to look into his face. ‘Don’t go on this Cambodia thing. Not up against Nakamura.’

‘Carla.’ It was almost a reprimand the way he said it. ‘We’ve been over this before. It’s my job. We don’t have any choice. There’s the house, the cards, how are we going to cover those things if I’m not driving?’

‘I know you’ve got to drive, Chris, but at Hammett McColl—’

‘It’s not the same, Carla. At HM I already had my rep. I’ve got to carve it out all over again at Shorn, or some snot-nosed junior analyst is going to call me out, and once that starts you’re watching your tail forever. If they think you’re easing up, going soft, they’re on you like fucking vultures. The only way to beat that is to stay hard and keep them scared. That way you make partner, and from then on it’s a Sunday afternoon spin. They can’t touch you. No one below partner status is allowed to call you out.’ A vague disquiet passed over him as he remembered what Bryant had told him about Louise Hewitt and the partner called Page. ‘And partner challenges are few and far between. You see them coming. You can negotiate. It’s more civilised at that level.’

‘Civilised.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Carla was silent for a while. Then she rolled away from him and huddled herself into the pillow.

‘The disc says Nakamura are going to send Mitsue Jones.’

Chris shifted a little and tucked in behind her. ‘Yes, probably. But if you’d stayed to watch the rest of it, you would have seen that Jones hasn’t duelled in the last six months. And it won’t be her home turf. There’s a good chance they won’t even use her because of that. Not knowing the road can get you killed a lot faster than going up against a better driver. And anyway, driving on the same team as Mike Bryant and this other guy Makin, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Really.’

Carla shivered. ‘I saw a profile of Jones a couple of years ago. They say she’s never lost a tender.’

‘Nor have I. Nor has Bryant as far as I know.’

‘Yes, but she’s driven over two dozen challenges, and she’s only twenty-eight. I saw her interviewed, and she looks scary, Chris. Really scary.’

Chris laughed gently against the skin at the nape of Carla’s neck. ‘That’s just camerawork. In the States, she’s done centrefolds for Penthouse Online. Pouting lips, the works. She’s a fucking pin-up, Carla. It’s all hype.’

For a moment, he almost believed it himself.

‘When is it?’ she asked quietly.

‘Wednesday next week. Dawn start. I’ve got to sleep over at the office Tuesday night. You want to come in and stay in the hospitality suites with me?’

‘No. I’ll go across to Dad’s.’

‘You could always ask him to come and stay here for a change.’ Chris frowned and nuzzled at her back. ‘You know I don’t like the thought of you sleeping in that shithole. I worry about you.’

Carla turned round to face him again. It was hard to tell which was uppermost in her expression, affection or exasperation. ‘You worry about me? Chris, listen to yourself, will you? Next Wednesday you’re out on the road, duelling, and you’re worried about me sleeping in some substandard housing. Come on.’

‘There’s been a lot of violence on that estate,’ said Chris doggedly. ‘If I had my way—’

He stopped, not entirely sure what he wanted to say next.

‘You’d what?’

He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Forget it. I just think, why can’t Erik come and stay here with us for a change?’

‘You know why.’

Chris sighed. ‘Yeah, because I’m a fucking suited parasite on the lives of honest working men and women.’

‘Got it in one.’ Carla kissed him. ‘Come on, I’ll be alright. You just worry about keeping my spaced armour intact. If you come back with the wings all chewed up like last time, you really will see some violence.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She jabbed him in the ribs. ‘Oh yeah. I didn’t put in all that work to have you broadside and stick like a fucking no-namer. You drive like it matters what happens to your wheels, or that’ll be the last blowjob you see this year.’

‘Have to go to my usual supplier then. Ow!’

‘Fucking piece of shit! Usual supplier did you say? Who else are you getting blowjobs from, you piece of—’

‘Blowtorch! I thought you said blowtorch.’

Their mingled laughter penetrated the glass of the window and sounded faintly, in the still of the garden beyond. Had Erik Nyquist been there in the darkness, he would have been forced to admit that what he could hear was, indisputably, the sound of his daughter and the man she had married having fun. He might even have been glad to hear it.

Unfortunately, Erik Nyquist was nearly a hundred kilometres south-west of the laughter, listening instead through paper-thin walls to the sounds of an edge dealer beating his girlfriend to pulp. In the garden, the only witness to the noise of Chris and Carla’s hilarity was a large tawny owl who watched the window unwinkingly for a moment, and then turned its attention back to the more pressing matter of disembowelling the half-dead field mouse in its talons.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Apparently, it was a long-standing Shorn tradition to do final briefings down among the variously stripped and jacked-up bodies of the company workshops. Chris could see where the custom originated. Nominally, it gave the executives the opportunity to do some corporate bonding with the mechanics overseeing their final vehicle checks. Far more importantly, the scattered flare of welding torches and the stink of scorched metal put the hard edge of reality on what might have otherwise seemed very far removed from the air-conditioned civility of a more conventional briefing room. In Shorn parlance, it avoided any potential ambiguity.

Accordingly, Hewitt kept it brutally short. Keep it tight, don’t fuck up. Come back with the contract. Leave the others in pieces on the road. She thanked the chief mechanic personally for his team’s hard work, and walked away.

After she’d gone, Bryant went for Indian carry-out and Chris sat in the open passenger doorway of the Saab, leafing absently through the background printout on Mitsue Jones, while two mechanics in logo-flashed company coveralls strove in vain to find anything worth doing to the engine that Carla had not already done.

‘Chris?’ It was Bryant, somewhere off amidst the clang and crackle of the body shop. ‘Chris, where are you?’

‘Round here.’

There was the sound of stumbling, a clatter and cursing. Chris repressed a grin and did not look up from the printout. Ten seconds later Bryant appeared round the opened hood of the Saab, cartons of take-out food in his arms and a huge naan bread jammed into his mouth. He seated himself without ceremony on a pile of worn tyres opposite Chris and started laying out the food. He took the naan bread out of his mouth and gestured with it towards two of the cartons.

‘That’s yours. Onion bhaji, and dhansak. That’s the mango chutney. Where’d Makin go?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Toilet? He looked pretty constipated.’

‘Nah, Makin always looks like that. Anal-retentive.’

A shadow fell across the food cartons and Bryant looked up, biting on the naan again. He talked through the mouthful.

‘Nick. Your tikka’s in there. Rice there. Spoons.’

Makin seated himself with a wary glance at Chris.

‘Thanks, Michael.’

There was silence for a while, broken only by the sounds of chewing. Bryant ate as if ravenous and finished first. He cast glances at both men.

‘Make your wills?’

‘Why? I’m not going to die.’ Makin looked across at Chris. ‘Are you?’

Chris shrugged and wiped his fingers, still chewing.

‘See how I feel.’

Bryant coughed laughter. Makin allowed himself a small, precise smile. ‘Vewy good. It’s good to have a sense of humour. I hear they ah big on it at HM. Must make losing more beahable.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris smiled gently back. ‘It can make winning pwetty wadical too, you should twy it.’

Makin tensed. His glasses gleamed in the overhead arc light.

‘Does the way I speak amuse you?’

‘Not weally.’

‘Hey, you guys,’ Bryant protested. ‘Come on.’

‘You know, Chwis,’ Makin looked down at his open right hand as if considering using it as a fist. ‘I’m not a chess player. Not much of a game player at all. Oh, I know you like symbolism. Games. Humour. All good ways of avoiding confontation.’

He tossed his fork into the cooling sauces of Chris’s carton.

‘But tomorrow is a confontation. You can’t laugh it away, you can’t turn it into a game. Mitsue Jones won’t play chess with you. She’ll hit you with evything she’s got and she’ll hit you fast.’

On the last word he clapped his hands violently and his eyes pinned Chris from behind the rectangular-paned screens of his glasses.

‘There’ll be no time to consider your moves out there. You must see it coming.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘And act. Nothing else.’

Chris nodded and looked down at his food for a moment. Then his hand whiplashed out and snatched Makin’s glasses from his nose.

‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said brightly.

‘Chris.’ There was a warning in Mike Bryant’s voice.

Without his glasses, Makin looked a lot less sharkish, for all his clear lack of vision defects. The narrowly watchful face now looked simply thin. When he spoke, his voice had gone thick and slow with rage, but there was nothing to back it up.

‘Michael, I don’t think I want to dwive with this clown.’

Chris held out his hand. ‘Would you like your glasses back?’ he asked innocently.

Oddly, it was Bryant who snapped.

‘Alright you two, that’s enough. Nick, you asked for that, so don’t act so fucking superior. And Chris, give him back his glasses. Jesus, I’m going up against Nakamura with a pair of fucking kids.’

‘Michael, I don’t think—’

‘No, you didn’t think, Nick. You just opened your fucking mouth. Louise asked me to head up this team. When she asks you, you can pick who drives with you. Until then, just get in line and keep a lid on it.’

The small circle of space between the three men rocked with silent tension. Behind them, the two mechanics looking over the Saab had stopped what they were doing to watch the action. Nick Makin drew in a compressed breath, then took his glasses back without a word and stalked away.

Bryant prodded at the food cartons for a while. Finally he glanced up and met Chris’s gaze.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him. He’ll have calmed down by morning.’ He brooded a little. ‘I think this chess thing might be backfiring. Symbolic conflict isn’t what you’d call a popular concept around here.’

‘What, no game-playing? Come on, you’re winding me up.’

‘Yeah, there’s games, sure. Some of the other Shorn guys I know are into those alliance games on the net. The Alphamesh leagues, stuff like that. But chess.’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Just not cool, man. Makin isn’t the first to mention it. I don’t think it’ll be catching on.’

Chris picked an onion bhaji out of a carton and bit into it reflectively. ‘Yeah, well. Always happens when you challenge someone’s world view. Means they have to re-evaluate. Most people don’t like to think that hard.’

Bryant forced a chuckle that loosened up audibly as he produced it.

‘Yeah, me included. Still, Makin should know better. No way you start this shit at a time like this.’

‘Going to be bloody tomorrow, huh?’

‘You heard of Jones?’

‘Me and the rest of the Western world, yeah.’

Bryant looked at him. ‘There’s your answer, then.’

‘Well,’ Chris tossed the half-eaten bhaji back into the carton. ‘I always wondered what the big bonuses were for.’

‘You keep your mind on that bonus tomorrow,’ grinned Bryant, regaining some of his good cheer. ‘And everything will work out just fine. You’ll see. Easy money.’

The Acropolitic car caught the central reservation barrier head-on, flipped effortlessly into the air and came down on its back, wheels still spinning. A figure slumped broken and still within. Chris, who’d been expecting a prolonged dogfight with the other car, whooped and slammed a fist against the roof of his own vehicle as he swept past.

‘Acropolitic, thank you and goodnight! ’

‘Nice,’ said Mike Bryant’s voice over the intercom. ‘Now form up and stay tight. Those guys were in pristine condition, which to my way of thinking means Nakamura aren’t on this stretch.’

‘Conforming,’ said Nick Makin crisply. Chris smirked, raised his eyes to the roof and, saying nothing, tucked into the wedge behind Mike.

Behind them, the wrecks of the Acropolitic team lay strewn across three kilometres of highway, like the abandoned toys of a child with emerging sociopathic tendencies. Two of them were burning.

‘Conforming.’

Chris wasn’t the only one smirking at Makin’s fighter-pilot pretensions. Thirty kilometres up ahead, Mitsue Jones grinned disbelievingly as the voice crackled out of her car radio. She grasped the edge of her open door and hinged herself out of the Mitsubishi Kaigan. The wind came and battered at her two-hundred-dollar Karel Mann tumbling spike cut.

Oh well.

The face beneath the jagged hair was pin-up perfect, tanned from a month on the Mexican Pacific coast and made up to accent her Japanese heritage. In keeping with Nakamura duel tradition, she went formally suited, a black Daisuke Todoroki ensemble whose sole concession to the driving was the flared and carefully vented skirt. There were flat-heeled leather boots on her feet, sheer black tights on her legs.

‘Looking good, Mits.’

She cranked round in the direction of the shout. Behind the long sunken lines of the Kaigan, her colleagues’ own shorter, blunter Mitsubishi cruisers were parked with raked precision along the overgrown curve of the intersection roundabout. The two Nakamura wedge men were cutting up lines of edge on the sleek black hood of the closest car. One of them waved at her.

Jones pulled a face and turned to the motorway bridge railing on the other side of the road. Beyond the bridge, the green of the landscape rose in a series of granite flecked interlocking spurs that blocked out the view of the road at about five kilometres distance. She crossed the road and prodded at the feet of the fourth Nakamura team member, who sat with his back to the rails, checking the load on his Vickers-Cat shoulder-launcher. He glanced up as Jones kicked him and grinned through his beard.

‘Ready to rock ’n’ roll.’ It came out surfer-drawled. His English, like hers, was West Coast American. The association ran back a couple of years. He nodded across at the other two men and their edge ritual. ‘You cool with that?’

Jones shrugged. ‘Whatever works. New York says they’re the best we’ve got around here, and they should know.’

‘They should.’ The missileer laid his weapon aside and got up. Standing he was a giant, towering over Jones’s diminutive frame. ‘So what’s the disposition?’

‘Acropolitic are out of the game.’ Jones leaned on the bridge rail. ‘Shorn did the shit work for us, just like we figured. All we have to do is sweep them up.’

The missileer leaned beside her. ‘And you’re sure this is going to work?’

‘It worked at Denver, didn’t it?’

‘It was new at Denver.’

‘On this side of the Atlantic it’s still new. Total press blackout until US Trade and Finance thrash out the precedent.’ A cold smile. ‘Which, I’m reliably informed by our government liaison unit, is going to take the rest of the year. The report won’t be out till next spring. These guys aren’t going to know what hit them.’

‘It could still be disallowed.’

‘No.’ She seemed lost in the southward perspectives of the road below them. ‘I had the legal boys check the rulings back as far as they go. No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle, no substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. We’ll get through the same loophole we used in Colorado.’

Out of the open door of the Kaigan battlewagon, the radio crackled again. The voices of the men they were waiting for wavered as the set strained to pick up and decode the scrambled channel. There was a sudden increase in volume and clarity as the Shorn team cleared some geographical obstacle in amongst the rising land behind the bridge. Mitsue Jones straightened up.

‘Better get in position, Matt. Feels like showtime.’

Mike Bryant saw the intersection bridge up ahead as they cleared the last spur and he let a fraction of his speed bleed off.

‘Watch the bridge,’ he said easily. ‘Watch your peripherals till we’re past. Keep it tight.’

On the northside ramp, Mitsue Jones heard him and grinned as she slipped her driving glasses on. In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt settle into a firing stance with the Vickers-Cat. She let off the parking brake and the Mitsubishi shifted on the hard shoulder.

The missile leapt out, trailing a thin vapour thread as it went.

As they hit the bridge, Bryant saw it. Through the windscreen a column of greasy smoke lifted from the hills up ahead. A muffled crump rolled in to accompany the explosion.

‘See that?’ He braked a little more, puzzled. ‘They must be in trouble up ahead.’

‘I don’t know, Mike.’ Chris’s voice crashed into the cabin. ‘Trouble with who? Tender was all over the news this week. No one’ll be out here who doesn’t have to be.’

‘Maybe one of those fancy Mits’ fuel feeds blew up on them,’ suggested Makin.

‘Could be.’ Chris’s tone said he thought it was a stupid idea, but since they’d started the run both he and Makin had shut down the bullshit. ‘I still don’t like, go right!! Right!!!’

The yell came too late. They were under the bridge and past the access ramp and the sleek black shapes on the left came spilling directly down the grass slope like commandos breaching a wall defence. The lead Nakamura car hit the highway at reckless speed, bounced and slammed into Mike Bryant’s BMW.

‘Fuck!’

Bryant hauled on the wheel, too slow. The second Nakamura vehicle scuttled through the gap behind him and came up on his right flank. There was a long grating clang as the two Mitsubishi cruisers sandwiched him. Bryant caught a flash of a third vehicle, longer and lower, pulling ahead and knew what was going to happen. He wrestled desperately with wheel and brakes, but the clinch was set. The Nakamura wingmen had him.

‘Can you get these motherfuckers off me.’ Bryant tried for a nonchalant tone, but sweat was beading on his face. Every move he tried to break free was matched. ‘They’re going to head-to-head me.’

A side impact jarred through Bryant.

‘No fucking way.’ Chris yelled his results. ‘They’re locked on tight, Mike. You’ve got to crash-stop.’

‘Can’t afford to lose the momentum, Chris. You know that.’

‘You can’t afford to stay in theah, Mike.’ The crisp edge of control in Makin’s tone made him sound almost prissy. ‘Chwis is wight. Dwop out, pick it up after.’

‘No fucking way.’

Up ahead, the long, low Mitsubishi battlewagon whipped around on shrieking tyres and came back up the highway towards the locked-up Shorn leader.

‘Nick,’ Bryant’s voice was strained. ‘That’s Jones up ahead. Get out there and see if you can’t derail her.’

‘On it.’ Makin’s BMW flashed on the edge of Bryant’s vision as it accelerated away from the three-vehicle clinch. Bryant blew out breath, hard and fast, and settled into his speed.

‘What about me?’

‘You hang back, Chris. This doesn’t work, I’m going to need you.’

Up ahead, he watched as Nick Makin drove hard at what had to be Mitsue Jones’s vehicle. A hot knot of hope pulsed through his guts in defiance of the icy knowing that told him Jones would not be stopped. The Nakamura team had set him up with consummate skill, and they’d left him with only two options. Slam stop and lose the duel inertia; in effect drop out of the combat, admit Nakamura’s tactical superiority and have to drive catch up for the next two hundred kilometres—

An image of Chris’s chessboard flashed through his mind.

Symbolic defeat.

Or—

The Mitsubishi flinched aside and left Makin stalled across the highway. Bryant grimaced and floored his accelerator. The two Nakamura vehicles matched it effortlessly. The battlewagon came on.

‘Chris, this is going to be messy,’ he gritted. ‘Get yourself clear.’

Seconds from the chicken head-to-head, the two Nakamura wingmen peeled away as if their vehicles were under the command of a single driver. Bryant caught a face grinning at him from the left-hand vehicle and a hand lifted in farewell. Jones’s car was almost on him. The radio crackled at him.

‘Sayonara, Bryant-san.’

Mitsue Jones must have jerked the wheel at the last possible moment. Bryant misread it and stayed on line, but Jones had left the rear of the Mitsubishi in his path. The BMW hit at speed and the front left wing of the car kicked into the air. Bryant yelled, incoherent with shock as his vehicle left the road. The Omega turned lazily in the air and came down on its side, trailing a carpet of sparks across the asphalt. Three seconds into the skid, it ploughed into the central reservation.

Jones heard the yell but had no time for anything other than fighting her own vehicle back under control. The Mitsubishi whipped about on the impact and staggered sideways. For three seconds the wheel was like a live thing under her hands, and then she had it back. She braked the cruiser towards a smoking halt, facing back the way she’d come.

Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the central barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, windscreen showing spiderweb cracked in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.

Trapped and twisted against his own seatbelt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and flailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head round far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.

He just had time to scream.

‘Ah, fu—’

And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-grey Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.

‘Chris?’

Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.

‘Be right back.’

Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.

‘Makin, where are you?’

‘Up ahead.’ There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. ‘I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.’

‘On my way.’

Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.

‘Right,’ he muttered.

The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a hand’s breadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the hand’s breadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car towards the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.

It could have been better - could for example have been the drop on the other side of the carriageway - but it would have to do.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike.

‘Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you?’

‘Done.’

The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.

The rapid rumble as they crossed the cats-eye line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s gear box and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab’s pushing, and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.

The Mitsubishi exploded.

‘Bonus,’ said Chris to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash-stop.

A kilometre back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting. Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase and found it. The Saab leapt forward.

Past the egg-yolk yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed and burnt wingman, back down the slope towards the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back towards the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windscreen, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—

At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He ploughed into her righthand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab spaced armouring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tyre. Chris hit the brakes and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred metres of road away from him.

The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarised glass hid Jones from view.

Finish it.

He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tyre on the leading edge of his front fender and braked. Textbook manoeuvre. The tyre ripped and exploded with a muffled bang. He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.

Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!

The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built, the car wallowed on the road and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure of eight in towards the bank and hit with an audible crump.

Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A three-sixty sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.

‘Chris?’ It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.

‘Yeah, Mike. I’m here.’ The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. ‘One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?’

‘I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?’

He stared at the wrecked battlewagon. The sleek bodywork was torn and crumpled, sunk on tyres that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amidst all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.

Finish it.

‘Jones is out of the game,’ he said.

Mike’s whoop came through, bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever, and with the motion a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.

Then finish it!

Burn her up. The thought belched abruptly up from the deepest mud-geyser recesses of his being, and it gripped him like claws. It was the sickness of the moment before, turned up to full. The edgy thrill of rollercoaster exhilaration as he turned the sticky new idea over in his mind. Ram the tank and barbecue that bitch. Go on! If it doesn’t blow when it ruptures, you can go and light her from close up. Like—

He shook himself free of it with a shiver. Impossible to believe he’d even been considering it. After all, what if the tank blew when he hit—

They almost never do.

‘Too risky.’ He heard himself talking out loud to the hot mud-thing in his head and what he heard sounded too much like whining. He grimaced and dropped the car into reverse again. Much better just to—

He backed up another twenty metres, aligned the nose of the Saab and then crushed the accelerator smoothly to the floor. The Saab leapt across the the short gap and slammed into the driver’s side door. Metal crunched and the Mitsubishi rocked on its springs. The glass in the side window cracked and splintered. He backed up and watched carefully to see if there was any movement.

Do it again! Finish it!

She is finished.

Hewitt, with the Nemex in her hand. You bring back their plastic.

He heard his own voice in the Shorn conference chamber two months ago.

Nobody likes ambiguity.

Yeah, and this is real fucking ambiguous, Chris. So either you go for the burn, or you take that pistol in your pocket and go and recover Jones’s fucking plastic right now.

‘Chris, are you okay?’ Bryant, sounding concerned. His voice ruptured the ominous quiet on the comlink, and every second that Chris left without replying was a stillness that prickled.

‘Yeah. I’m fine.’ He unlatched the door and pushed it open. The Nemex had already somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Be right back.’

He climbed out and advanced cautiously towards the Mitsubishi, gun-hand extended and trembling slightly. Steam was still boiling from the engine space, hissing as it went, but there was no scent of petrol. The car’s fuel system, classic weakness in most Mitsubishi battlewagons, had apparently not ruptured.

Chris stopped less than a metre away from the smashed glass of the polarised window and peered in over the sight of the Nemex. Mitsue Jones lay, still strapped into the driver’s seat, face bloodied and right arm hanging slackly at her side. She was still conscious and as Chris’s pale shadow fell across the car window she looked up. Blood had run into her right eye and gummed it shut, but the other eye was desperately expressive. Her left hand came up and across her trapped body in a futile warding gesture.

Finish it!

Chris shielded his face with one hand and levelled the Nemex on Jones’s face.

Nobody likes ambiguity.

The shot echoed out flatly across the pewter-smeared sky. The blood splattered warm on his fingers.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Would you say that this tender was excessively bloody?’ Chris’s face felt stretched tight under the make-up. Studio lights made his eyes ache with glare. Beside him, Bryant betrayed no discomfort as he tilted his head back at an angle and swivelled slightly on his chair.

‘That’s a tricky question, Liz.’

He paused. Pure theatrical bullshit, the bloodshed question was a staple of all business news post-tender interviews. Bryant had had nearly a full day to think about his answer.

Liz Linshaw waited. She crossed long, tanned legs and readjusted the datadown clipboard on her short-skirted lap. From where he was sitting, slightly to the left of Bryant’s centre-stage, Chris could see liquid crystal sentences spilling down the clipboard screen. Her next set of cues from the studio control room.

From where he was sitting, he could also see the swell Liz Linshaw’s left breast made where it squeezed up in the open neck of her blouse. He shifted his gaze uncomfortably, just as Bryant launched into his answer.

‘The thing is, Liz, any competitive tender is bound to involve a certain degree of conflict. If it didn’t, then the whole market ethos of what we’re doing here would be lost. And in the case of a tender of this magnitude, obviously the parties involved are going to play hard. That, sadly but necessarily, means bloodshed. But that’s exactly the way it should be.’

Liz Linshaw made out she was taken aback. ‘There should be bloodshed? You’re saying that it’s desirable?’

‘Desirable, no.’ Bryant put on a schoolmasterly smile that looked Notley-derived. Beside him, Louise Hewitt nodded sober agreement. ‘But consider. The situation in Cambodia is extreme. These people are not part of some theoretical economic model. They are involved in a life-and-death struggle to determine the future of their nation. At Shorn, we’ve just been appointed their financiers. We are supposed to fund and advise these people and, I might add, take a fair chunk of their GNP as a fee. Now, if you were a Cambodian, what kind of exec would you want? A suited theoretical economist with computer models he says define your reality half a world away? Or a warrior who has put his own life on the line to earn his place beside you?’

‘You call yourself a warrior.’ Linshaw made an elegant gesture that might have been acceptance. ‘And obviously the fact that it’s your team here at the Tebbit Centre this evening proves your credentials in that department. Alright. But does that necessarily make you the best economist for the job? Does a good economist have to have blood on his hands?’

‘I’d say a practising free-market economist has blood on his hands, or he isn’t doing his job properly. It comes with the market, and the decisions it demands. Hard decisions, decisions of life and death. We have to make those decisions, and we have to get them right. We have to be determined to get them right. The blood on our hands today is the blood of our less determined colleagues, and that says something. To you, Liz, to our audience, and most of all to our Cambodian clients, that blood says that when the hard decisions come, we will not flinch from them.’

‘How do you feel about that, Chris?’ Liz Linshaw swivelled abruptly to face him. ‘You eliminated Mitsue Jones today. What do you think the Nakamura team lacked that gave you the edge?’

Chris blinked. He’d been drifting.

‘I think, ah. Ah, they were very polished, but . . .’ He scrambled after the answer they’d worked out earlier when they ran the question checklist with the programme’s producer. ‘But, ah, there didn’t seem to be much flexibility of response in the way they played as a team. Once they’d sprung the trap and it failed, they were sluggish.’

‘Was this the first time you’d driven against Nakamura, Chris?’

‘Yes. Ah, well, apart from a few informal skirmishes, yes.’ Chris got his act together. ‘I drove against Nakamura junior execs in two consortium bids when I was working at Hammett McColl, but it’s not the same. In a consortium bid, people tend to get in each other’s way a lot. They usually haven’t had a lot of time to train. It’s easy to break team wedges. This was a whole different engine.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled brilliantly at him. ‘Was there any point where you were afraid Shorn were going to lose to Nakamura?’

Hewitt sat forward, bristling.

‘I don’t think we ever came that close,’ said Bryant.

‘Yes, but you were trapped in wreckage for most of the duel, Michael.’ There was just a hint of acid in Linshaw’s voice. ‘Chris, you were the one who actually took Jones down. Was there ever a critical point?’

‘I—’ Chris glanced across at Bryant who was wearing a rather thin smile. The big man’s shoulders lifted in the barest of shrugs. Beyond him, Hewitt showed as much emotion as a block of granite. ‘I think the missile ploy caught us the way it was intended to - and the jury’s still out on whether that was a legal manoeuvre or not - but after Nakamura actually engaged, we were never really up against it.’

‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw leaned forward. ‘This is a great moment for you, isn’t it Chris. The hero of the hour. And coming so soon after your transfer. You must be over the moon.’

‘Uh, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’

‘A job you enjoy?’

Mindful of Hewitt’s gaze, Chris manufactured a smile. ‘I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz.’

‘Of course.’ Linshaw seemed to have got what she wanted. She turned her attention to Hewitt. ‘Now, Louise, you made all this happen. How do you feel about the way your team performed?’

Chris switched off again as Hewitt began to mouth the viewer-consumable platitudes.

‘What was that all about?’

He asked Bryant the question later, as they sat in front of whisky tumblers in the hotel bar of the Tebbit Centre. Outside, wind-driven rain lashed impotently at big glass panels that gave a view out onto drenched and darkened hills. Makin had cried off early, pleading tomorrow’s crack-of-dawn start. It was pretty obvious he was choked about Chris’s guest spot on the Liz Linshaw evening special. Standard practice in post-tender reports was to interview only the team leader and the divisional head, but Bryant had been crowing about Chris’s performance from the moment they cut him out of the wreckage of his BMW. Makin had gone conspicuously unmentioned.

‘That?’ Bryant gave him a wry grin. ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not flavour of the month with Ms Linshaw at the moment.’

Chris frowned. His nerves were still a little shot from the duel and he found his mind tended to skitter when he tried to concentrate. At the same time, as if compensating for its poor performance in other areas, it spat chunks of memory at him with near total recall. Now, as if listening to it on tape, he heard the words Liz Linshaw had used over the radio that first morning as he drove in to the new job at Shorn: Still nothing on the no-name call out for Mike Bryant at Shorn Associates, don’t know where you’ve got to, Mike, but if you can hear me we’re anxious to hear from you. He strained to remember Bryant and Linshaw’s body language the evening of the quarterly review party, but his recall was too alcohol-damaged to trust.

‘Were you two, ah . . . ?’

Bryant grinned and sank half his whisky. ‘If, by that delicate ah, you mean fucking, then yes. Yes, we were fucking.’

Chris sat still, remembering Suki.

As if reading his mind, Bryant said, ‘It was no big deal. Scratching an itch, you know. She gets off on drivers the way some guys do on Italian holoporn. It was back when Suki was, you know, off sex. Just after Ariana was born.’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, no big deal.’

Chris tried to think of an appropriate question to fill the space. In the background, something insipid lilted from the bar’s sound system.

‘So how long did it last?’

‘Well,’ Bryant turned to face him, getting comfortable. ‘In the initial stages, about eight months. I’m telling you, Chris, she was hot. We both were. She was doing this in-depth study of Conflict Investment, for a series and then, you know, that book, New Asphalt Warriors. So we saw a lot of each other without anyone wondering. She used to do these interviews and then we’d get off camera and fuck like rabbits wherever there was a lockable door. I used to get hard-ons just talking to her on camera. Even after the series was wrapped, we were fucking two or three times a week in hotels around the city, or the car. She really liked that, the car. Then it sort of cooled off. Once a week, sometimes not even that. And Suki came back on line, so there was that as competition. I’d missed Suki, you know, and that whole pin-up buzz thing was fading anyway. There was about six months when Liz and I didn’t see each other at all.’ Another grin. ‘Then she made, like, this amazing comeback. She asked me out to the studio one night, after everyone had gone home. I wasn’t going to go at first, but I was curious, you know. Man, I’m glad I went.’ Bryant leaned closer, still grinning. ‘We fucked on the interview set and she filmed the whole thing with one of those big studio cameras. Then she mailed me the fucking disc at work. You believe that? I mean, I didn’t know at the time she was doing it, otherwise I’d never have agreed. Then suddenly there’s this Studio Ten disc on my desk with Souvenir written on it.’

‘Jesus.’

Bryant nodded. ‘I thought at first she was going to send it to Suki. Fact, I thought she already had when I got my copy. But when I rang her she just asked how I’d liked it and if I wanted a repeat performance. So the last six months we’ve been repeat-performing a couple of times a month and it’s still as hot as ever.’

‘And Suki?’

‘She doesn’t know. You know, the weird thing is, you’d think I’d go back to Suki too tired to perform but it’s not like that. I’m more buzzed when I get home from a session with Liz than I would be if I hadn’t had sex all week. It’s that fucking disc, man. It makes you feel like a fucking porn star.’

‘So what’s the problem now?’

‘Ah, nothing really. We had this big row the last time we met up to fuck.’ Bryant’s gaze floated off into the corners of the bar. The carnal shine faded from his face. He seemed disinclined to go on.

‘What about?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Ah, shit. Chris, do you think I was right to shoot those gangwit motherfuckers that night at the Falkland?’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Chris heard himself and stopped. ‘I mean—’

‘See that’s what I think.’

‘They were—’

‘Fucking going to trash us, right?’

Chris gestured. ‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Right, that’s what I said. It’s what Suki says, it’s what the fucking corporate police enquiry says. So, what’s the big deal?’

‘She doesn’t buy it?’

Bryant glanced at him. ‘What’s to buy? I told her the truth.’

‘What about the machetes?’

‘Machetes? Wrecking bars? What’s the fucking difference. I don’t even remember which thing I told her.’ Bryant swallowed more whisky and waved his glass laterally. ‘Didn’t matter. She said I was a fucking animal. Get that. I, I was an animal. Never mind the fuckers with the crowbars. I was a fucking animal. You understand that?’

Chris crowded Carla’s voice out of his head with a pull at his own drink. ‘She wasn’t there, man.’

‘That’s right, she wasn’t.’ Bryant stared broodingly at the bottles behind the bar. ‘Fucking reporters.’

Chris snapped his fingers and the liveried barman arrived as if on rails. Bryant didn’t look at him. Chris indicated their glasses.

‘Fill us up.’

The liquor drizzled down, catching the light.

‘Got work to do tomorrow,’ said Bryant gloomily. ‘Makin’s right, you’ll see. They’ll want twenty-five fucking drafts of that contract before it’s put to bed. Bentick from the DTC, I know that motherfucker and he wants every ‘‘i’’ double-dotted, just in case his precious minister runs into embarrassing questions on civilian casualties or some such shit.’

‘Worry about it tomorrow.’ Chris raised his glass. ‘Here. Small wars.’

‘Yeah, small wars.’

Crystal chimed between them. Bryant knocked back the whisky in one and signalled the barman again. He watched the glass fill up.

‘I’m an animal,’ he muttered with bitter disbelief. ‘I’m a fucking animal.’

They kicked it in the head about an hour later, when it became clear that no amount of drinking was going to extract Bryant from his sudden puddle of gloom. Chris half-carried his friend to the lift and along the corridor to his room, where he propped him against the wall while he fumbled with keys. Once inside the room, he hauled Mike most of the way onto the pristine expanse of king-size bed and set about unlacing his shoes. Bryant began to snore. Chris took off the shoes and shovelled Mike’s unshod feet up onto the bed with the rest of him.

As Chris bent over him to remove his tie, the other man stirred.

‘Liz?’ he queried blearily.

‘Not a chance,’ said Chris, loosening the knot on his tie.

‘Oh.’ Bryant heaved his head up and made an attempt to focus. ‘Chris. Don’t even think about it, man. Don’t even think about it.’

‘I won’t.’ Chris finished unknotting the tie and stripped it from around Bryant’s neck with a single hard tug.

‘That’s right.’ Bryant’s head fell back on the bed again and his eyes rolled sluggishly closed. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. That’s you. You’re a. Fucking good guy.’

He drifted off to sleep again. Chris left him there snoring and let himself quietly out of the room. He slipped into his own room like a thief and went to his hotel bed, where he lay awake a while, masturbating to the thought of Liz Linshaw’s tanned thighs and cleavage.

It was very quiet inside the limo now. The torrential rain of the storm had died back to a persistent drizzle that smeared the windows but no longer drummed on the roof. The limo’s Rolls Royce engine made slightly less noise than the rush of its tyres on the wet asphalt outside. The loudest sound in the rear cabin was the chirrup of Louise Hewitt’s laptop as it processed data.

Maps and graphs came and went, summoned and dismissed by the deft ripple of Hewitt’s hands across the deck. Projections for the Cambodian conflict, altered minutely as new potential elements were factored in. Crop failures, what if ? Typhoon impact, what if ? Hong Kong federation cuts diplomatic ties, what if ? Bryant’s preliminary work was an inspired piece of modelling, but Hewitt believed in tracking her subordinates and pushing for potential weaknesses until they emerged. It was an exercise in basic security. As with any alloy, you didn’t know the material well until you knew what would break it.

The car mobile purred up at her from where it was curled on the seat like a red eyed cat. She killed the phone’s video option and picked up the handset, eyes still fixed on the Hong Kong federation variant.

‘Yes?’

A familiar voice crackled in her ear. She smiled.

‘On my way to Edinburgh, why?’

Crackle crackle.

‘No, I didn’t think there was any point. I’ve got breakfast with a client in the Howard at eight and contracts to go over before that.’

Crackle crackle SNAP. Hewitt’s smile broadened.

‘Oh, is that what you thought? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I wouldn’t have come all the way up here just for that. Good enough to eat though you looked.’

The phone crackled some more. Hewitt sighed and hoisted her gaze to the roof. Her voice became soothing.

‘Yes, media exposure’s a powerful thing. But I was sitting there, remember. I really wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’

The voice in her ear grew agitated and Hewitt’s good-natured exasperation hardened. She sat forward.

‘Alright, listen. You just let me worry about Faulkner. You leave him alone.’ The crackling stopped on a sharp interrogation mark.

‘Yes, I know. I was there, remember. It’s no big surprise, to be honest. Look, it’s just an angle.’

Snap, crackle. Incredulous.

‘Yes, I do.’

Snap, question.

‘Because that’s what they pay me for. I don’t have the details worked out yet, but it shouldn’t take much leverage.’

Crackle, crackle, crackle.

‘Mike Bryant will do as he’s told. That’s the difference between them, and you need to remember that. Now, we’ve talked about this enough. I’ll be back in London day after tomorrow, we can meet and discuss it then.’

Sullen crackle. Silence.

Hewitt cradled the phone and grinned to herself in the quiet gloom.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Seen enough?’

Erik Nyquist got up and held the cracked remote closer to the screen. The red active light winked feebly a couple of times and the programme credits continued to scroll down, superimposed over an aerial view of Nakamura wreckage. Finally, Erik gave up on the failing remote and snapped on the blue standby screen manually. In the glow it cast, he turned back to face his daughter. Carla sat, glass in hand, and stared at the place where the images had been.

‘The hero of the hour,’ Erik grunted. ‘Jesus, the irony of that. Butcher a couple of fellow human beings to maximise neo-colonial profiteering half the globe away and you’re a goddamn hero.’

‘Dad,’ Carla said tiredly.

‘You heard her. This is a great moment for you, Chris. And your beloved husband sitting there grinning like a Mormon. I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t like it, Liz. Christ!’

‘He had no choice. The woman on the left was his boss, and from what I hear she already doesn’t like him. What was he supposed to do? If he stepped out of line the way you want, he’d probably lose his job.’

‘I know that.’ Erik went to the table that served him as an open-plan drinks cabinet and began to mix himself another vodka and orange. ‘Been there, bought the T-shirt. But sometimes you have to stand by the odd principle, you know.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Carla snapped, surprising herself. ‘And where did that get you in the end, standing by your much-vaunted principles?’

‘Well, let’s see.’ Erik grinned down into the glass he was pouring. Having provoked her, he was now cheerfully backing down again. It was one of his favourite drinking games. ‘I was arrested, held without trial under the Corporate Communications Act, shunned by my so-called friends and colleagues, blacklisted by every news editor in the country and refused a credit rating. I lost my job, my home and any hopes for the future. Nothing that a young man of Chris’s calibre couldn’t take in his stride. The trouble is, he just lacks the vision to make it happen.’

Carla smiled, despite herself.

‘Liked that one, did you?’ Erik lifted his glass in her direction. ‘For once, it’s something I just made up. Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ She barely sipped at her own neat vodka. It had taken her the whole news report to get three fingers down the drink, and now it was warm.

‘Dad, why do you stay here? Why don’t you go back to Tromsö?’

‘And meet your mother in the high street every day? No thanks. I’m living with enough guilt as it is.’

‘She isn’t there most of the time and you know it.’

‘Okay, I’d just see her every time she comes back from some particularly successful book launch or lecture tour.’ Erik shook his head. ‘I don’t think my ego’s up to that. Besides, after all these years, who would I know?’

‘Alright, you could move to Oslo. Write a column back there.’

‘Carla, I already do.’ Erik gestured at the battered computer in the corner. ‘See that. It’s got a wire in the back that goes all the way to Norway. Marvellous what they can do with technology these days.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘Carla.’ The mockery drained from his tone. ‘What am I going to change, moving back there now? It isn’t as if the costs are prohibitive here. Even with the zone tax on top, email is so cheap you can’t realistically cost it on the number of articles I mail out in a month. And even if you could, even if I was walking my work to the editors in Oslo to save money, I’d spend what I saved on winter socks.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, it’s not that cold.’

‘I think you’re forgetting.’

‘Dad.’ Her voice grew very gentle. ‘We were there in January.’

‘Oh.’ She heard, in that single gruff syllable, how much it hurt him. He made a point of looking her in the face. ‘Visiting your mother?’

She shook her head. ‘There wasn’t time, and anyway, I think she was in New Zealand. Chris took me to the Winter Wheels show in Stockholm, and we went across to see Sognefjord on the way back. He’d never been there.’

‘And it wasn’t cold? Come on, Carla. I may not be able to afford flights on a whim, but it hasn’t been so long.’

‘Alright, it was cold. Yes, it was cold. But, Dad, it was so—’ She gave up and gestured around her. ‘Dad, look at this place.’

‘Yeah, I know I haven’t tidied up for a while, but—’

‘You know what I mean!’

Erik looked at her in silence for a while. Then he went to the window and tugged back one of the ragged curtains. Outside, something had been set on fire and it painted leaping shadows on the ceiling above where he stood. Shouts came through the thin glass pane. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I know what you mean. You mean this. Urban decay, as only the British know how to do it. And here I am, fifty-seven years old and stuck in the middle of it.’

She avoided his eyes.

‘It’s just so civilised back there, Dad. There’s nobody sleeping on the streets—’

‘Just as well, they’d freeze to death.’

She ignored him. ‘—nobody dying because they can’t afford medical attention, no old people too poor to afford heating and too scared to go out after dark. Dad, there are no gang zones, no armoured police trucks, there’s no exclusion like there is here.’

‘It sounds as if you should be talking to Chris, not me.’ Erik knocked back a large portion of his drink in one. It was an angry gesture, and his voice carried the ragged echo of the emotion. ‘Maybe you can persuade him to move up there if you like it so much. Though it’s hard to see what you’d both do for a living without anybody to kill on the roads.’

She flinched.

He saw it and reined himself in.

‘Carla—’

She looked at her lap. Said nothing. He sighed.

‘Carla, I’m sorry. I. I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘No.’ He set down his drink and came to crouch in front of her. ‘No, I didn’t, Carla. I know you’re just doing what you have to get by. We all are. Even Chris. I know that. But can’t you see? Any argument for me going back to Norway is an equally valid argument for you. How do you think I feel, looking at you, stuck in the middle of this?’

The thought stopped her like a slap. Her hands tightened on his. ‘Dad—’ She swallowed and started again. ‘Dad, that’s not it, is it? You’re not staying because of me?’

He chuckled and lifted her chin with one hand.

‘Staying because of you? Staying to protect you, with all the money and influence I’ve amassed? Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Then tell me why.’

‘Why.’ He stood up and for a moment she thought she was in for another lecture. Instead, he went to stand at the window again, staring out. The flames were stronger now and they stained his face with orange. ‘Do you remember Monica Hansen?’

‘Your photographer?’

Erik smiled. ‘I’m not sure she’d like the possessive pronoun, but yes, Monica the photographer. She’s back in Oslo now, taking photos of furniture for some catalogue. She’s bored, Carla. The money’s okay, but she’s bored to screaming.’

‘Better bored than sleeping in the streets.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Carla. I’m not sleeping in the streets. And, no, listen to me a moment, think about it. You said yourself there’s no exclusion there like there is here. So what would I write about. Back in the comfort and safety of my own Scandinavian social system? No, Carla. This is the front line - this is where I can make a difference.’

‘No one wants you to make a difference, Dad.’ She got up from the chair, suddenly angry again, and faced him. She jerked back the other curtain and glared angrily down at the fire below. ‘Look at that.’

The source of the flames, she saw as she gestured, was an overturned armchair. Other items lay scattered around, unrecognisable in the darkness and as yet untorched. A shattered window directly above suggested an origin. Someone had been in one of the first-floor flats, throwing down what it contained. Now figures in baggy, hooded sportswear stood gathered around the fire, making Carla think of menacing negative-image Disney dwarves out of some nightmare where it all definitely did not end happily ever after.

‘Look at it,’ she hissed again. ‘You think those people care what you write? You think most of them can even read? You think people like that care about you making a difference?’

‘Don’t be so quick to judge, Carla. Like Benito says, don’t make 3D judgments of what you can only see on your TV screen.’

‘Oh, for—’ Her expletives evaporated in an exasperation too old and deep for words. She rapped hard on the glass. ‘This isn’t a TV, Dad. It’s a fucking window, and you live here. You tell me what we’re looking at, community night barbecue maybe?’

Erik sighed. ‘No, it’s probably gang retribution for something. Someone they thought informed on them, someone who spoke out of turn. They did the same thing to Mrs McKenny last summer because she wouldn’t let her son run balloons for them. Of course, then he had to, just to buy some new furniture. You can’t fault the gangwits on psychology.’ He turned away from the window, and suddenly, in the motion, she saw how tired he had become. The vision only fanned the flames of her anger again. Up from the pit of her stomach, a licking, gusting sickness.

Erik appeared not to sense it coming. He was freshening his drink again, working on an ironic grin to match it. ‘Of course, it could just be kids having fun. Random stuff. A lot of those first-floor flats have been empty for longer than I’ve been here. They just break in and—’

He shrugged and drank.

‘And throw the stuff out the window!’ Suddenly she was yelling at him, really yelling. ‘And set fire to it! For fun! Jesus fucking Christ, Dad, will you listen to yourself. You think this is normal? Are you fucked in the head?’

The flashback caught like magnesium ribbon behind her eyes. Eleven years old again, and screaming at her father as he tried to explain what he had done and why she had to choose. It burned out as fast, after-image inked onto her retina and the returning dimness of the room. She looked up quickly, caught the expression on Erik’s face, and knew he was remembering too.

‘Dad, I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

Too late.

He didn’t say it, but he didn’t need to. Silence was settling around them in little black shreds, like scorched down from a pillow shot through at close range.

‘Dad—’

She had thought for a moment he might yell back, but he didn’t. He only moved slightly, the way she sometimes saw Chris move when some piece of driving-induced injury caught him awkwardly. He moved and nodded to himself, as if her scream had been a swallow of rough but interesting whisky. She saw the way he was composing himself, and knew what was coming.

‘Normal?’ He said the word with careful pedantry that almost hid the returning gruffness in his voice. ‘Well I think, in the context of the slaughter we’ve just seen committed by the man you share your bed with—’

‘Dad, please—’

His voice trampled hers down. ‘I’d call it normal, yes. In fact I’d call it comparatively healthy. Burnt furniture you can always replace. Burnt flesh is a little harder.’

She breathed deliberately, loosening the tightness in her chest. ‘Listen, Dad, I’m not going to—’

‘Of course, there is always the double standard to consider. As Mazeau would have put it, crime is a matter of degrees and the degree that really matters in society’s eyes is the extent to which the criminal has asserted himself beyond his designated social class and status—’

‘Oh, bullshit, Dad!’

But the anger had deserted her, and all she could feel now was the edge of tears. She held onto her drink with clumsy, eleven-year-old hands, and watched as her father retreated, swathing himself in the gauze bandage of political rhetoric to hide the hurt.

‘The sons and daughters of the powerful buy and sell drugs amongst themselves with impunity, because all they have done is overstep slightly the licence their class entitles them to, misunderstood the lip service to legality that must be paid if the common herd are to continue grazing quietly. But let one child from the Brundtland enter their fairy kingdom and do the same, and watch the full bloody weight of the law fall on him, because he has presumed to behave as he is not entitled, presumed to not know his place. And that we cannot allow.’

‘Dad,’ she tried one more time, voice pitched low and urgent. ‘Please, Dad, look down there again. Never mind whose fault it is.

Never mind the politics of it. Do you think anyone down there gives a flying fuck what you write? Do you think they give a fuck about anything any more?’

‘And my son-in-law does?’ He did not turn to the window, but his eyes were bright with the reflected fireglow. ‘Chris gives a flying fuck for the bodies he left on the motorway today? Or the bodies that they’ll be stacking in the streets of Phnom Penh a year from now? You know what I wish, Carla? I wish you’d married one of those edge dealers down there instead of that suited piece of shit you sleep with. The dealer, at least, I could make excuses for.’

‘That’s great, Dad.’ Finally, with the insult to Chris, she had the anger back. The strength to hurt. Her voice came out flat and cold. ‘You finally had the guts to say it to my face. The man who paid your rent and bought you a new kitchen last Christmas is a piece of shit. And I guess it’s clear what that makes me.’

She set down the drink on the coffee table and made for the door. She saw how he lifted one arm involuntarily towards her as she passed him, but she shut it out.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to pack my bag, Dad. And then, if I don’t get mugged and raped on the way out by one of your oppressed proletarians, I’m going home.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to be on your own in the house.’

He said it sulkily, but there was an undertone of fear and regret in his voice now. Dismayed, she realised that it was exactly what she wanted to hear. She could feel the relish bubbling up on hearing it.

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I’d rather be alone, somewhere safe and sane, than with you in this shithole.’

She didn’t turn to see his face as she said it.

She didn’t need to.

Some damage, Chris had once told her, you don’t need to see. You know what you’ve done on impact. You can feel it. All you have to do after that is disengage.

She went to pack.

FILE#2:

Account Adjustment

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It finally hit Chris while he was waiting at the counter in Louie Louie’s for a double-spike cappuccino.

He’d sat up late the previous evening, going over the possibilities, and by the time he finally came to bed, Carla was already asleep. More and more, that was becoming the pattern. Work on the Cambodia contract was keeping him later and later at Shorn. He was forced to relegate his self-defence classes and gun practice to lunch-time, which stretched the day even longer. Carla was getting home anything from two to five hours ahead of him during the week and they had given up any pretence of dining together. He ate the remains of what she had cooked for herself earlier and talked desultorily to her about his day. Loading the dishwasher was usually the only shared activity of the evening; after that, one of them would retire upstairs to read, leaving the other marooned down in the living room with the entertainment deck.

There was an air of detached politeness to their lives now. They had sex at increasingly irregular intervals and argued less than they ever had before, because they rarely had the time or energy to talk about anything of significance. They kept meaning to take a long weekend together somewhere like New York or Madrid and use the time to recharge, but somehow it never came together. Either Carla forgot to book the Saturday off with Mel, or Chris was suddenly needed for a weekend meeting with the Cambodia team. Summer came on, pleasantly mellow, but the layer of superficiality continued to thicken over their day-to-day life and Chris found himself enjoying the new weather only in moments of isolation that he was later curiously unwilling to share with Carla.

He lay awake beside her, turning the game over in his mind until he finally fell asleep.

On the drive in that morning he’d tried again, but he’d been too sleepy from the night before. In the last few weeks his habitual driver’s caution had grown lax to a point that under other circumstances might have been called recklessness. As it was, the attitude made perfect sense. Following the Nakamura challenge, word had got out about the dangerous new player at the Shorn table and no one among the young no-name challengers was keen to go up against Chris Faulkner’s clearly identifiable Saab Custom. The vehicle’s spaced armouring and Mitsue Jones’s demise at its owner’s hands were equally thoroughly mythologised among the driving fraternity - detail upon invented detail until it was impossible even for Chris to separate the true facts from the thicket of embellishments that had sprung up around them. In the end, he gave up trying and started to live with the legend. In this, he was probably the last person on board. Amidst all the hype, one thing had been universally accepted in the City of London weeks ago - there had to be easier ways to carve a name for yourself than go up against Chris Faulkner.

‘Double cap for Chris,’ yelled the girl at the counter.

He was on first name terms with the staff of Louie Louie’s these days - they’d torn out the front cover of GQ that month and pinned it up behind the counter. Reluctantly, he’d autographed it, and now, every time he went in, his carefully groomed features grinned back at him from beneath the imprisoning gloss and black ink scrawl. It made him slightly uneasy. Fame had dripped like sap all over him and now it was hardening into amber and he was trapped inside for all to see. Fansites were starting to give him serious coverage for the first time since the death of Edward Quain. East European working girls with unlikely stage names and credit-card hotlines were in his mail, plying him with suggestions of varying subtlety.

And you’re pinned down, overdeployed, no way to—

The solution boiled out at him like the milk froth from the steamer, bubbling up on itself as it unfolded. It might have been the cross-hatched patterning of the yellow and black tiles behind the counter, or maybe just the results of dissociative thinking, a technique he’d picked up from a psych seminar the week before. Whatever it was, he fielded the insight and took it back up in the Shorn elevator with his coffee.

‘Cambodia Resourcing continues to lead the rising stock trend,’ the elevator informed him as they powered upward. ‘With end-of-day trading at—’

He tuned it out. He already knew.

Mike Bryant was talking to the machine. Chris could hear him through the door, dictating in jagged pieces to the datadown. It was a chewed-over version of a document to the Cambodian rebels that they’d been working on most of yesterday. The East Asia Trade and Investment Commission was leaning on them for Charter compliance with an uncharacteristic fervour. Industrial espionage reports suggested Nakamura bribes were going in at high level.

‘We have no interest in the so-called, no, scratch that, no interest in the areas you have designated resettlement zones, nor are we concerned with what goes on within those zones. The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction provided no overt human rights abuse, uh-uh, provided no human rights abuse, mhmmm, no, back up again, not within our jurisdiction, uhhh, provided, given that, oh fuck it—’

Chris grinned and knocked at the door.

‘What?’ Bryant bellowed.

‘Having trouble?’

‘Chris!’ Bryant stood poised in the middle of his office space, arms slung on a polished wood baseball bat that he’d braced at the nape of his neck. It gave him the posture of a man crucified, and the tiredness in his face did nothing to alter the impression. ‘Would you believe I’ve been on this motherfucker since eight this morning. It has to go to the uplink at noon, and I’m still splitting fucking hairs on the covering letter. Listen to this.’ He walked to the desk and read aloud from a piece of hardcopy that curled from the datadown printer. ‘ ‘‘The administration of the camps is, of course, not within our jurisdiction, provided no human rights abuse occurs.’’ Sary’s going to go through the roof if we send him that - he’ll say we’re implying the Friday statement’s a lie.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘Please.’ Bryant rolled his neck against the wood of the bat. ‘I’m trying to do politics here. We can’t imply he’s lying.’

‘I thought we were going to go with ‘‘given that no human rights abuse is occurring’’.’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Won’t wash with the UN. There’s an Amnesty report doing the rounds in Norway and no one’s prepared to deny it at ministerial level. We’ve got to stay ‘‘vague but firm’’. That’s a direct quote from Hewitt.’

‘Vague but firm.’ Chris pulled a face. ‘Nice.’

‘Fucking Amnesty.’

‘Yeah, well. Shit happens.’ Chris came and stood at Bryant’s shoulder, reading the hardcopy. ‘What about . . .’

He tore the sheet from the printer and scanned it. Bryant unslung the baseball bat from his shoulder and parked it in a corner.

‘. . . Confident. That’s it, look. Admin of the camps blah blah blah not within our jurisdiction and we are confident that no human rights abuse, no, that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred.’ He handed back the sheet. ‘How about that?’

Bryant snatched it.

‘You bastard. Forty-five fucking minutes I’ve been staring at this.’

‘Caffeine.’ Chris held up his take-out from Louie Louie’s. ‘Want some?’

‘I’m all caffeined out. I was in at six with Makin, and this landed on my desk an hour ago from upstairs. Notley and the policy board. Response required. As if I didn’t have enough else to do. Let’s see . . . ‘‘that none of the alleged human rights abuse has occurred’’. Right. Now what about this? ‘‘However we cannot permit your forces to obstruct the passage of fuel and supplies’’.’

‘Try ‘‘forces operating in the area’’. Takes the sting out of it and makes him feel like a big man. Like you’re asking him to police the zone generally, not just get a grip on his own troops.’

Bryant muttered and scribbled on the hardcopy as he read it back. ‘ ‘‘However we cannot permit forces operating in the area to obstruct the passage of fuel and’’ blah blah blah blah. That’s it. Brilliant.’

Chris shrugged. ‘Ready-wrapped. I used the same scam on the Panthers of Justice a couple of weeks back, and they lapped it up. Stopped the banditry dead. All most of these rebels really want is some kind of recognition. Paternal acknowledgement from some kind of patriarchal authority. According to Lopez, it had them swaggering around, posting police directives in every village.’

Mike barked a laugh. ‘Lopez? That Joaquin Lopez?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you put Harris up to tender after all.’

‘Well, like you said. It was our investment he was fucking with. And Lopez works flat out for a half per cent less of total. Really took Harris apart in the bullring too, apparently.’

‘Yeah, he’s still young enough to have the drive. Harris burnt out years ago, it’s just no one ever called him on it. You did the whole industry a service putting him out.’

‘It was your idea. If anything, I owe you one for the advice. So anyway, what’s this six a.m. shit with Makin? Anything I should know about?’

‘Nah, shouldn’t think—’ Bryant stopped. ‘Actually, maybe I should bounce it off you. You worked the NAME, didn’t you? North Andean Monitored Economy? Back when you were at HM?’

Chris nodded. ‘Yeah, we were into the ME in a big way. Anybody with a decent emerging markets portfolio had to be. Why, what’s going on down there now?’

‘Ah, it’s fucking Echevarria again. You remember that first day we met in the gents, I told you I was off to see some greasy dictator for a budget review?’

‘That was Hernan Echevarria? I thought he was dying.’

‘No such luck. The old bastard’s pushing eighty, he’s had major surgery twice in the last decade, and he’s still hanging on. He’s grooming his eldest son, in true corrupt land-owning motherfucker fashion, to take over the whole show when he’s gone. And, as you’d expect with these hacienda families, the son’s a complete fucking waste of space. Spends all his time in Miami doing the casinos, powdering his nose and fucking the local gringas.’

Chris offered another shrug. ‘Sounds okay. Easy enough to control, anyway.’

‘Not on present showing.’ Bryant punched a couple of points on the datadown screen and the display shifted. ‘See, Echevarria junior’s making a lot of friends in Miami. Investor friends.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, oh. Fresh money, most of it homegrown, but some from Tokyo and Beijing via US management funds. Have a look at this little snap.’ Bryant turned the datadown screen to face Chris. ‘Taken aboard Haithem Al-Ratrout’s private yacht last week. You’ll recognise some faces.’

It was a standard paparazzi shot. Hurried and unflattering angles on people who usually only appeared in the public eye coated in a high media gloss. Chris spotted two Hollywood pin-ups of the moment displaying the cleavage for which they were famous, the US Secretary of State caught picking the olive out of his martini and—

‘Over on the left you’ve got Echevarria junior. The one in the Ingram suit and the stupid hat. And that next to him is Conrad Rimshaw, executive head of Conflict Investment for Lloyd Paul New York. On the other side and towards the back you’ve got Martin Meldreck from Calders Rapid Capital Deployment division. The vultures are gathering.’

‘But the father’s still ours so far, right?’

‘So far.’ Bryant nodded and touched another part of the screen. The photo minimised and gave way to a spreadsheet. ‘But it’s an uphill struggle. These are from the budget review I mentioned. The stuff in red is contested. He wants more, we can’t let him have it.’

There was a lot of red.

‘The Echevarrias have been with Shorn’s Madrid office ever since Hernan pulled the coup back in ’27. Good solid clients. Our Emerging Markets division backed them all through the civil war and the crackdown afterwards.’ Bryant bent back fingers one at a time as he enumerated. ‘Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter gunships, counter-subversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for over twenty years it’s all paid off big time. Quiescent population, low wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neoliberal dream.’

‘But not any more.’

‘But not any more. We’ve got another generation of guerrillas in the mountains screaming for land reform, another generation of disaffected student youth in the cities, and we’re all back to square one. Emerging Markets got scared and dropped the whole thing like a hot brick - straight into Conflict Investment’s lap. Hewitt gave it to Makin.’

‘Nice of her.’

‘Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin’s rep was riding pretty high. Top commission analyst for the year and all that. I guess Hewitt thought he’d swing it in his sleep. But things didn’t work out, so they brought me in to assist. Now Makin’s having to share Echevarria with me and I’ve got to say,’ Bryant walked across to the door and pressed it completely closed. His voice lowered. ‘I’ve got to say he’s not handling it all that well.’

Chris leaned against the edge of Bryant’s desk, feeling the friendly warmth of trust and a shared conspiracy coming off the other man.

‘So what’s the problem?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Problem is, Makin doesn’t know how to handle Echevarria. See, he’s used to these penny ante revolutionaries holed up in the jungle with their peasant education programmes and he thinks Echevarria’s just the same animal made good.’

‘Oops.’

‘Yeah, I’ve told him. The Echevarrias are as close as you get to nobility in that part of the world. That’s how come the link with Europe. Old Hernan traces his ancestors right back to Pizarro’s original conquistadors. As he never fucking tires of telling us. ’course, all that means is he’s descended from some dirt-poor younger son mercenary glory-roader who grabbed a seat on the boat over from Spain, but it isn’t cool to mention that in budget meetings.’

‘Makin said that?’

Bryant laughed. ‘No, I’m exaggerating. Makin’s too damn good a negotiator for that. But it smokes off him every time Echevarria starts in on that nobility rap. You can almost see his lip curl. Echevarria sees it too, and that fucking Hispanic pride stokes up, and Makin’s lip curls some more, and there we are, deadlocked. We’re trying to lock him into something long-term, so that when he finally croaks the NAME’ll be stable and, more importantly, ours, but he gets more hostile every time we talk to him. Now he wants double-figure percentage increases in the military budget to put down the rebels, and there’s no way we can afford to give that to him and keep the fund managers happy. The problem is, he’s taking the whole thing personally.’

‘So he won’t sign?’

‘He might eventually,’ Bryant picked up the baseball bat again, twirled it through the air and shipped it across one shoulder. ‘If I can talk him round. But eventually might be too late. He’s not a well man. If he dies or his condition deteriorates too much, junior takes over and then we’re fucked. Junior hasn’t got his old man’s illusions about the European connection, and he’s pissed off with Makin for his attitude - he’ll bring in Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap just to snub us. And they’d just love to buy us out.’

Chris sipped at his coffee and thought about it while Bryant paced towards the window, playing imaginary curveballs off the bat. When the other man turned back to face him, he set the styrofoam canister down on the desk with studied calm.

‘What about the rebels?’ he asked.

‘The rebels?’ Bryant spread his hands in supplication. ‘Come on, who the fuck are they? This is a twenty-year client we’re talking about. You can’t write that off against some bearded campesino hiding out in the hills. There’s probably half a hundred different factions and fronts, all squabbling about their revolutionary lineage. We don’t know them, we don’t have the time to get to know them and anyway—’

‘I know them.’

‘What?’

‘I said I know them. HM Emerging Markets did an in-depth survey of the ME’s radical factions last year.’ Chris gestured, open-handed. ‘We flew out there, Mike. I’ve got the files at home somewhere.’

Bryant gaped. ‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘Do you a profile by Thursday.’

‘Jesus. What did you do, just come up here to make my day?’

‘Oh.’ Chris picked up his coffee and crossed to the low table where Mike kept the chess board. He hooked up a knight between index and second finger and relocated it. ‘Almost forgot. Check.’

Bryant grinned and feinted at him with the bat. Chris caught it with his other hand.

‘Motherfucker.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris looked at the board. ‘And mate in seven, I reckon.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The HM files were in the garage, stacked on an upper shelf next to a box of worn gear bearings that Carla had hung onto for some unfathomable reason. Chris went up on a stepladder to retrieve the disc he wanted and nearly turned an ankle jumping down afterwards.

‘Fuck.’

Had Carla been there to see it, he thought, she would have laughed. She would have laughed out loud, and he would have joined in, pretending that his ego was not pricked through, and after a few moments the fleeting anger at being mocked would have leached out for real.

But Carla was at an evening course with two other mechanics from Mel’s Autofix, learning about developments in virtual design technology, and the house echoed with her absence.

He went through to the study and fed the disc into the datadown. A search protocol swam up onto the screen.

‘North Andean Monitored Economy,’ he told the machine. ‘Hernan Echevarria, political opponents.’

The search protocol dissolved and in its place a series of thumbprint photos began to spring up like multicoloured blisters. Chris stood and watched for a moment as the programme resized the rapidly multiplying images, trying vainly to fit them all onto a single screen page. Then he went out to the lounge, to fetch the whisky.

He’d built this file in a no-star hotel room overlooking the luminous night-time surf of the Caribbean. Hammett McColl sent two teams out to the NAME - one highly publicised visit, booked into the Bogota Hilton, whose function was largely cosmetic, and one stealth audit crew, flown in undercover of a shoestring movie company’s location scouting. It had been a stupid kind of fun at first, until the policing data started to flow in.

Chris remembered velvet black nights, street life and lanterns strung in the street outside. Sweat rolling off his body and brow, pricked out in almost equal quantities by the humidity and the details from the detention records. His fingers leaving damp prints on the keys of the laptop. He drank cane rum and smoked atrocious local cigarettes and somehow kept it all in perspective most of the time. Just sometimes he paused and lifted his fingers from the keyboard as if he had heard something, because even the rum could not keep out the animal-instinctive knowledge that the things the reports described were going on right now in police stations across the city.

He never heard screams, he told himself, then and later. It was the reports talking, working at his imagination like a feeble dentist at an infected tooth. That was all. He heard nothing.

The telephone rang.

He jerked round, one hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and looked out towards the lounge. It was the home phone, the unscreened line. He left the office and stood in the connecting doorway, staring across at the little blue screen. The call bell symbol pulsed on and off in green, in time with the soft chiming.

Who—

Can’t be Carla. He checked his watch. The seminar still had half an hour to run, and anyway he’d had the thought before he knew what time it was. As their separate work schedules chewed off more and more of the time they used to spend together, they’d fallen out of the habit of checking in with each other for anything other than pure necessity.

The telephone rang.

He watched it stupidly, holding the whisky, thoughts locked up.

Work would have used the datadown. From habit and from the manual. There was a Shorn directive against talking shop on unscreened lines.

The phone rang.

Erik, ringing to back down from the ludicrous sulk Carla had described when Chris got back from the north. Chris grimaced. That particular Viking? Not likely.

Just answer the fucking thing, for Christ’s sake.

He crossed to the terminal and thumbed the accept. The blue background blipped out and a picture sank into place.

For a curious moment, Chris wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He made out dark glossy hair and a profile, seemingly pillowed on twin cushions that . . .

Moaning gusted through the air from the speaker.

The profile turned, mouth open.

A hand appeared, enamel red-tipped.

Adrenalin bubbled abruptly through Chris’s head as the picture made sense. He was watching a slice of holoporn, downloaded direct to the phone link. A heavily made-up woman with long black tresses was crouched over an equally painted blonde partner, sucking and nibbling at a pair of breasts so large and so perfectly rounded it was hard to believe they were physically attached to either participant.

Chris sank onto the arm of the sofa, watching.

The shot dilated a little and background detail emerged. The two women were sprawled on what appeared to be some kind of exercise bench and wore nothing beyond a few studded leather accessories that served only to lift and separate curved areas of flesh. The blonde half of the duo was on her back and upside down, hair trailing to the floor. The other woman had somehow contrived to straddle her partner but leave her own backside raised high in the air like the top of a child-drawn heart. The twin mounds of buttocks mirrored the silicone-enhanced globes of the woman below so that a bizarre kind of vertical symmetry was created. You could almost believe you were looking at a single hourglass-shaped creature with the incidental appendages of limbs and faces added after the event.

Chris felt the blood stirring through his stomach and puddling into his prick as the two woman faked their way towards a mutual climax. The dark-haired performer was evidently cast in the role of dominatrix and she worked the other woman’s flesh with much snarling and flashing of purple-painted eyes, while the blonde beneath her moaned and rubbed semi-convincingly at her own improbable breasts.

The dominatrix—

The thought skated almost casually across the rink of his mind, replacing something else he’d been going to think.

—was Liz Linshaw.

He leaned forward uncomfortably over his erection. Confirmed, the recognition sent a small shiver up his spine. Liz Linshaw had aged a few years since the footage was shot, but behind the purple eyeshadow and the dyed black hair, the face was unmistakable. It was the same line of cheekbone and nose, the same long, mobile mouth. The same slightly crooked teeth.

Chris’s eyes flickered from the face to the exposed flesh below it. Six weeks ago, at the Tebbit Centre studio, he’d seen the steep curve of her cleavage loaded into just-glimpsed lingerie under an open-necked blouse. He’d fallen asleep that night thinking about it and - he only admitted it to himself now - he’d looked for it on the morning Prom and App bulletins since.

Now, here it was laid out for his perusal at leisure, and it was, he noticed, the same steep curve. Liz Linshaw’s breasts were not of the same epic proportions as those of her performing partner, but they were still cosmetic-standard enough to defy gravity without external support. The nipples, now being forced mock-sadistically into the blonde woman’s mouth, were large and dark and blunt. If there were scars where the implants had gone in, they were lost in the all-over tan.

Chris was rock hard.

He watched as the blonde woman’s mouth dragged and smeared down the length of Liz Linshaw’s body to the juncture of her thighs. The panting and moaning grew mutual as the two women got into the inevitable top-to-tail clinch and filled their brightly taloned hands with bronzed flesh. Chris’s hand moved unwillingly across the buckle of his belt. Semi-convincing or not—

White lights splashed across the window and drenched the curtains. The Land Rover crunched up the drive.

Chris leapt up and snapped the phone off. The liquid sounds of orgasm evaporated into stillness. For a moment he stood over the unit, glaring at it. The message option pulsed, download message, dump message, replay message, download, dump, replay, download, dump replay, download—

He stabbed the screen and the copying bar filled from left to right like a tiny, unrolling carpet in mauve.

The Land Rover’s engine stilled. A door clunked, open and closed.

He stabbed the eject button and snatched the minidisc as it emerged. It fell from his fingers, hit the floor and rolled.

Footsteps on gravel.

He cast about, tiny triphammers in his temples. The disc glinted silver from under an armchair.

Carla’s recognition tag scraped on the lock.

He bent and grabbed the disc, buried it in his pocket on the way out of the lounge. He heard the front door open as he reached the study. He made it to his seat.

‘Chris? I’m home.’

‘Just a minute.’

The erection, he was relieved to find, had melted in the panic. His jeans felt almost loose. He swivelled on the chair as Carla came in and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Work?’ There was just a hint of weary resignation in the single word as she glanced past him at the screen.

‘That’s right.’ He returned the kiss, feeling as if he fitted badly into his own skin. The words were jumbled and overlarge on his tongue. ‘It’s some stuff I’m digging out for Michael.’

‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah, the rest of the curry. You?’

‘On the way.’ She grimaced. ‘Kebab.’

‘Yeah, I can smell it.’

‘Yeah. Sorry.’ She stopped abruptly and leaned back a little, holding his head between her palms. ‘You okay? You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m.’ He gusted a sigh, pushing out some of the tension. Jerked his head at the screen so she had to let go. ‘It’s just some of this stuff. We’re looking at the North Andean Monitored Economy. I’d forgotten the shit they get up to in police cells out there.’

She moved away. ‘No worse than what’s going on in Cambodia, from what I hear.’

‘We’re leaning on them to stop that,’ he told her.

‘Yeah?’ There was a dull disinterest in her voice as she walked out of the room, a coat of detachment they had both started to evolve as an alternative to the rows there was no longer time or energy for.

He went after her. Back into the lounge, where the phone terminal stood in the corner. He remembered with a jolt through the stomach that he had not erased the original message.

‘Carla.’

‘What?’

He moved up close to her and put one arm on the juncture of neck and shoulder. The gesture felt clumsy, unaccustomed. It was weeks since they’d fucked. She looked at him out of suspicious eyes.

‘What, Chris?’

He ran his fingers up into the hair behind her ear and tugged through until his hand was clasping the back of her head. It was a caress that invariably set her cooking, but it still felt awkward. He closed the final gap between them, relieved to find that his erection had returned in force. She felt it pressed between them and a thin little smile appeared on her lips.

‘So what’s got into you?’

He kissed her. After a couple of moments she warmed to it. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said when their mouths split apart.

‘I’ve missed you too.’

‘Come upstairs with me.’

She had started to rub at the crotch of his jeans with one hand. The other worked at the buckle on his belt. ‘What’s wrong with right here?’

He hesitated. The passion in the moment guttered down. She looked up from what her hands were doing, terrifyingly attuned to the confusion fogging his head.

‘Chris?’

‘I don’t want you getting carpet burns,’ he said, and hauled her off her feet. The classic wedding threshold lift. One hand went to her breast, cupping and

the blonde gobbles down Liz Linshaw’s nipple, smearing crimson lipstick

She laughed.

‘Well, well. Romance.’

Staggering a little, he got her upstairs. They crashed onto the bed and shed their clothes. Carla turned towards him, naked, and he felt a tiny crystal of warmth drip and slide somewhere deep inside him. He had forgotten how beautiful her body was, the broad-shouldered, long-boned pale expanse of it, the flat width of stomach and the full breasts above, breasts that would have been large on a smaller-framed woman but here

the swollen hemispheres, flesh taut to breaking point, kneaded by red taloned hands

He blinked and forced the image aside. Focused on the woman he was with, slotting into the old, comfortable sequence of postures and pressures, the places she liked to be touched, the eventual coupling

Liz Linshaw’s mouth, burrowing

He could not lose it. Even when Carla got on her hands and knees ahead of him the way they both liked to finish, he fantasised the other two women into existence on the bed with them. He imagined them vampire-like, clutching and sucking at Carla’s flesh and his own, and he came with that last image printed indelibly across his eyes.

They left then, dragging his post-coital warmth away with them like the fur of a newly slaughtered animal. And afterwards, when Carla shifted and murmured and tightened her arms around him, all he could feel was trapped inside something that wasn’t his.

‘This is fucking great stuff.’

Mike Bryant paced about the office space, leafing through the sheaf of hardcopy. Chris sat in a corner armchair and watched him. He hadn’t slept well, and there was a spreading ache behind his left eye. He was having a hard time getting up to the same level of enthusiasm as Bryant.

‘I mean, Jesus, these guys have got some grievances. Just look at it. Better than a dozen different insurgent leaders and every single one has got family tortured to death or disappeared. Fantastic. Primary Emotional Motivation, PE fucking M, right out of Reed and Mason. Textbook diehard revolutionaries. They’ll never quit. Listen, we only need to hold about a third, no, less than a third, of this stuff over Echevarria’s head, and he should cave right in.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘Of course he will. What’s wrong with you? We’d only need to persuade about three of these groups to team up, give them some second-hand Kalashnikovs out of stock - and Christ knows we’ve got enough of those - they’d piss all over Echevarria’s regular army.’

Chris’s temple throbbed. ‘Yeah, but what if he doesn’t scare?’

‘Chris, come on.’ Mike looked at him reproachfully. ‘You’re ruining my day here.’

‘What if, Mike. Fucking think about it.’

‘Jesus, you got out of bed the wrong side today. Alright.’ Bryant threw himself into another armchair opposite, dumped his feet on the coffee table between. ‘Let’s be grown up about it. What if. Contingency planning. Like I said, we wave about a third of these guys in his face. And we tell him there are double as many more where those came from, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Then, if he doesn’t see sense, we’ll use someone out of the other two-thirds. That way, whatever reprisals he takes, he’ll be hitting the wrong people. Meanwhile, we talk to the front runner, and if necessary set him up with what he needs. That’d be, let’s see.’ Bryant flipped through the hardcopy again. ‘This guy Arbenz maybe, the People’s Liberation Front for whatever it was. Or Barranco’s Revolutionary Brigade. Or Diaz. They’re all strong contenders. You were there. Who do you make for the best bet?’

‘Well, not Arbenz. He got shot up in a gunship raid a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t you catch the bulletin?’

‘Fucked if I remember.’ Bryant snapped his fingers. ‘Wait a minute, that business with the villages in the south. Echevarria’s been strafing them again, fucking shithead. You know he made me a direct promise those BAe helicopters wouldn’t be used against civilians this year. Lucky we didn’t issue a press statement on that one.’

‘Yeah, well, your BAe gunships shattered Arbenz’s legs from the hips down, and apparently they were running that bioware ammunition, the stuff we saw at Farnborough back in January, slugs coated with immune-system inhibitors. Very nasty. They’ve got him in a field hospital in the mountains, but the last I heard from Lopez, it’s touch and go if he’ll make it.’ Chris rubbed at his eye and wondered about painkillers. ‘And even if he does, he’ll be in no condition to conduct a campaign any time soon.’

‘Okay, so that’s Arbenz out. What about Barranco?’

‘Yeah, I’d leave Barranco alone too, unless you absolutely have to use him. I met him once. He’s committed, and he’s short on ego - tough to win over.’

Bryant pulled a face. ‘You met Diaz too, right?’

‘Couple of times, yeah. He’s a better bet. Very pragmatic, strong sense of his place in history. He wants his name on a statue somewhere before he dies. Oh, and he’s a real Shakespeare nut.’

‘You’re winding me up.’

‘No, seriously. He can quote the fucking stuff. Got a scholarship on some bullshit liberal arts exchange programme in the States when he was a student. He gave me Hamlet, Macbeth, whatsit, King Lear, you name it. All word-perfect.’ Chris shrugged. ‘Well, sounded like it was word-perfect anyway. What do I know? Anyway, he told me, get this; he always wanted to visit Britain and see the mother of parliaments.’

‘What?’ Bryant barked laughter. ‘You are winding me up.’

‘I swear. Mother of parliaments. That’s what he said.’

‘The mother of parliaments. Man, I love it. I almost hope Echevarria doesn’t cave in, just so we can have this guy across.’

Makin, perhaps predictably, was less amused by it all. He went through the stapled paperwork, one snatched-aside sheet at a time, without saying a word, then tossed the whole thing onto his polished desktop so it slid away from him. He looked across the desk to where Chris and Mike sat in steel frame chairs, bracketing him. He focused on Bryant.

‘I seiously don’t think this is the way to go, Mike.’

Bryant wasn’t up for it. He said nothing, just rolled his head in Chris’s direction.

‘Listen, Nick,’ Chris leaned forward. ‘I’ve worked the NAME before and I’m telling you—’

‘Youah telling me nothing. I’ve been working Latin American CI longer than you’ve been here. I took top commission in the Americas market last yeah—’

Bryant cleared his throat. ‘Year before last.’

‘I’m in it for this year as well, Mike.’ Makin’s voice stayed even, but behind the steel glasses his face looked betrayed. ‘When the unwesolveds come in.’

‘Ah, come on Nick.’ Chris felt a tight, feral jag of pleasure as he swung the comeback. ‘That was last season. First thing you ever said to me, man. Can’t live off stuff like that indefinitely. It’s a whole new quarter. Time for fresh meat. Another new appoach. Remember that?’

Makin looked away. ‘I don’t remember saying that, no.’

‘Well, you did, Nick.’ Bryant got up and brushed something off the shoulder of his suit. ‘I was there. Now, this is no longer under discussion. We are going to do it Chris’s way, because, to be honest, your Echevarria game plan is making me tired.’

‘Mike, I know how these fucking spics work. This is the wrong move.’

Bryant looked down at him. He seemed more disappointed with the other man than anything else. ‘This isn’t Guatemala, Nick. Chris is the resident NAME expert, you like it or not. Now you talk to him and get this stuff into a usable form by Monday. I meant what I said. I am tired of dicking about with that old fuck. We go uplincon with Echevarria and his cabinet next week, and I want the axe over his head by then. You coming for a coffee, Chris?’

‘Uh. Sure.’ Chris got to his feet. ‘Nick. You’ll call me, right?’

Makin made a noise in his throat.

At the door, Bryant turned and looked back across the office.

‘Hey, Nick. No hard feelings, huh? It’s just, we’ve let this slide too far. It’s getting out of hand. Time to bring in the riot squad, you know. I don’t want Notley looking in on us like we’re a bunch of kids just set fire to the kitchen. That’s not good for anyone.’

They left Makin with it.

‘You threatening him?’ asked Chris, in the lift.

Bryant grinned. ‘Bit.’

The doors opened at ground level and they walked out into the arching, light filled space of the tower’s lobby area. Fountain splash and an ambient subsonic vibe filled the air. Chris felt his mouth flex into a grin of his own.

‘You pissed off with him, then?’

‘Nick? Nah. Just he’s too fucking impressed with himself, is all. Ever since that Guatemala thing. He just needs to know where the orders are coming from, then he jumps. Jesus, look at that.’

Hanging in the air above one of the fountains, a huge Shorn Associates holo ran back-and-forth flicker-cut footage of the Cambodian conflict. Cross-hair graphics sprang up and tracked selected hardware as it appeared on screen - helicopters, assault rifles, medical gear, camera zeroing in, logistical data scrolling down alongside each sniper-caught item. Make, specs, cost. Shorn contribution and involvement.

‘This the BBC footage?’ asked Bryant. He’d handed publicity to Chris a couple of weeks ago.

‘At base, yeah. We bought it right out of the can in Phnom Penh, in case there was something inappropriate in there. You never can tell with that guy Syal, he’s a real fucking crusader. Won a Pilger Award last year. Anyway, the woman at Imagicians said they’d generate some of the closer detail themselves, like for the medical hardware. They can shoot some real state-of-the-art life-support stuff in the studio, then mix and match on the palette, so it looks like it was really there.’ Chris nodded up at the holo. ‘Looks good, huh?’

‘Yeah, not too shabby. So did Syal cut up rough when they took his footage off him?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Don’t think he got any say. We made sure there was a programme producer out there for the handover. Standard sponsorship terms. And what we handed them back had enough battle sequences to come across as gritty realism. You know, corpses on fire, that sort of stuff.’

‘No women or children, right.’

‘No. Ran it myself on the uplink. It’s clean.’

In the holo, a Cambodian guerrilla commander appeared, face weary. He rattled away in Khmer. Subtitling sprang up in red letters. It is a hard fight but with the help of our corporate partners, our victory is as certain as

‘He really saying that?’ asked Bryant curiously.

‘Think so.’ Chris was tracking a well-endowed blonde woman across the floorspace. ‘Think they give them cue cards or something. You know, sometimes I think I could just come down here and stand under the subsonics for half an hour, save myself buying the coffee.’

Bryant spotted where Chris was looking. ‘That’s not subsonics.’

‘Ah, come on Mike.’

‘Yeah, that reminds me. Want to go to a party tomorrow night?’

‘Party in the zones?’ Chris and Mike had been back across the cordons a few times since the Falkland incident, though never back to that particular pub and never quite as wrecked as they had been that night. At first, Chris was nervous on these visits, but Mike Bryant’s easy familiarity with the cordoned zones and their nightlife slowly won him over. He came to see that there was a trick to handling things there, and that Bryant knew it. You didn’t flaunt your elite status, but nor did you try to play it down. You acted like who you were, you didn’t try to be liked, and in most cases you were accorded a wary respect. In time the respect might develop into something else, but you didn’t expect that. And you didn’t need it to have a good time.

‘Why should it be in the zones?’ asked Bryant innocently.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ They stepped through the armoured-glass doors and into the street. The sun fell warm on their faces. ‘Because the last three were?’

‘Bullshit. What about Julie Pinion’s bash?’

‘Okay, the last two, then. And Julie’s wasn’t far off, come to that.’

‘I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that, price she paid for that duplex. That’s an up-and-coming regenerated area, Chris.’

‘So it is. I’d forgotten.’

They pushed into Louie Louie’s and nodded at familiar faces in the queue. Chris’s fame had eroded sufficiently that all he got from his Shorn colleagues these days were grunts and the odd grin.

‘So tell me about this party.’

Mike leaned back on the tiled wall. ‘Remember Troy?’

‘From the Falkland. Sure.’ They’d run into the Jamaican a couple more times in clubs on the other side of the wire, but in Chris’s mind he was irrevocably linked with the events of that night.

‘Well. Turns out his eldest son just got a scholarship to the Thatcher Institute. Fast-track international finance and economics programme, guaranteed placement with a major consulting firm at the end of it. So he’s throwing a party at his place. You are cordially invited.’

‘So it is in the fucking zones.’

‘What? Nah, Troy doesn’t live in the zones. He moved out years ago, got a place on the edge of Dulwich.’

‘Which edge?’

‘Look, it’s a better area than Julie Pinion picked, alright. You don’t want to come, I’ll tell him you’re working late. On a Friday.’

‘He invited me?’

‘Yeah, like I said. Cordially. Bring Faulkner, he said.’

‘Nice of him.’

‘Yeah, you got to come. Troy’s parties are fucking cool. Lots of powders and potions, big sound systems. Really good mix of people too. Suits, media, DJs, dealers.’ Bryant’s face fell abruptly. ‘Shit, you know what. I bet fucking Liz’ll be there.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Look, I really don’t think it’s going to be your kind of thing.’

‘Why not?’ Carla folded her arms and leaned back against the door of the freezer. ‘Too high-class for me? Am I going to show you up?’

‘That isn’t fair. I’ve asked you to come to every Shorn function we’ve had this year.’

‘Yes. Very dutiful of you.’

‘And that’s really not fucking fair. I wanted you there, every time. Including all the times you said no, I wanted you to be there with me.’ Chris lowered his voice. ‘I was proud of you. I wanted to show people that.’

‘You mean you wanted to show off.’

‘Ah,’ Chris made a helpless gesture. ‘Fuck you, Carla. I put myself on the line for you every single—’

‘If you’re going to talk to me like that . . .’ She was already moving, across the kitchen and away from him. ‘I’m going to bed. Goodnight.’

‘Fine. Fuck off, then.’

He stood, fists knotted, surrounded by the twinned debris of another evening’s separate dining, while she walked out on him. Again. Her voice drifted back down the stairs.

‘I’ve got better things to do tomorrow night, anyway.’

‘Fine, then fuck off.’ He bawled the last two words after her, dismayed at the sudden detonation of fury in his guts.

She didn’t answer.

For a while, he crashed plates and cutlery about, loading the dishwasher with a lack of care or interest that he knew could sometimes drag her back into the kitchen to take over. He was kidding himself, and he knew it. This was a new level of hostility they’d reached.

He selected a clean tumbler and went to look for the whisky. Poured the glass half full while he stared into the dead blue glare of the TV. The end titles of whatever mindless terrorists-threaten-civilisation flick they had just spun was already gone, already wiped off the screen as cleanly as the details of plot and action from his mind. Rage evaporating into remorse and a creeping sense of desolation.

A vicious clarity caught up with him, just before he knocked back the drink.

He was glad of the row, he knew abruptly. Glad of the out it had given him.

He was relieved she wouldn’t be coming with him.

Relieved, because—

He took the knowledge by the throat and drowned it.

Troy Morris’s home might not have been in the cordoned zones, but Chris could see a zone checkpoint just down the street from his front door, and the quality of housefronts plunged rapidly on the way there. The street was restored Victorian, Troy’s place and the surrounding facades carefully painted, windows clean. After that it started to get rough - at the checkpoint end, paint was a flecked rumour on most frontages and window glass had become strictly optional. Plastic coverings flapped in a couple of places.

The last three houses on both sides of the street had been demolished to provide open ground on either side of the checkpoint. The rubble had been cleared, and defoliant kept the weeds down. A hundred metres beyond the barriers, the closest structures on the other side were riot-fire blackened and crumbling. A shabby concrete block rose ten storeys high behind the shells, dirty grey facades stained darker with leakage from substandard guttering. Chris spotted someone watching him from a window near the top.

It was a perfect summer evening, still fully light after eight o’clock and the day’s heat was leaching slowly out of the air without the rain that had been threatening all afternoon. Junk salsa thumped out of Troy’s opened sash windows and when Bryant rang the doorbell, the door seemed to blow open on a gust of bassline.

‘Mike! Good to see you, man.’ Troy was kitted out in a Jamaica Test ’47 shirt with Moses McKenzie’s grinning victorious face poking out behind a holoshot fast-bowled cricket ball that seemed to come right off the fabric at them. In contrast, Troy’s face seemed unusually sombre. ‘Hey, Faulkner. You came. That’s good.’

Chris murmured something, but Troy had already gone back to Bryant.

‘Mike, listen. Need to talk to you later, man.’

‘Sure. What’s the deal?’

Troy shook his head. ‘Later’s better.’

‘Whatever you need.’ Bryant craned his neck to look down the hall. ‘Any chance of a spliff?’

‘Yeah, somewhere I guess. That blonde TV face you like, she’s here, she’s rolling.’

‘Right.’

They went down the hall, into the heart of the party.

Chris had never been much of a fiesta machine. Growing up smart and strangely accented in a zone school had ensured he was routinely bullied nearly every day of his life and didn’t get invited to many parties. Later, he learned to fight. Later still he grew into looks that a lot of the cooler female kids liked. Life got easier, but the damage was already done. He remained withdrawn and watchful around other people, found it hard to relax and harder to have fun if he was surrounded. A reputation for moody cool, approved and codified by male peers and female fans alike, nailed the doors shut on him. By the time he hacked his way into the corporate world, he had exactly the demeanour required for long-term survival. The edgy, peer-thrown parties and corporate functions, rancid with rivalry and display politics, were a comfortable fit. He turned up because he had to, faked his way through the necessary rituals with polished skill, never let his guard down and hated every minute. Just like the parties of his youth.

Accordingly, he was mildly shocked to discover, a couple of hours later, the extent to which he was enjoying himself at Troy Morris’s gathering.

He’d ended up, as he often did at house parties, in the kitchen, mildly buzzed on a couple of tequila slammers and a single line of very good cocaine, arguing South American politics with Troy’s son James and a glossy Spanish fashion model called Patricia, who they’d discovered - wow, you’re kidding me - had appeared in the same issue of GQ as Chris, though wearing a lot fewer clothes. Not, Chris couldn’t help noticing, that she was wearing a lot of clothes at the moment either. There were about a dozen of these exotic creatures sprinkled around the party like sex-interest models at a motorshow. They drifted elegantly from room to room, drawn occasionally into the orbits of the expensively dressed men they appeared to have come with, spoke English in a variety of alluring non-English accents and, without exception, danced superlatively well to the junk salsa blasting out of the speakers in the lounge. To judge by Patricia and her end of the South America conversation, they had all been required to check their brains in at the door. Or had maybe just pawned them for the wisps of designer clothing they were fractionally wrapped in.

‘For me, all these bad things they say about Hernan Echevarria, I think they exaggerate. You know, I have met his son in Miami and he is a really quite nice guy. He really loves his father.’

James, perhaps thinking of his imminent entry into the Thatcher Institute and the possible eavesdroppers on this conversation, said nothing. But he was young and unschooled as yet, and his face said it all.

‘It isn’t really a question of his son,’ said Chris, making an effort. ‘The point is that excessive use of force by a regime, any regime, can make investors nervous. If they think the government is stepping up repressive measures too much, they start to wonder how secure the regime is, and what’ll happen to their money if it comes tumbling down. It’s like scaffolding around an apartment block - it’s not the sort of thing that makes you keen to buy in that block, is it?’

Patricia blinked. ‘Oh, I would never buy a flat in a block,’ she assured him. ‘No garden, and you would have to share the swimming pool. I couldn’t stand that.’

Chris blinked as well. There was a short silence.

‘Actually, the right kind of repression is usually a pretty good booster for investor confidence. I mean, look at Guatemala.’

It was the dealer of the high-quality powdered goods. He’d been leaning into the conversation on and off for the last hour, each time making remarkably astute observations about the political and economic salients of Latin America. Chris couldn’t make up his mind if this was a result of close association on the dealer’s part with some of his corporate clients or just exemplary background knowledge of his supply chain. He thought it’d be unwise to ask.

‘Guatemala’s a different game,’ he said.

‘How so?’ asked the dealer. ‘From what I hear their indices are pretty close to Echevarria’s, pro rata. About the same balance of payments. Same military budget. Same structural adjustment.’

‘But not the same governance durability. The last twenty-five years, you’ve had over a dozen different regimes, a dozen regime shifts, most of them with violence. The US military has been in and out of there like it was a urinal. Violent change is the norm. The investors expect it there. That’s why they get such a huge return. And, sure, violent repression is part of the picture, but it’s successful violent repression. You’re right. Which does inspire investment.’

James cleared his throat. ‘But not in the North Andean Monitored?’

‘No, Echevarria’s been in power a long time. Tight grip on the military, he’s one of them himself. Investors expect stability, because that’s what he’s given them for decades. That’s why shooting protesters on the steps of major universities isn’t smart.’

‘Oh, but they were marquistas,’ broke in Patricia. ‘He had to do that to protect the public.’

‘Thirty-eight dead, over a hundred injured,’ said Chris. ‘Almost all of them students, and more than half from middle-class families. Even a couple of visiting scholars from Japan. That’s very bad for business.’

‘So are you handling the NAME account for Shorn these days?’

It was Liz Linshaw, suddenly propped against the worktop opposite, a spliff cocked in one upheld hand beside her face, spare arm folded across her body to support the other elbow. He looked across at her and felt her presence turn on a tiny tap in his guts.

He’d seen her a couple of times already, once in passing on the stairs up to the bathroom, once across the cleared space and dancers in the lounge where she was weaving back and forth alone to the junk salsa-beat. She was decked out in classic designer oil-stained Mao jeans, a deep red T-shirt and a black silk jacket. Her riotous blonde hair was gathered up and pinned at one side with an artful lack of care, left elsewhere to tumble down past her shoulder and partly mask that side of her face. There was a tigerish vitality in it all, he saw now, an animation that took the constructed charms of Patricia’s kind and made them plastic and spray.

Now she tilted the hair away from her eyes and grinned at him.

He found himself grinning back. ‘You know I can’t answer that, Liz.’

‘Just you sounded so informed.’

‘I’m informed about a lot of things. Let’s talk about Mars.’

It was that season’s Dex and Seth ultra-cool quote, immortalised in a series of sketches featuring Seth’s fawning, craven TV interviewer and Dex’s high-powered American corporate shark. Whenever the interview steered into politically iffy waters, Dex started to make angry American noises that didn’t actually contain any words and Seth’s interviewer invariably reacted by cringing and suggesting let’s talk about Mars.

With that line, you knew that across Europe, hundreds of thousands of watchers were reeling away from their illegally tuned screens, clutching their sides and weeping with laughter. Apart from being as far removed as you could humanly get from current affairs on Earth, news from Mars was famously dull. After nearly two decades of manned missions and exploration, the rotating teams of scientists were doing nothing anyone cared remotely about. Sure, people might be able to live out there in a century. Big fucking deal. Meanwhile, here are some more red rocks. More Red Rocks was another big Dex and Seth number, the two comedians done up in pressure suits and geeky masks, bouncing in faked low g and singing the lyrics to tunes ripped off from junk-salsa giants like Javi Reyes and Inez Zequina.

‘Let’s not talk about Mars,’ said Liz Linshaw firmly, and everyone in the kitchen broke up with laughter. Amidst it, she leaned across the narrow space between them, and offered the spliff to Chris.

Her eyes, he suddenly noticed, were grey-green.

The dealer sniffed the air with professional interest. ‘That the new Moroccan stuff?’ he wanted to know. ‘Hammersmith Hammer?’

Liz spared him a glance. ‘No. Thai direct.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘I seriously doubt it.’

Chris drew it down, coughed a little. Let it up again almost immediately. He wasn’t a big fan of the stuff. Aside from a couple of parties at Mel’s place with Carla, he hadn’t smoked in years.

Liz Linshaw was watching him.

‘Very nice,’ he wheezed, and tried to hand the spliff back. She pushed it away, and used the motion to lean in close. Close enough that tendrils of her hair brushed his face.

‘I’d really like to talk to you somewhere,’ she said.

‘Fair enough.’ He found a stupid grin crawling onto his mouth and twitched it away. ‘Garden?’

‘I’ll meet you out there.’ She withdrew, nodded casually at James and the powder man, and wandered out of the kitchen, leaving Chris holding the spliff. Patricia watched her go with enough venom in her gaze to poison a city water supply.

‘Who is that woman?’ she asked.

‘Friend,’ said Chris, and drifted off in Liz Linshaw’s wake.

Either Troy’s garden was larger than he’d expected or the Thai grass was already beginning to kick in. It was full dark by now, but Troy had thoughtfully provided half a dozen garden torches, driven at intervals into the long tongue of well-kept lawn. The garden was bordered by a mix of trees and shrubs, amidst which the dwarf palms seemed to be doing the best, and at the far end a gnarled oak tree raised crooked limbs at the sky. From one lower branch someone had strung a simple wooden swing on blue plastic ropes that picked up the flickering light of the nearest torches and glowed. Liz Linshaw was seated there, one long leg drawn up to wedge her body back against one of the ropes, the other on the ground, idly stirring the swing in tiny arcs. There was a fresh spliff burning in her hand.

Chris hung from the moment, and felt something happen to him. It wasn’t just the fact that he knew she was waiting for him. There was something in the air, something that caught in the luminous blue twistings of the swing ropes, in the casual elegance of the way she had folded her body like an origami sketch of sexual appeal. The lawn was a carpet laid out under his feet, and the other people in the garden - he only registered them now - seemed to turn in unison and approve his passage towards the tree.

He grimaced and threw away the spliff. Made his way warily to her.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘You wanted to talk to me.’ It came out rougher than he’d intended.

‘Yes.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’ve wanted to talk with you since the Tebbit Centre. Since the first time we met, in fact.’

It felt as if the ground beneath his feet had gone suddenly soggy and unsupportive.

‘Why is that?’

She lifted a hand. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Uh, Liz, to be honest, I thought you and Mike—’

‘Oh.’ The crooked smile was back. She smoked some more and he struggled with his doped senses. ‘He told you about that. Well, Chris, how can I put this? Mike Bryant and I are not some kind of exclusive event.’

The ground was, apparently, gone now.

‘In fact,’ she said very softly, ‘there’s no reason why I can’t ask you for what Mike’s been giving me. Is there?’

He stared at her. ‘Sorry?’

‘Interviews,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Your life so far, Chris. My publishers are promising me a half-million advance, if I can come up with another book like The New Asphalt Warriors. It’s a guaranteed bestseller. And with the Nakamura thing, Cambodia and the rest of it, you’re the man of the moment. Ideal focus.’

The ground came up and hit him in the heels, so hard he almost stumbled.

‘Oh.’ He looked away from the level grey-green gaze. ‘Right.’

She was still grinning. He could hear it in her voice. ‘Why, what did you think I was talking about?’

‘No, I. Yeah. Fine, that, that’s good.’

She pushed with her foot and cranked the swing back a little, then let go. The edge of the wooden seat hit him across the front of the thighs. Her weight swung with it, pressed against him.

‘Was there something else you wanted, Chris?’

Sprawled, airbrushed bodies on the exercise bench, liquid moans

Carla, the house, the stagnant anger through empty rooms

You’re a good guy, Chris. Bryant, lolling semi-conscious on the hotel bed

That’s you. You’re a. Fucking good guy.

It fell through his head like an avalanche, images crushing each other.

Liz Linshaw’s cleavage loaded into an open-necked blouse

Carla, soaping him in the shower, hands still gritty with the work on the Saab

Mitsue Jones, trapped in the wreck of her Mitsubishi, struggling

what we value here at Shorn is resolution

you’re a fucking good guy

was there something else you wanted

‘Chris!’

It was Bryant. Chris took a sudden step back from Liz Linshaw and the swing. He saw her face, and the way it changed. Then he was facing Mike as he strode up the garden towards them.

‘Been looking for you everywhere, man. Hi, Liz.’ The conjunction appeared to strike him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘What are you guys doing out here?’

‘Talking,’ said Liz, unruffled.

Chris scrambled for cover. ‘Book deal.’ He made a gesture at Liz that felt like a warding off. ‘She says.’

‘Yeah?’ Bryant gave Liz an unfriendly look. ‘Well, my advice is don’t tell her anything too realistic. You wouldn’t want to get labelled an animal.’

Liz, smiling to herself, turning away, unfolding herself from the swing. Chris shut it out and focused on Bryant.

‘So what’s happening?

‘Ah, no big deal. Troy needs a favour. Liz, you want to give us a little privacy?’

‘Already leaving, boys. Already leaving.’

They both watched her walk back down the garden and into the house. Mike turned and mimed a pistol at Chris’s face. He wasn’t smiling.

‘Hope you know what you’re doing here, Chris.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mike. I’m married. She just wants another half-million advance from her publishers.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that being the whole story.’

‘Mike, I am married.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ Bryant rubbed at his face. ‘Not like you, though, huh?’

‘You said that, not me.’

‘Yeah.’ Bryant smiled sadly and slung an arm across the other man’s shoulders. ‘You’re a good guy, Chris. You’re a good fucking guy.’

Chris stowed the unease slithering through him.

‘So. What’s the deal with Troy?’

It was all in the zones.

Mike said he’d drive, though Chris wasn’t convinced he was in any way the more sober or straight of the two of them. They went out to the car together with Troy, who for the first time since Chris had known him seemed angry and uncomfortable.

‘I’d come with you, Mike . . .’

‘I know you would, man. But you can’t.’ Mike held up his corporate plastic. ‘We’re the only ones can do this for you. You know that.’

The Jamaican shook his head. ‘I owe you for this. Big time.’

‘You don’t owe me shit, Troy. Remember Camberwell?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right, well as far as I’m concerned, I’m still paying off the interest. ’kay? Now give Chris the camera.’

Troy Morris swallowed and handed over the shoulder set. His features were knotted up with rage and frustration. Chris remembered him at the Falkland, the sawn-off shotgun propped against his shoulder as he left laughing, the sense of street competence that radiated off the man. It was a brutal transition to the Troy he saw before him now. Chris felt a jagged pang of sympathy. He knew the feeling of sudden impotence from his own youth, knew how it could cook your brains in your head, chew up your insides until you couldn’t sleep.

He got in the car. Stowed the shoulder set in the back seat.

‘Be back before you know it,’ said Mike as he swung himself in the driver’s side. The engine rumbled awake. Gears engaged and the BMW swept out into the street.

‘What was that about Camberwell?’ Chris asked, as they came up on the checkpoint lights.

‘Yeah, first time I met Troy. About ten years ago, back before he had this place. I was out in the zones, hitting the whiff pretty hard, went home with the wrong woman.’

‘For a change,’ said Chris sourly.

Mike chuckled. ‘Yeah, guess you never can get all the spots off the tiger, huh?’

‘Leopard.’

‘What?’ They pulled in beside the checkpoint. A nervous-looking kid in guard uniform came out of the cabin and glanced into the car. He seemed unsure of himself. Mike leaned out and handed over his plastic.

‘Leopard,’ said Chris, while they were waiting. ‘Tigers used to have stripes, not spots. Leopards were the spotted ones.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, saw it on some nature digest a while back. They used to be able to climb trees, just like a real cat.’

‘What, tigers?’

‘Leopards.’

The young guard finally got his hipswipe unit to work and Mike’s card chimed through. The barrier rose and they were waved across.

‘I swear these guys get younger every time we do the zones,’ said Chris. ‘I mean, is it really a good idea to give automatic weapons to teenagers like that?’

‘Why not? They do it in the army.’

They hit their first pothole. Mike took a left. Around them, the housing grew increasingly haggard.

‘So yeah, Camberwell. This was before I met Suki. I was pretty wild back then. Pretty stupid. Used to get through a can and a half of Durex a month, easily. And the drugs, ah, you know how it is when you’ve got money. Anyway, this tart wasn’t really a tart, or maybe she was a tart and she changed her mind, I don’t know. End result, there were these three guys waiting outside her apartment. They threw me down a flight of stairs and started dancing on my head. Troy was living in the apartment downstairs, he heard the noise, came out and chased them off.’

‘All three of them?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. He’s pretty fucking hard, Troy is. Or could be he faced them down. Don’t know, I was out by then, semi-conscious. But, yeah, maybe he just talked them out of it. See, they were black, I was white, Troy was black. That maybe had something to do with it. Or maybe not. Anyway, the guy saved me getting hospitalised for certain, maybe saved me from a wheelchair. I owe him forever, and then some.’

They drove in silence the rest of the way, parked outside a nondescript little row of three-storey houses and sat for a moment. Mike hauled the camera out of the back seat and dumped it in Chris’s lap.

‘Okay, now just follow my lead. Back me up.’

They got out of the car, went through an ungated garden gateway and up a short, decaying concrete path. The door was cheap beige impact plastic, scarred and ugly. A Sony securicam lens and speaker grille gleamed incongruously from the chest-high panel in which it had been set. The installation looked professional. Mike touched the edge of the panel with one finger.

‘See. Going up in the world. Just like the man said.’

Chris shook his head and whispered. ‘I can’t believe—’

‘Believe it.’ Mike hit the doorbell. ‘Now turn that thing on.’

Chris found the on/off in the camera’s grip. A cone of hard light leapt out of the front end and splashed on the scarred plastic of the front door. He wondered if this was going to play. Most state-of-the-art shoulder sets these days would shoot the whole range from infra-red to ultraviolet with no external lighting at all.

Movement behind the door. He shouldered the set and tried to look like a cameraman.

‘You know what fucking time it is?’ said a female voice from the speaker grille. ‘This had better be fucking important.’

Mike pitched his voice media bouncy. ‘Ah, Mrs Dixon? This is Gavin Wallace from Powerful People. Is your husband home?’

A silence. Chris imagined her peering into the securicam screen at the two expensively-dressed men on her doorstep. The voice came, tinged with suspicion.

‘You from TV?’

‘Yes, Mrs Dixon, that’s what I said. Your husband has been selected from—’

A second voice, male and further from the speaker pick-up. The woman’s voice faded as she turned away from the door.

‘Griff, it’s the TV. Powerful People.’

Another pause, laced with muffled voices. Someone had a hand over the pick-up. Mike looked at Chris, shrugged and put on the media voice again.

‘Mr Dixon, if you’re there. We don’t have a lot of time. The helicopter has already left Blackfriars, and we need to get through the preliminaries before it arrives. We’re on a very tight schedule.’

It was the right chord. Half the draw of Powerful People derived from the breakneck pace the programme sustained from the moment the names came out of the studio computer. There was much aerial footage, cityscapes tilting away beneath the swift-flying pick-up copters, locator teams sprinting through the zones in search of the night’s contestants—

The door cracked open the width of a heavy-duty security chain. A lean, pale face appeared in the gap, blinking in the light from the shoulder set. There was a thin pink streak of artiflesh smeared over a cut on one temple.

‘Mr Dixon. Good.’ Mike leaned in, beaming. ‘Gavin Wallace. Powerful People. Pleased to. Oh. That looks nasty, that cut. Make-up’ll need to see that. In fact, I hate to say this but in all conscience—’

It was a stroke of genius. Powerful People’s selection teams had been known to pass over a candidate for as little as recent dental surgery. The door hinged in, the chain came off. Griff Dixon stood before them in all his midnight glory.

‘It’s just a scratch,’ he said. ‘Honest. I’ll be fine. I’m fighting fit.’

It was an appropriate expression, Chris thought. Dixon was stripped to the waist, taut-muscled torso rising from a pair of jeans with real stains on them. His hair was a razored single centimetre all over, there were heavy black boots on his feet and in his hand was a crumpled-up white T-shirt that Chris somehow knew he had just tugged off.

‘Well,’ said Mike richly. ‘If you’re quite sure you—’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Look, you want to come in, right.’

‘Well, alright.’ Mike made a show of wiping his shoes on the doorstep and walked into the threadbare hall, smiling a big TV smile. ‘Hello, Mrs Dixon.’

A thin, worn-looking woman about Carla’s age stood behind Dixon’s sculpted musculature, one thin-boned hand resting on his shoulder. She squinted into the camera light and brushed vaguely at her shoulder-length brown hair.

‘This is my colleague Christopher Mitchell. I’m sorry. Could we maybe film this in the living room?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Sure.’ Dixon’s eagerness was almost pitiful. ‘Jazz, make some tea, will you. Or would you like coffee?’

Bryant glanced round. ‘Christopher?’

‘Uhh, yeah.’ Chris fumbled the question. ‘Coffee. White, no sugar.’

‘And black for me,’ said Mike. ‘One sugar, please. Thank you.’

The woman disappeared up the hall, while Dixon let them pass and closed the door behind them. In his excitement, he forgot the chain. They went left into a small living room dominated by a huge Audi entertainment deck set against one wall. The system didn’t look any older than the securicam in the door.

‘Ah, that corner, I think,’ said Mike, nodding at Chris. ‘I’ll sit here and Griff, do you mind if I call you Griff, if you could sit here.’

Dixon lowered himself onto the edge of the armchair. There was something painfully vulnerable in the expression on his face as he looked at Bryant.

‘You’ll need to get dressed,’ said Mike gently.

‘Huh?’

‘The T-shirt?’

‘Oh. Oh, no, it’s. Filthy.’ He compressed the already crumpled piece of clothing in his hands. ‘Been working on my bike. I’ll go up and get another one.’

‘Well.’ Bryant lifted a forestalling hand. ‘Perhaps in a moment. But we really need to get these questions sorted out. Uhm. You have a child, don’t you?’

‘Yeah.’ Dixon grinned happily. ‘Joe. He’s three.’

‘And he’s,’ Mike gestured at the ceiling, ‘upstairs asleep, I suppose.’

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Good, good. Alright, now the official questions,’ Bryant reached into his jacket. ‘Where are we, ah. Yes.’

The Nemex.

Even for Chris, the transition was an almost electrical jolt. Mike transformed in a single motion from beaming, chocolate-voiced media host to a man with a levelled gun.

For Dixon, it was clearly beyond the realms of comprehension.

‘What’s,’ he shook his head, grin still licking around his lips. ‘What’s, what’re you doing?’

‘Chris.’ Mike didn’t look round. ‘Close the door.’

Dixon still hadn’t got it. ‘Is this part of—’

‘Show us the T-shirt.’

‘Wha—’

‘Show me the motherfucking T-shirt, you piece of shit!’

‘Mike?’

‘Just relax, Chris. Everything’s under control. When Jazz comes back, you just keep her out of the way. We’re not here for her.’

Dixon stirred. ‘Listen—’

‘No, you listen.’ Bryant took a step forward and drew a fresh downward bead on Dixon’s face. ‘Throw the T-shirt on the floor. Now.’

‘No.’

‘I’m not going to ask you again. Show me the fucking T-shirt.’

‘No.’ It was like talking to a cornered child.

Bryant moved faster than Chris had ever seen another human being move. From standing, he was suddenly at Dixon’s chair. The Nemex whipped out sideways and Dixon was reeling back, clutching at his head with both hands. The T-shirt fell to the threadbare carpet and Bryant scooped it up left-handed. Blood splintered bright through Dixon’s fingers.

‘You’re not on TV, Griff.’ Mike’s tone had gone back to conversational. He crouched to Dixon’s level. ‘There’s no need to be shy.’

He shook the T-shirt out and laid it on the floor, face up. It was clean and freshly ironed, black lettering on soft white cotton.

WHITE ARYAN RESISTANCE.

The words were printed horizontally, one under the other, the first letter of each limned in red in case someone didn’t get the message.

The door swung open and Jazz backed into the room, still crouching from the contortion necessary to depress the handle without putting down the tray in her hands.

‘I brought some—’

Turning, she saw Griff cringing and bleeding in the chair, saw the gun in Mike Bryant’s hand. She dropped the tray and shrieked. The coffee leapt sideways, broad swipes of liquid on its way to the floor. Cheap crockery scattered and broke amidst something else. Biscuits, Chris saw. She’d brought biscuits.

‘Be quiet,’ snapped Bryant. ‘You’re going to wake Joe up.’

Naming the child seemed to do something to Griff Dixon. He dropped his hands from his face. The gouge that the forward sight of the Nemex had opened in his scalp showed clearly through his razored hair, and blood was running down his face into one eye.

‘You fucking listen to me. Whoever you are, I know people. You touch any of us, I’ll—’

‘You’ll do nothing, Griff. You’ll sit there and fucking bleed, and you’ll listen to me, and you’ll do nothing. Jazz, will you shut up. Chris, for Christ’s sake make her sit down or something.’

Chris got hold of the woman and forced her onto the sofa. She was trembling and making a high keening sound that might have had the words my baby in it somewhere.

‘I know people who—’

‘You know political people, Griff.’ The scary thing about Mike’s voice, Chris realised, was the energy of it. He sounded like an enthusiastic coach pushing a fighter who wasn’t punching his weight. ‘Political scum. Look at this gun, Griff. Recognise it?’

It was only then that Chris saw the fear appear on Dixon’s face. For the first time since they’d entered the house, Griff Dixon was afraid.

‘That’s right.’ Bryant had seen it too. He grinned. ‘Nemesis Ten. Now you know the only people got access to these babies, don’t you Griff. You’re well enough connected for that. This is a corporate gun. And where it comes from, politicians mean less than a bucket of runny shit.’

Jazz’s keening changed pitch.

‘First question for you, Griff.’ A tremor ran down Mike Bryant’s face. It was the single indication of the fury he was working through. ‘What possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman?’

Dixon flinched as if struck. His wife’s keening broke abruptly into something between a sob and a howl.

‘Didn’t you understand the question? Would you like to phone a friend? I asked you, what possible reason does a member of the white master race have to stick his dick in a black woman? Especially, Griff, if that black woman is screaming and fighting and begging you not to do it?’

The room settled down to quiet and the sound of Dixon’s wife weeping. Bryant crouched again. He pressed his lips together hard. Pushed out a breath.

‘Alright, Griff. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to hurt your wife or your son, because in the end it isn’t their fault you’re a piece of shit. But I’m going to shoot you in both kneecaps and the balls.’

Jazz erupted in shrieks. She tried to get up from the sofa and reach her husband. Chris held her back. Bryant got up.

‘And then I’m going to blind you in one eye. There’s no way around any of this. I want you to understand that. You and your friends picked on the wrong black girl.’

Dixon came out of the chair, screaming. For a brief second he reached Mike with his fists. Then the hollow boom of the Nemex shook the room and Dixon was convulsed on the floor, blood soaking the crotch of his jeans. The new sound that came out of him didn’t sound human.

Mike Bryant got back to his feet, bleeding from the mouth. He got his breath back, then very carefully sighted on Dixon’s left knee and pulled the trigger. The white supremacist must have passed out because the noise stopped. Bryant wiped his mouth and lined up on the other leg. By now Jazz had given up fighting Chris and was holding onto him as if he could rescue her from drowning. Her tears burnt on his neck. He covered her ears with his hands as Mike pulled the trigger for the third time.

In the cordite-reeking quiet, he watched as Bryant stowed the Nemex, took out a steel-cased pen, bent to Dixon’s head, peeled back the eyelid and jabbed hard into the eye beneath. It all seemed to happen very slowly and without sound and somehow he found that his gaze had slipped away by the end and focused on the sleek lines of the entertainment deck.

‘Chris.’ Bryant was leaning over him.

‘What? Yeah, yeah.’

It took both of them to unfasten Jazz’s grip on Chris. When they had finally tugged her away, Bryant crouched in front of her and gripped her lower jaw in one hand. In the other, he held up a folded wad of notes.

‘Alright, now listen to me. This money is for you. Here. Here, take it. Take it, for Christ’s sake.’ Finally, he had to open her hand and fold her fingers around the notes himself. ‘If you want him to live, you’d better get help for him soon. I don’t much care if he lives or dies, but if he lives you tell him. He, or anyone else around here, touches another person with the surname Morris or Kidd, I’ll come back for the other eye, and I’ll kill your son.’

Her whole body jerked. Bryant took her hand and squeezed the money into it again.

‘Now you tell him that, and you make sure he understands I mean it. I don’t want to come back here, Jazz. I don’t want to do it. But I will if your fuckwit racist husband and his friends make me.’

In the car, Bryant put his hands on the centre of the steering wheel in front of him and pressed his body back into the padded seat. He emptied his lungs in a long, hard single breath. Then, he just stared at the windscreen. He seemed to be waiting for something. There were lights on in some of the houses, but either no one had heard the gunshots or no one had any interest in finding out what they signified.

‘Did you mean it?’ Chris asked.

‘The eye?’ Bryant nodded to himself. His voice was barely above a murmur. ‘Oh, yes. People like that, they’ve got to have something to lose. Otherwise, you’ve got no leverage on them.’

‘No, his son. Did you mean it about his son?’

Mike looked across at him, outraged. ‘Jesus Christ, of course not. Fuck, Chris, what kind of man do you think I am?’

He was silent for a while. Very faintly, the sound of a siren came wailing to them out of the night. Bryant looked at his watch. He grunted.

‘Fast. She must have called a pricey one.’

He started the engine. The BMW’s lights carved up the gloom in the poorly lit street.

‘Let’s get out of here, huh? We’ve got a lot to do.’

It took them the rest of the night to find the other two men. Both were young, neither had a family and it was Friday night in the zones. Troy Morris’s information gave starting points, but from there on in, it was hard work. Mike drove, Chris checked streets, house numbers, the names on dismal little neon signs. They worked their way through mistaken addresses, dimly-lit pipe houses, underground clubs with promising names like Cross of Iron and Endangered Race, brothels, fast-food stands and even a local paycop garrison near the river. Everywhere they went, Mike Bryant brandished the Nemex or thick wads of cash to almost interchangeable effect. The money worked more often than the gun. It unzipped the right lips, opened the right doors.

They found the first man at a hot-dog stand, drunk and swaying. He didn’t know they were looking for him. No one had bothered to warn him. The white supremacists weren’t big on solidarity, and besides, functioning phones weren’t all that common in the zones. The landlines got fucked up by technosmart vandal gangs and mobile cover was a bad joke, fatally compromised by rolling waves of government jamming aimed at satellite programming like Dex and Seth. Wheeled transport was all but non-existent. People didn’t get about much, messages even less.

Bryant leaned on the stand, bought the man a burger and watched him eat it. Then he told him why he was there. The man took off, trying to sprint. They went after him. Halfway down a side alley they found him vomiting up Mike’s burger and the rest of the night’s intake. Mike shot him four times in the groin and stomach with the Nemex, then bent to peer at the damage in the dim light. When he was sure the man was bleeding to death, they left him alone.

They had to drag the second supremacist out of a bed that wasn’t his own in a fifteenth-floor apartment that reeked of damp and rat poison. The woman next to him didn’t even wake up. When they got him into the living room he was mumbling, incoherent with ingested chemicals and sleep. They took an arm each and ran him head first against the balcony window until it smashed through. Outside, on the glass-strewn balcony, dawn was turning the night air slowly grey and there were birds singing in the trees below. Neither of them were sure if the man was dead or not. They stopped over the body, careful to avoid getting glass in their hands, picked him up and threw him over the rail. The birdsong stopped abruptly with the impact on the concrete below.

In the kitchen, Mike left money for the broken window.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The sun caught them leaving the zones somewhere south of London Bridge. The streets were already full of pedestrians on their way to work and Mike had to hoot repeatedly to get them out of the road as they approached the checkpoint. Queues backed up hundreds long, snaking randomly away from the various turnstile entrypoints. There was even a queue at the road barrier, three rusting buses that looked almost pre-millennial, one of them belching oily fumes from its exhaust. Beyond the checkpoint, glimpsed through the low rise of preferential South Bank housing, gold light impacted and dripped on glass skyscraper panels across the river.

‘Jesus, look at this,’ said Bryant disgustedly. ‘Emissions monitoring, my fucking arse. Look at the shit coming out of that bus.’

‘Yeah, and it’s packed. We’re going to be here for a while.’

It was true. Armed guards were ordering the passengers out of the first bus, lining them up. The first line had already assumed the position - right hand on the back of the head, passcard held up in the left. A single guard moved down the line, scrutinising the cards one at a time and swiping them through his hip unit. Every second card needed repeated swipes.

‘Don’t know why they bother,’ Chris yawned with a force that made his jaw creak. ‘It’s not like there’s been anything resembling terrorism in London for the last couple of years.’

‘Yeah, and you’re looking at the reason why. Don’t knock it, man.’ Bryant drummed his fingers on the wheel. ‘Still, this is going to take forever. You want to get breakfast?’

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Chris twisted about in his seat. A handful of frontages down the street they had just driven up, a grimed sign said Café. People flowed in and out with paper packets and garishly coloured cans.

‘In there?’

‘Sure. Cheap and nasty, plenty of grease. Just what you need.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ Chris still felt slightly queasy when he thought about what Mike had done to Griff Dixon’s eye. ‘Think I’ll stick to coffee.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Bryant plugged the BMW into reverse and punted it back along the street. The engine whined high with unnecessary revs. Pedestrians scrambled to get out of the way. Level with the café, Bryant slewed into the curb and jolted to a halt at a rakish angle. He grinned.

‘Man, I love the parking in this part of town.’

They climbed out to hostile stares. Bryant smiled bleakly and alarmed the car with the remote held high and visible. Someone behind Chris rasped something unintelligible and hawked up spit. Twitchy with the events of the night, Chris pivoted about. The phlegm glistened yellow and fresh near his feet. Not what he needed.

He scanned the bystanders’ faces. Mostly they shuffled and looked away, but one young black man stood his ground and stared back.

‘You got something to say to me?’ Chris asked him.

The man stayed silent but he didn’t look away. His white companion laid a hand on his arm. Bryant came round the car, yawning and stretching.

‘Problem?’

‘No problem,’ said the white one, pulling his friend away.

‘Good, you’d better get cracking then.’ Bryant jerked a thumb up the street. ‘That’s a hell of a queue up there. You coming, Chris?’

He shoved back the door of the café and they worked their way past the line of people waiting at the take-out counter to the seating area at the back. There were no customers apart from a black-clad old man who sat alone, staring into a mug of tea.

‘This’ll do.’ Mike slid into a booth and beat a drum riff on the tabletop with the flat of both hands. ‘I’m starving.’

There was a menu scrawled in luminous purple marker across the quickwipe surface of the table. Chris glanced across it and looked away again, nervous of the standing queue at his back. He knew the food. He’d eaten in places like this most of his teens, and occasionally, after a mechanic’s night out with Carla and the others from Mel’s Autofix, he still did. Like prime-time satellite programming, it would be a loudly flavoured blend of low-grade bulking agents seasoned with garishly advertised vitamin and mineral additives. The sausages would average about thirty per cent meat, the bacon came swollen with injected water. He was glad he had no appetite.

A waitress appeared at the booth.

‘Getya?’

‘Coffee,’ said Chris. ‘White. Glass of water.’

‘I’ll have the big breakfast,’ said Mike expansively. ‘You get eggs with that?’

‘They’re Qweggs,’ said the waitress sullenly.

‘Right. Better give me, uh, six of those then. And plenty of toast. Coffee for me too. Black.’

The waitress turned her back and strode off. Mike watched her go.

‘Friendly here.’

Chris shrugged. ‘They know who we are.’

‘Yeah, which means a massive tip if they can just secrete a little common courtesy. Pretty fucking short-sighted attitude, if you ask me.’

‘Mike.’ Chris leaned across the table. ‘What do you expect? The clothes you’re wearing cost more than that girl makes in a year. She probably lives in an apartment smaller than my office, damp walls, leaking drains, no security, and about two-thirds her weekly wage just to cover the rent.’

‘Oh, and that’s my fucking fault?’

‘It isn’t about—’

‘Look, I’m not her fucking mother. I didn’t pop her out in the zones, just so I could claim breeding benefit. And if she doesn’t like it here, she can make her own sweet way out, just like anybody else.’

Chris looked at his friend with sudden dislike. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘That’s right. Listen, Troy was born and bred in the zones, he made it out. James is off to the Scratcher in six weeks, he could end up making more money than both of us. So don’t tell me it can’t be done.’

‘And what about Troy’s cousin? The one got raped two nights ago by Dixon and his pals. How come she hasn’t made it out?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’ Bryant’s anger collapsed as rapidly as it had sprouted. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Look, all I’m saying, Chris, is some of us have what it takes. Others don’t. I mean, this isn’t some cut-rate little African horrorshow of a nation. You don’t have to live in the zones because of your tribe or something. No one cares what colour you are here, what religion or race. All you’ve got to do is make the money.’

‘They seem to care what colour you are in Dixon’s neighbourhood. ’

‘Yeah, that’s fucking politics, Chris. Some maggots’ nest of little local government thugs looking for a way to build a powerbase. It’s got nothing to do with the way the real world works.’

‘That’s not the impression I get from Nick Makin.’

‘Makin?’

‘Yeah, you heard him in that meeting. He’s a fucking racist, that’s why he can’t handle Echevarria.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Mike brooded. ‘Might have to do something about Makin.’

The coffee came. It wasn’t as bad as Chris had expected. Bryant drained his and asked for another cup.

‘There going to be an investigation?’ wondered Chris.

‘Nah, shouldn’t think so.’

‘They got you for those jackers at the Falkland.’

‘Yeah, that’s a whole different story. Civil rights activists, off the back of grieving family members, my little Jason was a good boy, he only stole cars because social deprivation blah, blah, boo, hoo. That kind of crap. This thing with Dixon is different. There’s an agenda. Dixon’s political friends are on the anti-globalism wing. Britain for the British, immigrants out, fuck multiculturalism and tear down the international corporate power conspiracy. Right now, the last thing they need is for that to come out into the open. They’ll sit on this.’

‘But the zone police—’

‘They’ll buy them off. They’ll get some paycop outfit to dig the slugs out of Dixon’s floor and the street under that other piece of shit we wasted, and they’ll make them as Nemex load.’ Bryant grinned. ‘That should send a message.’

Chris frowned. ‘Isn’t that going to be a whole stack of political capital for them? The big bad corporations, off the leash. They’ll milk it ’til it bleeds.’

‘Oh, yeah, on a local level, of course they will. They’ll turn Dixon into a fucking martyr, no doubt. If he lives, they can have him in a wheelchair at the local Young Nazi fundraisers, and if he dies they can have his weeping widow do the same thing. But they aren’t about to take on Shorn in the public arena. They know what we’d do to them.’

‘And Dixon?’

Mike grinned again. ‘Well, I’d say Dixon’s got his hands full for the next six months just learning to walk again. And if he ever does, well he’s got a family and another eye to worry about before he does anything stupid. Plus, you know what? Somehow, I don’t think the civil rights crowd are going to be there for him. Just not the right profile.’

Mike’s breakfast arrived on a tray and the waitress set about laying it out. While she worked, Bryant grabbed a Qwegg off the plate with finger and thumb, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed vigorously.

‘You going to work today?’ he asked through the mouthful.

Chris thought about the house, cold with Carla’s absence or, even worse, with her unspeaking presence. He nodded.

‘Good.’ Mike swallowed the Qwegg, nodded thanks at the departing waitress and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Listen, I want you to call Joaquin Lopez. Tell him to catch a flight down to the NAME and start sounding out the names on that list. Today, if possible. We’ll pick up the expenses.’

Chris felt a small surge go through his guts, not unlike the feeling he’d had talking to Liz Linshaw the night before. He nursed his coffee and watched Mike eat for a while.

‘You think we’re going to have to do it?’ he asked finally.

‘Do what?’

‘Blow Echevarria out of the water.’

‘Well,’ Bryant chased another Qwegg around his plate and after some effort managed to puncture it with his fork. ‘Believe me, I’d love to. But in this case, you know how it goes. Regime change is our worst-case scenario. We’ll only go that way if we absolutely have to.’

He gestured at Chris with his fork.

‘You just get Lopez on the case. Get the names to Makin, make sure there’s a clear strategy locked down for the uplincon next week.’

‘You want me in on that?’

Bryant shook his head, chewing. He swallowed.

‘Nah, you stay out of it. I want a clean break between current negotiations and whatever we need you to do. Echevarria doesn’t know about you, he doesn’t know about your contacts. There’s no line for him to follow. Better that way.’

‘Right.’

Bryant grinned. ‘Don’t look so disappointed, man. I’m doing you a favour. I tell you, every time I have to shake hands with that piece of shit, I feel like I need to disinfect. Murderous old fuck.’

They gave it another half hour to let the queues subside, then paid and left. Despite his grouching, Bryant left a tip almost as much as the cost of the whole meal. Outside, he yawned and stretched and pivoted about, face turned up to the sun. He seemed in no hurry to get in the car.

‘We going to work?’ asked Chris.

‘Yeah, in a minute.’ Mike yawned again. ‘Don’t feel much like it, tell you the truth. Day like this, I should be home playing with Ariana. Playing with Suki, come to that. Christ, you know, we haven’t fucked in nearly two weeks.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Bryant cocked his head. ‘Carla giving you grief about that?’

‘Only all the time.’ Chris considered the reflexive lie. ‘Well, recently not so much. We’re both tired, you know. Don’t see a lot of each other.’

‘Yeah. Got to watch that shit. Come the end of quarter, you ought to take some time out. Maybe get out to the island for a week.’

‘You see Hewitt signing off on that?’

‘She’ll have to, Chris, the profile you’ve got on Cambodia. It’s turning into the year’s premium contract. Shorn owe us all some serious downtime before the end of this year. Hey, who knows, maybe me and Suki’ll get out there the same time as you guys. That’d be cool, huh?’

‘Yeah. Cool.’

‘Well, don’t sound so fucking enthusiastic about it.’

Chris laughed. ‘Sorry. I’m wasted.’

‘Yeah, let’s kick this in gear.’ Bryant disarmed the BMW’s alarm and cracked the driver’s side door. ‘Sooner we get out of here, sooner we can get home and act like we have a life.’

They cleared the checkpoint without incident, threaded onto the approach road to the bridge and accelerated up across the river. Sunlight turned the water to hammered bronze on either side of them. Chris fought down a wave of tiredness and promised himself a take-out from Louie Louie’s as soon as they hit the Shorn tower.

‘Be good to get some real coffee,’ he muttered.

‘That coffee wasn’t bad.’

‘Ah, come on. It was about as real as the eggs. I’m talking about something with a pedigree here. Not fucking Malsanto’s Miracle beans. Something with a hit you can feel.’

‘Fucking speedfreak.’

They both laughed, as if on cue. The BMW filled up with the sound as they left the river behind and cruised into the gold-mirrored canyons beyond. To Chris, groggy with no sleep and the events and chemicals of the night before, it felt good at a level deeper than he could find words to explain.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mike dropped him outside Louie Louie’s and drove off into the car decks with a wave. Chris shot himself full of espresso at the counter, then ordered take-out and another coffee to carry up to his office. Shorn was unusually quiet for a Saturday, and he barely saw anyone on his way in. Even the security shift was made up of men and women he barely knew well enough to nod at.

It was the pattern for the day. Outside of the datadown, there was no one to talk to. Makin had not shown, which was going to make for a tight squeeze when they tried to put together the NAME package on Monday. Irritated, Chris rang Joaquin Lopez anyway and told him what he wanted. Lopez, at least, was keen, but it was still the early hours of the morning in the Americas and Chris had got him out of bed. His conversation wasn’t sparkling. He grunted back understanding, possible flight times and hung up.

Chris rang Carla at Mel’s and discovered she’d taken the day off. He checked his mobile, but there was no message. He phoned home, and heard her voice telling anyone who rang she was flying up to Tromsö to see her mother. She would probably stay the week. It sounded, to Chris’s tutored ear, as if she had been crying. He threw the mobile across the office in a jag of caffeine-induced rage. He rang Mike, who was on the other line. He retrieved the mobile, got a grip on himself and went back to talking to the datadown.

By five o’clock, he’d had enough. The work was a seamless plane, extending to the horizon in all directions. Cambodia, Assam, Tarim Pendi, the Kurdish Homeland, Georgia, the NAME, Parana, Nigeria, the Victoria Lake States, Sri Lanka, Timor - in every single place, men were getting ready to kill each other for some cause or other, or were already about it. There was paperwork backed up weeks. You had to run just to stand still.

The desk phone rang. He snapped the ‘open’ command.

‘Faulkner.’

‘You still here?’

Chris snorted. ‘And where are you? Calling from the island?’

‘Give me time. Listen, rook to bishop nine. Check it out. Think I’ve got you, you bastard.’

Chris glanced over at the chess table.

‘Hang on.’

‘Yep.’ He could hear the grin in Bryant’s voice.

It was a good move. Chris studied the board for a moment, moved the piece and felt a tiny fragment of something detach itself from his heart and drop into his guts. He went back to the desk.

‘Pretty good,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t think it’s locked up yet. I’ll call you back.’

‘Do that. Hey, listen, you and Carla want to drop round tonight? I rang Suki and she’s just bought a screening of that new Isabela Tribu movie. The one that won all the awards, about that female marine in Guatemala.’

‘Carla’s away at the moment.’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it still hurt coming out. ‘Gone to see family in Norway.’

‘Oh. You didn’t mention—’

‘No, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I mean, we’d talked about it.’ Chris stopped lying abruptly, not sure why he suddenly needed to justify himself to Bryant. ‘Anyway, she’s gone.’

‘Right.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, look Chris. Why don’t you come across anyway? If I’ve got to watch this fucking tearjerker, I’d sooner not do it alone, you know.’

The thought of escaping the silence waiting for him at home for the warmth and noise of Mike’s family was like seeing the distant lights of a village through a blizzard. It felt like cheating Carla out of something. It felt like rescue. On the other hand, given the fury of the last knock-down drag-out bare-knuckle bout with his own wife, he wasn’t sure he could face Suki Bryant’s saccharine Miss Hostess 2049 perfection.

‘Uh, thanks. Let me think about it.’

‘Got to be better than going home to an empty house, pal.’

‘Yeah, I—’ The phone queeped. ‘Hang on, I’ve got an incoming. Might be Lopez from the airport.’

‘Call me back.’ Mike was gone.

‘This is Chris Faulkner.’

‘Well, this is Liz Linshaw.’ There was a dancing mockery in the way she said it, a light amusement that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite touch. He groped after words.

‘Liz. What, uhm, what can I do for you?’

‘Good question. What can you do for me?’

The last twenty-four hours fell on him. Suddenly, he was close to angry. ‘Liz, I’m about to call it a day here, and I’m not really in the mood for games. So if you want to talk to me—’

‘That’s perfect. Why don’t I buy you dinner this evening?’

About half a dozen reasons why not suggested themselves. He swept them to the edges of perception.

‘You want to buy me dinner?’

‘Seems the least I can do, if we’re going to cooperate on a book.

Look, why don’t you meet me uptown in about an hour? You know a place called Regime Change?’

‘Yes.’ He’d never been inside. No one who worked Conflict Investment would ever have considered it. Just too tacky.

‘I’ll be in there from about six-thirty. The Bolivia bar, upstairs. Bring an appetite.’

She hung up.

He called Mike back and made some excuses. It was tougher work than he’d expected - he could hear the disappointment in the other man’s voice, and the offer of the night with the Bryants now carried added overtones of comfortable safety compared to—

‘Look, to be honest with you, Mike, I need some time on my own.’

A brief silence down the line. ‘You in trouble, Chris?’

‘It’s.’ He closed his eyes and pressed hard on the lids with finger and thumb. ‘Carla and I aren’t getting on too well right now.’

‘Ohhh, shit.’

‘No, it’s. I don’t think it’s that serious, Mike. It’s just, I wasn’t expecting her to take off like that. I need to think.’

‘Well, if you need to talk . . .’

‘Yeah. Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.’

‘Just take it easy, huh.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I will. I’ll talk to you Monday.’

He wandered aimlessly about the office for a while, picking things up and putting them down. He studied Mike’s move, tried out a couple of half-hearted responses. He leaned on the window glass and stared down at the lights of Louie Louie’s in the street fifty floors below. He tried not to think about Carla. Tried, with less success, not to think about Liz Linshaw.

In the end, he killed the office lights and went down to sit in his car. The enclosed space, recessed instruments, the stark simplicity of wheel and gearshift, were all more bearable than life outside. As the Saab’s security locks murmured and clunked into place, he felt himself relaxing measurably. He sank back into the seat, dropped his hand onto the gearstick and rolled his head side to side in the neck support web.

‘Now then,’ he told himself.

The car deck was almost deserted. Mike’s BMW was gone, the other man no doubt well on his way home to Suki and Ariana. There was a thin scattering of other BMWs across the luminous yellow-marked parking ranks, and Hewitt’s Audi stood off in the partners’ corner. It dawned on Chris how little he’d seen of the executive partner since Cambodia took off. There’d been the usual brushes at quarterly functions, a few team briefings and a couple of congratulatory mails, copies to himself, Bryant and Makin. For the rest, Hewitt had ignored him as completely as was possible given the work they both had to do.

For a moment he entertained the fantasy of waiting behind the wheel until she came down to the car deck. He thought about ramming the vehicle into drive and smashing the life out of her. Smearing her across the deck surfacing, the way Edward Quain—

He shook it off.

Time to go. He fired up the engine, rolled the Saab up the ramp and out into the street. He let the vehicle idle westward. There was no traffic to speak of, Regime Change was five minutes away, and with the corporate ID holoflashed into the windscreen glass he could park anywhere.

He left the Saab on a cross street filled with the offices of image consultants and data brokerage agencies. As he alarmed the car and walked away from it, he felt a slow adrenal flush rising in his blood. The buzz of a London Saturday evening drifted to him on the warm air, streets filling slowly with people, talk and laughter punctuated with the occasional hoot from a cab trying to get through the tangle of pedestrians. He slipped into it, and quickened his pace.

Regime Change was the end building on a thoroughfare that folded back on itself like a partially-opened jackknife. Music and noise spilled out onto the streets on either side from open-slanted floor-length glass panels in the ground floor and wide open sash windows above. There were a couple of queues at the door, but the doorman cast an experienced eye over Chris’s clothes and nodded him straight in. Chorus of complaint, dying away swiftly as Chris turned to look. He dropped the doorman a tenner and went inside.

The ground floor bar was packed with propped and seated humanity, all yelling at each other over the pulse of a Zequina remix. A cocktail waitress surfed past in the noise, dressed in some fevered pornographer’s vision of a CI exec’s suit. Chris put a hand on her arm and tried to make himself heard.

‘Bolivia Bar?’

‘Second floor,’ she shouted back. ‘Through the Iraq Room and left.’

‘Thanks.’

Screwed-up face. ‘What?’

‘Thanks.’

That got a strange look. He took the stairs at a lope, found the Iraq Room - wailing DJ-votional rhythms, big screens showing zooming aerial views of flaming oil wells like black and crimson desert flowers, hookah pipes on the tables - and picked his way through it. A huge holoprint of Che Guevara loomed to his left. He snorted and ducked underneath. A relative quiet descended, pegged out with melancholy Andean pipes and Spanish guitar. People sat about on big leather beanbags and sofas with their stuffing coming out. There were candles, and some suggestion of tent canvas on the walls.

Liz Linshaw was seated at a low table in one corner, apparently reading a thin, blue-bound sheaf of paperwork. She wore a variant on her TV uniform - black slacks and a black and grey striped silk shirt buttoned closed at a single point on her chest. The collar of the shirt was turned up, but the lower hem floated a solid five centimetres above the belt of her slacks. Tanned, toned TV flesh filled up the gap and made long triangles above and below the single closed button.

Either she didn’t see him approaching, or she let him get close deliberately. He stopped himself clearing his throat with an effort of will, and dropped into the beanbag opposite her.

‘Hullo, Liz.’

‘Chris.’ She glanced up, apparently surprised. ‘You’re earlier than I thought you’d be. Thanks for coming.’

She laid aside what she’d been reading and extended one slim arm across the table. Her grip was dry and confident.

‘It’s.’ Chris looked around. ‘A pleasure. You come here often?’

She laughed. It was distressingly attractive, warm and deep-throated and once again Chris had the disturbing impression of recall he’d had on the phone.

‘I come here when I don’t want to run into anyone from the Conflict Investment sector, Chris. It’s safe. None of you guys would be seen dead in here.’

Chris pulled a face. ‘True enough.’

‘Don’t be superior. It’s not such a bad place. Have you seen the waitresses?’

‘Yeah, met one downstairs.’

‘Decorative, aren’t they?’

‘Very.’ Chris looked around reflexively. There was a long bar bent into one corner of the room. A woman stood mixing drinks behind it.

‘What would you like?’ Liz Linshaw asked him.

‘I’ll get it.’

‘No, I insist. After all, you’re making yourself available to me, Chris. It’s the least I can do, and it’s tax-deductible.’ She grinned. ‘You know. Research costs. Hospitality.’

‘Sounds like a nice way to live.’

‘Whisky, wasn’t it? Laphroaig?’

He nodded, flattered that she remembered. ‘If they’ve got it.’

Liz Linshaw pressed a palm on the table top and the menu glowed into life beneath her hand. She scrolled about a bit, then shook her head regretfully.

‘No Laphroaig. Lot of bourbons, and, ah, what about Port Ellen? That’s an Islay malt, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s one of the new ones.’ The sense of flattery crumbled slightly. Had she being doing research on him, he wondered. ‘Reopened back in the thirties. It’s good stuff.’

‘Okay, I’ll try it.’

She pressed on the selection and swept a hand across the send patch. At the bar, the woman looked down, face stained red by the flashing table alert on her worksurface. She glanced across at them and nodded.

‘So, Chris.’ Liz Linshaw sat back and smiled at him. ‘Where did you develop your taste for expensive whisky?’

‘Is this part of the interview?’

‘No, just warming you up. But, I’m curious. You grew up in the zones, didn’t you. East End, riverside estates. Not much Islay malt around there.’

‘No. There isn’t.’

‘Is it painful to talk about this, Chris?’

‘You’re a zone girl yourself, Liz. What do you think?’

The drinks came, hers with ice. Liz Linshaw waited until the waitress had gone, then she picked up her tumbler and looked pensively into it. She swirled the drink and the ice cubes clicked about.

‘My zone origins are mostly, shall we say, artistic licence. Exaggerated for exotic effect. The truth is, I grew up on the fringes of Islington, at a time when the lines weren’t as heavily drawn as they are now. My parents were, still are, moderately successful teachers and I went to university. There’s nothing that hurts in my past.’

Chris raised his glass. ‘Lucky you.’

‘Yes, that’s a fair description. You weren’t so lucky.’

‘No.’

‘Yet age nineteen you were driving for Ross Mobile Arbitrage. You were their top paid haulage operative, until you moved sideways into LS Euro Ventures. Two years after that Hammett McColl, headhunted. No qualifications, not even driver’s school. For someone with zone origins that’s more than remarkable, it’s nigh on impossible.’

Chris gestured. ‘If you want out badly enough.’

‘No, Chris. The zones are full of people who want out badly enough, and then some. It gets them nowhere. The dice are loaded against that kind of mobility, and you know it.’

‘I know other people who’ve made it out.’ It felt strange to suddenly be on the other end of the argument he’d had with Mike Bryant that morning. ‘Look at Troy Morris.’

‘Do you know Troy well?’

‘Uhh, not really. He’s Mike’s friend more than mine.’

‘I see.’ Liz Linshaw lifted her drink in his direction. ‘Well, anyway. Cheers. Here’s to Conflict Investment. Small wars.’

‘Small wars.’ But there was something vaguely disquieting in hearing it from her lips. He didn’t like the way it sounded.

She set down her tumbler. Beside it a microcorder. ‘So. How does it feel to be the rising star at Shorn CI?’

The interview went down as smoothly as the Port Ellen. Liz Linshaw had a loose, inviting manner at odds with her screen persona, and he found himself talking as if to an old friend he hadn’t seen in many years. Such areas of resistance as he had, she picked up on and either backed smoothly away from the topic or found another way in that somehow he didn’t mind as much. They laughed a lot, and once or twice he caught himself on the verge of giving up data that he had no business discussing with anyone outside Shorn.

By nine o’clock they were working up to Edward Quain, and he had drunk far too much to be able to drive the Saab safely.

‘You didn’t like him, did you.’ There was no question in her voice.

‘Quain? What makes you think that?’

‘Your form.’

He laughed, slurring slightly. ‘What am I, a fucking racehorse?’

She smiled along. ‘If you like. Look, you’ve made a total of eleven kills, including Mitsue Jones and her wingmate, plus the Acropolitic driver on the same run. Eight before that. Three at LS Euro, two tenders and one Prom and App duel. Then the move to HM, and out of nowhere you take Quain down.’

‘It was the easiest way to get up the ladder.’

‘It was off the wall, Chris. Quain was the top end of your permissible challenge envelope. As senior as it gets without exempted partner status. At that level in some companies he would have been an exempted partner.’

‘Yeah, or out on his ear.’ Chris drained his current whisky. ‘You want to know the truth, Liz? Quain was a burnt-out old fuck. He wasn’t bringing in the business, he drank way too much, did too much expensive coke, he fucked his way through every high-price whore in Camden Town, and he paid for it all with bonuses taken out of money junior analysts on a tenth his income were generating. He was an embarrassment to everyone at Hammett McColl, and he needed taking out.’

‘Very public-spirited of you. But there must have been easier targets on the way up the HM ladder.’

Chris shrugged. ‘If you’re going to kill a man, it might as well be a patriarch.’

‘And what I find curious is the duels after Quain. Four more kills, none of them even close to as brutal as Quain’s and—’

‘Murcheson burnt to death,’ Chris pointed out. The screams, he did not add, still came back to him in his nightmares.

‘Yes, Murcheson was trapped in wreckage. It was nothing to do with you.’

‘Hardly nothing. I created the wreckage.’

‘Chris, you ran over Quain five times. I’ve seen that footage—’

‘What are you, Liz? An X fan?’

The crooked smile again. ‘If I was, I’d have been pretty unhappy with your performance for the next eight years. Like I said, four more kills, all clean bar Murcheson, who was an accidental burn. And alongside that, another seven inconclusives, including one you actually rescued from wreckage and drove to hospital. That’s not going to get you an honourable mention on any of the Xtreme sites, is it.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Relax, Chris. I didn’t say I was an Xer. But when you’re trying to build a profile, this stuff matters. I want to know what you’re made of.’

He met her eyes, and the look lasted. Went on far longer than it should have. He cleared his throat.

‘I’m going to go home now.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to drive?’

‘I.’ He stood up, too fast. ‘No, maybe not. I’ll get a cab.’

‘That’s going to cost you a fortune, Chris.’

‘So. I earn a fortune. ’s not like the fucking army, you know. I get well paid for murdering people.’

She got up and placed a hand on his arm.

‘I’ve got a better idea.’

‘Yeah?’ Suddenly he was aware of his pulse. ‘What’s that, then?’

‘I live in Highgate. That’s a cheap cab ride, and there’s a spare futon there with your name on it.’

‘Look, Liz—’

She grinned suddenly. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Faulkner. I’m not about to tear your clothes off and stuff your dick down my throat, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like the men I fuck to be sober.’

Unwillingly, he laughed. ‘Hey, give it to me straight, Liz. Don’t let me down gently.’

‘So.’ She was laughing too. ‘Do we get this cab?’

They ordered the taxi from the same table menu as the drinks. This early in the evening, it wasn’t hard to get one. Liz cleared the tab, and they left. There was frenetic dancing in the Iraq Room, harsh, mindless beats drawn from early millennium thrash bands like Noble Cause and Bushin’. They ducked through the press of bodies, got the stairs and made it out into the street, still laughing.

The taxi was there, gleaming black in the late evening light like a toy that belonged to them. Chris fetched up short, laughter drying in his throat. He glanced sideways at Liz Linshaw and saw the hilarity had drained out of her the same way. He could not read the expression that had replaced it on her face. For a moment they both stood there, staring at the cab like idiots, and like a Nemex shell the realisation hit Chris in the back of the head. The sardonic amusement on the phone, the maddeningly familiar note in her deep-throated laugh. The sense of recall about this woman came crashing down on him.

She reminded him of Carla.

Carla when they first met. Carla, three or four years back. Carla before the creeping distance took its toll.

Suddenly, he was sweating.

What the fu—

It was the fear sweat, chasing a rolling shudder across his body. A feeling he’d left behind a decade ago in his early duels. Pure, existential terror, distilled down so clear it could not be pinned on any single identifiable thing. Fear of death, fear of life, fear of everything in between and what it would do to you in time. The terror of inevitably losing your grip.

‘Oy, are you getting in or what?’

The driver was leaning out, thumb jerked back to where the door of the black cab had hinged open of its own accord. There was a tiny light on inside, seats of cool green plush.

Liz Linshaw stood watching him, face still unreadable.

The sweat cooled.

He got in.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Westward, there were mountains spearing up grimly under gathered blue cloud. Weak ladders of late afternoon sun fell through at infrequent intervals, splashing scant warmth where they hit. Carla shivered slightly at the sight. There was no darkness yet - this far north, daylight held the sky as it would for another full month, but the Lofoten skyline still looked like the watchtowers of a troll city.

‘Cold?’ Kirsti Nyquist glanced sideways from the jeep’s driving seat. Her ability to pick up on her daughter’s moods and feelings sometimes verged on the witchy. ‘We can close the hood, if you want.’

Carla shook her head. ‘I’m fine. Just thinking.’

‘Not happy thoughts, then.’

The road unwound ahead of them, freshly carved from the bleak terrain and laid down in asphalt so new it looked like liquorice. There were none of the luminous yellow markings as yet, and they kept passing raw white rock walls that still had defined grooves where the blasting holes had been sunk. A sign said Gjerlow Oceanic Monitoring - 15 kilometres. Carla sighed and shifted in her seat. Kirsti drove the big Volvo All-Terrain with a care that, to Carla’s London-forged road instincts, seemed faintly ridiculous. They’d seen five other vehicles in the last hour, and three of those had been parked outside a fuelling post.

‘Tunnel,’ called her mother cheerily. ‘Mittens.’

Carla reached for her gloves. This was the second tunnel of the trip. The first time, she’d ignored her mother’s warning. They were less than two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic circle, and the weather had been pleasant since she got off the plane at Tromsö two days ago, but tunnels were another matter. Deep in the mountain rock, an Arctic chill hit you in the lungs and the fingers before you’d gone a hundred metres.

Kirsti flipped on the headlamps and they barrelled down into the sodium yellow gloom. Their breath frosted and whipped away over their shoulders.

‘Now you’re cold, hey?’

‘A bit. Mum, did we really have to come all this way?’

‘Yes. I told you. It’s the only chance we’ll get to see him.’

‘You couldn’t invite him up to Tromsö?’

Kirsti made a wry face. ‘Not any more.’

Carla tried primly not to laugh. Kirsti Nyquist was well into her fifties now, but she was still a strikingly handsome woman and she changed her lovers with brutal regularity. They just don’t grow with me, she once complained to her daughter. Perhaps that’s because they’re all young enough to be your children, Carla had retorted, a little unfairly. Her mother’s choices often were younger men, but not usually by more than a decade or so, and Carla herself had to admit most of the options in the fifty-plus male range weren’t much to look at.

The tunnel was six kilometres long. They made the other side with teeth chattering and Kirsti whooped as she drove into the fractured sunlight outside. The temperature upgrade soaked into Carla’s body like tropical heat. The chill seemed to have gone bone-deep. She tried to shrug it off.

Get a fucking grip, Carla.

She was already missing Chris, a lack for which she berated herself because it felt so pathetic alongside her mother’s cheerful self sufficiency. The anger at him that had driven her out of the house was already evaporating by the time her plane took off, and all she had by the time she arrived in Tromsö was maudlin drinking talk of distance and loss.

Now, out of the mess she had laid out for her mother the night she arrived, Kirsti had snatched the possibility of meaningful action. Carla wondered vaguely what you had to do to attain operational pitch like that - have a child, write a book, lose a relationship? What did it take?

‘There it is.’ Kirsti gestured ahead, and Carla saw the road was dropping down to meet one side of a small, stubby fjord. On the other side, institutional buildings were gathered in a huddle, lit up shiny in a wandering shaft of sunlight. It looked as if the road ran all the way up to the end of the inlet and then back round to the monitoring station.

‘So this is all new as well?’

‘Relocated. They were based in the Faroes until last year.’

‘Why did?’ Carla remembered. ‘Oh, right. The BNR thing.’

‘Yes, your beloved British and their nuclear reprocessing. Gjerlow reckons it’s contaminated local waters for the next sixty years minimum. Pointless taking overview readings. None of the tests they do will stand the radiation.’

Not for the first time, Carla felt a wave of defensiveness rising in her at the mention of her adoptive home.

‘I heard it was just heat exchanger fluids - not enough to do much damage.’

‘My dear, you’ve been living in London too long if you believe what the British media tell you. There is no just where nuclear contaminants are concerned. It’s been a monumental disaster and anyone with access to independent broadcasting knows it.’

Carla flushed. ‘We’ve got independent channels.’

‘Does Chris buy off the jamming?’ Her mother looked interested. ‘I didn’t think you could do that effectively.’

‘No, he’s exempted. Under licence. For his job.’

‘Oh, I see.’ There was a studied politeness in Kirsti’s voice that didn’t quite shroud her distaste. Carla flushed again, deeper this time. She said nothing more until the wheels of the Volvo crunched across the gravel parking lot beside the monitoring station. Then, sitting still in the passenger seat as Kirsti killed the engine, she muttered, ‘I’m not sure this is such a good idea.’

‘It was a good idea when we had it on Friday night,’ said her mother emphatically. ‘It’s still a good idea now. One of my best. Now, come on.’

Kirsti’s Tromsö University ID got them in the front door, and a quick search of the building’s locational database at reception told them Truls Vasvik was up on the top floor. They took the stairs, Kirsti leading by a couple of steps on every flight. Good for the buttocks, she flung over her shoulder in response to her daughter’s puffed protests to slow down. Only five levels. Come on.

They found Vasvik in the staff café. He was, Carla thought, a classic Kirsti type - gaunt and long-limbed, radiating self-sufficiency like the effects of some drug recently injected. He wore a crew-neck sweater, canvas work trousers, walking boots and an uncared-for heavy black coat that he somehow hadn’t got around to removing. The clothes hung off him, incidental drapings on his lean frame, and his silver-threaded black hair was long and untidy. He looked to be in his early forties. As they approached, he got up and offered a bony hand.

‘Hello Kirsti.’

‘Hello Truls. This is my daughter, Carla. Carla, Truls Vasvik. It’s good to see you again.’

Vasvik grunted.

‘Have you seen Gjerlow yet?’

‘About an hour ago.’

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise—’

‘Shall we all sit down. There’s machine coffee over there, if you want it.’

‘Can I get you one?’

Vasvik indicated the cup in front of him and shook his head. Kirsti went off to the bank of self-service machines across the café and left Carla stranded. She offered Vasvik an awkward smile and seated herself at the table.

‘So, you’ve known my mother for a while.’

He stared back at her. ‘Long enough.’

‘I, uh, I appreciate you taking the time to see us.’

‘I had to be here anyway. It wasn’t a problem.’

‘Yes, uh. How’s it going? I mean, can you talk about it?’

A shrug. ‘It isn’t, strictly speaking, confidential, at this end anyway. I need some data to back up a case we’re putting together. Gjerlow has it, he says.’

‘Is it a British thing?’

‘This time around, no. French.’ A marginal curiosity surfaced on his face. ‘You live there, then?’

‘Where, Britain? Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

She bit her lip. Kirsti arrived with coffee cups and saved them both from the rapidly foundering conversation.

‘So,’ she said brightly. ‘Where are we up to?’

‘We haven’t started yet,’ said Vasvik.

Kirsti frowned. ‘Are you okay, Truls?’

‘Not really.’ He met her gaze. ‘Jannicke died.’

‘Jannicke Onarheim? Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Truls.’ Kirsti reached out and put her hand on Vasvik’s arm. ‘What happened?’

He smiled bleakly. ‘How do ombudsmen die, Kirsti? She was murdered. I only got the call this morning.’

‘Was she working?’

Vasvik nodded, staring into the plastic-topped table. ‘Some American shoe manufactury up near Hanoi. The usual stuff, reported human rights abuse, no local police cooperation.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘They found her car run off the road an hour out of town, nowhere near where she should have been. Looks like someone took her for a ride. Raped. Shot. Single cap, back of the head.’

He glanced up at Carla, who had flinched on the word raped.

‘Yeah. It’s probably good you hear this. Jannicke is the third this year. The Canadians have lost twice that number. UN ombudsmen earn their money, and often enough we don’t get to spend it. From what Kirsti says, your man might not suit the work.’

The implied slight to Chris, as always, fired her up.

‘Well, I doubt you’d last long in Conflict Investment.’

The other two looked at her with chilly Norwegian disapproval.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Vasvik finally. ‘It was not my intention to insult you or your man. But you should know what you are trying to get him into. Less than fifty years ago, this was still a comfortable, localised, office-based little profession. That’s changed. Now, at this level, it can get you killed. There is no recognition of the work we do - at best we are seen as fussy bureaucrats, at worst as the enemies of capitalism and the bedfellows of terrorists. Our UN mandate is a bad joke. Only a handful of governments will act on our findings. The rest cave in to corporate pressure. Some, like the United States and so, of course, Britain, simply refuse point blank to support the process. They are not even signatories to the agreement. They block us at every turn. They query our budgets, they demand a transparency that exposes our field agents, they offer legal and financial asylum to those offenders we do manage to indict. We shelve two out of every three cases for lack of viability and,’ he jerked his chin, perhaps out to wherever Jannicke Onarheim’s body now lay, ‘we bury our dead to the jeers of the popular media.’

More silence. Across the café, someone worked the coffee machine.

‘Do you hate your job?’ asked Carla quietly.

A thin smile. ‘Not as much as I hate the people I chase.’

‘Chris, my husband, hates his job. So much that it’s killing him.’

‘Then why doesn’t he just quit?’ There was scant sympathy in the ombudsman’s voice.

‘That’s so fucking easy for you to say.’

Kirsti shot her a warning glance. ‘Truls, Chris was born and brought up in the London cordoned zones. You’ve seen that, you know what it’s like. And you know what happens to the ones who manage to claw their way out. First-generation syndrome. If quitting means going back to the zones, he probably would rather die. He’d certainly rather kill. And in the end, we know how closely those two can be intertwined.’

Another smile, somewhat less thin. ‘Yes. First-generation syndrome. I remember that particular lecture quite well, for some reason.’

Kirsti joined him in the smile. She flexed her body beneath her sweater in a fashion that made her daughter blush.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised it was that memorable.’

It was as if something heavy had dropped from Vasvik’s shoulders. He sat up a little in the moulded plastic chair, turned back to Carla.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t deny it. Someone like your husband could be useful to us. The information he has alone would probably be enough to build a couple of dozen cases. And, yes, a background in Conflict Investment would go a long way to making a good ombudsman. But I can’t promise you, him, a job. For one thing, we’d need an extraction team to get him away from Shorn. But, yes, if he really wants out, I can ask around. I can set some wheels in motion.’

It was what she wanted to hear, but somehow it didn’t fill her with the feeling she’d expected. Something about Vasvik’s clamped anger, the news of sudden death or maybe the bleak landscape outside, something was not right.

And later, when they got up to go and Kirsti and Truls embraced with genuine affection, she turned away so that she would not have to watch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Monday was soft summer rain and a nagging pain behind the eyes. He drove in with a vague sense of exposure all the way, and when he parked and alarmed the car, tiny twitches of the same discomfort sent him scanning the corners of the car deck for watchers.

This early, there was nobody about.

There were phone messages on the datadown - Liz Linshaw, drawling, ironic and inviting, Joaquin Lopez from the NAME. He shelved Liz and told the datadown to dial up Lopez’s mobile. The Americas agent had called four times in the last two hours and he sounded close to panic. He grabbed the phone at the third ring, voice tight and shaky.

‘Si, digame.’

‘It’s Faulkner. Jesus, Joaquin, what the fuck’s the matter with you?’

‘Escuchame.’ There was the sound of movement. Chris got the impression Lopez was in a hotel room, getting up from the bed, moving. The agent’s voice firmed up as he crossed into English. ‘Listen, Chris, I think I’m in trouble. I got down here last night, been making some enquiries about Diaz and now I got a clutch of Echevarria’s political police all over me like putas on payday. They’re in the bar across the street, downstairs in the lounge. I think a couple of them have taken a room on this floor, I don’t—’

‘Joaquin, calm down. I understand the situation.’

‘No, you don’t fucking understand my situation, man. This is the NAME. These guys will cut my fucking cojones off if they get the chance. They bundle me into a car, and that’s it, I’m fucking history, man—’

‘Joaquin, will you just shut up and listen!’ Chris went direct from the command snap to enabled conciliatory without allowing the other man a response. Textbook stuff. ‘I know you’re scared. I understand why. Now, let’s do something about it. What do these guys look like?’

‘Look like?’ A panicky snort. ‘They look like fucking political police, what do you want me to say? Ray Bans, bellies and fucking moustaches. Get the picture?’

Chris did get the picture. He’d seen these cut-rate bad guys in operation on his own trip to the Monitored Economy with Hammett McColl. He knew the gut-sliding sense of menace they could generate simply by appearing on the scene.

‘No, Joaquin, I meant. Did you get pictures? Have you got your shades set down there?’

‘Yeah, I brought them.’ A pause. ‘I didn’t use them yet.’

‘Right.’

‘I freaked. I’m sorry, Chris, I fucked up. I didn’t think.’

‘Well, think now, Joaquin. Get a grip. You can fuck up on your own time, right now you’re on the Shorn clock. I’m not paying you to get your arse killed.’ Chris glanced at his watch. ‘What time is it there? One a.m.?’

‘A little after.’

‘Right. How many of these moustaches are there?’

‘I don’t know, two down in the lobby.’ The panic started to seep back into Lopez’s voice. ‘Maybe another two or three more across the road.’

‘Can you get me pictures?’

‘I’m not fucking going outside, man.’

‘Alright, alright.’ Chris paced, thinking. Trying to put himself in the hotel room with Lopez. The Nikon sunglasses and the data transmission gear had been an end-of-quarter gift from Shorn - they were very high spec. ‘Look, can you see the ones in the bar from your window? Go and check.’

More movement. Lopez came back calmer.

‘Yeah, I can see their table. I think I can get a decent shot from here.’

‘Alright, that’s good. Do that.’ Chris cranked his voice down, as soothing as possible. ‘Then I want you to go down to the lobby and get full frontals of the other two. They shouldn’t try anything there. Are you armed?’

‘Are you kidding? I came through US security at the airport, just like everybody else.’

‘Fine, doesn’t matter. Just get the pictures and mail them through to me as quickly as you can. I’ll be waiting. And, Joaquin. Remember what I said. You don’t get killed on the Shorn clock. We’ll pull you out of there. Got it?’

‘Got it.’ A brief pause in which he could hear Lopez breathing down the line.

‘Chris. Thanks, man.’

‘De nada. Stay cool.’

Chris waited until he heard the disconnect. Then he slammed a foot against the desk leg, knotted a fist.

‘Fuck.’ Another kick. ‘Fuck.’

Back to the datadown. He estimated Lopez’s performance time, placed forward calls. Then he went to the window and stared out at the London skyline until the phone chimed.

The images came through, two clear face-and-trunk shots that must have been taken from less than five metres. Lopez had got close. The two parapoliticals were grinning unpleasantly into the Nikon’s hidden lens. Their teeth showed, spotted brown with decay. The café snap was less to rejoice about, but there was a pavement table centred in the shot, three clear figures around it, faces turned in the camera’s direction.

The first of the forward calls went through. Even with the forewarning, the other end took a while to pick up, and the first sound to come through was a noisy yawn. Chris smiled for the first time that day.

‘Burgess Imaging.’ The screen caught up, filled with a dark unshaven face in its late teens. ‘Oh, hello, Chris. What can I? Uh, those satellite blow-ups okay?’

‘Yeah, fine, it’s not that. Listen, can you do me step-ups of a street shot, right now? Faces good enough for machine ID?’

Jamie Burgess yawned again and scratched at something in the corner of one eye.

‘Cost ya.’

‘I guessed. Look, I’m wiring it through on inset. Just take a look.’

Burgess waited, blinked at the screen a couple of times and nodded.

‘Nikon shot, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Give me two minutes. Leave the line open.’

‘Thanks, Jamie.’

Another yawn. ‘Pleasure.’

Burgess was as good as his word. The datadown spat back perfect head-and-shoulder shots ninety seconds later. Chris punched them up next to the two he already had from the lobby and nodded.

‘Okay, motherfuckers. Let’s hope you’ve been to church recently.’

The second forward call picked up on the first ring. A grizzled virtual head above crisp army khaki fatigues. The accent was American, the real-life version of Mike Bryant’s Simeon Sands burlesque.

‘Langley Contracting.’

‘This is Chris Faulkner, Shorn Associates, London. Do you have operational units in the Medellín area?’

There was a pause, presumably while Chris’s scrambler code and authorisation cleared at the other end. Then the virtual customer service agent nodded.

‘Yes, we can work in that area.’

‘Good, I need five extreme prejudice deletions with immediate effect. Exact locational data and visual ID attached.’

‘Very good. Please indicate the level of precision required.’

‘Uh.’ This was a new refinement. ‘Sorry?’

‘Please indicate level of precision required from the following five options; surgical, accurate, scattershot, blanket, atrocity.’

‘Jesus, uh.’ Chris gestured helplessly. ‘Surgical.’

‘Please note the surgical option may incur a substantial time delay. Char—’

‘No. That’s no good. This is with immediate effect.’

‘Do you wish to supersede precision levels with an urgency marker?’

‘Yes. I want this done now.’

‘Charge card or account?’

‘Account.’

‘Your contract is enabled. Thank you for choosing Langley Contracting. Have a nice day.’

Chris looked once more at the five faces floating on his screen. He nodded again and pressed a thumb down on each one to make it go away.

‘Adios, muchachos.’

When the last face had wiped, he wired the datadown line to his mobile and went out to get coffee from Louie Louie’s.

Lopez called him about an hour later. Voice rampant down the line, whooping shrill with delight. Sirens in the backdrop.

‘Chris, you’re beautiful man!!!! You did it. Hijos de puta, they’re all over the street, man! They’re all over the fucking street!’

‘What?’ said Chris faintly.

‘Drive-by, man. Fucking exemplary. They must have used one of those shoulder-launchers. Whole fucking café’s on fire. I’m telling you, there’s nothing left but pieces.’

Chris sat down heavily behind the desk. He saw it, lit in tones of night and flame. Pastiche newsreel footage, memories of a hundred such scenes. Bodies and bits thereof, streak-scorched black and red. Screams and blundering panic from the sidelines.

‘The hotel.’ It was almost a whisper, like words he couldn’t be bothered to push out of his mouth. ‘The people in the hotel.’

‘Yeah, they got them too. I heard the shots. Spray guns.’ Lopez made a stuttering machine gun noise. He was drunk on his own narrow escape. ‘Just been down to check, right now. See, I was still looking out the window at the fire when—’

‘No, Joaquin. Stop. The other people in the hotel. You know, staff. Other customers. Did they hit anybody else?’

‘Oh.’ Lopez stopped. ‘I don’t think so, I didn’t see any other bodies. Man, who’d you call?’

‘Never mind.’ It was like tasting ashes. He could smell the blast, smell the scorched flesh on the scented night air. Over the phone, the sirens sobbed out and he heard screaming in the space it left. ‘You best get out of there. Better yet, get back to Panama City. You’re blown down there for now. You’ll have to work through someone else.’

‘Yeah. What I thought.’ Lopez’s voice shifted. ‘Listen, Chris. I lost it for a while back there, but I know my work. I didn’t make one wrong move in the last twenty-four hours. Those hijos de puta, they knew I was coming.’

Chris nodded drearily, for all it was an audio link.

‘Right, Joaquin.’

‘Give me another two days. We can still make this run. I know the right people. You don’t have to worry.’

He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Right.’

‘Count on it, man. I’ll hook you up, I swear.’

Behind Lopez, someone started using an ampbox to yell down the noise of the crowd. Chris reached out and cut the link.

Bryant and Makin got in about the same time. Chris went down to the car deck to meet them. Mike grinned when he saw him.

‘Hey, Chris! Jesus, what time did you get in?’

He ignored the greeting and went straight for Makin. Right fist in under the rib cage with the full force of the last stride behind it. Makin doubled up and vomited a spray of breakfast. Chris stepped back and hooked into his face from the side. The glasses flew. Makin hit the deck and rolled, retching. Chris got a single kick in, and then Mike had him pinioned from behind and was dragging him out of range.

‘That’s it, Chris. Time out.’

‘Fucking piece of shit. Sell out my agents, you fuck.’

‘I don’t,’ Makin got to one knee, holding his face. ‘Know. What the fuck. Youah talking about.’

Chris renewed his efforts to break Mike’s hold. Makin straightened, wiped his mouth and looked up. He raised his free arm.

‘I’ll see you on the fucking woad for that, Faulkner.’

‘Hey!’ Mike loosened his hold on Chris’s shoulders. ‘That’s enough of that shit, Nick. Nobody sees anybody on the road in this team. Nobody. You save that shit for the tenders. Chris, I’m going to let you go now, okay. Now you behave. No brawling on the car decks, it’s undignified. This isn’t the zones.’

He let go of Chris and stepped away, carefully poised between the two men, arms spread slightly upward from the waist, ready. Makin prowled sideways and spat. Chris felt the reaction twitch through him from the fist back to the shoulder. Mike Bryant drew a deep breath.

‘Okay, guys. What the fuck is going on?’

‘This piece of shit,’ Chris was still adrenalin fired, thrumming with the need to do violence. ‘Wired through our detail on Diaz to Echevarria.’

‘Yeah, so?’

Bryant blinked. ‘You did that, Nick?’

‘Jesus, yes. You said to light a fiah under Echevaia’s arse.’

Chris felt the fury drop out of him to make room for disbelief. He saw the same in Bryant’s stare. The big man shook his head.

‘But—’

‘Christ, Mike. I want the axe over his head by Monday, that’s what you said. What was I supposed to do?’

Chris flared. ‘That’s fucking bullshit. You weren’t in here at the weekend.’

‘How the fuck do you know wheah I was? What are you, my fucking mother?’

‘I didn’t see you Saturday,’ said Bryant quietly.

‘I took the stuff home, Mike. Look, Echevaia was holding rallies for the faithful all weekend. It seemed like a good time to shake him. The uplincon is tomorrow, what was I going to do? Wait and then twy and paste it all together today? I’ve got Cambodian logistics to think about, a palace wevolution in Yemen. The Kashmiah thing. Guatemala’s coming apart again. I don’t have time for this shit.’

Chris surged forward a step. Fetched up with Mike Bryant’s arm across his chest.

‘I sent Joaquin Lopez down to the ME, fuckhead, asking after Diaz. He nearly fucking died today.’

‘That’s supposed to be my fault?’

Bryant sighed. ‘Diaz was off-limits, Nick. He was our holdout if old scumbag didn’t fold.’

‘You knew that!’

‘Oh, what am I? A fucking telepath? No one told me not to use Diaz, and he’s the stongest theat we’ve got.’

‘Alright.’ Mike rubbed at his face. ‘Maybe we didn’t make it clear enough. But you should have checked with Chris first. Same goes for you, Chris. You should have run it by Nick before you sent Lopez down there.’

‘But.’ Chris couldn’t identify the sudden feeling in his chest. ‘You told me to send him.’

‘Well, yeah, but not without consultation.’ Bryant looked back and forth between the two men. ‘Come on, people. A little communication. A little cooperation, for Christ’s sake. Is that too much to ask?’

Neither of the other men even glanced at him. Chris and Makin were either end of a hardwired stare.

‘People died, Mike, because of this fucking clown.’

Makin snorted.

Bryant frowned. ‘I thought you said nearly.’

‘Not Lopez. Other people. I had to call in Langley to get the goons off his back, and they blew up a whole fucking café.’

Makin traded in his snort for a sneer. Bryant made a noise only slightly less dismissive.

‘Well, what’d you expect? Come on, Chris. Langley? These guys used to be the CIA, for fuck’s sake. Even before deregulation, they were a bunch of cack-fisted incompetent fucking clowns.’ He looked across at Makin, grinned and made an imploring gesture with one hand. ‘I mean, Langley, for Christ’s sake.’

Chris felt himself losing his temper with his friend. ‘There was no fucking option, Mike,’ he snapped. ‘No one else in the ME has the response time. You know that.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s one for the Monopolies Commission.’ Mike pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. ‘Look. It’s a shame about the café, but it could have been worse. I mean, with Langley you’re lucky they didn’t kill Lopez for you as well.’ Makin laughed out loud. Bryant joined in. ‘Fuck, the kind of punk sicarios they’re contracting out to these days, you’re lucky they didn’t take out the whole block.’

‘It isn’t funny, Mike.’

‘Oh, come on, it is a bit.’ Bryant shelved his grin. Sobered. ‘Alright. A fuck-up, is what it is. But we can cover the damage. We’ll ride out any waves Echevarria makes tomorrow, keep it in the team, and we’ll bury the Langley account. Pay it off, I don’t know, through one of the Cambodia slush funds or something. No one else has to know. Clean hands all round, come the quarterly. Alright?’ He looked round at his team. ‘Agreed?’

Makin nodded. Chris, finally, too. Bryant’s grin came back.

‘Good. But remember, gentlemen. A little more attention to detail next time, please.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hernan Echevarria, predictably, did not take it so well.

‘You sit this out,’ said Mike, rather grimly, as they stood in the covert viewing chamber, waiting for the uplink to go through. ‘We’ll do the lying.’

As usual when faced with politics, he had slung his baseball bat across his shoulders cruciform, and now he prowled about, rolling his neck back against the polished wood. On the other side of a one-way glass wall, Nick Makin busied himself with bottled water and screen control mice along one edge of the conference table. The rest of the slate grey expanse was bare, but for the shallow slope of recessed display screens near the centre.

‘You think this is the break point?’ Chris asked.

Mike pulled a face. ‘If yesterday’s performance is anything to go by, it’s pretty fucking close. It’s only the fact he is actually yelling at us that makes me think we might still have a chance. If he was planning to walk, I don’t think we’d even be talking. Well, shouting.’

The call had come in a couple of hours before lunch, barely past dawn back in the NAME. Echevarria must have spent all night talking to his forensic experts in Medellín. Mike took it. Chris never heard the detail, but understood it had gone something like what the fuck did you gringo sons of whores think you were doing on my turf, who the fuck do you think you are, talking to this Marquista traitor Diaz behind my back, if you were men of honour and not grey suited scum I would etcetera etcetera, blah, blah, apoplexy.

‘Okay, not quite,’ Mike admitted. ‘Figure of speech. He hasn’t dropped dead, fortunately. Otherwise we really would be in trouble. I don’t rate our chances of negotiating with Echevarria junior at all. So, at the meeting, let’s try and keep temperatures low. Conciliatory approach.’

Later that day, they heard the news. The gunships had flown, the highlands west of Medellín were in flames and the Monitored Economy’s pet press were proclaiming Diaz either dead or fleeing for the Panamanian border where he would be cornered and caged like the cowardly Marquista dog he was. In the cities, the arrests ran into triple figures.

‘He’ll be riding high, we’ve got that going for us.’ Mike, trying for upbeat as the three-minute countdown for the uplink commenced. ‘Taste of blood in his teeth, with a bit of luck he’ll think he’s invincible. With the right amount of cringing apology, I think we can talk him round.’

Chris hauled up a chair and leaned on the back. ‘You sure you don’t want me in there instead of Makin?’

Bryant just looked at him.

‘What?’

‘You going to let this go?’

‘Mike, it isn’t even my fucking account. In the end, I don’t give a shit. But you’re not going to tell me this wasn’t deliberate.’

‘Oh, give me a fucking break with the conspiracy theories, Chris. Why can’t you just accept it was a communications fuck-up? Is basic incompetence so hard to believe in?’

In the conference room, Makin stood facing them and rapped on the glass.

‘Two minutes, Mike.’

Bryant leaned down to one of the mikes and pressed trans. ‘Be right there, Nick. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.’

He slipped the baseball bat off his shoulders and leaned it in a corner. Chris put a hand on his arm.

‘Mike, you saw his face when we ran it by him on Thursday. You were there. He resented the change of tack, and he made damned sure it blew up in our faces. He handed up Diaz so we’d have nothing else to work with, and you know it.’

‘And nearly blew out his own account? Cost himself maybe thousands in lost bonuses, come quarterly. Chris, come on. It makes him look bad. Why would he do that? What’s in it for him?’

Chris shook his head. ‘I don’t know, but—’

‘Exactly.’ Mike gripped his shoulders. ‘You don’t know. I don’t know either. There is nothing to know. Now let it go.’

‘Mike, I’ve got no axe to grind here. I came—’

Another sharp rap on the glass. ‘Youah cutting it fine, Michael.’

‘I only came on board to help you, and I’m—’

The shoulders, squeezed tighter. Mike met his eye. ‘Chris, I know that. And I’m grateful. And I’m not blaming you for what happened. But you’ve got to let it go now. Get back to Cambodia. Start worrying about your own quarterly review.’

‘Mike—’

‘I’m out of time, Chris.’ He squeezed once more, then darted for the door. Chris watched through the glass as he zipped into the seat next to Makin and settled, instants before the uplink chimed.

One thing that every Conflict Investment client Chris had ever dealt with had in common was their love of developed world technotoys. It was basic CI wisdom, handed down from partners to analysts everywhere in the trade. Don’t stint on toys. At the top of every hardware gift list, you placed your state-of-the-art global communications gadgetry. That, and personalised airliners. Then the military stuff. Always that order, it never failed. Echevarria’s uplink holocast was razor-sharp in resolution, and came with about a dozen attached display screens.

Chris knew his face, of course, from the HM files and occasional newscasts from the ME. Still, it had been a while since he’d seen Echevarria for real. He leaned in close to the glass wall and focused on the sagging, leathery face; the pouched eyes and clamped mouth, the scrawny neck, held ramrod straight, disappearing into the neck of a dress uniform laden with medals and awards. The peripheral display screens fanned out behind him unignited, like a black halo. The hands resting on the holocast table top looked bloated.

‘Ah, General,’ said Bryant, with plastic charm. ‘There you are. Welcome.’

Echevarria raised one hand to his lips and looked to his left. The uplink chime sounded again and about a metre down the table, a second holocast image blipped and fizzled into existence.

‘My son will be joining us for these proceedings.’ The dictator smiled, showing brilliant white teeth, clearly not his own. ‘If you gentlemen don’t object.’

The irony was heavy, but worse lay behind it. Francisco Echevarria was currently in Miami, Chris knew. And the speed with which the holocast had come in past Shorn’s databreaks, uninvited, suggested a level of intrusion equipment beyond that usually on offer to guests at the Miami Hilton.

He’s with the fucking Americans. Rimshaw or Meldreck, got to be. Chris scrabbled for a hold. Most likely Rimshaw. Lloyd fucking Paul. Calders aren’t usually this flamboyant.

The new holocast settled down. Francisco Echevarria emerged, darkly handsome in one of his habitual Susana Ingram suits. His face was already flushed with anger looking for discharge.

Mike Bryant took it and ran with it.

‘Of course. We are delighted to have Señor Echevarria with us as well. In fact, the more varied the input at a time—’

‘Hijo de puta,’ spat Echevarria junior without preamble. ‘The only fuckin’ input I have to tell you is that if my father was not so sentimental about old attachments, you would be drivin’ for tender tomorrow. I am sick of your Eurotrash duplici—’

‘Paco! Please.’ There was a light amusement in the father’s voice. His English, Chris noticed, had a mannered southern-states drawl to it, at odds with the Miaspanic rhythms of his son’s speech. ‘These gentlemen have an apology to make. It would be rude not to hear them out.’

So.

Chris saw how Makin tautened. He wasn’t sure if the father and son noticed.

‘Certainly,’ said Mike Bryant smoothly. ‘There has been a serious misunderstanding, and I do feel that the responsibility is ours. When my colleague brought our files on the rebels to your attention, he perhaps did not stress enough that we were concerned—’

Echevarria junior rasped something indistinct in Spanish. His father looked in his direction and he shut up. Bryant nodded grateful acknowledgment to the father, and picked up the threads again.

‘Were concerned that perceived instability was going to draw new and less scrupulous investors than ourselves.’

Hernan Echevarria smiled bleakly from around the globe.

‘This instability you speak of has been dealt with. And you’re right, Señor Bryant. That was not how your colleague presented the matter.’ One of the peripheral screens woke into static prior to transmission. ‘Would you like to see the message?’

Bryant raised a hand. ‘We’ve all seen the message, Colonel. I don’t propose to take up any more of your valuable time here than absolutely necessary. As I said, it was a case of poor communication, for which we take full responsibility.’

He looked pointedly at Makin.

‘General Echevaia.’ It sounded as if the words were being ripped out of Makin with pliers. ‘I apologise. Unconditionally. For any. Misunderstanding I have caused. It was never my intention to. Suggest that we would be intested in dealing with your political enemies—’

‘The enemies of my country, señor. The enemies of our national honour, of all Colombian patriots. Condemned, you will recall, by the Catholic church and every other symbol of decency in the Americas.’

‘Yes,’ said Makin stiffly. ‘As you say.’

‘I have something here.’ Bryant came to his rescue. ‘Which you may be interested in.’

One of the recessed screens flickered to life, and Chris knew that on the other side of the world the Echevarrias were watching the image emerge from somewhere over Mike Bryant’s shoulder.

‘This is some of the primary documentation you received from us in its original format,’ said Bryant, steering the control mouse with one casual hand. ‘As you’ll see from the blow-up, it is not a document originating from Shorn. In fact, this, as I’m sure you’ll recognise, is the logo of Hammett McColl.’

It could have been computer-generated fakery, and everyone in the room knew it. But Echevarria had invited HM out to the NAME himself the year before, and he knew it fitted.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘From a source.’

Echevarria junior erupted again in mother-related Spanish insults. Bryant waited him out. The father silenced the son again, this time with an irritated gesture.

‘What source?’

‘At this stage,’ said Bryant carefully, ‘I am not prepared to reveal that information. A source is only useful so long as it remains secure, and this link-up is not. However,’ he caught the son’s bristling and moved to beat it, ‘in a genuine face-to-face situation, I would be happy to discuss all and any details pertaining to this matter. I feel that we owe you a certain candour after the weekend’s confusion.’

‘You are suggesting I fly to London?’

Bryant spread his hands. ‘In your own time, naturally. I am aware that you have a number of pressing engagements at home.’

‘Yes.’ Echevarria smiled again, with about as much warmth as before. ‘Notably clearing up the mess created by one of your agents.’

Mike sighed. ‘General, I have done what I can to demonstrate our good faith. I give you my word—’

A repressed snarl from Echevarria junior.

‘—that whatever this man was doing in Medellín, it was not at our request. He may have been operating at the behest of Hammett McColl, or someone else. I do not deny that our source in HM could very well have sold the same data to anyone else willing to pay corporate prices. I understand this person, let us say, has good contacts in both New York and Tokyo and—’

‘Alright, Señor Bryant. I believe I have heard this excuse. You have offered a face-to-face meeting. To what end?’

‘Well.’ Mike went back to the mouse. The HM document faded and was replaced by one of the hardware lists he’d shown Chris the week before. ‘There is an outstanding question over the matter of military equipment. In view of these new developments, and the disturbances they are bound to cause, I had it in mind to review the budget.’

Chris caught the reaction. He wondered how Mike managed not to grin.

‘You are saying?’

‘Next month, London hosts the North Memorial arms fair. I am suggesting that you kill two birds with one stone and that we visit the fair together with an eye to your immediate requirements. While you are here, we can discuss the matter of Hammett McColl’s information and its US implications.’

Echevarria’s eyes narrowed. ‘US implications?’

‘I’m sorry, I meant international implications.’ Mike did a good imitation of embarrassment. ‘I tend to leap to conclusions that cannot always be justified, but. Well. We can discuss this further when you are in London.’

After that, it was just noise. Bryant layered on the apologies, with a couple of wheeled-in words from Makin. Echevarria junior growled and snapped at intervals, always brought to heel by his father who just looked thoughtful throughout. Goodbyes were said cordially enough. Mike came storming back into the viewing chambers and slammed the door behind him.

‘Get on to Lopez. I want contact with the rebels by the end of the week. This motherfucker is going to turn on us.’

Chris blinked. ‘I thought you’d hooked him.’

‘Yeah, for the moment. The military stuff ought to hold him for a while, and that smear about US involvement will stave off junior’s Miami connections. But in the end, it’s a slum block waiting to come down. Old Hernan doesn’t really buy anything we said in there, he’s just biding his time to see what he can get out of us. And he’s not going to stay bribed with a handful of cheap cluster bombs, which is about all we can afford right now, the state things are in. No, the Americans are going to get him, sooner or later, and I want a player of our own in position before that happens.’

‘Yeah, but who?’ Chris gestured out through the glass to where Makin still sat at the table, staring into the middle distance. ‘Fuckhead there’s managed to trash Diaz. Who does that leave us?’

‘We’ll have to go with Barranco.’

‘Barranco? ’

‘Chris, he’s what we’ve got. You said yourself, Arbenz isn’t going to be in any position to lead an armed insurrection this year.’

‘Yeah, but Barranco. He’s committed, Mike.’

‘Ah, come on. They all start out that way.’

‘No, he’s a real fucking Guevara, Mike. I don’t think we’re going to be able to control him.’

Bryant grinned. ‘Yeah, we will. You will.’ He glanced back through at Makin. The other executive hadn’t moved. ‘I’m going to take this shit to Hewitt and get Nick reassigned. It’s high fucking time. Meanwhile, you get Barranco to sit down. I don’t care what it takes. Fly out there yourself if you have to, but get him to a table.’

There was a brief rush off the words, an image from the Hammett McColl visit, a Caribbean night sky shingled with stars, the warm darkness beneath and the noises of the night time street.

‘You want me to go out to Panama?’

‘If that’s what it takes.’

‘Hewitt isn’t going to like this. She gave the account to Makin in the first place. It isn’t going to look good if he’s written off as the wrong choice. And that’s without her feelings about me. She’s hardly a fan.’

‘Chris, you’re fucking paranoid. I told you before. Hewitt’s a fan of money, and right now you’re making plenty of it. Bottom line, that’s what counts.’ Mike grinned again. ‘And anyway, she gives me any static, I’ll go talk to Notley. You are in, my friend, like it or not. Welcome to the NAME account.’

Out in the conference room, Makin stirred in his chair and turned to look towards them. It was as if he’d heard the conversation. He looked beaten and betrayed. Chris stared back at him, trying to chase out a faint disquiet that would not go away.

‘Thanks.’

‘Hey, you earned it. Run with it.’ Bryant slung an arm around his shoulders. ‘Besides, we’re a fucking team. Now let’s kick Hernan Echevarria into touch and make some fucking money.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Someone had tied up a damaged speedboat beside the jetty and then left it to drown. The boat’s prow was raised, roped tightly to a mooring iron, but behind the fly-specked windscreen, the water was up over the pale leather upholstered interior almost to the dashboard. Chris saw a fish hanging suspended below the surface like a tiny zeppelin, nibbling at something on the lower arc of the submerged steering wheel. Twigs and decaying leaf matter floated around the sunken stern, shifting sloppily back and forth as the wake of a passing water taxi rolled up to the jetty. Wavelets slapped at the wooden supports. Out across the lagoon, low cloud adhered like grey candyfloss to trees on the islands, and drifted across the seaward view, trailing rain. The sun was a vague blot on the lighter grey overhead. The air was warm and clammy.

Chris turned away. It wasn’t the Caribbean as he remembered it. He went back to where Joaquin Lopez sat with his back to the wooden shack that justified the jetty’s existence.

‘You sure he’s coming?’

Lopez shrugged. He was a tall, tightly-muscled man, mostly Afro-Caribbean, and he radiated a calm at odds with the panic he’d shown over the phone from Medellín. ‘He has every reason to. I wouldn’t have brought you for nothing, man. Smoke?’

Chris shook his head. Lopez lit a cigarette for himself and plumed smoke out across the water. He scratched absently at a scar on his forehead.

‘It will not have been easy for him. There’s a lot of heat along this part of the coast. The turtle patrols have authority to stop and search anyone they think is poaching. And you sometimes got US drug enforcement boats up from the Darien. They don’t have any authority, but . . .’

He shrugged again. Chris nodded.

‘When did that ever stop them, right?’

‘Right.’ Lopez looked away and grinned.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. You don’t talk like a gringo.’

Chris yawned. He hadn’t slept much in the last couple of days. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Keep it up. It may help with Barranco.’

It was piling up behind his eyes now. London, Madrid, San Jose Costa Rica. A blur of airports, executive lounges in muted pastel shades, the grey whisper of air-conditioned flight. Chasing down the sun, gaining a day. Helicoptered out of San Jose at dawn and across the border into Panama. Touchdown on a sun-drenched airfield outside David, where Lopez had sneaked out of Panama City and west to meet him. Another short hop north to Bocas del Toro, a series of shacks and people Lopez knew, a gun on loan, a water taxi out here, wherever exactly it was, and waiting, waiting for Barranco.

‘You ever meet him?’

Lopez shook his head. ‘Spoke to him on the videophone a couple of days ago. He’s looking tired, not like the pinups they did of him back in ’41. He needs this, Chris. This is his last throw.’

The year echoed in his head. In ’41, Edward Quain had died in smeared fragments on the cold asphalt of the M20. At the time, it had seemed like some kind of ending. But Chris had woken the next day to find the world intact and nothing he’d begun at Hammett McColl even close to tidy, let alone finished. It had dawned on him only then that he’d have to go on living, and that he’d have to find some new reason to do it.

A soft snarling, out across the water.

‘Boat coming,’ said Lopez.

The vessel came into view around a forested headland, raising a bow wave to match the noise of its engines. It was a big, navy-grey vessel, built for speed and, judging by the twinned machine guns mounted behind an impact-glass cupola on the foredeck, for assault. A flag flapped at the stern, white design on a green background. Lopez breathed a sigh of relief when he saw it.

‘Turtle patrol,’ he said.

The powerboat slowed and settled in the water as the motors cut to an idle. It nosed into the jetty and someone dressed in khakis came up on the foredeck. Yells in Spanish. Lopez responded. The deckhand gathered up a line and jumped blithely to the jetty with it. He landed with a practised flex in the legs. A woman, similarly attired, came and leaned on the machine-gun cupola, staring at them. Chris felt caution creep through him.

‘You’re armed too, right?’ he muttered to Lopez.

‘Sure. But these are turtle guys, they aren’t—’

The next man off the boat wore the same army fatigues and had a Kalashnikov assault rifle slung over his shoulder. He passed Chris without a glance, ambled up to Lopez and rapped out something in Spanish. When he got the answer, he disappeared into the shack behind them. Chris looked at the water on the other side of the jetty and wondered how deep it was. He’d want a good half metre over his head to be sure of not getting shot. The Smith and Wesson Lopez had lent him was apparently guaranteed to fire wet, but against assault rifles—

Let’s face it, Chris, you wouldn’t last five minutes. This isn’t a Tony Carpenter flick.

‘Señor Faulkner?’

He jerked back to the boat. Another khaki-clad figure had joined the woman on the foredeck. As the man vaulted to the jetty, Chris caught up with the voice. It was Barranco.

It was the same weathered set of features Chris remembered from the HM meeting just over a year ago - a face darkened by sun and altitude, broad across the cheekbones, chipped with the blue of eyes tossed into the gene pool by some European colonist decades or centuries absorbed. The same close-cropped greying hair, the same height and length of limb as Barranco moved to greet him. The same calloused grip, the same search in the eyes when you got up close. It was a gaze that belonged on the bridge of some warship from the last century, or maybe the last of the pirate trawlers, scanning the grey horizon for signs.

‘Señor Faulkner. I remember you now, from the Hammett McColl mission. The man with the laptop. You were very quiet then.’

‘I came to listen.’ Chris reached into his jacket. ‘This time I—’

‘Very easy, please.’ Barranco raised his own hands. ‘My companions are a little nervous this far from home, and it wouldn’t do to let them think you’re planning to use that badly concealed gun in your belt.’

He gestured in turn at the woman by the cupola and the first deckhand ashore, who now straightened from the mooring iron with a pistol gripped in one fist. Chris heard the snap of a weapon being cocked, looked back at the shack and saw the man with the assault rifle emerge from the building again, weapon cradled at his hip.

‘So,’ said Barranco. ‘Welcome again to Latin America.’

The interior of the shack was equipped with basic facilities - a toilet behind a wall of plastic partitioning, a tiny stove in a corner and an ancient wooden table two metres long, scarred with decades of use and carved with what looked like whole generations of grafitti. A half dozen tired-looking plastic moulded chairs were gathered around the table - Chris’s choice from among the untidy pile they’d found behind the shack when they arrived. Hardly Shorn conference standard. The windows were small and liberally grimed, but bulbs from an aqualight system hung suspended at intervals in the roof space and the long uptake taper was still intact, dangling down through a crudely bored hole in the floorboards and into the water below the pilings. Chris had tested the system earlier and the taper was well soaked. Now he flipped the wall switch and gentle light sprang up in three out of the five bulbs.

Barranco glanced around the shack and nodded.

‘Well, it’s not the Panama Hilton,’ he said. ‘But then, I suppose I am not Luis Montoya.’

It seemed to require a reaction. Chris tried a chuckle and gestured towards the table. ‘Please sit down, Señor Barranco. I’m afraid our concern so far has been security rather than comfort. Outside of one or two deluded drug enforcement diehards, Luis Montoya has no real enemies in the Americas. You, unfortunately, have many.’

‘A problem you are offering to solve for me, no?’ Barranco did not sit down. Instead, he nodded at his own security, two of whom had followed him in. Without a word, they moved to positions at the windows and took up an at-ease stance that fooled no one. Neither of them spared Chris more than a glance, and that filled with easy contempt.

Chris walked to the table and pulled out the chair for Barranco.

‘I’m sure that, given time and a little luck, a man such as yourself is probably capable of solving the problem without any help from men like me. Given time and luck. Please. Have a seat.’

Barranco didn’t move. ‘I am not susceptible to flattery.’

Chris shrugged and took the seat for himself. ‘I didn’t think you were. I was making a statement of fact. I believe, which is to say we, my colleagues at Shorn and I, believe you are capable of resolving a number of the issues facing Colombia at present. That is why I am here. This visit is a demonstration of our faith in you.’

It brought Barranco to the table, slowly.

‘You call it Colombia,’ he said. ‘Is that how your colleagues refer to it in London?’

‘No, of course not.’ Chris brushed at the table top and held up his hands, seeking the gaze of Barranco’s security before he reached slowly into his jacket and brought out the folded laptop. He thought he made it look pretty cool, considering. ‘We call it the North Andean Monitored Economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. As I’m also sure you’re aware, we are hardly alone in this.’

‘No.’ There was a flat bitterness in the words. Barranco’s hands had fallen on the back of the chair opposite Chris. ‘You are not. The whole world calls us that way. Only that son of a whore in Bogotá uses the name Colombia, as if we were still a nation.’

‘Hernan Echevarria,’ said Chris softly, ‘milks the patriotism of his countrymen to shore up a regime that rewards the top five per cent of the country with riches and keeps the remainder with their faces in the dirt. You do not need me to tell you this. But I think you need me to help you do something about it.’

‘How quickly we move.’ There was a look on Barranco’s face, as if he could smell something bad seeping through the plastic partition from the toilet. ‘How quickly, from flattery to bribery. Did you not say that a man such as myself could resolve—’

‘Given. Time.’ Chris locked gazes, made sure he’d stopped the other man, then set placidly about unfolding the laptop. ‘I said, given time. And given luck. And I said ‘‘probably’’. ’

‘I see.’ Chris wasn’t looking at him, but Barranco sounded as if he was smiling. How quickly we move. From a sneer to a smile. But he didn’t look up yet. The laptop was heavily creased in a couple of places and it was taking a while to warm up. He busied himself with flattening out the screen. He heard the chair opposite him scrape out. Heard it take Barranco’s weight.

The screen lit with a map of the Monitored Economy.

Chris looked up and smiled.

Later, with the numbers wrung out to dry, they walked out along the jetty and stood at the end, watching the weather. To the east, the sky was clearing in patches.

‘Smoke?’ Barranco asked him.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ Chris took the proffered packet and shook out a crumpled cylinder. Barranco lit it for him from a battered silver petrol lighter that bore engraving in Cyrillic around a skull and cross bones and the date 2007. Chris drew deep and promptly coughed himself to tears on the smoke.

‘Whoh.’ He took the cigarette out of his mouth and blinked at it. ‘Where’d you get these?’

‘A shop you haven’t been to.’ Barranco pointed what looked like southwest. ‘Seven hundred kilometres from here, up in the mountains. It’s run by an old woman who remembers the day Echevarria took power. She won’t sell American brands. It’s black tobacco.’

‘Yeah, I noticed.’ Chris took another, more cautious draw on the cigarette and felt it bite in his lungs. He gestured. ‘And the lighter? Military issue, right?’

‘Wrong.’ Barranco held up the lighter again, rubbing a finger back and forth across the Cyrillic characters. ‘Advertising. It says Death Cigarettes - too bad you’re going to die. But it’s a, what do you call it in English, a knock-out? An illegal copy?’

‘Knock-off.’

‘Yes, a knock-off. Some crazy English guy back in the last century, he actually made cigarettes with that name.’

‘Doesn’t sound too smart.’

Barranco turned and breathed smoke at him. ‘At least he was honest.’

Chris let that one sit for a while. Barranco wandered the width of the jetty, smoking, waiting him out.

‘I think you should come to London, Señor Barranco. You need—’

‘Are your parents alive, Señor Faulkner?’

It stabbed him through, punctured the slowly inflating sense of a deal done that was filling him up.

‘No.’

‘Do you remember them?’

He shot a glance across at the face of the man beside him, and knew this was not negotiable. This was required.

‘My father died when I was young,’ he said, surprised at how easy it had become to say it. ‘I don’t remember him well. My mother died later, when I was in my teens. Of thorn fever.’

Barranco’s eyes narrowed. ‘What is that? Thorn fever.’

Chris smoked for a moment, checking his memories for leakage before he answered. He thought he had it locked down.

‘It’s a TB variant. One of the antibiotic-resistant strains. We lived in the zones, what you’d call the favelas, and there’s a lot of it there. She couldn’t afford the smart drugs, no one there can, so she just took basic ABs until she collapsed. No one’s sure what killed her in the end, the thorn fever or something else her immune system was too wasted to cope with. It took—’

He didn’t have it locked down. He looked away.

‘I am sorry,’ said Barranco.

‘It,’ Chris swallowed. ‘Thanks, it’s okay. It was a long time ago.’

He drew on the cigarette again, grimaced suddenly and flung it away from him into the water. He pressed the back of his index finger against his eyes, one by one, and looked at the scant streaks of moisture they left.

‘My mother was taken away,’ said Barranco from behind him. ‘In the night, by soldiers. It was common at the time. I too was in my teens. My father had long ago left us, and I was out, at a political meeting. Perhaps it was me they came for. But they took her instead.’

Chris knew. He’d read the file.

‘They raped her. Echevarria’s men. They tortured her for days, with electricity and with a broken bottle. And then they shot her in the face and left her to die on a rubbish tip at the edge of town. A doctor from La Amnestia told me they think it took her about two hours.’

Chris would have said sorry, but the word seemed broken, drained of useful content.

‘Do you understand why I am fighting, Señor Faulkner? Why I have been fighting for the last twenty years?’

Chris shook his head, wordless. He turned to face Barranco, and saw that the other man had no more emotion on his face than he’d shown when they were discussing cigarettes.

‘You don’t understand, Señor Faulkner?’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Well, I cannot blame you. Sometimes, neither do I. Some days, it makes more sense to take my Kalashnikov, walk into any police station or barracks bar and kill everything that wears a uniform. But I know that behind those men are others who wear no uniform, so I change this plan, and I begin to think that I should do the same thing with a government building. But then I remember that these people in turn are only the front for an entire class of landowning families and financiers who call themselves my compatriots. My head spins with new targets.’ Barranco gestured. ‘Banks. Ranches. Gated suburbs. The numbers for slaughter rise like a lottery total. And then I remember that Hernan Echevarria would not have lasted a year in power, not a single year, if he had not had support from Washington and New York.’ He raised a finger and pointed at Chris. ‘And London. Are you sure, Señor Faulkner, that you want me in your capital city?’

Chris, still busy hauling back in the emotional canvas, mustered a shrug of his own. His voice rasped a little in his throat.

‘I’ll take the chance.’

‘Brave man.’ Barranco finished his own cigarette and pinched it out between finger and thumb. ‘I suppose. A brave man, or a gambler. Which should I call you?’

‘Call me a judge of character. I think you’re smart enough to be trusted.’

‘I’m flattered. And your colleagues?’

‘My colleagues will listen to me. This is what I get paid for.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

Chris caught the drip of it in Barranco’s voice, the same thing he’d seen in the other marquistas’ eyes in the shack.

fuck

He’d overplayed it, too much macho boardroom acceleration coming off the emotional bend. He was leaning in for damage limitation, but what he wanted to say twisted loose on its way out. Aghast, he heard himself telling the truth, raw.

‘What have you got to lose? You’re in shit-poor shape, Vicente. We both know that. Backed up in the mountains, outgunned, living on rhetoric. If Echevarria comes for you now, the way he did for Diaz, you’re history. Like Marcos, like Guevara. A beautiful legend and a fucking T-shirt. Is that what you want? All those people in the NAME, going through what your mother went through, what good are you to them like that?’

For a moment that froze as the last word left his mouth, he imagined the world caving in around him with the deal. Barranco’s eyes hardened, his stance tightened. Telegraphed so clear it sent the security guard on the patrol boat’s deck smoothly to her feet. An assault rifle hefted. Chris’s breath stopped.

‘I mean—’

‘I know what you mean.’ Barranco’s posture relaxed first. He turned to the woman on the boat and made a sign. She sank back to her seat. When he turned back, something had changed in his face. ‘I know what you mean, because this is the first time you’ve come out and said it. You can’t imagine how much of a relief that is, Chris Faulkner. You can’t imagine how little all your numbers have meant to me without some sign that you have a soul.’

Chris breathed again. ‘You should have asked.’

‘Asked if you had a soul?’ There wasn’t much humour in Barranco’s parched laugh. ‘Is that a question that can be asked in London? When I am seated around the table with your colleagues, discussing what slices of my country’s GDP I must offer up to gain their support. What crops my people must grow while their own children starve, what essential medical services they must learn to live without. Will I ask them where they keep their souls then, Señor Faulkner?’

‘I wouldn’t advise it, no.’

‘No. Then what would you advise?’

Chris weighed it up—

fuck it, it’s worked so far

—and told the unbandaged truth again.

‘I’d advise you to get what you can from them with as little commitment on your side as possible. Because that’s what they’ll be doing to you. Leave yourself escape clauses, remember, nothing’s ever written in stone. Everything can be renegotiated, if you can make it worth their while.’

A pause. Barranco laughed again, warmth leaking into the sound this time. He offered the cigarettes again, lit them both with the Russian knock-off.

‘Good advice, my friend,’ he said through the smoke. ‘Good advice. I think I would hire you as an adviser, if I could afford you.’

‘You can. I’m part of the package.’

‘No.’ The trawlerman’s gaze settled on him. ‘I know a little about you now, Chris Faulkner, and you are not part of any package in London. There is something in you that resists incorporation. Something.’ Barranco shrugged. ‘Honourable.’

It flickered across Chris’s memory before he could stop it. Liz Linshaw’s body in the white silk gown that untied and opened like a gift. The curves and shadowed places within. The sound of her laugh.

‘I think you are mistaken about me,’ he said quietly.

Barranco shook his head. ‘You will see. I am not a bad judge of character myself, when it counts. You may get paid by these people, but you are not one of them. You do not belong.’

Lopez got him back to Bocas by nightfall, and they sat in a water-front café waiting for the late flight to David. Across the water, the sequin twinkle of restaurant lights on another island seemed threaded directly onto the darkness. Local-owned pangas puttered about in the channel between, cruising for taxi custom. Voices drifted out over the water like smoke, Spanish shot through with an occasional English loan word. Kitchen noise clattered in the back of the café behind them.

The whole meeting with Barranco already seemed like a dream.

‘So it went well,’ Lopez asked.

Chris stirred at his cocktail. ‘Seems that way. He’s going to come to London, anyway.’ His mind cut loose the replays of Liz Linshaw and went wearily to work. ‘I want you to set that up as soon as possible, but safe. Above all, safe. Quick as you can without endangering his life or his strategic position. I’ll move things around at my end to fit in with whatever that means.’

‘Billing?’

‘Through the covert account. I don’t want this to show up until . . . No, better yet you pay for it yourself. Cash. I’ll have the money dumped to you in Zurich soon as I get back. Mail me an advance estimate at the hotel tomorrow morning. Oh yeah, you got anything that’ll help me sleep?’

‘Not on me.’ Lopez dug out his phone. ‘You’re at the Sheraton, right?’

‘Yeah. 1101. Jenkins.’

The phone screen showed a cosy green glow. Lopez punched his way down a list and held up the instrument to face him. After a couple of rings, a voice answered in Spanish.

‘En inglés, guei,’ said Lopez impatiently.

Whoever he was looking at grumbled something filthy and then switched. ‘You here in town, man?’

‘No, but a friend of mine will be shortly. And he needs a little something to help him sleep.’

‘Is he a fizi?’

Lopez looked up from the phone at Chris. ‘You do a lot of this sort of stuff?’

‘Christ, no.’

The Americas agent dropped his gaze to the phone screen again. ‘Definitely not. Something gentle.’

‘Got it. Address.’

‘Sheraton, room 1101. Mr Jenkins.’

‘Charge card or account.’

‘Very fucking funny. Hasta luego.’

‘Hasta la cuenta, amigo.’

He folded up the phone. ‘Stuff’ll be waiting for you at the desk. You go in, just ask if you got any messages. There’ll be an envelope.’

‘You can vouch for this guy, right.’

‘Yeah, he’s a plastic surgeon.’

Chris couldn’t see why that was supposed to reassure him, but he was getting past caring. The thought of crushing his jetlag beneath the soft black weight of seven or eight hours of chemically guaranteed sleep was like a finishing line ahead. Liz Linshaw, Mike Bryant and Shorn, Carla, Barranco and the skipper’s scrutiny; he let them all go like a pack he’d been carrying. Sleep was coming. He’d worry about everything else tomorrow.

But behind the aching relief, Barranco’s words floated like the voices out on the water.

You do not belong.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

He woke in the standard issue luxury of the Sheraton, to the softly insistent pulse of an incoming signal from his laptop. He flopped over in the bed and glared blearily around the room. Located the fucking thing, there on the carpeted floor amidst the trail of his dropped clothes. Bleeee, bleeee, fucking bleeee. He groaned and groped, half out of bed, one hand holding his body rigidly horizontal off the floor. He snagged the machine, dragged it onto the bed and sat up to unfold it in his lap. Mike Bryant’s recorded face grinned out at him.

‘Morning. If I timed this right, I figure you’ve got about three hours before your flight, so here’s something to think about while you’re waiting. You are under attack. And this time, you are going down!’

Groggy from the plastic surgeon’s special delivery, Chris felt a sluggish spasm of alarm rip through him. Then the other man’s face blinked out and a stylised chessboard took its place. Mike had launched an unlooked-for rook-and-knight assault on him while he slept. It looked bad.

‘Motherfucker.’

He got up and shambled about, packing. Still not flushed clean of the sleeping fix, he reacted unwisely to Mike’s gambit over breakfast and lost a bishop. Bryant, it seemed, was playing in real time. He went to the airport smarting from the loss and picked up the pieces in the exec lounge. It was Saturday and Mike, if he’d known what was good for him, should have let the game ride for the weekend. He could have thought it out over the next couple of days and taken Chris apart at leisure, but Chris knew him better. Bryant was lit up with the taste of his victory and he’d stay in real-time play now. View, absorb, react, all night if he had to. Chris had lent him Rakhimov’s Speed Chess and the Attack Momentum a couple of months ago, and the big man had swallowed it whole. He was in for the kill.

Somewhere over the Caribbean, Chris beat off the attack. It cost him his only remaining knight and his carefully constructed castled defence was in ruins, but Mike’s attack momentum was down. The flurry of moves slowed. Chris played doggedly across the Atlantic and by the time they touched down in Madrid, he had Bryant nailed to a lucky stalemate. Mike sent him a Tony Carpenter clip attachment in response - the post-fight stand-off from The Deceiver. Carpenter’s trademark lack of acting talent, lines creaking with the burden of cliché. We are well matched, you and I. We should fight on the same side. It was so bad it was almost camp.

Chris grinned and folded the laptop.

He got off the flight with a bounce in his step, grabbed a sauna and a shower in the exec lounge while he waited and slept naturally on the shuttle back to London. He dreamed of Liz Linshaw.

At Heathrow, leaning on the barrier at arrivals, made up and dressed in clothes that hugged at her figure, Carla was waiting.

‘No, it’s just. You didn’t need to. You know, I’m running on the Shorn clock. They’d pick up the tab for a taxi all the way home.’

‘I wanted to see you.’

So why the fuck’d you go to Tromsö? He bit it back, and watched the curving perspectives of the road ahead. Saturday morning traffic on the orbital was sparse, and Carla, with the easy confidence of the professional mechanic, had the Saab up to a hundred and fifty in the middle lane.

‘How was your mum?’

‘She’s good. Busy. They want to bring out an interactional version of the new book, so she’s been rewriting, slotting in the GoTo sections with some datarat from the university.’

‘Is she shagging him?’ It didn’t quite come out right. Too harsh, too much silence around it. There was a time Chris could get away with these riffs on Kirsti’s sex life, and Carla used to laugh in mock outrage. Now she just looked across at him and went back to watching the road, tight lipped. The chill filled the car almost palpably.

‘Sorry, I—’

‘That was nasty.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Helplessly.

What the fuck is happening to us, Carla. What the fuck are we doing here? Is it just me? Is it?

He saw Liz Linshaw again, the easy smile in the spare room, face and hair dappled with street lighting through the tree outside, the glass of water in her hand. She had navigated the moment with the same ease that Carla drove the Saab. Stepping closer than necessary to hand him the water, the warm tang of whisky on her breath. A soft, surprised oh, in ladylike tones her newscasts had never seen, as he pulled at the raw silk belt and the gown fell open. Broken street light across the curves within. The feel of her breast, as he laid one hand on it, was burnt into his palm. The soft sound of the laugh in her throat.

Highgate.

Involuntarily, he opened the hand at the memory. Looked at it, as if for some sign of branding.

I, uh, I can’t do this, Liz, he’d lied, I’m sorry, and he’d turned away to stare out of the window, pretty sure this was the only way to stop the landslide. Trembling with the force of it.

Fair enough, she told him and in the window he watched her bend to leave the glass on the table by the futon. She stood for a moment at the door before she left, looking at his back, but she said nothing. She had not retied the gown. The gap between its edges was black in the reflected image, empty of detail that his own mind was feverishly happy to fill.

In the morning, he woke to find the gown draped across the quilt he had slept under. At some point during the night she had come in, taken it off and stood naked, watching him sleep. Even through the layers of mild hangover, it was an intensely erotic image and he felt himself hardening at the thought.

The house was silent around him. Birdsong from the tree outside the window, a solitary car engine somewhere distant. He lay propped up on one elbow in the bed, vague with last night’s drinking. Without conscious thought, he reached for the gown, dragged it up the bed and held it to his face. It smelled intimately of woman, the only woman’s scent outside of Carla’s that he had breathed in nearly a decade. The shock was visceral, dissolving the hangover and dumping him out into reality like an exasperated bouncer. He threw off the gown and the quilt in a single motion, threw on clothes. Watch and wallet, off the bedside table in a sweep, stamping into shoes. He slid out of the spare room and paused.

There was no one home. It was a feeling he knew well, and the house echoed with it. A handwritten note lay on the kitchen table, detailing where breakfast things could be found, the number of a good cab company and how to set the alarms before leaving. It was signed stay in touch.

He got out.

No appetite for breakfast, no confidence that he wouldn’t do something really stupid like go through her things or, worse still, wait around for her to come back. He triggered the alarm set-up and the door closed him out on a rising whine as the house defences charged.

He found himself on a tree-lined hill street that swept up behind him and down then up again in front. A couple of prestige cars and a four track were parked at intervals along the kerbs, and down near the base of the parabola the street described, someone was walking a German Shepherd. There was no one else about. It looked like a nice neighbourhood.

He didn’t know Highgate, had been in the area only a couple of times before in his life, to drink- and drug-blurred parties at the homes of HM execs. But the air was mild and the sky looked clear of rain in all directions.

He chose the downslope at random, and started walking.

The Saab jolted on a badly mended pothole. Dumped him back into reality. The memory of Highgate dropped away, receding in the rearview.

‘Carla.’ He reached across the space between them. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything about your mother. It was a joke, alright.’

‘Ha fucking ha.’

He held down the quick flare of anger. ‘Carla, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve only been in each other’s company half an hour, and we’re fighting already. This is killing us.’

‘You’re the one who.’ She stopped, and he wondered what she was biting back the way he’d bitten back words a few moments earlier.

Is this it, he wondered dismally, is this the only way to survive a long term relationship? Hide your thoughts, bite back your feelings, build a neutral silence that won’t hurt. Is that what it’s all about? Neutrality for the sake of a warm bed?

Is that what I turned Liz down for?

Liz, waiting, wrapped in the white silk that carried her scent.

‘Carla, pull over.’

‘What?’

‘Pull over. Stop. There, on the hard shoulder. Please.’

She shot him a look, and must have seen something in his face. The Saab bled speed and drifted across the lanes. Carla dropped a gear and brought the car under a hundred kilometres an hour. Onto the hard shoulder and they crunched to a halt. Carla turned in her seat to face him.

‘Alright.’

‘Carla, listen.’ He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling his way towards what he needed to say. ‘Please don’t run off like that again. Like you did. I missed you. I really did. I need you, and when you’re not here I really. I miss you so much. I. I do stupid things.’

Her eyes widened.

‘Things like what?’

And he could not fucking tell her. He couldn’t.

He thought he was going to, he even started to, started with Troy Morris’s party, even got as far as talking about Liz and her book proposal, but he couldn’t do it, and when she knew there was more behind it and pushed for it, he veered off into the zones and what he and Mike Bryant had done to Griff Dixon and his friends.

She whitened as he told it.

‘That can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘You, they can’t,’ scaling almost to a shout. ‘People can’t do things like that. It’s not legal.’

‘Tell that to Mike. Ah, Christ, tell it to the whole fucking Shorn corporation, while you’re at it.’ And then it all had to come tumbling out, the morning after, the NAME contract, the fuck-up with Lopez and Langley, the dead in Medellín and the quick-fix burial of the facts, Panama and Barranco and his quiet insistence. You do not belong. Chris found he was trembling by the time he got to the end and there was what felt like a laugh building in his throat, but when it finally came out his eyes were wet. He unfastened his belt and leaned across the space between the seats. He pulled himself across and against her, teeth gritted on the fraying shreds of his control.

They clung together.

‘Chris.’ There was something in Carla’s voice that might have been a laugh as well, and what she was saying made no kind of sense, but the way she held him that didn’t seem to matter much. ‘Chris, listen to me. It’s okay. There’s a way out of this.’

She started to lay it out for him. Less than a minute in, he was shouting her down.

‘You can’t be fucking serious, Carla. That’s not a way out.’

‘Chris, please listen to me.’

‘A fucking ombudsman. What do you think I am, a socialist? A fucking loser? Those people are—’

He gestured at the enormity of it, groping for words. Carla folded her arms and looked at him.

‘Are what? Dangerous? Do you want to tell me again how you murdered three unarmed men in the zones last weekend?’

‘They were scum, Carla. Armed or not.’

‘And the car-jackers, back in January. Were they scum too?’

‘That—’

‘And the people in that café in Medellín?’ Her voice was rising again. ‘The people you killed in the Cambodia playoff. Isaac Murcheson, who you dreamed about every night for a year after you killed him. And now, you have the insane fucking nerve to tell me the ombudsmen are dangerous?’

He raised his hands. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You were going to.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say,’ he lied. ‘I was going to say those people are, they’re losers Carla, they’re standing against the whole tide of globalisation, of progress, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Is it progress?’ she asked, suddenly quiet. ‘Balkanisation and slaughter abroad and the free market feeding off the bones, a poverty-line economy and gladiatorial contests on the roads at home. Is that supposed to be progress?’

‘That’s your father talking.’

‘No, fuck you Chris, this is me talking. You think I don’t have opinions of my own. You think I can’t look around and see for myself what’s happening? You think I’m not living out the consequences?’

‘You don’t—’

‘You know, in Norway when I tell people where I live, where I choose to live, they look at me like I’m some kind of moral retard. When I tell them what my husband does for a living, they—’

‘Oh, here we go.’ He turned away from her in the narrow confines of the car. Outside his window, the wind whipped along the embankment, flattening the long grass. ‘Here we fucking go again.’

‘Chris, listen to me.’ A hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off angrily.

‘You’ve got to stand outside it for a moment. That’s what I did while I was in Tromsö. You’ve got to see it from the outside to understand. You’re a paid killer, Chris. A paid killer, a dictator in all but name.’

‘Oh, for—’

‘Echevarria, right? You told me about Echevarria.’

‘What about him?’

‘You talk as if you hated him. As if he was a monster.’

‘He pretty much is, Carla.’

‘And what’s the difference between the two of you? Every atrocity he commits, you underwrite. You told me about the torture, the people in those police cells and the bodies on the rubbish dumps. You put those people there, Chris. You may as well have been there with the electrodes.’

‘That’s not fair. Echevarria isn’t mine.’

‘Isn’t yours?’

‘It isn’t my account, Carla. I don’t get to make the decisions on that one. In fact—’

‘Oh, and Cambodia’s different? You get to make the decisions on that one, because you told me you do, and I read the reports while I was away, Chris. The independent press for a change. They say this Khieu Sary is going to be as bad as the original Khmer Rouge.’

‘That’s bullshit. Khieu’s a pragmatist. He’s a good bet, and even if he gets out of hand we can—’

‘Out of hand? What does that mean, out of hand? You mean if the body count gets into the tens of thousands? If they run out of places to bury them secretly? Chris, for fuck’s sake listen to yourself.’

He turned back. ‘I didn’t make the world the way it is, Carla. I’m just trying to live in it.’

‘We don’t have to live in it this way.’

‘No? You want to live in the fucking zones, do you?’ He reached across and grabbed at the leather jacket she was wearing. ‘You think they wear this kind of stuff in the zones? You think you get to jet off to Scandinavia when you fucking feel like it if you live in the zones?’

‘I’m not—’

‘You want to be an old woman at forty?’ She flinched at the lash in his voice. He was losing control now, tears stinging in his eyes. ‘Is that what you want, Carla? Obese from the shit they stuff the food with, diabetic from the fucking sugar content, allergies from the additives, no money for decent medical treatment. Is that what you want? You want to die poor, die because you’re poor? Is that what you fucking want, Carla, because—’

The slap turned his head. Jarred loose the tears from his eyelids. He blinked and tasted blood.

‘Now you listen to me,’ she said evenly. ‘You shut up and hear what I have to say, or this is over. I mean it, Chris.’

‘You have no idea,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t try to pull rank on me, Chris. My father lives in the zones—’

‘Your father?’ Derisively. Voice rising again. ‘Your father doesn’t—’

‘I’m warning you, Chris.’

He looked away. Cranked down the anger. ‘Your father,’ he said quietly, ‘is a tourist. He has no children. No dependants. Nothing that ties him where he is, nothing to force him. He isn’t like the people he surrounds himself with, and he never will be. He could be gone tomorrow if he chose to, and that’s what makes the difference.’

‘He thinks he can make a difference.’

‘And can he?’

Silence. Finally, he looked back at her.

‘Can he, Carla?’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘Yesterday I was on the other side of the world, talking to a man who might be able to kick Echevarria out of the ME. If I get my way, it’ll happen. Isn’t that worth something? Isn’t that something better than the articles your father hammers out for readers who’ll shake their heads and act shocked and never lift a fucking finger to change anything?’

‘If it matters to you so much to change things all of a sudden, why can’t you—’

The heavy throb of rotors overhead. The car rocked on its suspension. The radio crackled to life.

‘Driver Control. This is Driver Control.’

The rotor noise grew, even through the Saab’s soundproofing. The helicopter’s belly dropped into view, black and luminous green, showing landing skids, underslung cameras and gatlings. It skittered back a few metres, as if nervous of the stopped car. The voice splashed out of the radio again.

‘Owner of Saab Custom registration s810576, please identify yourself.’

What the fuck for, dickhead? The thought was a random jag of anger. Match me from the footage you’ve just shot through my windscreen, why don’t you? Instead of wasting my motherfucking time.

‘This is a security requirement,’ admonished the voice.

‘This is Chris Faulkner,’ he said heavily. ‘Driver clearance 260B354R. I work for Shorn Associates. Now fuck off, will you? My wife’s not feeling well, and you’re not helping.’

There was a brief silence while the numbers ran. The voice came back, diffident.

‘Sorry to trouble you, sir. It’s just, stopping like that on the carriageway. If your wife needs hospitalisation, we can—’

‘I said, fuck off.’

The helicopter dithered for a moment longer then spun about and lifted out of view. They sat for a while, listening to its departing chunter.

‘Nice to know they’re watching,’ said Carla bitterly.

‘Yeah.’ He closed his eyes.

She touched his arm. ‘Chris.’

‘Alright.’ He nodded. Opened his eyes. ‘Alright. I’ll talk to them.’

FILE#3:

Foreign Aid

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Two weeks.

For Chris, marooned on the fringes of the preparations, it passed like a waking dream. He lived a distorted copy of his real life, tinged in equal portions by nightmarish tension and an odd, unlooked-for romantic nostalgia.

Work was as he’d expected. He acted normal and watched his back. Troop movements in Assam, hostage-taking in Parana, and in Cambodia a handful of executions no one had foreseen. He handled it all with eerie calm.

At home, he dared not talk openly to Carla so they took up a bizarre dual existence, life in the house as if nothing had changed, set against hushed exchanges snatched in the secure confines of the Saab. Carla, somehow, had persuaded Erik and Kirsti to act together as the link with the ombudsmen, and she went regularly to the Brundtland to gather details from her father. Some kind of code was in use over Erik’s netlink, a fake reconciliation underway between the parents to serve as cover for the information Chris and Carla agreed in their hasty conferences in the car.

And here came the nostalgia, the bittersweet taste of something almost used up. The moments grabbed in the Saab had the tang of illicit sexual encounters, and once or twice even ended that way. And the rest of the time, acting out normality for any possible listeners, they treated each other with an abnormal tenderness and consideration. In both aspects of their new existence, they were getting on better than they had in months.

It was weird.

Two weeks, and the ombudsman came.

He disliked Truls Vasvik on sight.

Partly, it was the Norwegian thing - the same irritating aura of easy outdoor competence that he’d noticed in most of Carla’s friends on the few occasions they’d been up to Tromsö together. But more than that, it was the clothes. Here was a trained professional who, Carla claimed, earned at least the same as he did, and Chris could have bought the man’s entire outfit for less than he usually spent on a haircut. The grey wool of the jersey was stretched and pilled, the nondescript trousers were bagged in the knees and the walking boots had shaped themselves to Vasvik’s feet with constant use. The coat looked as if he’d slept in it. It only needed the carelessly-tied-back greying hair to complete the image of a teen antiglobalist who’d never grown up.

Which is exactly what he is.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said guardedly.

Vasvik shrugged. ‘I should thank you. You are taking a far greater risk than I.’

‘Really?’ Chris tried to ignore the jolt Vasvik’s comment delivered to his stomach. The set-up had left him jangled and twitchy. A shrill part of him wondered if the ombudsman was trying to psych him out. ‘I would have thought we’d both be arrested pretty fucking rapidly.’

‘Yes, we would. But your government would be forced to release me intact. That much power we still have. The police might work me over a little while they have me, but it’s unlikely to be worse than some other close encounters I’ve had.’

‘Hard man, huh?’

Another shrug. Vasvik looked around the workshop and spotted an ancient steel bar stool shoved against one wall. He went to fetch it. Chris mastered his irritation and waited for the Norwegian to come back. Again, he couldn’t be sure if Vasvik was doing it deliberately or not. The ombudsman’s detached calm was impenetrable.

Out in the rest of Mel’s AutoFix, tools whined and screeched. The noise raked along his nerves. It hadn’t been easy, finding a safe place to meet, and even now he wondered how far he could trust Carla’s boss.

‘Well.’ Vasvik dragged the stool under the jacked-up Audi Mel had left on the lifter, and seated himself. ‘Shall we talk about extraction?’

‘In a minute.’ Chris prowled the space beneath the Audi. Extraction. The way the word hung there was another jolt in itself, like walking up to Louise Hewitt at the quarterly and asking her out loud if she wanted to fuck. ‘I’m still getting used to this. Maybe I still need to be convinced.’

‘Then we’re wasting each other’s time. I’m not here to talk you into something, Faulkner. We can live without you at UNECT.’

Chris stared at him. ‘Carla said—’

‘Carla Nyquist cares about you. I do not. Personally, Faulkner, I don’t give a shit what happens to you. I think you’re scum. The ethical commerce guys would like to hear what you have, that’s why I’m here, but I’m not a salesman. I don’t have to reel you in to get my name up on some commission board somewhere, and frankly, I have a lot of better things to do with my time. You come in or you don’t. Your choice. But don’t waste my time.’

Chris flushed.

‘I’m told,’ he said evenly, ‘that UNECT recruit people, scum, like me for the ombudsmen. That’s important, because I need a job. Now. Have I been misinformed?’

‘No. That’s correct.’

‘So we could end up colleagues.’

Vasvik looked at him coldly. ‘It takes all sorts.’

‘Must be hard,’ Chris taunted. ‘Working alongside people that disgust you. Putting up with such a low grade of humanity.’

‘It’s good preparation for undercover work. Living with the stink.’

The workshop Mel had lent them had been swept for bugs an hour ago, and there was too much metalwork going on in the other shops for exterior scanning to be possible. Still, there seemed to be an audience waiting as the pause smoked off Vasvik’s words. Chris felt his fists curling.

‘Do you have any idea,’ he said, ‘who the fuck you’re talking to?’

The other man’s grin was a baring of teeth, a challenge. ‘Why don’t you enlighten me.’

‘I have treated you with respect—’

‘You’ve got no fucking choice, Faulkner. I’m your escape hatch. You want out so bad I can smell it on you. Your shrivelled little soul has finally got tired of what you do for a living, and now you’re looking for redemption with no drop in salary. I’m your only hope.’

‘I doubt you earn what I’m used to.’

‘Doubt away.’

‘Oh yeah? Blow it all on clothes, do you?’ Chris stabbed a finger at the Norwegian. ‘I know your sort, Vasvik. You grew up in your cosy little Scandinavian nanny state, and when you found out the rest of the world couldn’t afford the same propped-up artificial playgroup economic standards, you never got over it. Now you’re out there sulking and throwing moral tantrums because the world won’t behave the way you want it to—’

Vasvik examined the palm of one hand. ‘Yeah, but on the other hand I didn’t watch my mother die of a curable illness and—’

‘Hey—’

‘And then go to work for the people who made it happen.’

It was like a lightning strike. The slow burning anger sheeted to split second fury, and Chris was in motion. Attack raged at the edges of his control. A Shotokan punch to the temple that would have killed Vasvik, had it landed. Somehow, the ombudsman was not there. The stool staggered in the air, tumbled sideways. Vasvik was a whirl of black coat and reaching hands, off to one side. Chris felt his wrist brushed, turned in some subtle way, and then he was hurled across the workshop on the wings of his own momentum.

He crashed into the bench, hands trying to brace. A sound behind him and something hooked his legs out from under him at the ankles. His face smashed the bench surface among scattering drill bits and bolts. Something sharp gouged his cheek in passing. He felt Vasvik’s weight on him and tried to kick. The Norwegian locked his arm up to the nape of his neck, grabbed his head by the hair and rammed it back down on the bench sideways.

‘Mistake,’ he gritted in Chris’s ear. ‘Now, you going to behave, or am I going to break your fucking arm?’

Chris heaved up once against the weight, but it was useless. He slumped. Vasvik let go suddenly and was gone. Somewhere behind him, Chris heard the ombudsman picking up the stool. When he got himself upright and turned, Vasvik was seated again. There was a faint beading of sweat across the pale forehead, but otherwise the fight might never have happened.

‘My mistake,’ he said quietly, not looking at Chris. ‘I shouldn’t have let you get to me like that. In a Cambodian enterprise zone, that kind of giveaway’d get me a bullet in the back of the head.’

Chris stood there, blinking tears. Vasvik sighed heavily. His voice was dull and weary.

‘As an operational ombudsman, you’ll earn approximately a hundred and eighty thousand euros a year, adjusted. That includes a hazardous-duties bonus, which you can reckon on getting for about sixty per cent of the work you do. Undercover assignments, swoop raids, witness protection. The rest of the time they keep you on backroom stuff. Admin and forward planning. That’s so you don’t burn out.’ Another deep breath. ‘Housing and schools for your kids are free, accommodation and expenses while on assignment, you claim. I’m sorry for that crack about your mother. You didn’t deserve that.’

Chris coughed a laugh. ‘Told you I made more than you.’

‘Yeah, well fuck you then.’ Vasvik’s voice never lifted from the tired monotone. His gaze never shifted from the corner of the workshop.

‘Do you like it?’ Chris asked him finally.

The ombudsman looked at him. ‘It matters,’ he said, pausing on each word as if English were suddenly difficult for him. ‘You’re doing something that matters. I don’t expect you to understand that. It sounds like a bad joke, just saying it. But it means something.’

They faced each other for a while. Then Chris reached into his jacket and pulled out a plastic sheathed disc.

‘This is a breakdown of the accounts I service for Shorn. There’s nothing here you can use, but anyone who knows the ground will be able to work out what I know. Take it back and ask them if I’m worth extracting. I want the package you just talked about, plus a million-dollar or -euro equivalent payout on extraction.’

He saw the look on Vasvik’s face. He heard his own voice harden.

‘It’s not negotiable. I’m losing heavily if I pull out now. I’m plugged in here. Comfortable. Stock options, executive benefits. The house. Industry rep, client connections. All of that’s worth something to me. You want me, you’ve got to make it worth my while.’

He tossed the disc across. Vasvik caught it and examined it curiously. He looked back up at Chris.

‘And if we don’t want you that badly?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Then I’ll stay here.’

‘Yeah? You sure you’ve still got the stomach for that?’

‘I’m not like you, Vasvik.’ Chris wiped at the gouge in his cheek and his fingers came away specked with blood. ‘I’ve got the stomach for whatever they can feed me.’

Vasvik left in the back of a covered truck, supplied by Mel and on its way to Paris for Renault parts. Jess drove, no shotgun rider along. UNECT operatives would vanish the ombudsman at the other end. No questions. Carla had sold the whole thing to Mel as wrangling over preferential supply contracts, a new covert bid from Volvo coming in to upset the BMW status quo at Shorn. Both Mel and Jess hated BMWs with a deep and abiding passion, and as far as they were concerned anything that might reduce the number of them on the streets of London just had to be a good thing, dear, just had to be.

Carla came in a couple of minutes later, a welding mask still pushed up on her head. Chris was trying to assess the damage to his face in a propped-up fragment of mirror he’d found on the floor.

‘What did you say to him?’ she asked angrily.

Chris pressed at his cheek, peering at the gouge in the mirror shard. ‘I told him our terms. And I gave him the disc. Went like swimming.’

‘You had a fight, didn’t you.’

‘We had a minor disagreement.’ He gave up on the mirror and turned to face her. ‘I said some things I shouldn’t have. Then he said something he really shouldn’t have. Took a while to straighten out.’

‘He’s trying to help you, Chris.’

‘No.’ He couldn’t keep the snap out of his voice. ‘He’s looking for benefits, Carla. Just like every other fucker in this world. Quid pro fucking quo.’

She stared at him, wordless for a moment, then turned away and walked out of the workshop.

He let her go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It rained hard most of the next week, and the roads turned treacherous. As usual, patchwork repairs hadn’t stood up to the summer weather, and the various service providers were still squabbling about whose responsibility it was to put it right. Chris drove the Saab at careful velocities, getting in to Shorn later than usual and doing a lot of his phone work from the car. The datadown ran remote scrambling and patched through flagged callers on automatic.

Back to work. Back to the pretence.

It was easier now he was committed. Two weeks of jittering uncertainty, of not knowing if they’d get away with it, knowing even less what would come of the meeting - now it all gave way to solid data. He knew they wanted him now, knew at a level he could trust more than Carla’s wishful thinking assurances and his own mixed feelings. Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if they could afford him. A no-lose situation. They could afford him, he went. They couldn’t afford him, he stayed. Either way, he had work, he had guarantees. He had income.

A small part of him knew that he would lose Carla if he stayed, but somehow he couldn’t make that matter as much as he knew it should.

Back to work.

Wednesday morning, turning onto the Elsenham ramp, he heard from Lopez. Confirmation of Vicente Barranco’s arrival date.

‘It’s good,’ said the Americas agent through the crackle of the scrambler and a bad satellite link. ‘The way I figure it, you’ve got North Memorial on. You could show him round, maybe buy him a few assault rifles.’

‘Yeah, that’s. Fuck.’ His foot came off the accelerator as the realisation hit. He nearly braked.

‘Chris?’ Lopez sounded concerned. ‘You still there?’

He sighed. The car picked up speed again, down the ramp. ‘Yeah, I’m still here. I don’t suppose there’s any way you can set that date back about a week?’

‘A week? Jesus, Chris, you said as soon as possible. You said you’d move things around to—’

‘Yeah, I know.’ The rain intensified as he came off the ramp. Chris turned up the wipers. ‘Look, forget it, send him anyway. My problem, I’ll deal with it here.’

‘Is this something I need to worry about?’

‘No. You did the right thing, it’s fine. I’ll be in touch.’ He cut the connection and redialled.

‘Yeah, this is Bryant.’

‘Mike, it’s Chris. We’ve got—’

‘Just the man. You in yet?’

‘On the way. Listen, Mike—’

‘How about lending me some of that old Emerging Markets background you don’t like to talk about these days, huh? You wouldn’t fucking believe what happened in Harbin this morning.’

‘Mike—’

‘You remember that thing we were putting together with the guys in EM? The transport net sell-off?’

Chris gave up and searched his memory. The north-eastern end of the former People’s Republic of China wasn’t his sphere of interest. Outside the tendencies of ethnic Chinese where Tarim Pendi was concerned, he didn’t pay the area much attention. And his dealings with Shorn’s Emerging Markets division had been minimal so far. They were a hard enough bunch, but still pretty urbane by CI standards.

Still, listening to Mike’s tale of woe might help take the sting out of the minor fuck-up he had to report.

So think.

He recalled a late night wine bar bitching session a week back. Mike and some elegant Chinese woman from Shorn EM. Crossover with an old CI account, guerrilla figures from the last decade, now snugly installed as political leaders. Privatisation schematics and character assassination of the major players. Who could be trusted further than they could be thrown. Macho stuff. The wine had been crap.

‘Chris?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ He groped after a name. ‘The Tseng thing, right?’

‘Right.’ It was hard to tell if Bryant was angry or amused. ‘Had it all lined up and ready to roll. Now some shithead civil servant has taken out, get this, a fucking injunction to prevent the sell-off. They’re claiming it’s unlawful under the ’37 Constitution.’

‘Well, is it?’

‘How the fuck would I know? I’m not EM, am I? Irene Lan’s team handle the legal stuff.’

‘Well, can’t you, I don’t know, pass a law or something? Change the current law? It’s not like this is Conflict as such. You are the government out there.’

Mike sighed audibly. ‘Yeah, I know. Fucking politics. Give me a Kalashnikov and a dickhead to fire it any day. So. What’s up?’

‘What?’

‘You sounded worried.’

‘Ah, yeah. Just a glitch. Barranco’s down to arrive in London on the eighteenth—’

‘The eighteenth. Ah, fuck, Chris. That’s two days after Echevarria. ’

‘I know.’

‘Couldn’t you have—’

‘Yeah, my fault, I know. I gave Lopez carte blanche to get him here asap. No other parameters.’

‘Carte Blanche?’ He could hear Mike grinning. ‘Who’s she? Yeah, alright, I don’t suppose it matters much. We’d better just make sure they don’t bang into each other in a corridor.’

‘Or at the North Memorial. I was thinking—’

Impact!

The meaty crunch of metal on metal. The Saab jolted hard left and started to skid from the back. His foot slipped on the accelerator and he felt the treacherous slither as the wheels spun in water.

‘Fuck!’

‘Now what?’ Bryant, through a yawn.

He fought the skid, shedding speed as fast as he dared. Eyes ripping across the mirrors, searching for the other car. Teeth gritted.

‘Where are you, motherfucker?’

‘Chris? You okay?’

Another crunch from the rear. He wasn’t yet fully out of the skid and it sent him slithering again. He hauled on the wheel.

‘Motherfucker!’

‘Chris?’ By now, Mike had got it. His voice came through urgent. ‘What’s happening out there?’

‘I’m—’

Impact, again. He thought the Saab might spin clear round this time. Fighting it, he caught a glimpse of the other vehicle as it pulled clear. Primer-grey, looked like an old Mitsubishi from what he could see of the lines, but with the amount of custom-built armouring, it was hard to tell.

No-namer?

It was coming back, and the skid—

He made the decision too fast for it to register until afterwards. As the other car leapt forward, he jerked the wheel back the way he’d hauled it and opened the skid up. His guts sloshed. The no-namer struck, but Chris had read the manoeuvre correctly. With the spin on the Saab, his attacker’s impact was a barely felt jab, in a direction he was already sliding.

The Saab spun about.

For a heartbeat they were parallel, facing each other. He saw a pale face, staring through the windscreen of the other car. Then it was gone, past him southward as he braked the Saab to a wagging halt, pointed north.

Rain drummed down on the roof. He felt his pulse catch up.

‘Chris?’

‘I’m fine.’ He slammed the car into gear and cut a sharp U-turn, peering through the sluicing water across his windscreen. Up ahead, he spotted brake lights. ‘Some. Motherfucker. Is about to have his chassis squeezed.’

‘You’re fighting a challenge?’

‘Looks like it.’ He took the Saab up through the gears, pushing each one as hard as he dared in the rain. The brake lights ahead of him went out and he had to work to spot the outlines of the other car. ‘Guy just landed on me, Mike. No-namer, and no warning.’

He frowned. And no proximity alarm.

‘Chris, call Driver Control.’ Bryant sounded worried. ‘You don’t have to drive this, if he hasn’t filed. He’s in breach of—’

‘Yeah, yeah. Be with you in a minute.’ The car was swelling in his forward view, moving but throttled back, waiting for him. ‘Come on, you fucker. Let’s see what you’ve got.’

The grey car braked suddenly, trying to get behind him. He matched the manoeuvre and slewed into the vehicle’s side. Metal screeched and tore. His wing mirror went, ripped free and bouncing away in their wake like a grenade. He looked across and made eye contact through windows streaming with rain. He saw the other driver flinch.

The side-to-side clinch came apart. The no-namer picked up escape speed. Chris grinned savagely.

Rattled.

He went after him.

His own shock was ebbing now, pulse coming down, brain working. Time to kill this piece of shit. Bryant seemed to have rung off, and the only sound was the roar of the engine and the hammering rain. The other car held him off. Neither driver could afford to go flat to the floor in a rain duel, and the no-namer was cool enough to know it. Chris stopped trying to close the gap, and thought about the road ahead.

‘This is Driver Control.’

He glanced down at the radio in surprise.

‘Yeah?’

‘Driver clearance 260B354R, Faulkner, C. You are engaged in an unauthorised duel—’

‘Hardly my choice, Driver Control.’

‘You are required to disengage immediately.’

‘No fucking way. This piece of shit is going down.’

A pause. Chris could swear he heard a throat being cleared.

‘I repeat, you are required to disengage and—’

‘Have you tried telling that to our little primer-painted friend?’

Another pause. The gap was less than ten metres. Chris upped his velocity, higher than he could afford on the rain-slick road. He felt a tiny bubble of fear rising in his chest with the knowledge.

‘Your opponent does not respond to radio address.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll just go talk to him.’

‘You are required, immediately, to—’

He flattened the accelerator, momentarily, and clouted the no-namer across the driver-side rear wing. Driver Control wittered from the speaker as the Saab slipped and he dropped speed, fighting the urge to brake hard. The no-namer was trying to slow down. He drifted across and blocked the move. Another clank as they jammed together, nose to tail. The other car flailed spray off the road as it tried to pull away and lost purchase in the wet. Chris felt his upper lip peel back from his teeth. He pulled fractionally left, shivery with the lack of firm control he had over the Saab, and accelerated again.

‘Good night, motherfucker.’

He hit at an angle and the skid kicked off in both cars. He felt the Saab start to skate from the front, saw the other car doing the same from the rear, in graceful mirror image. Fragments of control left to him, like sand through his fingers. He made a noise behind his teeth and fed all he had to the engine. Hard and fast and raking uncontrolled across the no-namer’s sideways-skating rear fender. Enough to push the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption for either of them. The nose-to-tail clinch came apart like a stick broken across a knee.

It was like cutting a cable.

Loss of control, seeming weightlessness, something approaching calm as the Saab spun out. For a timeless moment, it was almost quiet. Even the snarl of the frustrated engine seemed to fade. Then, he felt a sideswiping impact as the two cars glanced off each other in drunken ballet. The Saab lurched. Time unlocked again. He was on the brakes. His hands were a blur on the wheel, hopelessly late behind the uncontrolled motion of the vehicle. The rain took over. In the windscreen, it seemed to curtain back momentarily, to show him the embankment, coming up fast.

Deep breath.

The Saab hit.

The force of impact lifted the car up on two wheels. It hung there for a moment - he had time to see the grass on the bank flattened against the passenger side window - then fell back to the asphalt, hard. The landing snapped his teeth together and clipped a chunk out of his tongue.

For what seemed a very long time, he sat in the stilled car, arms on the wheel, head down, tasting the blood in his mouth.

The steady drumming of rain on the roof.

He lifted his head and peered out across the carriageway. Fifty metres off in the slashing grey, he spotted the other car jammed against the crash barrier. There was steam pouring out of the crumpled hood.

He grunted, and sucked at the damage to his tongue. One hand crept out more or less automatically, knocked on the hazard lights, killed the Saab’s engine, which - I fucking love you, Carla - had not cut out. He opened the glove compartment and found the Nemex. Checked the load and snapped the slide.

Right.

He cracked the door and climbed out into the rain.

It drenched him before he’d gone half the distance to the other car, plastered his shirt to transparency on his body, turned his trousers sodden and filled his Argentine leather shoes. He had to blink the stuff out of his eyes, rake his hair back from his face to peer into the wrecked car. It looked as if the other driver was trapped in his seat, struggling to free himself. Oddly, the expected victory surge didn’t come. Maybe it was the rain that dampened the savagery, maybe a rapidly assimilating picture of angles that didn’t fit.

No proximity alarm.

No filed challenge.

He stared at the side of the primer-painted vehicle. There was no driver number anywhere on the body.

No point.

He circled the wreck warily, Nemex held low in both hands, as Mike had shown him. He blinked rain out of his eyes.

The other driver had the door open, but it looked as if the whole engine compartment had shifted backwards with the impact and the steering column had him pinned back in the seat. He was young. Not out of his teens, by the look of it. The unhealthy pallor of his skin suggested the zones. Chris stared at him, Nemex down.

‘What the fuck did you think you were doing back there?’

The kid’s face twisted. ‘Hey, fuck you.’

‘Yeah?’ The anger came gushing up, the memory of the attack suddenly there. He sniffed the air and caught the scent of petrol under the rain. ‘You got a cracked fuel feed there, son. You want me to fucking light you, you little shit?’

The bravado crumpled. Fear smeared the kid’s eyes wide. He felt a sudden flush of shame. This was some car-jacker barely out of nappies, some joy-rider who

just happened to jack an unnumbered crash wagon? Some joy-rider who just happened to be cruising a motorway ramp an hour out of town? Who decided to take on an obvious corporate custom job whose proximity alarm just happened to fail? Yeah, right.

Chris wiped rain from his face, and tried to think through the adrenalin comedown and the drenching he was getting.

‘Who sent you?’

The kid set his mouth in a sullen line. Chris lost his temper again. He took a step closer and ground the muzzle of the Nemex into the boy’s temple.

‘I’m not fucking about here,’ he yelled. ‘You tell me who you’re a sicario for, I might call the cutters for you. Otherwise, I’m going to splash your fucking head all over the upholstery.’ He jabbed hard with the gun, and the kid yelped. ‘Now, who sent you?’

‘They told me—’

‘Never mind what they told you.’ Another muzzle jab. It drew blood. ‘I need a name, son, or you’re going to die. Right here, right now.’

The kid broke. A long shudder and suddenly leaking tears. Chris eased the pressure on the gun.

‘A name. I’m listening.’

‘They call him Fucktional, but—’

‘Fucktional? He a zoner? A gangwit?’ He jabbed the gun again, more gently. ‘Come on.’

The kid started to cry out loud. ‘He run the whole estate man, he’s going to—’

‘Which estate?’

‘Mandela. The crags.’

Southside. It was a start.

‘Okay, now you’re going to tell me—’

‘STAND AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE.’ The sky filled with the metal voice. ‘YOU ARE NOT AUTHORISED ON THIS STRETCH. STAND AWAY.’

The Driver Control helicopter swung down from the embankment where the Saab had wound up and danced crabwise across the air to the central reservation, ten metres up. Chris sighed and lifted his hands, Nemex held ostentatiously by the barrel.

‘STAND ASIDE AND PLACE YOUR WEAPON ON THE GROUND.’

The kid was looking confused, not sure if he was off the hook yet. He couldn’t move enough to wipe the tears off his face, but there was an ugly confidence already surfacing in his eyes.

Well, whoever said a good driver had to be smart as well.

‘I’ll be talking to you later,’ Chris snapped, wondering how the hell he was going to ensure it happened. Estate ganglords had a nasty habit of disappearing their sicarios when they became a liability, and he didn’t have much faith in the regular police’s ability to keep undervalued zone criminals alive in custody. He’d have to call a contractor, get private security onto the cutting crew and trace the kid to whatever charity clean-up shop they dumped him at. Then talk to Troy Morris about the southside gangs.

He backed off a half-dozen steps, bent and placed the Nemex on the ground, then straightened up and spread his arms at the helicopter.

‘RETURN TO YOUR VEHICLE AND AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. ’

He went, arms still raised, just in case.

He was about halfway back when the gatlings cut loose.

The sound of whining, whirling steel and the shattering roar of the multiple barrels unloading. He hit the asphalt, face down, a pair of seconds before the realisation hit him, that they were not firing at him, could not be because he was still alive. He lifted his head a cautious fraction, craned it to look back.

The helicopter had sunk almost to asphalt level, and swung around, nose to nose with the wrecked car. Later, he guessed the manoeuvre was intended to keep him out of the field of fire. The zone kid must have got it head-on, the full fury of the gatling hail as it tore through the windscreen and everything behind it.

The tank went up with a dull crump. Chris clamped his hands over his head, face to the road. An insanely calm part of him knew there wouldn’t be much shrapnel off a vehicle that armoured, but you always had glass. He heard some of it hiss past.

The gatlings shut off. In their place, there was a greedy crackling as the fire took hold in the wreck. The departing throb of the helicopter. He lifted his head again, just in time to see it disappear over the embankment the way it had come. Flames curled from the strafed car, bright and cheery through the rain. Thinking about getting up, he heard a sudden ripple of explosions and flattened himself to the asphalt again. Slugs in the abandoned Nemex, he guessed, cooked to ignition point by the backwash of heat from the fire. He stayed down. The fucking Nemex. He found himself grinning.

Louise will be pleased.

Finally, he judged it safe and picked himself up. He lifted his arms wide and stared down at himself. His shirt was sodden and grimed from contact with the road, but there was no blood that he could find. No pain but the faint sting of abrasions on his palms and a couple of numb spots on hip and knee. He couldn’t tell if he’d done any serious damage to the suit trousers, but he guessed they were as soiled as the shirt.

In the wreck, the rain was already beating out the flames.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The inquest was held, in stark corporate style, around a huge oval table in Notley’s penthouse conference chamber. Shorn had given the public sector three days - overly generous in my opinion, was Hewitt’s comment - and now it was smackdown time.

The conference chamber was an apt arena. The walls were full of violent commissioned art from the new brutalist school, solid blocks of primary colour dumped amidst vague scattered scrawls that might have been writing or crowds of tiny people. Obvious videoscan units gleamed beadily from the ceiling, but there was a standard forty-second delay on the recording system, and two Shorn lawyers sat in, to make sure anything potentially awkward got stopped before it was halfway said. In the run-up, Chris and Mike both got repeated briefings from the legal team until they were coached almost to a line. Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton joined Notley to form an operational quorum, though everybody on the corporate side of the table knew no serious decisions would be taken at this particular meeting. This was noise-making. Shorn was coiled up like a rattle-snake, signalling loud offence. Any genuine strike would come later, when no one was around to take notes.

Across the table from Chris sat the crew of the helicopter and the Driver Control duty officer from the day of the duel. They were recognisable by their suits - you could have bought any three of the outfits they wore for the price of Jack Notley’s shoes.

Between Notley and the duty officer sat the Assistant Commissioner of Traffic Enforcement and the District Police Superintendent for London South Nine. Holographically present at the opposite end of the table, the current Minister for Transport floated like an apologetic ghost.

‘What remains most disturbing about this matter,’ said Notley, as the recriminations began to run down, ‘is not the type of response elicited from Driver Control, but the rapidity of that response. Or should I say the lack of rapidity.’

The duty officer flinched, but stoically. He’d already had a pretty rough ride and he was learning not to react. Any attempt at defence from the public sector players around the table had led to a shredding at the hands of the Shorn partners. Hewitt led, wet-razor-swift and slicing, Hamilton provided soft-spoken, insolent counterpoint and Notley came in behind, picking up the points and swinging the mace of Shorn’s corporate clout. There wasn’t a person in the room, the Minister included, whose job was secure if Notley decided the time had come to slop the coffee cup hard enough.

The Assistant Commissioner, nobly, essayed a rescue. She’d been working salvage throughout the meeting. ‘I think we’re agreed that the response team would have been scrambled earlier if Mr Bryant’s original emergency call had been supported by Mr Faulkner’s responses to radio communication. The recording shows—’

‘The recording shows an angry executive, acting unwisely,’ said Louise Hewitt, with a thin smile in Chris’s direction. ‘I think we can all understand how Chris Faulkner felt, but that does not mean he reacted correctly. He was, shall we say, overwrought. As duty officer, with the advantage of a detached view, it was your job to realise that and react accordingly.’

The duty officer met her gaze bravely. ‘Yes, I appreciate that. I should not have allowed an executive to override my professional instincts. I shall not let it happen again.’

‘Good.’ Hewitt nodded and scribbled on her display pad. ‘That’s noted, and appreciated. Superintendent Lahiri, can we go back to the matter of the criminal who, according to Chris Faulkner’s testimony, was responsible for hiring the sicario.’

The superintendent nodded. He was a wiry, tough-looking man in his fifties, an obvious hangover from the autonomous days. He had kept quiet for most of the proceedings and watched the interplay with shrewd attention. When he spoke, it was with the precision of a man who measured and cut his sentences before uttering them.

‘Khalid Iarescu, yes. He has been arrested.’

‘Has he confessed?’

Lahiri frowned. ‘He is a career criminal, Ms Hewitt. Simply arresting him has caused serious injury to three of my men. We are unlikely to extract a confession.’

‘Can’t we put pressure on his family?’

‘Not without further large-scale incursions into the southside, and that I would not recommend. The populace is already stirred up more than we’d like. And Iarescu has unchallenged control of the Mandela estate, as well as agreements with the ganglords in neighbouring areas. His immediate family are doubtless already well hidden and protected. And his lawyers are now attempting to have him released under the Citizen’s Charter.’ Lahiri spread his hands. ‘I can have him charged with resisting arrest, maybe with one or two outstanding drug offences, but beyond that, I am not hopeful. Even within that framework I am not hopeful that we can secure a conviction. Khalid Iarescu is a well-connected man.’

Bryant snorted. ‘He’s a fucking gangwit, is what he is.’

Notley cut him a sharp look. ‘The name, Superintendent. It’s what, Hungarian?’

‘Romanian. That is, his father was a Romanian immigrant. His mother is Moroccan.’

‘Can we threaten him with expulsion?’ Notley had shifted focus. The question was addressed to the Minister.

The holo shook its head regretfully.

‘No, I’ve examined the files. Both parents were naturalised. He is, in technical terms, as English as you or I.’

Notley rolled his eyes.

Hamilton made a sleepy gesture. ‘Just a thought. The boy who actually stole the car. He had family?’

‘Yes.’ Lahiri looked down at his notes, did not look up again while he spoke. ‘The Goodwins. Mother and father, two brothers and a sister. They’ve been evicted. As per policy.’

‘Yes, good.’ Hamilton reached for his glass of water and sipped at it. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance that this Iarescu will be seen to associate with them. Offer them succour, so to speak. Solidarity from the estate patriarch. The, uh, big man ethos.’

Lahiri shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that, sir, outside of the movies. Iarescu is a successful criminal. He knows the ropes both within and without the zones. If anything, he will distance himself from the whole affair. In fact,’ - a hesitant look at Chris - ‘I’m afraid there really is nothing substantial to make the connection in the first place.’

Chris held down his temper. They’d been round this block before. ‘I told you what I heard, Superintendent. I didn’t imagine it. The boy named the estate, and Iarescu.’

‘Yes, I understand that, sir. But you must see that this in itself is not evidence. No, please.’ He raised a hand. ‘Hear me out. In gang culture, status is accorded by association. The boy may have believed that by naming a major player as his sponsor, he could protect himself.’

‘Fascinating,’ murmured Hamilton. ‘Almost talismanic, isn’t it. Almost tribal.’

Lahiri’s lip almost curled. ‘Moreover, the tag Fuktional is close to generic. In the southside zones alone, you have gang leaders styling themselves Fuktion Red, Sataz Fuktion, Fuktyal, Fuktyal Bass. The list goes on. Gang culture is mimetic, imaginative only within very limited given parameters. To my ears, what you heard has the ring of stock response.’

Chris shook his head.

‘Do you have something fresh to add, Chris?’ asked Louise Hewitt sweetly.

Silence. Some shuffling from the duty officer. The Minister’s holo checked its watch, surreptitiously. Jack Notley uncapped an antique fountain pen with a loud snap.

‘Well, then,’ he said briskly. ‘If we can proceed to recommendations. ’

‘Motherfucking whitewash bullshit.’ Chris wasn’t sure if Mike’s place was secure or not; pre-Vasvik, he’d never even have given it consideration. Now he just didn’t care. The long squeeze of keeping to the Shorn script had festered in him for too long. ‘Fucking lies and shit-mouthed expediency from end to motherfucking end.’

‘You think so?’

Mike leaned across the kitchen table with the rioja and topped up his glass. Behind the gesture, he raised his brows at Suki, who shrugged and went on sculpting roses into the carrot sections on her chopping board.

Chris missed it. ‘Of course it was. Stock response, my fucking arse. That kid was hired by Iarescu to grease me, and someone hired Iarescu to get it done. Someone with money.’

Mike was silent. Chris gestured with his wine glass.

‘You heard what Lahiri said. Iarescu’s connected, in the zones and out. This is corporate, Mike. This came down from on high.’

‘Chris, you realise how paranoid you sound?’

‘I was there, Mike. They blew that kid away to stop him talking.’

Bryant frowned and leaned back in his chair. ‘The report says he went for a weapon.’

‘Oh, Mike. He was pinned in the fucking wreckage.’ Chris caught Suki’s glance at the ceiling. She’d only put Ariana to bed an hour ago. He lowered his voice. ‘Sorry, Suki. I’m just. Upset.’

‘We’re all upset, Chris.’ Mike got up and prowled the kitchen. ‘Obviously. I mean, yeah, we can’t have just anybody on the roads, raging without authorisation. The whole damn system’ll collapse.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Mike. This wasn’t just anybody. This was allowed to happen. They didn’t scramble the heli until they knew I’d driven that little shit off the road. They did what they were told, and they let it happen. I mean, why’d you think no one got sacked? The heli crew, the duty officer—’

‘Come on. They all got reprimands. It’ll go—’

‘Reprimands? ’

‘—on their file. Christ, the duty officer got three months’ suspension without pay.’

‘Yeah, and did you see how happy he was with that? He’ll be taken care of, Mike.’

‘I think,’ said Bryant sombrely, ‘that he was happy because he still has a job to go back to. Notley could easily have kicked him into touch.’

‘Exactly. So why didn’t he? Someone’s got dual control here, Mike, and you know it. Someone’s cranking Notley’s cable.’

This time Mike Bryant laughed out loud. Suki frowned at him.

‘Michael, that’s not very nice. Chris is upset.’

‘Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just the thought of someone cranking the cables on Jack Notley. I mean come on, Chris. You know the man. Suki, you’ve met him. He’s not exactly malleable.’

They both looked at Chris. He sighed.

‘Alright, maybe not Notley. Maybe not that high up. Maybe Hewitt, she’s never liked me. Or, listen, maybe it’s as simple as Nick Makin looking for payback on that punch I landed.’ This time he caught the exchange of glances between husband and wife. ‘Alright, alright, I know. But I’m not paranoid, Mike. Someone tampered with my proximity alarm.’

‘The report said it was the rain, Chris. You saw that crack.’ Bryant turned to include Suki. ‘The mechanics at Driver Control found a leak in the access panelling on Chris’s security masterboard. It shorted out the whole alarm system.’

‘Oh bullshit, Mike. Carla checks those panels every—’ He gestured, suddenly unnerved by his lack of certainty. ‘I don’t know, every week, at least. She would have spotted it.’

He didn’t tell them that he’d had a screaming row with Carla when the preliminary results of the Shorn investigation came in. That he’d jumped automatically towards blame and belief in what Mike obviously still believed, that Carla had missed the leak.

It had taken her over an hour to talk him down.

I know what I’m fucking doing, she told him grimly, when the row had burnt itself out. If there was a crack in that panelling, someone fucking put it there, and not that long ago.

‘Carla knows what she’s doing,’ he said, staring into his wine glass.

Nobody answered him. The silence started to creak under its own weight. Chris stared at the table top, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound deranged.

‘You really believe this, don’t you, Chris,’ said Suki. It didn’t come out as supportive as she was obviously trying to be.

Chris shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I believe. Look, Mike, is it possible this is something to do with the NAME contracts? Somebody outside Shorn, I mean. Maybe I was tagged getting in and out of Panama.’

Bryant gestured. ‘You said you were careful.’

‘I was. But something is going down, Mike. I can feel it.’

Sure, something’s going down. You’re about to sell out your colleagues for a public sector sinecure with the bleeding-heart UN leech gang. That’s what’s going down, Chris.

And maybe someone knows that.

The paranoia made icy tracks down his spine.

‘Okay.’ Mike sat down again. He steepled his fingers on the table. ‘Tell you what. We’ll look into it. Unofficially, I mean. I’ll talk to Troy, get him to ask around. He’s got friends in the southside zones. We’ll see what he turns up. Meantime, we’ve got other stuff to worry about. Echevarria—’

Chris groaned. ‘Don’t remind me.’

‘—flies in Tuesday, Chris. And we’ve got Barranco arriving right behind him. Not even two full days between.’

‘The week from hell.’

Mike grinned. ‘That’s right. So tonight, let’s just forget about the whole fucking thing and get wrecked. What time you reckon Carla’ll be here?’

‘She said before eight.’ Chris glanced at his watch. ‘Maybe she got held up at the checkpoints.’

‘Want to call her?’

‘No, it’s.’ He realised how it looked. ‘Yeah, maybe I should.’

Carla was running an hour late, for no reason she felt like offering. Chris bit back his annoyance.

‘Well, when—’ he began thinly.

‘Oh, Chris, just start without me. I’m sure you’re already having fun.’

He looked round at Mike and Suki, glad he’d used the mobile and not the videophone. Bryant was leaning against his wife and nuzzling at her ear through the immaculate auburn mane. She laughed, flinched away, then reached round to grab the ends of his loosed tie and pull him close. The little scene radiated groomed marital content, a synthetic blend of sex and wealth and domesticity straight out of a screen ad. He thought suddenly of a kitchen in Highgate, and an unforgiveable wish surged up in him.

‘Well, get here as soon as you can,’ he said, and hung up.

Mike looked up. ‘She okay?’

‘Yeah, be here in about an hour. Some kind of crisis with a lubricant system.’ He smiled weakly. ‘Suppose I should be glad she’s that obsessive.’

‘Shit, yeah. If Suki was my mechanic, I’d never let her out of the fucking garage. Ow!’

‘Bastard.’

He tried to join in with the laughter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

‘Chris, you know the horse joke?’ Bryant poured more wine. ‘Guy goes into a bar and sees a horse standing there. So he goes up to him and says So. Why the long face?’

More laughter, filling up the beautiful kitchen like the smell of cooking he wasn’t invited to share. He wished Liz would hurry up and

Carla!

He wished Carla would hurry up and

And what? Come on, Chris. Finish that thought.

It must have shown on his face. Mike came across and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Ah, Chris. Come on, man. Honestly. I really don’t think you should be worrying. I mean, in the end, you trashed the little fucker. He’s smoked meat. And let’s face it, with the rep you’ve got, no one smarter than a fuckwit gang sprog is going to want to drive against you.’ He raised his glass. ‘You got nothing to worry about, man.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Midweek, Regime Change was quiet. Cheap cocktails and genteel pole dancing brought in a scattering of suits from the local offices and recently-paid zone workers who knew they’d never get in on a Friday or Saturday night. By eight-thirty or nine they were mostly leaving, the zone types headed home with their shallow finances drained, the suits going on to less genteel clubs where you could get your hands on the dancers.

‘I would have suggested somewhere else.’ Chris gestured at the centre of the Iraq Room, where a veiled woman, naked from the neck down, flexed around a newly installed silver pole to the unwinding cadences of Cairo Scene. The spectators sat at pipe tables or stood about in small knots, staring. ‘I didn’t realise.’

Liz Linshaw laughed and sipped at the pipe between them. She plumed whisky scented smoke in the dancer’s direction.

‘You don’t approve?’

‘Uh.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘Well, it’s just not what I had in mind when I. You know, called you.’

‘Chris.’ She leaned closer to beat the music, grinning. ‘You really don’t have to work so hard at not looking at her. I already know you’re an honourable man. Way past honourable, in fact.’

The dancer bellied up to the pole, slid it up and down between her breasts. Chris took a deep interest in the low hammered copper table the pipe stood on. Liz Linshaw laughed again.

‘Look.’ She leaned across to place one hand gently against his cheek and pushed his head back towards the performance. He fought down a jagged impulse to grab the hand and twist it away. ‘I mean, look, really look at her. Let’s get this over with. She’s sexy, isn’t she. Young. No, don’t look away. It’s a great body. Worked out. And worked on, obviously, unless someone invented anti-gravity fields recently. Yeah, if I were a man, she’d do it for me. She’d make me, Chris, hey, Chris, you’re blushing.’

‘No, I’m—’

‘You are. I can feel it. Your face is hot.’ She laughed again, delightedly. ‘Chris, you really are in trouble. You’re a grown man, you’ve got a dozen kills under your belt, and you can’t look at soft porn without flushing like a teenager. I mean, what do you and Carla Nyquist do in the bedroom?’

She must have seen the change in his face. Before he could move, she reached out and touched his arm.

‘Sorry. Chris, I’m sorry. That was bitchy.’

This time he did take hold of her hand. He pushed it back across the table and sat looking at her in silence.

‘Chris, I said I’m sorry.’

They were saved by the pipe waitress. She sauntered across, lifted the cage and cast a practised eye over the glowing embers of tobacco in the pan. She glanced at Chris.

‘Bring you another?’

He hadn’t smoked much of the first, it was just the price of sitting there while he waited for Liz Linshaw. He shrugged.

‘No, I think we’re pretty much done here.’

The waitress left. He met Liz Linshaw’s gaze and held it.

‘Chris—’

‘Reason I asked you here, Liz. You’ve got friends in Driver Control, right?’

She looked away, then back. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’

‘Inside sources? People who can get information for you?’

‘Is this really why you called me, Chris?’

‘Yes. You have sources, right?’

A shrug. ‘I’m a journalist.’

‘There’s something I need to know. I need to find out if—’

‘Whoa, Chris.’ She gave him a hard little smile. ‘Slow down. Now I may have just gone over the line a little with that bitchy crack about your wife. But that doesn’t mean you own a part of me. Why the fuck would I put pressure on one of my hard-won sources for you? What’s in it for me?’

‘You’re writing another book, right?’

She nodded.

‘So this is a whole chapter if you’re lucky.’ He hesitated at the edge, looking for something to fill the gap that had suddenly opened up between them. ‘You heard I was up against a no-namer last week?’

‘Yes. Inconclusive, I heard. Driver Control had to come in and mediate.’ She smiled, a little more warmly this time. ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I like you but I don’t shadow you through the net on a day-to-day basis. There was something about a software failure, the challenge didn’t register in the system or something?’

‘Yeah, that’s the official line.’

One eyebrow arched. He thought there was a little mockery in it. ‘And the unofficial line?’

‘The no-namer was never registered in the first place. Some zone kid jacked a battlewagon and tried to take me down in the rain. No challenge issued. And Driver Control didn’t mediate, they turned up with an enforcement copter after I drove the kid off the road and they fed him a couple of cans of gatling shells for breakfast.’

He saw, with some satisfaction, the way the shock went through her. How her carefully constructed cool fractured open. Her voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.

‘They killed him?’

‘Pretty conclusively, yeah.’

‘But haven’t they traced the car?’

Chris nodded. ‘To an unemployed datasystems consultant. He reported it stolen from outside his house in Harlesden about an hour after the duel.’

‘He must have known before that!’

‘Not necessarily. He hadn’t driven it for a while, apparently. Couldn’t afford to renew the licence this quarter.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Journalistic interest kindling.

‘From the look of him in the interview tape, he’d be hard-pushed to afford a full tank of fuel, let alone a licence to use it, so yes, I do. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Whoever set this up is a long way up the chain from either him or the kid who nicked the car. And whoever set this up also has their claws into Driver Control.’

‘Alright, I’ll buy that. What else do you have?’

‘That’s the lot.’ He wasn’t about to get into the Mandela estate connection. Troy Morris was already running down rumours across the southside, asking softly after Robbie Goodwin’s displaced family, trying to find a safe approach to Khalid Iarescu’s underworld machine. The last thing he’d need was a high-profile journalist crashing the zones and stirring things up. Liz Linshaw was most use where she already was - highly placed in the world of competition driving, reeking of cachet and connection.

She smiled, as if she could read his thoughts.

‘No, there’s more. You just don’t feel like telling me right now.’ She shrugged. ‘ ’sokay, I can live with that. Sure, I’ll talk to some people I know. Shouldn’t take much leverage to see if something’s being covered up. I can take it from there.’ She picked up the pipe and drew on it. Inside the cage, the last of the embers flared. ‘You understand, this doesn’t come for free. I do it, and you’ll owe me, Chris. Big time.’

‘Like I said, it’ll make a chapter of—’

‘No.’ She shook her head, and her hair fell across her face. It made him want to clear it away with one hand. ‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘So what do you mean?’

The corner of her mouth quirked and she looked away. ‘You know what I mean, Chris.’

That sat between them for a while, smouldering out like the pipe.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘I know, Chris. I know. In fact, I’ve seen it all before. You’ve got some stuff you’ve got to work through. Don’t worry about it and. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not short of male company, believe me.’

‘You seeing Mike again?’ It was out before he could stop himself.

She raked fingers into her own hair and grinned up at the corner of the room. ‘That really is none of your business, Chris.’

‘I’m not like him, Liz.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘I don’t see the women around me as. Product.’ The images from the porn segment glowed in his head. Studded leather parting buttocks, encircling breasts impossibly full. Fully clothed, the Liz Linshaw sitting opposite him shrugged.

‘Mike Bryant knows what he wants, and he takes it and then he looks after it as best he can. I don’t think his morality stretches much further than that, but he does at least know what he wants.’

Her eyes flickered up to meet his. She was still smiling.

‘Listen, Liz. That night, I.’ He swallowed. ‘I’m having some problems with my marriage, but that doesn’t mean I—’

‘Chris.’ He’d never in his life been interrupted so gently. ‘I don’t care. I want to fuck you, not replace your wife. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. You came home with me that night, and you grabbed hold of the merchandise when it was on display. Whatever’s going on in your relationship with Carla, you might as well have fucked me then. You’ve got the same guilt, and the same hard-on for me. The fact you didn’t do it is a technicality.’

‘You—’

She waved it off. Getting up, shouldering her way into her jacket.

‘I’ll get back to you about Driver Control. But the next time you get a bed for the night at my place, you’ll work your passage.’

In the end, the pipe waitress came and told him he’d have to order something else if he wanted to sit there any longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lopez routed Barranco’s flight plan through Atlanta and Montreal before a dawn arrival at Reagan International, New York, where a Shorn jet would pick the two of them up under paperwork that identified them as economic advisers for the Parana Emergency Council. Lopez spoke Brazilian Portuguese almost as well as his native Spanish, and Barranco, like most political figures in Latin America these days, had enough to get by. Lopez was betting security at Reagan International would neither know the difference nor care.

Apparently, his assessment was on the nail. The Shorn jet lifted without incident and touched down in London just after lunch. Chris rode the courtesy copter out to meet it.

‘Señor Barranco.’ He had to shout above the racket of the rotors and the unseasonally cold wind that came buffeting across the asphalt of the private carriers’ terminal. His grin felt sandblasted onto his face. Armed security stood around in suits, jackets whipping up constantly to reveal their shoulder holsters. ‘Welcome to England. How was your flight?’

Barranco grimaced. He looked good in the smart-casual mobile consultant wardrobe Lopez had disguised him with, but above the knitted wool jacket his face was smeared with jet lag.

‘Which flight do you mean? I seem to have been in transit for a week. And now a helicopter?’

‘Believe me, Señor Barranco, you wouldn’t want to drive through this part of London. Is Joaquin Lopez with you?’

Barranco jerked a thumb back at the Shorn jet. ‘He’s coming.’

Lopez appeared in the hatch and clambered down, followed by two more men with baggage. He grinned and waved at Chris. No sign of the weariness you could see on Barranco. Beneath his mobcon clothing, there was a prowling energy that Chris guessed was chemical. In the absence of any other escort, he’d been Barranco’s only security since leaving Panama City.

Chris ushered everybody aboard the copter and into seats. The door cranked itself closed and shut out the wind with an airtight clunk. The pilot turned to look at Chris.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Take us home.’

The copter drifted into the sky. They bent away over the city. Barranco leaned across to the window and peered down at the sprawl below.

‘This doesn’t seem so terrible,’ he remarked.

‘No,’ Chris agreed. ‘From up here, it’s not.’

The tanned face turned to look at him. ‘I would not be safe walking in those streets?’

‘Depends on the exact neighbourhood. But as a general rule, no, you wouldn’t. You might be attacked and robbed, maybe just have stones thrown at you. At a minimum you’d be recognised as an outsider and followed. After that,’ Chris shrugged. ‘Depends on the kind of crowd you draw.’

‘I am not dressed like you.’

‘Wouldn’t matter. They don’t care about politics in the zones. It’s tribal. Localised gangs, territorial violence.’

‘I see.’ Barranco’s gaze went back to the city sliding past beneath them. ‘They have forgotten who did this to them.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

The rest of the flight passed in silence. They crossed the westward cordons and picked up the beacon for the West End cluster. Machines took the controls, read the flight data and drew the helicopter along a preprogrammed path. Hyde Park opened up under them. The hotels beckoned at its edge, like moored cruise liners from an earlier age.

Mike had Hernan Echevarria buried in the heart of Mayfair, well away from the modern hotels. They were playing to the dictator’s old-world pretensions. A Royal Suite at Brown’s, the whiff of two centuries’ tradition and the dropped names of European royalty along the historical guest list. An armoured Shorn limo collected Echevarria daily at the Albemarle Street frontage and ferried him about on a carefully balanced programme of meetings with senior banking officials, A-listed arms dealers and one or two house-trained political figures. Evenings were given over to opera and dinners with more tame dignitaries.

‘I’ll keep him busy,’ Bryant promised. ‘And I’ll keep him away from the Park end. You stash Barranco in the Hilton or something. Get a tower suite. I’ll cross-reference with you on programme, we’ll make sure these two guys never come within a couple of klicks of each other.’

The Hilton it was. They touched down on the tower helipad and were met by liveried attendants who busied themselves with the baggage and led Barranco and Lopez off in the direction of the access elevators. Chris went with them, mainly to take care of tips.

‘You won’t have to do that,’ he said, as the last attendant slipped out and closed the door with trained noiselessness. ‘Just sign gratuities on any room service you ask for, and we’ll cover it. I’d recommend about ten per cent. Expectations are a lot less than that, but it never hurts to be generous. So anyway, uh. I hope you’ll be comfortable.’

‘Comfortable?’

Barranco stood in the midst of the suite’s opulence, looking like a hunter whose large and dangerous quarry has suddenly disappeared into the surrounding undergrowth.

Chris cleared his throat. ‘Yes, uh. Joaquin Lopez will be staying on the floor below. Room 4148. I’ve put two armed security guards into 4146 as well. The hotel has pretty good security of its own, but you can’t be too careful, even up here.’ He produced a small matt black mobile and held it out. ‘This is a dedicated phone. A scrambled line direct to me. wherever I am. Any problem, night or day, call me. Just press the dial key.’

‘Thank you.’ Barranco’s tone was distant, but if there was irony in it, Chris couldn’t hear it.

‘I thought you’d probably want to rest now.’

‘Yes, that would be good.’

‘I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine later on, and also to my wife. I thought perhaps we could have dinner together. There’s a good Peruvian restaurant in the hotel mezzanine. We could eat late, say about nine-thirty. Or if you’d prefer to stay here and leave it for another night, that’s entirely up to you.’

‘No, no. I would,’ he drew a deep, jet-lagged breath, ‘like to meet your wife, Señor Faulkner. And your colleague, of course. Nine-thirty will be fine.’

‘Good, that’s great. I’ll call here just after nine, then.’

‘Yes. Now I think I would like to rest.’

‘Of course.’

He let himself out and went down to talk to the security detachment. They were pretty much what he’d expected - two hard-faced men past their physical prime in shirt sleeves and shoulder holsters. They answered the door and then his questions with impassive calm. The surveillance equipment he’d ordered wired into Barranco’s suite stood unobtrusively on a low table to one side. Standby lights winked below the row of small liquid crystal screens. On one of them, Barranco had already collapsed onto a bed, fully clothed. Chris bent and peered.

‘He asleep?’

‘Out like a light.’

‘You sure he isn’t going to be able to find any of these cameras?’

‘Yes, sir. Unless he’s a surveillance specialist. And he hasn’t shown any signs of looking for them yet.’

‘Well, let me know if he does start looking.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And if he moves from the suite, I want to know before it happens. You’ve got my direct line?’

They exchanged weary glances. One of them nodded.

‘Yes, sir. It’s under control.’

He took the hint and left to check on Lopez. The Americas agent had been waiting for him. Chemical impatience made his movements about the room erratic and irritating. Chris tried to project calm.

‘No transit problems then?’

‘No, man. Onward tickets.’ Lopez grinned speedily. ‘They don’t give a fuck who you are, so long as you’re going someplace else.’

‘And Barranco? Did he talk to you at all?’

‘Yeah, he told me I was a running dog for the global capitalist tyranny, and I ought to be ashamed of myself.’

‘No change there, then.’ Chris wandered across to the window and stared out over the park.

‘Yeah, you want to watch him, Chris. He’s out of his depth with all this corporate stuff, he’s going to be defensive. Most likely, he’ll cling to what he knows. My guess is you’re going to hear a shitload of out-of-date dogma this week.’

‘Well, he’s entitled to his point of view.’

That cracked Lopez up.

‘Yeah, ’s a free country,’ he chortled. ‘Right? Everyone’s entitled to their point of view, right? ’s a free country! That’s right!’

‘Joaquin, you need to take some downers.’

‘No. Less time around these Marquista hero types is what I fucking need, man.’

The sudden, bright vehemence brought Chris around from his contemplation of the view. Lopez was standing glittery-eyed in the centre of the room, fists knotted, surprised by his own sudden rage.

‘Joaquin?’

‘Ah, fuck it.’ The anger fled as rapidly as it had come. Lopez looked abruptly drained. ‘Sorry. It’s just my kid brother hands me the same fucking line all the time. Running-dog capitalista, running-dog capitalista. Ever since I got my PT&I licence. Like a fucking skip-burned disc.’

‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’

‘Yeah.’ The Americas agent waved a hand. ‘I don’t advertise the fact. Little squirt’s a union organiser in the banana belt, up around Bocas, where we were. Not the kind of thing you put on a Trade and Investment CV if you can avoid it.’

‘I guess not.’

Lopez’s eyes went hooded. ‘I try to keep the worst of the shit from raining on him. I made contacts that are good for that much. And when the strike-breakers do come round, I pay his hospital bills, I feed his kids. Gets back on his feet and he drops by to insult me again.’

Chris thought feelingly of Erik Nyquist. ‘Family, huh?’

‘Yeah, family.’ The agent lost his drugged introspection. Shot Chris a sideways look. ‘We’re just talking here, right, boss? You’re not going to go telling tales on me to the partners?’

‘Joaquin, I don’t give a shit what your brother does for a living, and nor would any of Shorn’s partners. They’ve got altogether bigger game to shoot. Everyone’s got an Ollie North or two hanging in the classified record. So long as it doesn’t interfere with business, so what?’

Lopez shook his head. ‘Maybe that’s a London attitude, Chris, but it wouldn’t wash that way with Panama T & I. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find myself served with a Plaza de Toros summons like you did to old man Harris.’

‘Hey, Harris was a fuck-up.’

‘Yeah, not much of a knife fighter either, even for a gringo.’ Lopez skinned an unpleasant grin, but something desperate leaked from the edges, around the eyes. ‘Time I reach that age, I want to be out of this fucking game. I do good work for you, Chris. Right?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ Chris frowned. Candour wasn’t something he’d looked for here, weakness still less. The naked anxiety in the agent’s tone was touching him in places he’d thought long sealed away.

And we’re still not into the brutal honesty shitstorm with Barranco yet. Jesus fucking Christ

‘I mean, I called it right everywhere you asked me, right? I set up what you need, soon as you needed, right?’

‘You know you have.’ He didn’t know which direction to roll this. Maybe—

‘I know I lost it back there in the NAME, I still owe you for that, but—’

‘Joaquin, you’ve got to drop that shit.’ Chris made for the mini-bar. Shipped bottles and ice up from the chiller unit onto a table, talking as he worked. ‘Look, it was a problem at this end. I told you that, and I told you we look after our own. Just think about it. Christ, if you don’t trust me, think about the logistics of the thing. Would I have hauled your arse out of there, with all the expense we incurred, just so I could can you six weeks down the line?’

‘I don’t know, Chris. Would you?’

‘Joaquin, I’m serious. You really need to take something.’

‘You know Mike Bryant, right?’

Chris stopped, a glass in each hand. ‘Yeah. He’s a colleague, so watch what you say next, alright.’

‘You know he’s working a Cono Sur portfolio at the moment? Running contacts through Carlos Caffarini out of Buenos Aires?’

‘Yeah, I heard. Didn’t know it was Caffarini, but—’

‘It isn’t any more,’ said Lopez abruptly. ‘Last week Bryant canned Caffarini because there were call-centre strikes in Santiago, and he didn’t see it coming. Or maybe he didn’t think it was important enough to chase. Now he’s on a ventilator in intensive care until his health cover runs out, and some fucking seventeen-year-old is running the portfolio at a quarter the old retainer. They were only strikes, Chris. Management abuse of female workers, localised action, no political demands. I checked.’

Chris put down the glasses and sighed. Lopez watched him.

Fuck, Mike, why can’t you just

‘Look, Joaquin. Strikes can get out of hand, whatever the original rationale. Reed and Mason, it’s chapter one stuff. You know that.’

‘Yeah.’ The Americas agent had the manic splinter back in his tone. ‘So tell me this, Chris. What’s going to happen to me if a banana strike gets out of hand on a certain plantation up near Bocas?’

Chris looked at him.

‘Nothing.’ He kept Lopez’s eyes while it sank in. ‘Alright? Got it? Nothing is going to happen to you.’

‘You can’t give me—’

‘I am not Mike Bryant.’

The snap in his voice came out of nowhere, jolting them both. He clamped down on it. Made his hands work on the drinks. He dumped ice into two glasses, decanted rum over the cubes and swirled the mix. Spoke quietly again.

‘Look. I’m happy with what you’ve done for us and I don’t give a shit about what happened in Medellín. Forget about Caffarini and whatever’s going on in Buenos Aires and Santiago. I give you my word, you’re secure with us. Now let’s drink to that, Joaquin, because if you don’t crank down soon, you’re going to pop. Come on, this is expense account overproof rum. Get it down you.’

He offered the glass. After a couple of seconds, Lopez took it. He stared into the drink for a long moment, then his face came up.

‘I will not forget this, Chris,’ he said quietly.

‘Nor will I. I look after my people.’

The glasses chimed in the room. The liquor burned down. Outside the windows, something happened to the light as afternoon shifted smoothly towards evening.

CHAPTER THIRTY

‘I still don’t see why you want me there.’ Carla checked her make-up again in the drop-down roof mirror as Chris rolled the Saab down into the Hilton’s parking deck. ‘It’s not like I know anything about the NAME.’

‘That’s exactly the point.’ Chris scanned the crowded deck, found nothing to his liking and steered down the ramp to the next level. ‘You can get him to tell you about it. I don’t want this guy to feel he’s surrounded by suited experts. I want him to relax. To feel in control for a while. It’s textbook client handling.’

He felt her eyes on him.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

The lower level was all but empty. Chris parked a good half dozen spaces away from the nearest vehicle. Since the proximity alarm had failed on him, he’d taken to parking out in the open where the security cameras could see him. It was irrational, he knew - no one short of a full covert ops squad was going to breach the perimeter defences of the Hilton or the Shorn block in the first place, let alone have the time and skill to get through the Saab’s security locks before they were noticed. But the proximity alarm had failed. How exactly was still up for grabs, but in the meantime he didn’t intend it to happen again.

‘I’ll go up and get him,’ he said, killing the engine. ‘The restaurant’s on the mezzanine level. El Meson Andino. Mike said he’d meet us there.’

‘You don’t want me to come up with you?’

‘There’s really no need.’

He didn’t tell her that he wanted to check in on the security squad on the way, and that in some undefined way he felt ashamed of the two blunt middle-aged men and their assemblage of little screens and mikes.

‘Suit yourself.’ She dug out a cigarette and put it to her lips. She seemed to draw into herself as she lit it.

‘I’ll see you there, then.’

‘Yes.’

The security men had nothing to report. On the screen, Barranco prowled back and forth like a prisoner in a cell. He had dressed in a black dinner suit a decade out of fashion. Chris went up to collect him.

‘I don’t know much about Peruvian food,’ he said as they rode down in the lift together.

‘Nor do I,’ said Barranco shortly. ‘I’m from Colombia.’

The food turned out to be excellent, though how Peruvian it was became a matter for dispute a few glasses of wine into the meal. It broke the ice with a resounding crack. Barranco argued that a couple of dishes were pure Colombian, and Chris, casting his mind back to his time in the NAME, had to agree with him. Mike, on good social form, reasoned with great persuasiveness and almost no evidence, that the cuisine of the different regions must have inter-penetrated over time. Carla suggested rather acidly that this probably had more to do with marketing than regional mobility. Peruvian was a consumer label here, not a national identity. Barranco nodded sober approval. He was obviously quite taken with Carla, whether because of her blonde good looks or her unorthodox political attitudes, Chris didn’t know or much care. He stowed an unexpected twist of jealousy and resisted the temptation to shift his chair closer to his wife’s. Relief at the way the evening was going closed it out.

Business leaked into the conversation in low-intensity bursts, mostly from Barranco’s side and nurtured by the warmth of Carla’s genuine interest. Chris and Mike let it run, sonar-tuned for the dangers of political reefs and set to steer rapidly away where necessary.

‘Of course, solar farms are a beautiful idea, but it is the old instability argument. The infrastructure is too costly and too easy to sabotage.’

‘Doesn’t that go for nuclear power too? I thought the regime was going to build two of those new Pollok reactors.’

‘Yes.’ Barranco smiled grimly. ‘Francisco Echevarria is a close personal friend of Donald Cordell, who is CEO of the Horton Power Group. And the stations will be built a long way from Bogotá.’

Carla flushed. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Yes.’

Mike shot Chris a warning glance and picked up the bottle.

‘Señor Barranco. More wine?’

‘I had a question about Bogotá,’ said Chris, feigning memory failure. ‘Oh, yeah. Last time I was there, I saw this really beautiful church in the centre of town. I was wondering . . .’

And so on. If Barranco resented the steerage, it didn’t show. He let the tides of the conversation carry him, and stayed polite throughout. Chris knew from the look on Carla’s face that she saw what was going on, but she said nothing.

Only once, when Mike Bryant retired to the toilets for the second time, did the veneer crack. Barranco nodded after him.

‘That kind of thing’s not a problem where you work?’

‘What kind of thing?’

Carla sniffed delicately. Chris looked in the direction of the toilets. He’d honestly not thought anything of it.

‘Well,’ said Barranco. ‘I wouldn’t say your colleague has a problem. But nor is he particularly subtle about it. In the Bogotá Hilton, in a restaurant full of people, things would be a little different. Even our ruling families have to watch their drug stance in public these days.’

‘Must be why Francisco Echevarria spends so much time in Miami.’ It hit Chris, just too late, that he’d drunk a little too much.

Barranco’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, I imagine it is. Meanwhile, his father uses the helicopter gunships you buy him to firebomb coca farmers into oblivion. Ironic, isn’t it.’

The silence opened up. Carla made a small noise into it, a mixture of amusement and disgust that told Chris he’d get no help from that quarter.

‘I, uh, that isn’t,’ he stumbled. ‘Shorn policy as such doesn’t outlaw coca production. In fact, we’ve done feasibility studies on bringing the crop into the legitimate commodities market. Shorn’s Financial Instruments division actually commissioned work along that line.’

Barranco shrugged. ‘You expect me to be impressed? Legitimisation will only send coca the way of coffee. Rich men in New York and London will grow richer, and the farmers will starve. Is that part of the package you plan to sell me here, Chris Faulkner?’

That stung. More so, with the fierce satisfaction he saw rising on Carla’s face. Mike had not reappeared. Feeling suddenly very alone, he scrambled to salvage the evaporating good humour around the table.

‘You do me an injustice, Señor Barranco. I merely mention the study to demonstrate that at Shorn we are not blinded by moralistic prejudice.’

‘Yes. I find that easy to believe.’

A small, colourless smile from Carla. Chris plunged on doggedly. ‘In fact, I was going to say, the study found legitimisation on the commodities market would be too problematic to consider seriously. For one thing, there’s a very real fear that it would drain immediate finance out of practically every other investment sector. And clearly we can’t have that.’

It was meant to be funny, but no one laughed. Barranco leaned across the table towards him. His blue eyes were bright and marbled wet with anger.

‘I give you fair warning, Chris Faulkner. I have little compassion to spare for the spoilt stupid children of the western world and their expensive drug problems. I look through the lens that your free marketeers have sold us, and I see a profitable trade. So.’ A short, hard gesture, one upward-jutting calloused palm, halfway between a karate blow and an offer to shake hands. ‘Sell us your weapons, and we will sell you our cocaine. This will not change when the Popular Revolutionary Brigade takes power in Colombia, because I will not sacrifice the wealth it can bring my people. If your governments are so concerned about the flow of product, let them buy up the supply on the open market like anybody else. Then they can burn it or put it up their noses as they see fit.’

‘Hear, hear!’ Mike Bryant was back, clapping slow applause as he circled the table back to his seat. His eyes burned bright enough to match Barranco’s pale blue glare. ‘Hear, hear! Outstanding analysis, really. You were right, Chris. This is the man for us. No doubt about it.’

He seated himself with a grin.

‘Of course, it’ll never happen. Our governments don’t really care enough to take that rather obvious step. They operate a containment policy in the cordoned zones, so crack and edge addiction there costs them almost nothing. And the rich, well, you can always rely on the rich to take care of their own misdemeanours without recourse to public process.’

Barranco looked at him with open dislike. ‘Strange, then, Señor Bryant, that there should have been so much loudly publicised military activity devoted to destroying the coca trade over the last seventy years.’

Mike shrugged and helped himself to more wine. ‘Well, of course, things weren’t quite as clearly defined a few decades back. There was a lot of playing to the gallery back then.’ He smiled again. ‘Something we don’t have to worry about these days.’

‘And yet the frigates sit at anchor in Barranquilla harbour still, flying foreign flags. Our coastal waters are smart-mined in contravention of UN law and our people are showered with napalm for trying to make a living.’

Another shrug. ‘Matters of control, Señor Barranco. I’m sure you’re familiar with the dynamic. It’s distasteful, I agree, but it is the stance the Echevarria government and its creditors have settled for. That, in a very real sense, is one of the reasons why we’re all here right now. If we can reach a realistic agreement with you, Señor Barranco, you could be the man to change that stance.’

Barranco’s lip curled. Bryant, seeming to miss it, sniffed and rubbed with a knuckle at both sides of his nose.

‘In the meantime, you have my word as a representative of the Shorn Conflict Investment division that until the time comes to implement those changes, you’ll be given access to the same covert export routes Hernan Echevarria currently turns a blind eye to.’

‘You’re going to take me to the table with Langley?’ Barranco’s gaze shuttled back and forth between Chris and Bryant. His tone had scaled towards disbelieving.

‘Of course.’ Mike looked surprised. ‘Who did you think I was talking about? They’re the premier distributors of illicit narcotics in the Americas. We don’t believe in doing things by halves at Shorn. I mean, we’ll hook you up with some other European and Asian distributors as well, naturally, but to be honest none of them are in the same class as Langley. Plus you’ll probably shift the bulk of your product in Langley’s back yard anyway, and they can do pretty good onward sales to most of the western Pacific Rim if you’re interested. More wine? Anybody?’

Carla drove them home, focused wholly on the road ahead. In the dashboard-lit warmth of the car, the silence came off her in waves. Chris, still smarting from the way she’d lined up with Barranco, turned away and stared out of the passenger-side window at the passing lights of the city.

‘Well, that was fucking great,’ he said finally.

Carla picked up the motorway feeder lane. She said nothing. If Chris had looked at her, he would have seen how close to the edge they were.

‘Mike in the bathroom powdering his fucking nose, Barranco on a political rant and you backing him up every fucking—’

‘Don’t start with me, Chris.’ The Saab never wavered from its accelerating trajectory up the feeder ramp, but there was a ragged edge in Carla’s voice that did finally make him look across at her face.

‘Well, didn’t you?’

‘You should be overjoyed I did. Wasn’t that my job tonight? Make your client feel good. Relax him. Isn’t that what you said?’

‘Yeh, that didn’t mean hang me out to dry in front of him.’

‘Well perhaps you should have made yourself clearer. I’m your wife, remember, not some grinning whore out of the escort pages. I don’t do this shit for a living.’

‘You fucking enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me!’

It drew a sideways look from her. For a full two seconds she stared at him in silence, then her eyes went back to the road.

‘You going to shout like that at Mike Bryant tomorrow?’ she asked quietly. ‘For his bathroom manners?’

‘Don’t avoid the fucking question, Carla!’

‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked me one.’

‘You enjoyed watching Barranco lay into me, didn’t you?’

‘You sound pretty convinced already.’

‘Just fucking—’ He clenched a fist, clamped his mouth. Locked down the fury. Forced out the words close to normal volume. ‘Just answer me the question, Carla.’

‘You answer mine first. You ever shout at Mike like this?’

‘Mike Bryant is on my side. Whatever else he might do, whatever problems he might have, I know that much. I don’t need to yell at him.’

‘Don’t need? Or don’t dare?’

‘Fuck you, Carla.’ It was almost a murmur. The sheeting fury had guttered out inside him. It wasn’t gone, but abruptly it was cold, and that frightened him more. Frightened him because in the chill he thought he could feel something slowly dying.

‘No, fuck you, Chris.’ Her voice was barely louder than his had been, but it hissed at him. ‘You want an answer to your question? Yes. I enjoyed it tonight. You know what I enjoyed? I enjoyed seeing a man who’s fighting for something more than his fucking quarterly bonus get the upper hand for once. I enjoyed hearing someone who cares what happens to other people telling the truth about the way your sick-making little world works.’

‘A man who cares.’ Chris bounced the loosely curled edge of his hand off the window in the weary ghost of a punch. ‘Oh, sure. A man who wants to sell crack cocaine and edge to children in the zones. Yeah, he’s a real fucking hero, Barranco is. You heard what he said.’

‘Yes, and I heard Mike Bryant promise to hook him up with Langley, who supply eighty per cent of North America’s inner cities. Langley, who you work with on a day-to-day basis. And this weekend, the two of you are taking Echevarria and Barranco both to the North Memorial to sell them the weapons they need to fight each other. And now you’re taking some kind of moral stance here? Jesus Christ, you could give lessons in hypocrisy to Simeon fucking Sands. What choice have we left these people, Chris? What favours have we done them? Why shouldn’t they swamp us all in crack?’

‘I didn’t say they shouldn’t.’

‘No, because the truth is you don’t care about that either. You don’t care about anything, in fact, except making your end of the deal stick so you can stay at the top table with the other big players. That’s what this is about, isn’t it Chris?’ She laughed, something that was almost a sob. ‘Chris Faulkner, global mover and shaker. Observe the cut of his suits, the cool command he brings with him to the table. Princes and presidents shake his hand, and when he speaks, they listen. Oil flows, where and when he says it will, men with guns rise up and fight at his command—’

‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Carla.’ The anger was suddenly warming again, heating his guts, looking for the way to do damage. ‘You got such a thing for Barranco and his moral crusade, maybe you should have just gone up to his fucking room with him instead of coming home with me. Maybe a man of conscience’ll light you up a little better than I do.’

Sudden pressure across the chest, almost pain. The belt gripped him into his seat. He heard the brief shriek of tyres as the Saab slammed to a halt.

‘You fucking bastard, Chris. You fucking piece of shit.’

She sat with her fists clenched on the wheel, head down. The car stood slewed fractionally off centre beneath the sodium glare of the motorway lamps. The engine rumbled to itself. As he watched, she shook her head slowly and lifted her face. There was an unsteady adrenalin-shock smile pinned to her mouth. She shook her head again, whispered it like a discovery.

‘You piece of shit.’

It was her end-of-the-line insult, the one she’d never used on him except in play. In the whole seven years of their relationship, he’d only heard her label perhaps a half dozen acquaintances with it. Men, and on one single occasion a woman, that she wanted to wipe out of her life, and in most cases had. For Carla, it meant total shutdown. Beneath contempt.

He sat and felt it dripping off him like a physical thing.

‘You’d better mean that,’ he said.

She would not look at him.

‘This is a new level, Carla.’ He looked at his hands in the stained orange radiance coming down through the windscreen. There was a fierce exhilaration pumping through him that he dared not examine closely. ‘We haven’t been getting on, but. This is new. This is.’

He lifted a hand to gesture. Gave it up half-formed.

It must have caught her peripheral vision. She stole a glance at him. Behind her eyes he saw fear, not of him.

‘I ought to make you get out of this fucking car.’ Her voice was shaking, and he knew she was going through the same pounding near-the-edge rush. ‘I ought to make you fucking walk home.’

‘It’s my car,’ he said gently.

‘Yeah, and every centimetre I built for you, and rebuilt and rebuilt again, you ever, Chris, you ever speak to me like that again, you—’

‘I’m sorry.’ It was out of his mouth before he realised he’d said it.

And then they were groping for each other across the space between, tears spilling down her cheeks, stopped up unshed in his throat, both of them held back by the idiot grip of the belts on their bodies. The solid ground of the relationship was suddenly back under their feet, the edge was gone, shoved back from convulsively, the thundering pulse of the drop receding in his ears, the familiar warm sticky slide of remorse and regret, the

safety

of it all again, bearing them up and binding them together.

They fought loose of the belts and held each other without speaking. Long enough for the hot, wet tear ribbons on her cheeks to cool and dry against his face. Long enough for the swollen obstruction in his own throat to ease, and the locked-up trembling to stop.

‘We have to get out of this,’ she said at last, muffled, into his neck.

‘I know.’

‘It’s going to kill us, Chris. One way or the other, on the road or not, it’s going to kill us both.’

‘I know.’

‘You’ve got to stop.’

‘I know.’

‘Vasvik will come back to you. I know he will. Please, Chris, don’t fuck it up when he does.’

‘Alright.’ There was no resistance left in him. He felt drained. It occurred to him, for the first time in the whirl of the last three days: ‘Have you heard anything more?’

She shook her head, still pressed against him.

He found a single tear welling up in one eye. He blinked it away. ‘They’re taking their sweet fucking time.’

‘Chris, it’s a lot of money. A big risk for them. But we haven’t heard and that means, Dad says that means they’re going to do it. He says otherwise we’d have heard by now. They’re raising the finance, justifying it at budget level, that’s what he thinks.’

Chris stroked her hair. Even the irritation at Carla’s constant undying faith in her father’s superhuman bloody wisdom was gone, temporarily dynamited in the shock of how close they’d come to the break.

‘Okay, Carla.’ There was a mirthless smile creeping out across his face now. ‘But whatever they’re doing, they need to hurry it up. Someone out there’s trying to kill me. Someone connected. And if they can’t take me down on the road, then they’ll find some other way.’

She raised her head to look at him.

‘Do you think they know? About Vasvik?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that if Vasvik and his pals don’t get a move on, they’re going to be too late to do anything except clean up the blood. Just like Nigeria and the Kurdish homeland and every other fucking gig the UN have ever played.’

He found, oddly, his smile was gaining strength. He couldn’t pick apart the knot of feeling behind it. Carla drew back from him as if he wore a stranger’s face. He looked away from her and along the night-time perspectives of the road.

‘Doesn’t give you much hope, does it?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

They got a good day for the North Memorial. The unseasonal gales drove out the cloud over the rest of the week and by Sunday the Norfolk sky was scraped almost clear. They spotted a big jet banking lazily against the blue while they were still a dozen kilometres off.

‘Surveillance mother,’ was Mike’s opinion. ‘Probably the new Lockheed. I hear they finally ironed the bugs out of the drone retrieval. They’ll be showing off. Ah, here we go. Junction seventeen. ’

He swung the BMW into the off-lane. Behind him, someone hit a horn with what sounded like both feet. Chris turned across the back seat and saw a streamlined red Ford jockeying to get past them. Beneath the tinted glass of the windscreen, he made out an angry young face.

‘Should have indicated, Mike.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Mike squinted up at the mirror. ‘Fucking asshole. If this strip wasn’t triple-monitored for the fair, I’d fucking have you, my son.’

‘What is it?’ Barranco had been catnapping in the front passenger seat.

‘Nothing,’ said Bryant. ‘Just someone looking to die young.’

Barranco craned round to look. Chris shook his head not to worry and grinned. The traffic had been heavy all the way up from London. They must have seen close to a hundred cars since they left, and as they drew closer to the Lakenheath turn-off, the density went steadily up. Bryant wasn’t used to driving in these conditions. No one was.

The red car edged up beside them as they hit the ramp. Bryant grinned and accelerated up the slope.

‘Maybe we should have flown,’ said Barranco nervously.

‘On a day like this?’ Mike was still grinning. ‘Come on!’

The Ford came level, on the right. Chris cast an eye over the vehicle’s lines and reckoned cheap, look-good armouring. Probably a junior analyst or a recruitment sprog. No contest. He braced himself without thinking and a second later Bryant feinted sideways. The other driver spooked, braked and slewed aside. Mike carved up the space he’d left and straightened out in the middle of the lane. He started to brake a couple of dozen metres off the summit, and came to a smooth halt at the roundabout junction. He waited, eyes on the mirror. After a couple of moments, the Ford crept up and queued respectfully behind them.

‘Thank you,’ said Mike, and turned sedately onto the curve.

Barranco looked back at Chris for guidance. ‘Did this mean something?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Bryant breezily. ‘No challenges permissible on this stretch today. Just teaching the guy a little something about respect.’

Chris winked.

Ten minutes later they cleared the main gate at the airbase and a uniformed attendant waved them through into the parking segment. The place was packed with corporate battlewagons and hired limos. Here and there, one or two khaki-drab armed forces utility vehicles had been left out, mainly, Chris suspected, to enhance the genuine feel of the fair. On occasion, new developing world clients remained resolutely unimpressed by the suited godparents they had come to depend on. It helped to accentuate the military aspect, gave dictators and revolutionaries something to relate to.

As they climbed out, a trio of venomous-looking fighter planes came screaming across the airfield at rooftop height, then trailed the gut-crunching roar of lit afterburners back up into the azure sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Barranco flinch.

‘Fucking clowns,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why they got to do that.’

‘Those are Harpies,’ Barranco told him quietly. ‘Demonstrating a strafe run. They are made in Britain. Last year you sold fifteen of them to the Echevarria regime.’

‘Actually,’ said Mike, alarming the BMW, ‘they’re made under licence to BAe in Turkey. Have been for a couple of years now. This way, I think.’

He set off in the direction of the hangars, where a loosely knotted crowd could be seen drifting about. Chris and Barranco followed him at a distance.

‘You did not need to bring me here,’ muttered Barranco.

Chris shook his head. ‘I think you’ll be glad we did. The North Memorial pulls in state-of-the-art weaponry from every leading manufacturer in the world. Not just the big stuff, you’ve got assault rifles, grenades, shoulder launchers, area denial systems. New propellants, new ammunition, new explosives. Vicente, even if you don’t buy much of this stuff, you need to know what Echevarria might be deploying against you.’

Barranco fixed him with a hard look. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what Echevarria’s got, and save us both some time.’

‘Uh . . .’

‘You know, don’t you? You supply him, you pay for it all.’

‘Not me.’ He stamped down the coil of guilt inside him, shook his head again. ‘That’s not my account, Vicente. I’m really sorry. I’ve got no more access to it than you do.’

‘No, but you could get access.’

Chris coughed. Bent it up into a laugh. ‘Vicente, that’s not how it works. I can’t just walk into another executive’s office and go through his client files. Quite apart from the security systems, it’s a question of ethics. No, seriously. I mean it. I could lose my job over something like that.’

Barranco turned away. ‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked. I realise you have a lot to lose.’

It didn’t seem to be meant ironically, and Chris thought he was beginning to get the measure of Vicente Barranco enough to spot these things. Over the past two days, he reckoned he’d built some pretty solid scaffolding for his relationship with the Colombian. He’d had the man out to dinner at his home and actively encouraged Carla to reprise her solidarity of the night at the Hilton. He’d gone drinking with him in some semi-risky clubs at the edges of the cordon. And on the Saturday morning after, at Barranco’s insistence, he’d even taken him on a short tour of the eastern zones in the Saab. This last, the Colombian sat through in almost total silence until he asked the single question. Is this where you grew up, Chris?

It was the first time he had used Chris’s first name on its own. A watershed. Chris considered a moment, then he spun the wheel of the Saab and made a U turn in the empty street. He headed southward through a maze of deserted one-way systems and roads he thought he would have forgotten by now, but had not. He found the abandoned, half-built multi-storey car park that overlooked the riverside estates to the west and drove up the spiral pipe to the roof. He parked at the edge and nodded forward through the windscreen.

‘Down there,’ he said simply.

Barranco got out of the car and wandered to the edge of the deck. After a while, Chris got out and joined him.

Riverside.

The name was like a taste in his mouth. Metallic bitter. He stared down at the low-stacked housing, the shaggy green of miniature park spaces allowed to run wild in between, the oil-scummed expanses of water the estates backed onto on three sides. It wasn’t the Brundtland, he told himself, it wasn’t the labyrinthine concrete expanse of homes never designed for any but the dregs. That wasn’t it. Something altogether different had gone wrong here.

‘In my country,’ said Barranco, echoing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy, ‘you would not be considered poor if you lived here.’

‘It wasn’t built for poor people.’

The Colombian glanced back at him. ‘But poor people moved in.’

‘Well, no one else would, you see. After the domino recessions. No facilities. No local shops, no transport unless you could afford taxis or fuel and a licence. Which, increasingly, no one could. You want to get anywhere?’ Chris turned and pointed north. ‘The nearest bus stop is two kilometres that way. There used to be a rail link, but the investors got scared and pulled out. When I was growing up, a few of the ones who had jobs used to cycle, but the kid gangs started throwing stones at them. They knocked one woman right off a dock into the river. Kept dropping stones on her ’til she went under for good.’ He shrugged. ‘Having a job, a real job, marked you out.’

Barranco said nothing. He stared down at the estate as if he could push the whole place back in time and spot the woman floundering in the oiled water.

‘A couple of the kids I used to play with died that way too,’ said Chris, remembering clearly for the first time in a long while. ‘Drowned, I mean. No security fence along the wharf, see. They just fell in. My mother was always telling me not to—’

He fell silent. Barranco turned to him again.

‘I am sorry, Chris. I should not have asked you to come here.’

Chris tried on a smile. ‘You didn’t ask me, exactly.’

‘No, and you brought me nonetheless.’

The obvious question hung there in the air between them, but Barranco never asked it. Chris was glad, because he didn’t have an answer.

They got back into the car.

‘Do you guys want to see this stuff, or what?’

It had dawned on Mike Bryant that Chris and Barranco were lagging behind and he’d come back for them.

Barranco exchanged glances with Chris and shrugged.

‘Sure. Even if I don’t buy much, I’ll need to see what Echevarria might be deploying against me. Right?’

‘Exactly!’ Mike clapped his hands and snapped out a pointed pistol finger. ‘That’s the spirit.’

Inside the hangars, big air conditioning units blasted warm, spice-scented air down from the ceiling. The exhibits sat in pools of soft light, interspersed with crisp repeating holos showing them in sanitised use. Brand names hung in illuminated capitals. Logos badged the walls.

Bryant made for the assault rifles. An elegant saleswoman glided forward to meet him. They seemed to know each other far better than Mike’s visit yesterday with Echevarria would explain.

‘Chris. Señor Barranco. I’d like you to meet Sally Hunting. She reps for Vickers, but she’s a freelance small-arms consultant in her spare time. Isn’t that right, Sal? No strings.’

Sally Hunting shot him a reproachful look. Beneath her Lily Chen suit and auburn tumbling spike haircut, she was very beautiful in a pale, understated fashion.

‘Spare time, Mike? What is that, exactly?’

‘Sally, behave. This is Señor Vicente Barranco, a valued client. And my colleague, Chris Faulkner.’

‘Of course, Chris Faulkner. I recognise you from the photos. The Nakamura thing. Well, this is a great pleasure. So what can I do you gentlemen for?’

‘Señor Barranco is fighting a highland jungle war against an oppressive regime and well-supplied government forces,’ said Bryant. ‘It’s our feeling he’s under-equipped.’

‘I see. That must be very difficult.’ Sally Hunting was all mannered sympathy. ‘Are you relying on Kalashnikovs? Mmm? Yes, I thought so. Marvellous weapons, I have clients who won’t look at anything else. But you may want to consider switching to the new Heckler and Koch. Now, it’s a little more complicated to operate than your basic AK, but—’

Barranco shook his head. ‘Señorita, my soldiers are often as young as fourteen years old. They come from bombed-out villages where most of the adults have been killed or disappeared. We are short of teachers, even shorter of time to train our recruits. Simplicity of operation is vital.’

The saleswoman shrugged. ‘The Kalashnikov, then. I won’t bore you with details, they’ve been making essentially the same gun for almost a hundred years. But you might like to have a look at some of the modified ammunition we have here. You know, shredding rounds, toxic jacket coatings, armour piercing. All compatible with the standard AK load.’

She gestured across at a display terminal.

‘Shall we?’

Barranco left the North Memorial armed - on paper - to the teeth. Seven hundred brand new Kalashnikovs, eight dozen Aerospatiale shoulder-launched autoseek plane-killers, two thousand lightweight King antipersonnel grenades and two hundred thousand rounds of state-of-the-art ammunition for the assault rifles. They were unable, despite Sally Hunting’s best efforts, to sell him landmines or a complex automated area-denial sentry system.

‘No big deal,’ she told them while Barranco was with one of the clinical experts, having immune-inhibitor toxins explained to him. ‘I’ll get standard commission on the AKs. Not as much as the Heckler and Koch, obviously, they’re still trying to break the lock Kalashnikov have on the insurgency market, and they’re being very generous this year. Still, with what I’ll make off the Aerospatiale stuff and the grenades, I’m not complaining.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ growled Mike, ‘because my impression was I just handed you a crippled rabbit on a four-lane drag. You owe me big time for this, Sally.’

She twinkled at him. ‘Collect any time, Mike. I’m a busy girl, but I can always fit you in, you know.’

‘Behave.’

On the drive back, Barranco was quiet. If his new acquisitions pleased him, he gave no sign. For the whole journey he held a single jacketed rifle slug in his hand, rolling it back and forth between his fingers like a cigar. His face invited neither conversation nor comment. He looked, Chris thought in one particularly morbid moment, like a man who has just been told he has a disease for which there is no known cure.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

They dropped Barranco at the Hilton, and were about to pull away again when the security entry alarms went off in violently coloured LEDs and nasal braying. Still buried in his brooding, the Colombian had tried to walk through the scanner with the AK round in his hand. Chris nipped up the steps to the entrance and unwrinkled things, clapped Barranco on the shoulder and told him to get some rest. He’d see him at nine the next morning to go over contractual stuff. Then he piled back in the BMW and they drifted out into the sparse traffic. Mike hooked around Marble Arch and picked up Oxford Street heading east. Still plenty of light in the sky.

‘Want to get something to eat?’ Mike asked him.

‘Sure, why not.’

‘Noodles?’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Chris jerked a thumb back the way they’d come. ‘You think he’s okay?’

‘Barranco? Yeah. Just shellshocked. Probably never seen so much hardware in a single day.’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t look happy.’

Mike snorted. ‘Well he bloody should be happy. That’s the biggest single credit-card payment I’ve ever made.’

‘You didn’t buy any toys for Echevarria yesterday?’

‘On account.’ Mike grinned at him. ‘Sixty-day cancellation clause.’

‘You route that stuff through Sally Hunting as well?’

‘No way. Total account separation, remember. Anyway, Sally doesn’t get her commission unless the money clears. Wouldn’t want—’

The BMW’s phone lit up with a priority call. Mike made a quiet gesture at Chris, and answered.

‘Yeah, Bryant.’

‘Mike. It’s Troy. That stuff about Faulkner you ran past me? Something came up.’

‘Right, he’s here with me, Troy. Tell us what you got.’

There was a brief pause. ‘It’s better we meet. I don’t want to talk on this line. Can you come out to my place?’

Mike glanced across at him. Chris nodded.

‘We’re on our way.’

Troy’s house seemed strangely quiet in the early evening light. It took Chris a moment or two to understand that he was comparing it with memories of the last time he’d been here, when the party was in full swing. He got a determined lock on his creeping paranoia, and followed Mike up to the front door.

The worry must have shown on his face. Mike grinned encouragingly at him.

‘Be alright,’ he said.

Troy Morris answered the bell by securicam before he opened up, ushered them in as if there was a storm coming, and then threw every bolt and security device the door had before he spoke again. The anti-tamper unit whined rapidly up to full charge. Mike looked at Chris and raised an eyebrow.

‘Little jumpy, aren’t we?’

‘You’d better come through,’ said Troy. ‘Someone I want you to meet.’

In the lounge, a thin black man in his early twenties sat twitching restlessly in one of Troy’s armchairs. There was a scar across his lower jaw and his clothes said zone gangwit. He surveyed the new arrivals without enthusiasm.

‘This is Marauder.’ Troy told them. ‘Marauder, this is Mike Bryant. Chris Faulkner. Friends of mine.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever.’

‘Mike, Chris, you want to sit down? Get you a drink?’

Mike Bryant nodded, most of his attention fixed on Marauder. ‘Some of that Polish vodka you keep in the freezer. Small one.’

‘Chris? Single malt, right?’

‘Yeah, if you’ve got it. Thanks.’

‘Aberlour or Lagavulin? Or I’ve got Irish.’

‘Lagavulin’s good. No ice.’

‘Marauder?’

The gangwit rolled his head once back and forth, slowly. He said nothing. Troy shrugged and went out to the kitchen. They sat and waited.

The silence stretched.

‘Who you run with?’ asked Mike suddenly.

Marauder lifted his jaw. ‘Fuck’s it got to do with you?’

Chris tensed. Neither he nor Mike were carrying, and Marauder looked street enough to be a problem in a straight fight. He checked Mike out of the corner of his eye, but saw no signs of impending violence.

‘Just curious,’ said Mike lazily. ‘Just wondered what kind of fuckwit outfit lets its soldiers get strung out on the merchandise.’

Marauder sat up. ‘Hey birdshit, you want to fuck with me?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Mike Bryant’s voice was patient. ‘I’m a suit. I represent the establishment. I wanted to fuck with you, you’d be in a penal hospital donating a kidney to society and your momma’d be out on the street, evicted and giving blowjobs to pay your post-op. Sit down.’

The gangwit was up out of his chair. On the way there, he’d magicked a blade out between the knuckles of his right hand. He brandished it.

‘Hey, fuck you, birdshit.’

‘I’d put that away as well, if I were you. Touch me, and I’ll have your fucking house bulldozed. That’s a promise.’

Marauder dithered, rage etched into his stance. If Mike had got up to meet him, Chris reckoned the gangwit would already have slashed at him.

‘Ernie, put that fucking thing away before I take it off you myself.’ It was Troy, back with a tray of bottles and glasses and an exasperated look on his face. ‘What do you think this is, the Carlton Arms lounge bar? This is my fucking home.’

‘Ernie?’ A huge grin lit up Bryant’s face. ‘Ernie?’

‘You behave as well, Mike. You should know better.’ Troy nodded at the gangwit, who looked away and snicked the blade back out of sight. He lowered himself onto the front edge of the armchair. Chris felt the tension leaking slowly out of him, and breathed again. Mike examined the nails of his right hand. Troy Morris hadn’t even put down the drinks tray.

‘That’s better.’

‘Call yourself a black man,’ muttered Marauder weakly. ‘Fucking line up with them every time, you’re nearly birdshit yourself.’

‘Ah, belt up.’ Troy wasn’t even looking at him any more. He handed drinks round and parked the tray on a coffee table. Settled into the remaining armchair with a whisky of his own, and gestured. ‘This fine example of urban youth has a story to tell. I told him you’d pay him.’

‘Well.’ Mike looked up at the ceiling. ‘That seems fair. Let’s hear it. Ernie.’

There was a sullen, hate-filled pause. Everyone looked at Marauder.

‘Going to cost you,’ he said finally, looking at Chris.

‘Two hundred.’ Chris told him. ‘That’s a promise. Maybe more, if I like it.’

‘You ain’t going to like it at all,’ the gangwit sneered. He seemed to be getting back his poise. ‘You’re Faulkner. Knew that ’cause I seen you on the TV. Big popular driver, right. Well, turns out you ain’t so fucking popular after all. Turns out someone thinks you’re a fucking sellout.’

Chris felt his guts chill. ‘Go on.’

Marauder nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Crags Posse got the word. Jack a wagon, put a sicario behind the wheel. Someone paid out fifty grand to have you bunnied.’

‘That’s not so much.’

‘It is around the crags, Mike,’ Troy said sombrely. ‘You can get a sicario hit on Iarescu’s patch for a grand, grand and a half. Maybe five, if they have to go into town.’

‘Well, expenses.’ Mike gestured. ‘Jacking the car.’

Marauder sneered again. ‘Wasn’t no fucking jack, birdshit. That guy, he knew they were coming. Iarescu sent a sparkman and datarat up to Kilburn to wire that wagon two days before it was jacked. Fucking suit knew, man, they paid him for it.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Chris asked him.

‘Defector. I run with the Gold Hawks—’

Mike Bryant threw up his hands. ‘Well, why was it such a big fucking secret before, you’re telling us now like it was nothing? Fucking—’

‘Mike, shut up.’ Chris looked back at the gangwit. ‘Yeah, the Gold Hawks. And?’

Marauder shrugged. ‘Like I said, defector. The sparkman, he came over. He’s black, the Crags are a birdshit gang, they only ever tolerated him for the wirework. He’s got a new girl in Acton now, suits him to get out from under Iarescu. He told me this shit couple of nights ago. I heard Troy was asking, so. Like that.’

Troy leaned forward. ‘Now tell them what the sparkman was doing to the wagon.’

‘Yeah. Said they put in a frequency jammer.’

Chris and Mike looked at each other.

‘A what?’

‘Sparkman didn’t know much about it.’ Marauder seemed to be settling into his role as storyteller. ‘The datarat did most of the work. Seems like he told him it was a system to trick out some kind of alarm. Very expensive, he said. Iarescu got it given to him specially.’

Chris nodded to himself. ‘Uh uh. Mike? Believe me now?’

‘Shit.’ Mike threw himself to his feet. Marauder twitched, but by then Bryant was at the window, staring out. ‘Shit.’

‘You said someone thinks I’m a sellout.’ Chris focused on the gangwit. He had to ask. ‘What does that mean? Who told you? The sparkman?’

‘Sure. Iarescu was full of it, talking up how the suits were selling each other out. How this guy Faulkner wasn’t a team player, he didn’t belong and that’s how come he was getting greased.’

‘Chris, that could just be Iarescu reinforcing his own loyalty system.

Look how much better we are than these fucking suits. Fucking each other over at every opportunity. Not like us, we stand together, and I’m the best fucking boss you ever had. Someone outside Shorn could have got hold of the prox frequencies on the Saab, if they were jacked in at the right level. Lloyd Paul. Nakamura, maybe. Any of them could have bought the information.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Outside the car, it was getting dark. The buildings of the financial district loomed around them as Mike threaded the BMW through deserted streets towards the Shorn block. Most of the lights in the towers were out, and there was a ghost town hush over the whole place. The emptiness of Sunday dying, like the last day of some cycle of civilisation now reaching its end. Chris felt the chill leaking into him again.

‘Why would they do it that way, Mike? It doesn’t make sense. Why trust some punk sicario more than one of their own drivers? Comes to another tender, they can field the best they’ve got against me.’

‘Not if they wanted to use that trick with the jammer. Trade Standards authorities’d be all over them like a crack whore. They’d fine them into bankruptcy.’

‘Exactly.’ Chris shook his head. ‘It doesn’t pay a major corporation to break the rules for the sake of a single driver. Not when there’s no money in it.’

‘So maybe it was personal. Mitsue Jones’s family or something.’

‘Same applies, Mike. They lose the insurance, the pension, the bereavement pay. Fuck it, they go to jail. Nakamura would drop them like vomit, and with no corporate protection more than likely Shorn would have them greased just to make an example.’

‘If they get caught. And revenge is a powerful—’

‘You think I don’t fucking know that. I—’ Chris got a leash on himself, appalled at what he’d been about to tell the other man. ‘You’re reaching, Mike. How many families of men you crashed have come after you?’

‘None, but—’

‘That’s right. None. This is the way things get done, Mike. Road-raging is here to stay. No one breaks the rules any more. They test, they probe, they hammer out new road precedent, but nobody does this. Nobody goes to the trouble unless there’s a hard cash reason. And that means someone inside Shorn.’

‘You’re thinking Makin?’

‘Or Hewitt.’

Bryant shook his head. The Shorn block appeared and he drew to a halt a few metres off the car deck security entry. He leaned his arms on the steering wheel. Stared up at the blank face of the tower.

‘Alright.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s assume you’re right.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

‘Let’s assume the fix was in, like you said, from inside Shorn. That means you were right about Driver Control as well. You know Liz has got contacts with those guys. Maybe I’ll give her a call, get her to do me a favour and ask some questions in the right places.’

‘What?’ Chris looked round, tried to squeeze the sudden pulse of alarm back out of his voice. ‘Liz Linshaw? Ah, maybe that’s not, I mean, is that a good idea? Involving her?’

‘Relax. You could trust Liz with your life.’

‘Yeah, but. I thought you and her were, you know. Over.’

Mike grinned. ‘That woman? No way. It runs hot and cold, depends on what else is going on in our lives. But it’s like gravity. No escape for either one of us. Longer we stay apart, hotter it is when we finally fuck. The last time, she left this bite on my shoulder you wouldn’t believe.’

Chris stared hard at the dashboard. ‘Yeah? What did Suki have to say about that?’

‘Well.’ Mike’s grin turned conspiratorial. ‘You’re not going to believe this either, but you know what I did? Went back to the office, smashed myself in the nose with the end of that baseball bat I’ve got.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Fucking agony. Gave myself a serious nosebleed. Dripped it all over my practice gi. Told her I’d snagged a psycho in a sparring session.’

Chris remembered the bruised nose from a few weeks back.

‘That’s what you told me, too.’

‘Well, yeah. Didn’t want to force you to lie for me if it ever came up with Suki.’ Mike Bryant’s expression grew musing. ‘You know, if it weren’t that I already had Suki and Ariana, I really think Liz might have been the one.’

‘You think so, do you?’

Mike nodded sagely. ‘Yeah, I do. She’s really something, Chris.’

On the Shorn car deck, the Saab stood isolated in the gloom. Anyone else clocking weekend time had gone home for dinner. Chris sat in the car for a long time before he started up. The quiet whined in his ears. Across the deck, a faulty roof light spattered on and off like an obscure distress signal. It felt as if he was waiting for someone.

When he finally powered the Saab up and got out into the streets, it was like driving in a dream. The city slid by on either side of him as if cranked past on rollers. The Saab’s interior was a bubble of neurasthenic calm, a safe place he was scared he might not be able to leave easily. The dashboard and wheel, pedals and shift, gave him remote control and a distant, autopilot strength. Options murmured in his ear. Let’s go there. No, here. No. Fuck going anywhere, let’s just leave.

Leave it all behind.

He was almost into the streets of Highgate before the autopilot neurasthenia cut out and he realised this was not the way home.

FILE#4:

Capital Volatility

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Carla was already asleep when he got in. He vaguely remembered she’d told him something about a crack-of-dawn start with Mel’s recovery unit on the western periphery. Partnership trials in some structural adjustment consultancy. Chris had never heard of them, but these days that wasn’t so unusual. He had a lot less to do with adjustment programmes now he was out of Emerging Markets, and new SAP consulting groups were always springing up, like mushrooms on a manure heap. It wasn’t rocket science, after all. Slash public health and education spending, open to foreign capital flows, dynamite local blockages in the legal and labour sectors. Lie about the results, and get the local military to crush inconvenient protest. A trained ape could do it. You could get the paper qualifications by distance learning inside ten weeks. Then all it took was a suit and a driver’s licence.

He stood in the bedroom, watching Carla sleep, and was overcome by a wave of almost unbearable tenderness. He pulled the quilt up a little higher around her shoulders and she muttered something without waking. He slipped out, closed the door gently behind him and went downstairs to the study. Behind another closed door, he ran the porn segment of Liz Linshaw and her plastically enhanced playmate.

He sat for an hour, head propped on one hand, trying to sort out what he felt.

He slept badly, twisted by brutal dreams that evaporated in vague traceries of impending menace when he finally woke. Carla was gone, her side of the bed was almost cold, and light was streaming in through half-open curtains. The bedside clock said ten past eight.

‘Fuck.’

He got out from under the quilt, groped after shirt and trousers and got them on. In the bathroom mirror, he stared at the angry eyes and the stubble, picked up a razor then flung it into the basin and settled for sticking his head under the cold tap. Chilly water trickled around his neck and down his back. He raked it out of his hair, crushed a towel over his head without taking it off the rail and closed his shirt. Slung a tie around his neck. Shoes and cuffs. Wallet and watch. Into the jacket and out the d—

Keys, fuckwit.

He ran back upstairs, couldn’t find them on the bedside table. Remembered his vigil in the study, darted in and grabbed them up off the desk. He kicked the Saab backwards out of the driveway, swerved untidily round in the road at the bottom and left rubber on the worn grey asphalt as he took off westward. He made the Elsenham ramp in record time.

Rolling in past junction ten, he checked his watch. Couple of minutes off quarter to nine. Great. Fucking great. He put through a call to Barranco at the Hilton. There was no answer from the room. Growing irritation sprouted suddenly into irrational fear. He cut the connection, redialled for the security detail. Someone answered on a yawn.

‘Yeah?’

‘Faulkner. What happened to Barranco?’

‘What’s the matter, he not turn up yet?’

Chris felt a spike of ice run him through the heart.

‘Turn up where?’

The voice on the other end got suddenly deferential. ‘At Shorn, sir. Weren’t we supposed to let him go? He took the secure limo. Called Shorn for it to come and get him.’

Foot to the floor, now. Head still fogged. Think.

‘Who authorised the fucking limo?’ he grated.

‘I, uh, I can check.’

‘You do that. Do it now. And stay on the line.’ He summoned a map of the day from memory and tried to place Hernan Echevarria on it. His head refused to cooperate. Breakfast with the partners, or was that Tuesday? Touring Mil-Tac’s new smart-mine facility in Crawley? If that was it, he was already out of town, under Mike Bryant’s watchful eye. He felt the tension ease a little.

Security came back on line from their room in the Hilton. ‘Transit was authorised at partner level,’ the voice said, smug with belated relief. ‘Louise Hewitt. She said she was surprised you weren’t around to cover it.’

‘Ah, shit.’

‘Was there anything else? Sir?’

Chris made a noise in his throat and killed the connection. The Saab barrelled down the approach road to the first underpass.

He was on the raised section that ran across the northern zones when he suddenly remembered where Mike Bryant and Hernan Echevarria were that morning.

He floored it again.

The damage was done.

He knew. Jolting the Saab into a space as close to the lifts as he could get, he knew and wondered why he was still bothering. Riding up alone with the chatty elevator voice for company, he knew and nearly screamed aloud at the waiting. Shouldering past a brace of startled admin assistants on the fifty-second floor, he knew beyond doubt. Staring at the coded entry door to the covert viewing chamber, the nightmarish confirmation of its carelessly ajar angle, he knew. Still, through all the knowing, as he threw the door all the way open and saw Barranco standing there, it hit him like sludge in his guts.

Beyond the glass, Nick Makin and Mike Bryant sat with Hernan Echevarria and another uniform, apparently discussing interrogation training. Their voices strained through into the chamber. A brittle burst of laughter rang so sharp it was almost static.

‘Vicente . . .’

Barranco turned the face of a corpse towards him. He was pale beneath his tan, mouth drawn down tight. A vein beat at one temple.

‘Hijos de puta,’ he whispered. ‘You—’

In the conference room, Echevarria was nodding sagely.

‘Vicente, listen to me—’

He flinched back, went halfway to a karate guard as he saw Barranco’s eyes. The Colombian was trembling. He wondered fleetingly what combat skills honed in genuine combat would look like up against his corporate Shotokan training. Barranco looked at him with sick wonder and then turned away. He stood staring down at the desk where someone had left a bound copy of the Echevarria schedule.

‘I did not believe,’ he said quietly. ‘When the assistant told me. Asked me if I was with Hernan Echevarria. If I had got lost, and brought me here, smiling, fucking smiling. Let me in here to watch you—’

‘Vicente, this isn’t what it looks like—’

‘It is exactly what it looks like!’ The yell rang in the confines of the chamber. It seemed impossible those beyond the glass wall could not hear. Barranco lashed out with one foot. The desk skidded, spilled schedule, associated discs and papers. A chair fell, caught Mike’s baseball bat and sent it rolling.

‘Vicente.’ In his own ears, Chris could hear the pleading in his voice. ‘You must have known Echevarria was still at the table. But he’s out now. You’re in. Can’t you see that?’

The Colombian turned back to face him, crook-handed.

‘In,’ he hissed. ‘Out. What is this, a fucking game to you? What do you have in your veins, Chris Faulkner? What the fuck kind of human being are you?’

Chris licked his lips. ‘I’m on your side, Vicente—’

‘Side? On my side?’ Barranco spat on the floor. His voice scaled up again. ‘You grinning, fucking whore, don’t talk to me about sides. There are no sides for men like you. A friend to murderers,’ he gestured at the glass, eyes glistening. ‘To torturers, if it pays. You are a fucking waste, a soulless gringo puto, a stench.’

Something ripped open behind Chris’s left eye. He felt himself flinch physically with the impact. Red-veined wings billowed upward in his head. The HM file opened for him like a brightly-coloured trap door. He saw helicopters hanging from a tattered-cloud rain-forest sky, whine and clatter of gatlings, whoosh-thump of rockets. Villages in flames, cremated trees, charred bundles scattered across the scorched earth. He heard discordant jail-cell screams spiking a tropical night. A visitation he hadn’t had since the death of Edward Quain was there beside him, shouting hoarse in his inner ear.

The bat.

It was in his hand.

The door code. Five tiny queeping touches across the keypad. The glass door hinged back and he erupted into the conference.

‘Faulkner, what the fuck are you doing?’

Makin, voice almost girlish in shock.

Mike, turning from a side table where he was building drinks.

Echevarria, eyes fixed past Chris on Barranco. His swollen, old man’s face mottled and worked as he struggled to his feet. Voice reedy with outrage.

‘This is—’

Chris hit him. Side on, both hands, full swing with the baseball bat and all he had behind it. Into the dictator’s ribs. He heard the bones go, felt the brittle crunch through the bat. Echevarria made a noise like a man choking and slumped against the edge of the table. Backswing, in again. Same spot. The old man shrilled. Mike Bryant waded in. Chris stabbed him handily in the solar plexus with the bat end. Bryant staggered and sat down against the wall, whooping for breath. The other uniform bellowed and tried to get round the table to his boss. He tangled in his own chair and went over backwards. Chris swung again. Echevarria raised an arm. The bat broke it with an audible snap. The old man screamed. Back up, and swing again. He got the face this time. The dictator’s nose broke, the bone over one eye caved in. Blood ripped out, spraying warm and wet on his own face and hands. Echevarria went down and lay on the floor, curled foetally and still screaming. Chris spread his stance low and wide, and chopped down as if he was splitting logs. Head and body, an indiscriminate frenzy of blows. He heard hoarse yelling, and it was his own. Blood everywhere, running off the bat, in his eyes. The white glint of exposed bone in the mess at his feet. Choking, bubbling sounds from Echevarria.

The other uniform came flailing round the table at last. Chris, down now to adrenalin-cold clarity, swung about and let him have the bat sideways across the throat with full swing. The man jerked back as if tugged on an invisible string. He hit the floor like an upturned beetle, strangling noisily.

Everything stopped. On the floor, Echevarria made a bubbling sigh and fell silent. A metre and a half off, Nick Makin had finally made it to his feet.

‘Faulkner!’

Chris hefted the bat. His face twitched. His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a well, rasping tones unrecognisable in his own ears.

‘Back off, Nick. I’ll do you, too.’

He heard Mike crawling to his feet. He looked back to the door he’d come in, where Vicente Barranco stood staring at the carnage. Chris wiped some of the blood off his face and grinned dizzily at him. The trembling was starting to set in. He tossed the bat to the floor, next to Echevarria’s crumpled form.

‘Okay, Vicente,’ he said shakily. ‘You tell me. Whose fucking side am I on?’

‘You know, that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever seen you do.’

Mike Bryant handed him the whisky glass and went back to sit behind his desk. Chris huddled on the sofa in the blanket the paramedics had lent him, still shivering. In front of him on the table, the chess board pieces faced off against each other in the silence. The onyx gleamed.

‘Sorry I hit you.’

Mike rubbed at his chest. ‘Yeah, with my own fucking bat. Could have done without that as well.’

Chris sipped at the whisky, both hands cupped around the glass as if it was hot coffee. The spirit went down, warming. He shook his head.

‘I just lost it, Mike.’

‘Yeah, no shit.’ Bryant glared at him. ‘Think I spotted that one too. Chris, what the fuck was Barranco doing at Shorn unsupervised? You knew we had Echevarria in for budget review today. Why didn’t you take Vicente out for a drive or something? Or at least keep him in the Hilton until you could check with me.’

Chris shook his head again. The words limped out of his mouth. ‘I was running late. He went out without me.’

‘That doesn’t explain how he got in here. Who cleared him for the tower?’

‘That’s what I tried to tell you earlier. Hewitt authorised a limo to bring him here.’

Mike’s eyes narrowed. ‘Hewitt?’

‘Yeah. Louise fucking Hewitt. I’m telling you, she’s been gunning for me since the day I walked in here. She wants—’

‘Oh, bullshit!’Bryant came to his feet, hands braced on the desk. He shouted for the first time since the aftermath in the conference chamber. ‘For Christ’s sake! Now is not the fucking time for your bullshit paranoia and hurt feelings. This is serious.’

The anger evaporated as fast as it had arrived. He sighed and sat down again. Swivelled the chair away and stared out of the window. One hand opened in Chris’s direction. ‘Well, I’m open to suggestions. What do you think we should tell Notley?’

‘Does it matter what we tell him?’

‘Fuck, yes.’ Mike jerked back round to look at him. What’s the matter, you want to lose your job or something?’

Chris blinked. ‘What?’

‘I said. Do you want to lose your job?’

‘I. But.’ Chris gestured helplessly and nearly dropped his whisky. ‘Mike, the job’s already lost. Isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just go round clubbing the clients to death, can you.’

‘Oh, I’m glad you realise that now.’

‘I’m. Mike, of course I don’t want to lose this job. I like what I do.’ Chris made the curious, prickling discovery that he was telling the truth. ‘We’re just getting somewhere important at last. I’m telling you, Barranco’s the one. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work. He can make us the. What?’

Mike Bryant was watching him narrowly.

‘Go on.’

‘Mike, I’m good at this. The people stuff. You know that. And after this, I’ve got Barranco for keeps. We’re close now. Really close. This one matters.’

‘And Cambodia doesn’t?’

‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing new in Cambodia. They’ve been down this road at least four times before. Same old song, just a different decade. All we have to do is ride the wave, and make sure the enterprise zones don’t catch any damage. The NAME’s different. You’re looking at a radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. How often do you get to do work like that any more?’

Mike said nothing for a while. He seemed to be thinking. Then he nodded and got up from the desk.

‘Alright, good. We’ll go with that. Radical restructuring. Tone down the stuff about Cambodia, though. All our accounts are important, and whatever Sary eventually does or doesn’t achieve, we stand to make a lot of money over there. Remember that.’

Raised voices from outside Mike’s office. The unmistakable tones of Louise Hewitt arguing with security. Mike made a wry face.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Block and cover. Start talking. And get rid of that fucking blanket, you look like an evicted criminal.’

‘What?’

‘Something about the NAME, Chris. Relevant detail. Come on, quick. Try to sound intelligent.’

‘Uh,’ Chris groped. ‘The, uh, the urban situation’s no better. Sure you’ve got a pretty contented overclass but that’s only—’

‘The blanket.’

He shrugged it off. Got up and started to pace. Voice strengthening as he picked up the thread again. Improvising. ‘The thing is, Mike, that business with the students was crucial. Some of those kids were from the overclass, okay not many, but with an extended family system like the one you’ve got in the NAME, pretty much everybody knows someone who—’

Louise Hewitt burst into the office.

‘What the fuck have you done, Faulkner?’

He turned to look at her and what struck him like a physical blow was how drop dead gorgeous she looked angry.

He’d always been aware that Hewitt was attractive in a hard, dark fashion, but it wasn’t the kind of look that drew him. Too severe, too buttoned up and in the end, let’s be honest here, Chris, blonde was really what did it for him. Louise Hewitt was manifestly a dark-haired woman in utter control of her own destiny. It didn’t help matters that he hated her guts.

Now, with colour burning in her cheeks, her hair in light disarray and her jacket settled with less than perfect attention on her shoulders, he suddenly saw through to the woman beneath. She stood with legs braced slightly apart, as if the fifty-second floor was the deck of a yacht in suddenly choppy waters, hands floating just off her hips like those of a movie gunfighter. The stance was unconsciously sensual, stretching the fabric of her narrow knee-length skirt and highlighting the lines of her hips.

One tiny part of Chris’s mind stayed rational enough to register the bizarre perversity of his sexual programming. The rest of him was shit-scared of what was going to happen next.

‘Louise,’ said Mike Bryant cheerfully. ‘There you are. I imagine you’ve heard, then.’

‘Heard? Heard?’ She advanced into the room, still half-focused on Chris. ‘I’ve just come from the fucking sickbay, Mike. They’ve got Echevarria on a ventilator. What the fuck is going on?’

‘Is he likely to die?’

Hewitt pointed her finger. ‘I asked you a question, Mike. Spare me the executive deflection techniques.’

‘Sorry.’ Mike shrugged. ‘Force of habit. The Echevarria end of things is played out. He was making the situation unmanageable.’

‘So you beat him to death?’

‘It’s unfortunate, but—’

‘Unfortunate? Are you—’

Chris cleared his throat. ‘Louise, Barranco is—’

‘You,’ she swung on him like combat, ‘shut the fuck up. You’ve done enough damage today.’

Mike Bryant came out from behind his desk, hands lifted, soothing. ‘Louise, we had no choice. It was lose Echevarria or lose Barranco. And Barranco is the key to this. He can turn the whole NAME around, if we get behind him. He can make it work.’

Chris just stopped himself staring as he heard his own words coming out of Bryant’s mouth. Hewitt looked from one man to the other. Her anger seemed to crank down a notch.

‘That’s not what Makin says.’

‘Well.’ Mike gestured. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Nick is running scared from his own mistakes. Come on, Louise, you know he’s fumbled this one since the outset. Why else did you call me in?’

‘Not to do this, that’s for sure.’

‘Look, let’s sit down for a moment.’ Mike gestured at the sofas around the chess table. ‘Come on. There’s no point in yelling at each other. It’s not an ideal situation, but it is manageable.’

‘Is it?’ Hewitt raised one immaculate eyebrow. Some of her customary cool seemed to be reasserting itself. ‘This I’ve got to hear.’

They sat. Mike bundled up the paramedic blanket and dumped it casually over the side of the sofa.

‘The thing is, Louise, Vicente Barranco’s our only shot. Echevarria was on his way out the door to the Americans. He was playing with us. And Barranco’s the only viable insurgency alternative. Chris’ll tell you. There are no other available choices.’

Hewitt switched her gaze to Chris. ‘Well?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris tried to snap out of his daze at the suddenly civilised turn events had taken. He’d expected by now to be either sitting in a holding cell or clearing out his desk. ‘Yeah, it’s true. Arbenz is dead or dying of a collapsed immune system. MCH bioware ammunition. And Diaz is either on the run or already caught and we just haven’t heard yet, in which case Echevarria’s secret police will have tortured him to death by now.’

‘There you go.’ Mike nodded along. ‘Barranco’s what we’ve got, and we nearly didn’t have him an hour ago. All we had was Echevarria getting ready to grab the hardware we’d advanced him and then kiss us goodbye and head out for Lloyd Paul or Calders RapCap. And Barranco thinking we’d sold him out. Under the circumstances, I think Chris did the only thing that had any hope of salvaging the situation. Now, at least, we have a chance.’

Hewitt shook her head.

‘This has got to go to Notley.’

‘I agree. But it can go to Notley as a handled package, or it can go as a mess.’

‘It is a mess, Mike. Barranco should never have been allowed anywhere near Echevarria in the first place.’

‘We all make mistakes, Louise.’

Something in Bryant’s tone brought Hewitt round. ‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you did authorise the limo for Barranco.’ Mike was all innocence. ‘I mean, sure, you probably assumed that Chris would be here to meet him. And then Chris was at the Hilton instead, so—’

‘Chris was fucking late,’ said Louise Hewitt delicately.

‘Yeah. That was a mistake. The limo was a mistake. Shit, it was my mistake, or Nick’s, leaving the viewing-chamber door open. Not to mention the idiot who told Barranco where to find us. You’re right, Louise, we have made a mess of this. But there’s no percentage for any of us in presenting it that way to Notley. We need to accentuate the positive.’

For a pair of seconds, Hewitt was silent. Chris could almost hear the whine of concentration as she played it through. Then she smiled sourly at both of them and nodded.

‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Let’s spin it, shall we.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Echevarria died just before noon, of repeated internal haemorrhaging. He never regained consciousness. Vicente Barranco was there to watch him die. Everybody else was too busy.

They’d been scrambling since Hewitt gave the green light.

‘Get his phone records from Brown’s,’ she flung at them on her way out to find Notley. ‘See if he posted any forward calls for this afternoon, and find out if he was checking in with anyone regularly. That way, we’ll have some idea of how much time we’ve got to play with. And start coming up with a disposal plan.’

Chris spent the next hour digging through files on useful terrorists.

Mike Bryant’s office became the command post. Chris commandeered the datadown while Mike paced about with his mobile, talking to people. They sent Makin after the phone records. All incoming business got routed down to the forty-ninth floor where junior analysts had orders to shelve it unless there was a NAME connection. In the cleared space it gave them, they built the contingency plan. A Langley shadow unit was hired out of Miami, sent to find and track Echevarria junior. The conference-chamber recordings were isolated from all external dataflow ports, and played back on a stand-alone projector to a grey-haired datafake expert on secondment from Imagicians. The expert tut-tutted like a disappointed schoolmistress, hit replay and started making notes. A stony-faced internal security squad with high-level clearance arrived, courtesy of Louise Hewitt, and Mike sent them to clean up the blood.

Makin called in from Brown’s with the phone data. There were no forward calls placed on Echevarria’s account.

‘Praiiise the Lord,’ said Mike, doing Simeon Sands with remarkable good cheer, given the circumstances. He flourished with his free hand. ‘There is a God because I am saved. Good work, Nick. They give you any static down there? Uh-uh. Good. No, but you never know. Bite the hair of the cliché that fed you and all that. What about regular stuff? Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Yeah, well, to be expected, I guess. Yeah, we’ve got the hounds out in Miami. Yeah, Langley, best we could do at short notice. They’re on a tight leash. What? Ah, come on, Nick, this isn’t the fucking time for recrimin—Yeah, well I’m sure he knows that too.’ He glanced at Chris and rolled his eyes. ‘Look Nick, we haven’t got the time for this. Pay them off, get copies of everything and get back here.’

He cut off the call, held the mobile away from him and massaged his ear.

‘Like a dog with a fucking bone. Blame, blame, blame, like it’s going to fucking help now. So what do you reckon, Elaine?’

The datafake expert froze the tape and raked a hand through her silvered hair. On the pastel shaded wall, Chris towered four metres tall, leaning into the swing, face blind with fury.

‘Does it need to stand up in court?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

She shrugged. ‘So we can fix it. Just tell me what you want.’

‘Okay, good. Chris, how you doing?’

Chris nodded at the datadown. ‘Got a few possibilities, yeah. But Mike, none of these guys have pulled off a successful bombing in London for years.’

‘Yeah, well, they won’t have to. All they need do is claim responsibility. There ought to be plenty of the little fuckers up for that. No effort, no risk, instant media coverage. What more could they want?’ Mike flicked a finger at the screen. ‘What about them? They look ugly enough.’

‘No good.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Christian militants, anti-gay, anti-abortion. No axe to grind. Besides, they’re too fucking inept for anyone to believe they could get something like this together.’

‘Yeah, but—’ Mike’s phone queeped in his hand. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Uh-uh. Alright, thanks. What about the other one? Uh-uh. Okay, well keep him that way then. No, I don’t know how long. Alright. Yes. Goodbye.’

He weighed the phone in his hand and looked pensively at it.

‘Echevarria’s dead. Just now. Dead and cooling fast. And Nick reckoned he promised to call his son in Miami some time this evening. We’re losing our window.’

In the end, they opted for a group of antique revolutionary socialists with a complicated acronym no one was likely to remember very well. The group had enjoyed a sudden resurgence in recent years, drawing disaffected zone youth in a number of European cities, staging the machine-gun assassination of low-level executives and causing big explosions in, or at least in the vicinity of, rather vaguely designated ‘globalist strongholds’. They’d managed to kill nearly two dozen people in the last five years, often including their intended targets. They used a wide range of military-grade automatic weapons and explosive devices, acquired mainly through Russian black-market channels and very easy to get hold of. Their justificatory rhetoric was a dense mesh of outmoded Trotskyist sentiment and anti-corporate eco-babble, and it appeared they spent almost as much energy purging the ranks and backbiting as they did killing people. Shorn’s infiltration ops wing had labelled them noisy but essentially harmless.

They were perfect.

Mike went to get fitted for a Weblar vest.

Chris was chasing up the hardware, when Jack Notley walked into the office unannounced and stood looking around with the nonchalance of someone on a guided tour. His Susana Ingram jacket was buttoned closed and he held his hands lightly clasped in front of him. He nodded pleasantly at the Imagicians consultant, who’d been back and forth from the imaging studio down the hall with variations on the requested footage and now, in Mike’s absence, was packing up her stuff.

‘Elaine. Glad to see we’re keeping you busy.’

‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise, Jack.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Notley’s gaze switched to Chris and he lost his smile. His eyes were unreadable. ‘And you. Are you busy as well?’

Chris fought down a tremor. ‘I, uh, we’re pretty much done here. But I need to check in with Vicente Barranco. He’s been—’

‘I’ve had Señor Barranco taken back to his hotel. Elaine, could you give us a few minutes?’

‘Sure. I’m done here anyway. I’ll come back for this stuff later.’

She slipped out. Chris watched her go with a pang of envy. Notley came round the desk to stand at his shoulder.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked flatly.

‘Hardware profile.’ Chris gestured at the screen, scrabbling after composure. He found, oddly, that he was more embarrassed than afraid. ‘We’ve found a group to take the fall for Echevarria. I’m matching most-used weapons against our local inventory. We’ll need to use our own people, of course, there’s no time for anything else.’

‘No. We are pressed for time, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, although to be honest it’s probably better this way.’ His throat was dry. ‘It, uh, lowers our exposure, and it means we can control the situation.’

‘Control, yes.’ He felt Notley move behind him, out of his peripheral field of view. It took an effort of will not to twist round in the seat. Now the warm blush of embarrassment was shredding away into cold fear. The senior partner’s voice was hypnotically tranquil at his back. It felt like hands laid on his shoulders. ‘Remind me, Chris. Why are we in this situation, exactly?’

Chris swallowed. He drew a deep breath.

‘Because I fucked up.’

‘Yes.’ Now Notley had moved back into peripheral view on the left. ‘Putting it mildly, you have indeed. Fucked. Up.’

He came round the side of the desk and he had the Nemex levelled. This time, there was no fighting down the tremor. Chris flinched, violently. Notley stared at him. There was nothing in his face at all.

‘Is there anything you want to say to me?’

Chris felt the pounding calm of a road duel descend on him. He measured angles, knew he was caught. His replacement Nemex was back in his own office, still not out of the factory wrapping. The desk pinned him. He couldn’t rush Notley, and there was nothing on the desktop worth throwing. He was used to making these calculations at combat speed, measuring and acting in the time it took for the Saab to cover a handful of asphalt metres. The immobility and the limping time scale made it unreal, a floating fragment of a dream.

the supermarket swam before his eyes, the painful bang of the gun in his ears, the sudden warm rain of blood

He wondered if

‘Well?’

‘I think.’ Suddenly it was easy. All he had to do was let go. ‘I think you’re making a big fucking mistake. Echevarria was a bag of pus waiting to burst. All I did was save you the trouble.’

Notley’s eyes narrowed. Then, out of nowhere, he lowered the Nemex and tucked it away in his waistband. He shook his head.

‘Nice image, that. A bag of pus, waiting to burst. Charming. You need to refine your act, Faulkner.’

He cast about and found a chair, pulled it up to the desk and sat down. Chris gaped at him, still swamped in chemicals by a nervous system expecting to be shot. Notley smiled.

‘Tell you a story,’ he said comfortably. ‘Guy called Webb Ellis. Went to my old school about two hundred years before I did. What does that tell you, incidentally?’

Chris blinked. ‘He was rich?’

‘Very good. Not wholly accurate, but close enough. Webb Ellis was what, these days, we’d call jacked-in. He had connections. Father died when he was still young, but his mother bootstrapped him up on those connections and come sixteen he was still a student. Among other things, he played a pretty sharp game of football and cricket. And apparently, during one of those football games he broke the rules pretty severely, by picking up the ball and running with it. You know what happened to him?’

‘Uh. Sent off?’

Notley shook his head. ‘No. He got to be famous. They built a whole new game around running with the ball.’

‘That’s.’ Chris frowned. ‘Rugby.’

‘That’s right. In the end they named it after the school. You can see why. Webbellisball would have been a bit of a mouthful. But that’s the legend of how rugby got started. There’s even a plaque on the wall at the school, commemorating old Webb Ellis and the day he broke the rules. I used to walk past it every day.’

Quiet soaked into the room.

‘Is that true?’ Chris asked, finally.

Notley grinned. ‘No. Probably not. It’s just a useful piece of school mythology, graven in stone to resemble the truth. But it is representative, in all likelihood, of what a whole gang of different elite schoolkids were doing at around that time. Breaking the rules, and making up new ones. Later that century, you get a formalised game and creative back-marketing lays it at the door of one man, because that’s what people relate to. But the interesting thing is this, Chris. The game was never new. It dates back to Roman times, at least. They’d been playing games just like it for centuries in the streets of villages and towns all over Britain. And you know what? Just around the time Webb Ellis and his friends were making sporting history, the common people were being told, by law and by big uniformed men with sticks and guns, that they weren’t allowed to play this game any more. Because, and this is close to a quote, it disturbed the public order and was dangerous. Do you see, Chris, how these things work? How they’ve always worked?’

Chris said nothing. It wasn’t five minutes since this man had held a gun on him. He didn’t trust the ice enough to walk on yet.

‘Okay.’ Notley leaned back in the chair. ‘Fast forward a couple of centuries. Here’s something you should know. Who made the first competition road kill?’

‘Uh, Roberto Sanchez, wasn’t it? Calders Chicago partnership challenge, back in, no, wait a minute.’ Chris sieved an unexpected chunk of information from the sea of TV junk he’d been letting wash over him in recent months. ‘Now they’re saying it wasn’t Sanchez, it was this guy Rice, real thug from the Washington office. He beat Sanchez to it by about three months or something?’

Notley nodded. He seemed, for a moment, to be lost in thought. ‘Yes, they say that. They also say it was Begoña Salas over at IberFondos. That’s the feminist revisionist angle, but it holds some water. Salas was cutting edge around then, and she always drove like a fucking maniac. There’s another school of thought that says Calders stole the idea from a strategic-thought unit in California. That people like Oco Holdings and the Sacramento Group were already trialing it secretly. You want to know what I remember?’

Once again, the distance behind Notley’s look, the sense that most of him was suddenly elsewhere.

‘Sure. What?’

Notley smiled gently. ‘I remember it being me.’

Fleetingly, Chris recalled his first impression of the senior partner, the day he came to work at Shorn. Like a troll in the elf pastel shades of the interview room. He looked at Notley now, at the brutal crackle of power about the man, shoehorned into the Susana Ingram like too much upper body muscle, and an initial urge to match the partner smile for smile slid abruptly away. His pulse began to pick up slowly.

Notley seemed to shake himself.

‘It was a different time, Chris. We’re all used to it now, but back then you could smell the change in the air.’ He breathed in, deep. ‘Fresh, like spilt fuel. Reeking with potential. The domino recessions had come and gone, we’d been bracing ourselves for it all that time, for the worst we could imagine, and it came and went, and we were all still standing. Better than still standing. We’d barely missed a step. A few riots, a few banks out of business, that nuclear nonsense in the Punjab. We surfed it, Chris. We rode it out. It was easy.’

He paused. He seemed to be waiting for something to fill the gap. Chris hurried to oblige, mesmerised by the intensity coming across the desk at him.

‘You still had to drive, though? Right?’

‘Oh yes.’ A casual gesture. ‘The domino gave us competitive driving. Hard-edged solution for hard-edged times. But it was still pretty civilised back then, still pretty close to its roots. You know how road-raging started?’

Chris stumbled, wrongfooted. ‘What? Uh, yeah, sure. Those formula cars, ones you see on the history channel, looked like little rockets, right? They started getting owned by the same people that made the money. And then, uh, with the roads empty and everything . . .’

He stopped. Notley was shaking his head.

‘No?’

‘Not really. Well. Yes, sure, you had that dynamic. That’s part of it, I suppose. But it all goes back a lot further than that. Back to late last century, the pre-millenial stuff. Stuff my father told me about. Back then some of the harder-nosed firms were already experimenting with conflict incentives for their new recruits. It was an American thing. Eight trainees in a section, sectional office space, and only seven desks.’ Notley made a QED motion with both hands. ‘So. Get to work last, you had to work on a window ledge. Or beg space from someone with a better alarm clock. Let that happen to you more than a couple of times, you can see how the group dynamic starts to lean. The late guy’s the weakest link. So the rest gang up on him. Chimp behaviour. Lend him your desk-space, and you’re weak, by association. You’re making the wrong alliances. So you don’t do it. You can’t afford to.’

Chris couldn’t decide, but he thought he saw a faint distaste rising in Notley’s eyes. Or maybe it was just the energy again.

‘Now. You transfer that idea, not just for trainees but for everyone. Think about the times. The domino recessions are scratching at the door, you’ve got to do something. Most investment houses and major corporations are waterlogged with top-end personnel. Ex-politicians on sinecure non-executive directorships, useless executive directors shipped around on the old-boy network from golden handshake to golden handshake, headhunted bright young things staying the obligatory two years then shipping out for the next move up on rep vapour and nothing else, because I ask you what, in two years, have you really achieved in a corporate post? And that’s just how we were fucking things up at the anglo end of the cultural scale. Elsewhere, you’ve got fuckwit younger sons and daughters being cut in on Daddy’s pie straight out blatantly, because in those cultures who’s going to tell Daddy otherwise? And all of this is teetering on the brink as the dominos start to fall. Something has to be done, at a minimum something has to be seen to be done. Something harsh.

‘So what do you do? You go right back to that eight-trainee section with seven desks, and you extrapolate. Late to work, you don’t lose your desk. You lose your job. At a time when you had a dozen identically qualified people for every real executive post, why not? It was as real as any other measure. You sure as hell couldn’t depend on sales figures or productivity, not with a global economy in tailspin. And since no one could afford to lose a job at a time like that, you got some pretty fierce driving. Some genuine road rage. But back then,’ Notley produced another of his smiles, wintry this time. ‘Back then, it was still enough to just get there first. Have you got anything to drink in here?’

‘Uh.’ Chris gestured across at Mike Bryant’s brushed steel, fitted drinks cabinet. ‘I don’t know, it’s Mike’s office. He’ll have some stuff in there.’

‘I imagine so.’ Notley hulked to his feet and wandered over to the cabinet. ‘You want anything?’

‘I, uh, I’ve got to—’ He nodded at the datadown. ‘You know, finalise. The, uh—’

An impatient wave. ‘So finalise it. I’ll make you a drink in the meantime. What do you want?’

‘Uh, whisky. Laphroaig, if it’s there.’ He knew Mike kept that around; he produced it with a flourish every time they ended up in the office late. Chess juice, he’d taken to calling it. ‘Just a small one. No ice.’

Notley grunted. ‘Think I’ll join you. I’m a gin man, myself, but I’m buggered if I can see any in here.’

Chris bent to the datadown. Nailed the explosives along with the cheap Russian machine pistols he’d already selected and thumbed it all down to issuing, tagged with Mike’s notification code. Notley placed a brimming tumbler at his elbow, swallowed some of his own drink and glanced over the on-screen detail.

‘You done? Good. So put on a tolerant expression and listen to the old man’s story.’ He went back to the seat and hunched forward over his drink. ‘Let’s see, I was working at Calders UK, I would have been what, twenty-four, twenty-five, something like that. Younger than you, anyway. About as stupid, though.’

No smile with that. Notley took another chunk off his drink.

‘I had this promotion playoff. Not the first I’d driven, not even one of the first, but it was the first time I’d thought I might be in trouble. Barnes, the other analyst, was my age, good rep, on the road and off, and he drove this flame-red Ferrari roadster. Very fast, but very lightweight. Nothing like the ones they make now. I was on Audis at the time, no choice back then, it was what I could afford. Good wagon, in its own way, but heavy, very heavy.’

‘No change there, then.’ For the first time in the conversation, Chris felt he was on familiar ground.

Notley shrugged carelessly. ‘Armouring is what they do. Same with BMW. Maybe it’s a German thing. Look, I knew if I could just get in front of Barnes, I could hold him off all the way there. Nothing that little roadster could do to my back end that wouldn’t straighten out in the shop. Back then it was the rule, everybody knew. You didn’t have to kill anyone, you just had to get to work first. So, that was it. Get ahead, stay ahead. Block and cover. And I had Barnes like that, every mile ’til the last. Then the little cunt slipped past me.’

He raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden profanity.

‘To this day, I still don’t know how he did it. Maybe I was too confident. Maybe it was a gear change I left too loose, do that on a heavy wagon, you know how it is, suddenly you’re underpowered.’

Chris nodded. ‘Happened to me a couple of times, before I got the Saab.’

‘Yeah, you’ve got that spaced armouring now, right?’

‘Yeah.’ He wasn’t sure if it was the whisky, or just the slide after the hours of tension and the rollercoaster ride of facing Notley’s gun, but Chris could feel himself starting to relax. ‘Works like a dream. I hear BMW are trying to get past the patents and do their own version.’

‘Quite possibly.’ Notley stared into his glass. ‘But we were talking about Barnes. Barnes, and that last bend on the overhead as you come into the Eleven off-ramp. It used to be a lot narrower then, barely even a double lane. We hit it with Barnes ahead, and I knew there was no way past him. And the way I remember it, there was no Roberto Sanchez making headlines then, no Harry Rice either. Could be it was just still under wraps, all denial and cover-up until Calders decided what needed to go into the shredder and what they could get away with. But I don’t remember any precedent, I just remember fury. Fury that I was going to lose by a couple of fucking metres.’

He took another mouthful of whisky and held onto it. Swallowed, grimaced.

‘So. I pushed him off. Down a gear, pedal flat, revs up to the red on that last bend. Into the back of that little roadster as if I was giving it one up the arse. It went through the crash barrier like a fist through tissue paper, right over and nose first into the Calders car park. Hit another car and one of the tanks blew, then the other one. By the time I got down there, it was all over. But they showed me security-camera footage later.’

Notley looked up and gave Chris a grin that slipped just a little.

‘He tried to get out. Was almost out, when the tank went. There was this two-minute sequence of Roger Barnes lit up in flame, still tangled in the belt. He tore free, he was screaming, screaming all the way. It must have been the pain that got him out, finally. He ran about a dozen steps on fire, and then he just seemed to . . . melt. Collapsed and folded over himself there on the asphalt, and stopped screaming.

‘And the next time I checked, I was a pin-up. Magazine covers, car ads, introduced to the CEO of Calders in Chicago. It was out in the open all of a sudden. It was precedent, Chris, it was legal, and Calders were the new field leaders. Pointing the way out of the domino trap. Turn up with blood on your wheels, or don’t turn up at all. It was the new ethic, and we were the new breed. Jack Notley, Roberto Sanchez, transatlantic mirror images of the same new brutalist dynamic. Worth our body weight in platinum.’

Notley seemed to have coasted to a halt. He looked up at Chris again.

‘Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts. Remember Webb Ellis. In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works. If it works, you get elevated and the rules get changed in your wake. Now. Tell me Barranco is going to work.’

Chris cleared his throat.

‘It’ll work. The NAME’s a special place. We’re talking about the radical restructuring of a regime that’s been in place almost since the beginning of the century. It’s time for that change. Echevarria was just a, a—’

‘Yeah, yeah, a bag of pus waiting to be. I remember. Go on.’

‘With Barranco, we can build a whole new monitored economy. He believes in things, he believes in change, and he can get other people to believe. That’s a power we can harness. We can use it to build something out there that no one in this fucking business has ever seen before. Something that gives people—’

It was the whisky. He clamped shut.

Notley watched him, features shrewd and attentive. He nodded, set his whisky on the edge of the desk and got up. Abruptly the Nemex was in his hand again, but gripped flat in his upheld palm.

‘Careful,’ he said, enunciating the word as if to demonstrate its meaning. ‘I like you, Chris. If I didn’t, make no mistake about this, they’d be taking you out of here in plastic. I think you’ve got what not one Shorn exec in ten has got, what we can’t ever get enough of round here, and that’s the ability to create. To build new models in your head without even realising you’re doing it. You’re a changemaker. And we have to have the guts to let you be what you are, to take the risk that you may fuck up, and to trust that you won’t. But you need to be clear on what we’re about here, Chris.

‘Shorn exists to make money. For our shareholders, for our investors and for ourselves. In that order. We’re not some last-century, bleeding-heart NGO pissing funds into a hole in the ground. We’re part of a global management system that works. Forty years ago, we dismantled OPEC. Now the Middle East does as we tell it. Twenty years ago we dismantled China, and East Asia got in line as well. We’re down to micro-management and the market now, Chris. We let them fight their mindless little wars, we rewrite the deals and the debt, and it works. Conflict Investment is about making global stupidity work for the benefit of Western investors. That’s it, that’s the whole story. We’re not going to lose our grip again like last time.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Yes, you did. And it’s natural to feel that way sometimes, above all when you’re rubbing up against someone like Barranco. You said it yourself, he can make other people believe. Do you think, just because you wear a suit and drive a car, that you’re immune to that?’ Notley shook his head. ‘Hope is the human condition, Chris. Belief in a better day. For yourself, and if they really get to you, for the whole fucking world. Give Barranco time and he’ll have you believing in that. A world where the resources get magically shared out like some global birthday tea for well-behaved kids. A world where everyone’s beaming content with a life of hard work, modest rewards and simple pleasures. I mean, think about it Chris. Is that a likely outcome? A likely human outcome?’

Chris licked his lips, watching the gun. ‘No, of course not. I just meant that Barranco is—’

But Notley wasn’t listening. He was lit up with the whisky and something else that Chris couldn’t get a fix on. Something that looked like desperation but wore an industrial-wattage grin.

‘Do you really think we can afford to have the developing world develop? You think we could have survived the rise of a modern, articulated Chinese superpower twenty years ago? You think we could manage an Africa full of countries run by intelligent, uncorrupted democrats? Or a Latin America run by men like Barranco? Just imagine it for a moment. Whole populations getting educated, and healthy, and secure, and aspirational. Women’s rights, for Christ’s sake. We can’t afford these things to happen, Chris. Who’s going to soak up our subsidised food surplus for us? Who’s going to make our shoes and shirts? Who’s going to supply us with cheap labour and cheap raw materials? Who’s going to store our nuclear waste, balance out our CO₂ misdemeanours? Who’s going to buy our arms?’

He gestured angrily.

‘An educated middle class doesn’t want to spend eleven hours a day bent over a stitching machine. They aren’t going to work the seaweed farms and the paddy fields ’til their feet rot. They aren’t going to live next door to a fuel-rod dump and shut up about it. They’re going to want prosperity, Chris. Just like they’ve seen it on TV for the last hundred years. City lives and domestic appliances and electronic game platforms for their kids. And cars. And holidays, and places to go to spend their holidays. And planes to get them there. That’s development, Chris. Ring any bells? Remember what happened when we told our people they couldn’t have their cars any more? When we told them they couldn’t fly. Why do you think anybody else is going to react any differently out there?’

‘I don’t.’ Chris spread his hands. He couldn’t work out how things had got back up to this pitch. ‘I know this stuff. I don’t need convincing, Jack.’

Notley stopped abruptly. He drew a deep breath and let it out, hard. He seemed to become aware of the Nemex in his hand for the first time. He grimaced and put it away.

‘My apologies. Shouldn’t touch the hard stuff this early.’ He picked up his glass from the edge of the desk and drained it. ‘So. Getting back to practicalities. You’ve got the disposal handled.’

‘Yeah. We pin the rap on the CE—, I mean CA—, uh—’ Chris gave up and gestured at the screen. ‘These guys. Mike’s down sorting out the limo and the logistics, but basically we’re all set.’

‘Louise tells me there’s another body. Echevarria had an adjutant? Is that correct?’

‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘And I understand you battered him too, in the same rather impulsive fashion you took care of Echevarria.’

‘Yes. He, uh, he got in the way.’

Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘That was inconsiderate of him. So, is he dead?’

‘No, not yet.’ Chris hurried into explanation. ‘But that’s okay. Sickbay have got him on life support, sedated until we’re ready. In fact, that’s one of the strengths of the way we’ve set this up. If I can just show you the—’

‘No, that won’t be necessary. As I said before, this is about having the guts to let you run with the ball.’ A faint smile. ‘Just like our old friend Webb Ellis. Illustrious company you find yourself in, Chris Faulkner. Maybe they’ll put up a plaque for you too, one day.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

He caught it on the radio as he drove home. Some general news reporter from the scene, a woman but not—

Cut that out.

‘—were shocked by this terrorist attack in the heart of London’s West End. I’m standing outside the famous Brown’s Hotel, only a few metres from the spot where less than an hour ago visiting head of state, General Hernan Echevarria and his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Rafael Carrasco, were fired upon by masked gunmen. Details aren’t clear as yet, but it seems two men opened fire with machine pistols as General Echevarria was brought to his hotel in a Shorn Associates limousine. The general’s aide and an unnamed Shorn executive were both hit by machine-gun fire as they exited the vehicle ahead of the general. The terrorists then threw some kind of anti-personnel grenade into the interior and made their escape on a motorcycle. All three men and the driver of the limousine have been rushed to intensive care at—’

He turned it off. He knew the rest. Michael Bryant, thrown miraculously clear of the explosion, recovers from gunshot wounds in hospital. The limo driver, protected by the armoured partition, gets off with burns, abrasions and shock. General Echevarria and his aide go home in body bags, scorched and shell- and shrapnel-riddled beyond useful autopsy. State funeral, full military honours. Rifles volley, women weep. Closed caskets. Everybody in black.

In the highlands, Barranco’s insurgents stir to freshly-equipped life.

You’re a changemaker, Chris.

He felt it rising in him, stirring like the hard-eyed men and women in the NAME jungle. He saw himself. Embodied purpose, rushing over asphalt in the darkness, carving a path with the Saab’s high beams like some furious avatar of the forces he was setting in motion on the other side of the globe. Riding the quiet power of the engine across the night, face masked in the soft backwash of dashboard light. Bulletproof, careproof, unstoppable.

He called Barranco at the Hilton.

‘You heard?’

‘Yes, it’s on the TV. I’m watching it now.’ For the first time that Chris could remember, Barranco’s voice sounded unsure. ‘You are okay?’

Chris grinned in the dark. ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’

‘I, would not have believed. Something like that. To do something like that. In front of your colleagues. In your situation. I did not expect—’

‘Skip it, Vicente. The old fuck had it coming.’

Barranco was silent. ‘Yes. That is true.’

And more silence across the connection, like snow drifting to the ground on the other side of the world. For a beat, Chris could feel the cold out there, like something alive. Like something looking for him.

‘I saw him die,’ said Barranco.

Chris shook himself. ‘I, uh. Good. I hope that was worth something to you, Vicente. I hope you feel. Avenged.’

‘Yes. It is good to know he is dead.’

When the Colombian showed no further sign of speaking, Chris cleared his throat.

‘Listen, Vicente. Get some rest. With what’s coming down in the next few weeks, you’re going to need it. Plane’s not ’til noon, so sleep in. Lopez’ll get you up in plenty of time.’

Silence, sifting down.

‘Chris?’

‘Yeah. Still here.’

‘They aren’t going to punish you for this?’

‘No one’s going to punish me for anything, Vicente. Everything’s under control, and you and I are going right to the top of this thing, together. I give it six months before you’re in the streets of Bogotá. Now get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

He waited for a reply. When there was none, he shrugged, cut the connection and gave himself to the driving.

changemaker!

He got off at the Elsenham ramp, and picked up the road east, pushing the Saab faster than was smart. The car jolted in potholes and the engine grew shrill as he dropped gears late on the bends. Trees stood at the roadside, sudden and dusty-looking in the glare of the Saab’s lights. When he got to Hawkspur Green, he shed some of his speed, but he was still rolling too fast. The car snarled angrily to itself as he took the turn into the driveway, and he had to lean on the brakes.

He killed the high beams and up ahead in the sudden dark, the house security lights flared to life. He frowned and glanced at the ID broadcast set. A tiny green active light glowed back at him, reassuring as far as it went. He felt tension go stealing along his nerves, wondering if Notley had, after all, gone conservative on him and sent night-callers with silenced guns. The Saab crunched up the winding drive. He reached across to the glove compartment and opened it. The Nemex fell out into his palm, still slightly greasy from the factory wrapping oils. He straightened up again and cleared the last bend.

Carla was waiting for him, wrapped tight in a towelling robe, hair wet and straggling. Backlit by the security system’s lamps, she looked like the ghost of a drowned woman. When she bent to his window, face hard-boned from the wet and the lack of make-up, he almost jumped.

He stopped the Saab short and opened the window.

‘What are you doing out here? You’ll catch your death of cold.’

‘Vasvik,’ she said. ‘He just called.’

The rest of the week snapped by like scenery.

He got Barranco out of the country, got final signatures on the regime term sheets on the way to the airport. Sandwiched between Lopez and Chris in the helicopter, Barranco signed it all like a man under sedation. Chris waved him goodbye from the asphalt.

He dropped in on Mike at the hospital. The other executive had nothing worse than severe bruising across the ribcage from the machine-gun fire, but it seemed politic to keep him in the intensive care unit for a few days at least. There were news crews queuing in the corridor outside, but Shorn security had them managed.

‘So now you’re a fucking celebrity?’

Mike grinned from a chair beside the bed. There were a couple of small cuts on his face, and his left hand was bandaged. He got up, wincing with the effort.

‘You see Liz out there?’ he asked.

‘No. You expecting her?’

‘Never know.’ Mike poured himself a drink from a pitcher beside the bed. ‘Nah, to be honest, she’d be the last thing I need right now. I’m in enough pain just breathing heavily. You want some of this?’

‘What is it?’

‘What does it look like? Juice.’

‘Maybe later. What happened to your face?’

‘Ah.’ Mike waved dismissively. ‘Did it myself with a broken bottle-neck, beforehand. Good for the media to see a real wound or two, I reckon.’

‘And the hand?’

A scowl. ‘Sprained my wrist going down on the pavement. Like a fucking idiot. I was trying to keep Carrasco upright for the machine gun, like this. And then dive out of the way, this way, when they tossed in the grenade. It was awkward.’

‘Any witnesses?’

Bryant shook his head. ‘Monday night, and it’s a quiet street, anyway. A couple of people might have looked our way once the firing started maybe, but too late to notice anything odd. There’ll be footage from the hotel security cameras, maybe that street scanner we couldn’t mask out at the corner of Stafford Street. Elaine’s already on it. No problem, she says. Barranco get off okay?’

Back at Shorn, Chris sat in the covert viewing chamber while Nick Makin and Louise Hewitt talked to Francisco Echevarria by uplink. The young man was pale and hollow-eyed, and it was clear he had been crying. From the way he kept looking off to the side, it was also clear he was not alone in the projection room at the other end. Hewitt conveyed smooth corporate sympathies, and encouraged him not to concern himself with contractual details at such a time. Shorn’s own principal officer for the NAME account was, in any case, unable to leave hospital for the foreseeable future. There was no sense in rushing into anything. Shorn CI would be very happy to put the whole issue on ice until the family felt more able to deal with the negotiations.

by which time, Barranco will have your worthless nuts in the fucking vice, you and your whole stinking hacienda clan

The sudden violence of his own thoughts took Chris by surprise.

Francisco Echevarria flickered out. They adjourned to Hewitt’s office to discuss a tentative calendar for Barranco’s revolution.

He went down to the forty-ninth floor to thank the junior execs who had covered the other accounts for them while the crisis was in full swing. He took gifts - cask-strength Islay single malt, Galapagos bourbon ground coffee, single estate Andaluz olive oil - and got into mock sparring sessions with a couple of the known hardcases in the section. No full-force blows, he stayed just the right side of friendly, but he pushed hard and fast and got close-up body contact each time. It wasn’t wise to show raw gratitude, untempered by signs of strength. It could get taken the wrong way.

He got back his caseload. Started mechanically through the detail, building back up to operational pitch where necessary.

He took a basket of Indonesian fruit and a crate of Turkish export beer up to the hospital, and found Liz Linshaw sitting on the corner of Mike’s bed. Mike sat there grinning like a post-blow-job idiot, Liz was a study in her usual off-screen rough-and-ready elegance. She showed Chris exactly the civilised blend of camaraderie and casual flirtation that he remembered from their earliest meetings. The downshift cut him to the quick.

‘Listen, Chris,’ Mike said finally, waving a hand at the bedside seat Liz wasn’t using. ‘We’ve been talking about your no-namer problem. Liz says she could ask around, no problem.’

‘That’s great.’ He looked across at her. ‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure.’

It was more than he could handle. He caught himself with a barbed comment about Suki rising to his lips, and called time. He made workload excuses and got out.

As he opened the door to go, Liz Linshaw called him back.

‘Chris, I’ll be in touch,’ she said.

Back at Shorn, he went down to the gym and did an hour of full contact with the autobag.

He worked late.

He took the Nemex to the firing ranges, and emptied two dozen clips into the ghost-dance of holotargets there. The machine scored him high on accuracy and speed, abysmally low on selection. He’d killed too many innocent bystanders.

And then it was Saturday.

It was time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

There were police trucks gathered at the entrance to the Brundtland. Revolving blue lights slashed the poorly-lit walkways and stairstacks with monotonous regularity, each touch fleeting and then gone, giving way again to the gloom. Torch beams and bulky armoured figures moved on the exterior walkways. An ampbox blattered across the night.

‘Ah fuck.’ Chris braked the Land Rover to a halt.

Carla stared at out at the lights, wide eyed. ‘Do you think . . .’

‘I don’t know. Stay here.’

He left the engine running and climbed down, digging in his pocket for corporate ID, hoping the Nemex didn’t show under the jacket. A body-armoured police sergeant noticed the new arrival and detached himself from the knot of figures beside the trucks. He strode across the cracked concrete, torch and sidearm held high.

‘You can’t come in here.’

Chris held his ID out in the beam of the torch. ‘I’m visiting someone. What’s going on?’

‘Oh.’ The sergeant’s tone shifted, abruptly conciliatory. He holstered his pistol. ‘Sorry, sir. With what you’re driving, you know, I didn’t realise.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Chris manufactured a grin of forbearance. ‘Easy mistake to make. My wife’s wheels. Sentimental value. So what’s going on here?’

‘It’s drugs, sir. Bathroom edge. A couple of the local gangwits have been bad boys. Exporting their product across the line, dealing in the Kensington catchment. Hanging around the schools and such.’ The sergeant grimaced in the torchlight and shook his head. ‘Not the first time either, and the community leaders have been warned before, so it’s the next step. We’ve been told to turn up the heat on cases like this. You know how it’s done, sir. Break a few doors, break a few heads. Only thing gets through to these animals in the end.’

‘Sure. Look, I need to get up to the fifth floor and see my father-in-law. It’s quite urgent. Can you do something about that?’

Hesitation. Chris switched on the grin again. Reached carefully into his jacket pocket, well above the Nemex.

‘I understand it’s trouble you don’t need right now, but it is important. I’d be very grateful.’

The torchlight gleamed off the edges of the racked plastic and the Shorn Associates holologo on the front card. At the back, the wallet was stiff with a thick sheaf of cash. The sergeant was looking down at it like someone afraid of falling.

‘Fifth floor?’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Just a moment, sir.’ He dug out a phone and thumbed it to life. ‘Gary? You there? Listen, are we working on five? No? So what’s the nearest? Okay. Thanks.’

He stowed the phone. Chris handed across a slice of currency.

‘Should be safe enough to go up there, sir. I’ll have a couple of my men take you up, just to be sure.’ He folded the notes into his palm with an awkwardness that bespoke lack of practice, and looked back at the Land Rover. ‘Your wife too?’

‘Yeah. Tell the truth, she wants to be here a lot more than I do.’

Their escort took the form of two helmeted, body-armoured uniforms with pump action shotguns and hip-holstered pistols. They bounded from the rear of the reserve truck like eager dogs when their names were called. One was white, one black, and neither looked old enough to be shaving yet. They covered angles in the stairwell with a kind of self-conscious intensity that on older men might have looked like professionalism, and once or twice they grinned at each other. The white kid chewed gum mechanically throughout, and the black kid appeared to be rapping under his breath. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. When the party reached the fifth floor, Chris gave them a fifty apiece and they clattered back down the stairs with what sounded like none of the drilled caution they’d exhibited on the way up.

Carla knocked at the door of fifty-seven. Erik answered, looking haggard.

‘I tried to call. The police—’

‘Just talked to them,’ said Chris, luxuriating in the advantage. ‘It’s an edge bust. Nothing to worry about.’

Erik Nyquist’s mouth tightened.

‘Yes, I forgot,’ he said thinly. ‘A different matter when you’re a member of the elite, isn’t it. When—’

‘Dad!’

‘Maybe we could come in,’ added Chris.

Nyquist gave him a venomous look, but he stood aside and they filed through into the lounge. Behind him, Chris heard the door being locked and bolted. Almost as loud through the cardboard-thin walls of the lounge, he could hear raised voices from the flat next door, and what sounded like a baby crying. He glanced around the cramped living space, kept an expression of distaste off his face with an effort, and seated himself gingerly in one of the battered armchairs. He looked up as Nyquist followed Carla into the room.

‘Getting on with the neighbours okay?’ he asked brightly, nodding towards the noise next door. ‘Sounds a little below your level of intellectual debate.’

interfering fucking cunt came leaking through the wall.

Erik looked at him stonily. ‘He’s a dealer. He’s probably expecting to have his skull caved in by your stormtroopers out there.’

‘No danger of that. Their commander told me they’re not working this floor. Want me to go next door and tell him?’

‘In those clothes?’ Erik sneered. ‘He’d probably stab you as soon as look at you.’

‘He could try.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot. I have a professional killer for a son-in-law.’

Chris rolled his eyes and was on his way to his feet when he caught a glare from Carla that stopped him.

‘Dad, that’s enough.’

Nyquist looked at his daughter and sighed.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with this.’

Chris clapped his hands together, pistol-shot loud. The voices next door stopped abruptly.

‘Suits me. So where is Vasvik? Hiding in the toilet?’

Carla made an angry gesture at him. Erik moved to a table loaded with bottles and glasses. His voice was toneless with suppressed anger. He picked up a bottle and studied the label intently.

‘Perhaps you’d like to act as if you were civilised for a change, Chris. I’m aware that the strain might be too much, but maybe you should try. This man is a guest in my house, and he, in fact everyone in this room, is taking chances for your benefit.’

‘Glem det, Erik.’ Truls Vasvik had appeared in the lounge doorway, scruffily dressed and running stubble. He looked tired. ‘Faulkner’s here to negotiate, just like me. The only favours he owes are to you for getting involved.’

Chris shook his head. ‘You’re wrong about that, Vasvik. I’m not here to negotiate. I’ve told you what I want and it’s not negotiable. Simple yes or no will do.’

‘Well then.’ Vasvik dropped into the other armchair, eyes speculative on Chris’s face. ‘The answer is yes. UNECT will take you. But I’m afraid there’s a catch. A sub-clause, I guess you’d call it.’

Chris looked up at Carla, whose face had gone from tension to relieved delight to puzzlement in as many seconds. He felt a petty, jeering sense of vindication rising in him.

‘What sub-clause?’ he asked.

‘You’ll have to wait.’ Vasvik was still watching him carefully. ‘For the extraction, I mean. We will extract you, and you will be paid what you ask. But we need you in place for another three to six months. Until the Cambodia contract has matured.’

‘What the—’ Chris stopped himself with an effort of will and worked back to the easy confidence he’d come in with. ‘What the fuck do you know about the Cambodia contract, Vasvik?’

‘Probably more than you imagine.’ The ombudsman made a dismissive gesture. ‘But that isn’t really the issue—’

‘No,’ snapped Chris. ‘The issue is, you’re fucking with me.’

Vasvik smiled faintly. ‘I don’t believe a time-frame was mentioned at any point. What did you think? I would come here and magic you out with one sweep of my UN wand? These things take time, Chris. You have to wait your turn. For a change.’

Pushing. The realisation seeped into Chris’s consciousness, damping down the instinctive anger to an irritated curiosity. Why’s he pushing me?

The previous meeting in the workshop at Mel’s. Vasvik’s face, hard with distaste.

Personally, Faulkner, I don’t give a shit what happens to you. I think you’re scum. The ethical commerce guys would like to hear what you have, that’s why I’m here, but I’m not a salesman. I don’t have to reel you in to get my name up on some commission board somewhere, and frankly, I have a lot of better things to—

But the ethical commerce guys have sent you back here, haven’t they, Vasvik? Chris felt the answer light up in his head like an arcade game. You warned them not to bite, but they overruled you and they sent you back for me, and now you’ve got to swallow that shit whole.

Unless, that is, you can trip me into blowing out the offer of my own accord.

He felt a grin building. The manoeuvring room was immense. And at the back of it all he had Notley’s avuncular indulgence spread like dark, protecting wings. He could run Vasvik ragged, grind his bony nose up against his own controllers’ orders to acquire Chris Faulkner at asking price, and even if he pushed the ombudsman over the edge and blew it, he could walk away from the wreckage of the deal. Fuck ’em if they couldn’t take a joke. He’d stay at Shorn.

‘Alright.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s talk about Cambodia then.’

The tension in the room eased. Carla seemed to sag slightly with it, and Chris saw how her hand fell on her father’s shoulder. Erik reached up and clasped it without looking back from the drink he was building. Neither of them looked at Chris.

‘Good,’ said Vasvik. ‘So. The way we see it at the moment, you’ve got Khieu Sary on the customary long-leash arrangement, nominally acting in line with the accords you all signed up to, but in actual fact pretty much doing what he feels like. Recruiting from the villages that’ll listen to him, burning the ones that won’t. Standard terror tactics. My question is, what are you going to do about the enterprise zones?’

Chris shrugged. ‘We’ve got an understanding with him about that whole area. Gentleman’s agreement, nothing on paper.’

‘I see. Any reason why he should stick to that any more than he’s stuck to the Geneva Convention stuff so far?’

‘Yeah. If he doesn’t, we pull the plug on his mobile cover. Ever tried coordinating a guerrilla war by landline?’

Erik Nyquist leaned over and handed Vasvik a tall glass. There was a conspicuous lack of a drink in his other hand as he turned to look at Chris, and a familiar anger rising on his face.

‘Very neat,’ said Vasvik thoughtfully.

‘Yeah, because that kind of thing matters, doesn’t it, Chris? Can’t have some first-world sportswear manufacturer losing productivity, can we?’

Chris sighed.

‘Erik, you still got any of that Ardbeg non-chill filtered I bought you for your birthday?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. Can I get some of that cheap blended stuff you like, then?’

Erik’s right arm twitched at his side. Chris saw the fist knot up. Then Vasvik murmured something in Norwegian, and the older man stopped himself.

‘Get your own fucking drink,’ he said, and stalked across to the lounge window. The police lights outside pricked the blue in his eyes as he stared downward. Chris shrugged, pulled a face at Vasvik and rose to follow his father-in-law’s advice. Carla turned away from him as he got there. She disappeared into the kitchen, arms wrapped around herself. Chris shrugged again. It was a view he was getting used to. He selected a clean glass and a bottle from the table, poured four inches of something apparently called Clan Scott.

‘I don’t see where you’re going with this, Vasvik,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s standard CI operating procedure. Protect the foreign capital base at all costs. Sary understands that, like all the rest of these toy revolutionaries.’

‘And presumably you have informed those with interests in the EZs that this is the state of play.’

‘Yeah, sure. Most of them are buying their protection through our reinsurance arm anyway.’ Chris sniffed dubiously at the Scotch and took it back to his armchair. ‘Why?’

‘Did you know that Nakamura are modelling for a military coup against the Cambodian government?’

‘No.’ Chris swallowed some of his drink and grimaced. Next door the shouting seemed to be starting up again. ‘But it doesn’t surprise me. With Acropolitic still holding the official advisory angle, it’d be their only chance of carving themselves a slice of the action. Our indesp guys should bring it in before they make any substantial moves.’

‘Industrial espionage might give you backroom detail on the models, but it won’t help you on the ground. What are you going to do if it looks like Nakamura can get the Cambodian army to do what they want?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Call Langley, I suppose. Have the relevant uniforms capped at home.’

At the window, Erik Nyquist made a noise in his throat. Chris glanced across at him.

‘Hey, I’m sorry if that upsets your sensibilities, Erik. But this is the way the world is run.’

‘Yes. I know that.’

fucking bastard screamed the woman next door. The baby was crying again. Chris frowned into his drink.

‘Well, Erik, maybe you’d prefer it if we left these generals with their skulls intact, and then they could roll their tanks out to play in the streets of Phnom Penh and slaughter a few thousand people.’

‘The way Khieu Sary is going to, you mean?’

‘That’s not the way we’ve modelled it.’

‘Oh, good.’

Again, Vasvik said something in Norwegian, and Erik looked back out at the night. He seemed to see something of interest down below.

‘Your friends are leaving,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s obviously enough law enforcement for this month. We must have used up our credit.’

‘Hey, not my friends, Erik.’ Chris grinned at the older man. ‘I just paid them off, that’s all. Just because I give someone money, doesn’t mean I like them. You should know that.’

‘The point,’ said Vasvik sharply, ‘is that we would like you to remain in position until the Nakamura move is completed one way or another. The Cambodian EZs are under investigation—’

Chris hissed through his teeth. ‘Yeah, so what else is new. Don’t tell me you’re actually getting ready to take someone to that joke court of yours.’

Something smashed against the wall in the next flat. The male voice was back, competing for air time with the woman. The baby’s crying scaled up a couple of notches, maybe in an attempt to be heard over all the yelling. Chris raised an eyebrow and drank some more Clan Scott.

‘We need inside information from after any move by the Cambodian military.’ For all the change in Vasvik’s voice, the fight going on next door could have been on TV. ‘I don’t want to disclose details but if we don’t have clear data then a number of the people we’ve got our eye on will be able to use the confusion of the coup to muddy the waters over their own actions. They’ll get through the reasonable doubt loophole and they’ll walk. We’ll lose the whole case.’

‘Don’t you usually?’

cunt, cunt, cunt screamed the guy next door. Fucking CUNT

A blow, and someone falling. A broken shriek.

The baby, wailing.

Carla came out of the kitchen, as if fired from a gun.

‘Dad, what the fuck is he doing to—’

‘I know.’ Erik came to take his daughter’s hands. He looked suddenly very old. ‘It’s, he’s. It happens a lot. There’s nothing you can—’

Vasvik stared into the middle distance with no more emotion than a cat.

Another shriek. A meaty thump. Chris stared around and coughed out a laugh.

‘You guys are fucking hysterical, you know that. Erik, with your fucking writing, and the fucking ombudsman here. All going to change the fucking world for the better.’ Suddenly he was yelling himself. ‘Look at yourselves. You’re fucking paralysed, all of you.’

Something hit the wall, big enough to be a body. Blows followed, regular, spaced. Chanting.

you cunt, like that? you cunt, like that? you fucking like that cunt?

He was in motion, and it was like the Saab ride home all over again. Embodied purpose, unstoppable. He went out, along the tiny entry hall, out the front door, left, along to the next door. He kicked it in. Cheap wood splintered in the frame, the door flew back. Slammed into the wall, rebounded. He kicked again and erupted into the space beyond, through the hall and into the lounge.

They’d heard him come in. The woman was sprawled across the carpet, dressed in a short, moth-eaten, grey towelling robe and moving weakly like an injured soldier trying to crawl to cover. She was bleeding from the mouth. Below the hem of the robe, her thighs were mottled with old bruises. The baby was in a plastic carry chair, marooned atop a cheap entertainment stack near the kitchen door, mouth open wide as if in surprise. The father was turning, garish purple shellsuit bottoms and a red sleeveless T-shirt tight across a boxer’s physique. MEAT THE RICH was inked across his chest in white capitals stretched wide. His eyes were defocused with fury and his fists were clenched. Blood on the knuckles of the right hand.

‘You’re making too much noise,’ said Chris.

‘What?’ The man blinked. The lack of uniform registered. Maybe the cut of Chris’s clothes too. ‘Fuck are you doing in my house, cunt? You looking for a fucking fight?’

‘Yeah.’

Another blink. ‘You fucking what?’

‘Yeah. I’m looking for a fight.’

For some reason, the answer seemed to stall the other man. Chris, who’d been worried about the baby, used the moment to take two neat steps sideways and give himself a clear field of fire. The other man gaped as if the executive in front of him had just done a pirouette. Chris cleared the Nemex and pointed the weapon in a single fluid move that he reckoned Louise Hewitt would have been proud of. The man gaped some more.

‘Never mind.’

Bang

Chris shot as low down the thigh as he trusted himself to hit. The target screamed and collapsed, clutching at his leg. Chris reversed his grip on the gun, stepped in close and clubbed the man hard, sideways across the head. He went down, eyes rolled up. The woman on the floor shrieked and scuttled backwards into a corner.

‘It’s okay,’ Chris said absently. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

‘Chris!’

Carla stood in the doorway, face ashen. Staring at him.

‘It’s okay, he’s not dead.’ Chris thought about it for a moment, then put the Nemex to the man’s knee, just below the first wound, and pulled the trigger. The man jerked with the impact, but didn’t come round. Carla and the other woman’s screams seemed to blend in the wake of the shot. The baby started wailing again. He looked across at the woman, whose left eye was rapidly swelling closed. Thought some more. He placed the Nemex muzzle on the man’s right elbow—

‘Chris - don’t.’

—and pulled the trigger again.

Carla jerked back as if it was her he’d shot.

He put the Nemex away and crossed to where the woman was crouched in the corner. He took out his wallet and gave her about half of the cash he was carrying.

‘Listen,’ he said, pressing it into her hand. ‘Pay attention, listen. This is for you. Call him an ambulance if you like, but don’t let them take him in. They’ll try to. It’s what they’re paid to do, that’s how they make the big money. Don’t let them. They’ll dress the wounds here if you ask them to. It’s cheaper and it’s all he needs. He’s not in any danger. He won’t die. Do you understand?’

She just stared at him.

He sighed and folded her hand around the money. She flinched as he touched her. He sighed again and got up. Looked at the baby. The mess around him. He shook his head and turned away.

They were all there now. Erik Nyquist, features tight with disgust. Carla, hugged in her father’s arms, face buried in his chest. Vasvik silent and impassive.

‘What?’ he asked them. ‘What?’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Land Rover jolted over another pothole, hard and too fast. Coins and other dashboard detritus cascaded onto the floor. Chris swayed in the grip of his seatbelt. He glanced across at Carla.

‘You want to slow down a bit?’

She looked back at him, then away. Said nothing. The Land Rover bounced again. High beams splashed jerkily across the curve of the unlit street and a ravaged concrete structure that looked as if it might once have been the back end of an arena. Dead street lamps stood at intervals, most of them remarkably intact and upright.

‘For Christ’s sake, Carla, this is the zones. You really want to have to stop and change a flat tyre around here?’

She shrugged. ‘You’ve got a gun. I’m sure you can cripple anyone who gives us a hard time.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

They left the curving street and swung left past decayed low-rise housing and steel-shuttered frontages. The usual graffiti leered from the walls, incoherent tribal rage and abstract flashing that looked like stretched purple and white skulls. Carla stared ahead, tight-lipped. Chris felt his post-fight mellowness charring at the edges.

‘Hey, perhaps you’d rather he’d beaten her to death while we all sat there and listened to it. Good training for my future in the ombudsmen. Observe, take notes and never, never fucking intervene in anything.’

No response.

‘Your father lives next door to that every fucking day of his life, Carla. And he does nothing. Worse than nothing. He just shakes his fucking head and writes his agonised social commentary and he feeds it to people who’ll never know the realities of the situations he describes, and they all shake their heads and do nothing. And next door, a thug goes on beating his wife to pulp.’

‘My father’s a man in his fifties. Did you see the size of that piece of shit?’

‘Yeah. That’s why I shot him.’

‘That’s no solution!’

‘I don’t know - it seemed to slow him down.’

‘And what about when he recovers, Chris? When he’s back on his feet and twice as angry as he ever was.’

‘You’re saying I should have killed him?’

‘This isn’t fucking funny!’

Chris twisted round to face her. ‘No, you’re right Carla, it isn’t. It’s sick. You’re trying to get me, out of some twisted sense of moral outrage, to quit my job at Shorn and go work for men like Vasvik. And you saw how concerned he was back there. What a moral stand the fucking ombudsmen are prepared to take in the face of injustice.’

‘He wasn’t there for that, Chris.’

‘Neither was I, Carla. But I did something about it. Just like I’m going to do something in the NAME. Jesus, you think you can go through this life with your pristine ideals, taking notes and trusting some fuckwit UN judge to make everyone play nice. You think—’

The Land Rover leaned abruptly on its suspension. The road swung away in the high beams, replaced by the cross-hatching of an empty parking area. An abandoned supermarket loomed up ahead, facades smashed in and boarded up in about equal measures. There seemed to be a white tubular metal reindeer riveted to the roof, face turned blankly to greet the shoppers in their cars. Vague, tangled debris that had once presumably been a sleigh trailed from the animal’s rear and spilled down the roof as far as the sagging gutters. For one bizarre moment, the image reversed for Chris and he saw an amorphous tentacled creature dragging the reindeer down to its death.

Carla braked them to a halt in the middle of the car park.

For a moment, they both sat staring out at the mall front. Then she turned to look at him.

‘What’s happened to you, Chris?’ she whispered.

‘Oh, Christ, Carla—’

‘I.’ She gestured convulsively. ‘I don’t. Recognise you any more. I don’t know who you are any more. Who the fuck are you, Chris?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘No, I mean it. You’re angry all the time, furious all the time, and now you carry that gun around with you. When you started at Shorn, you told me about the guns, and you laughed about it. Do you remember that? You made fun of it. You made fun of the whole place, just like you used to at HM. Now you barely laugh at anything. I don’t know how to talk to you any more, I’m scared you’re going to just snap and start yelling at me.’

‘Keep on like this,’ he said grimly, ‘and guess what, I’ll probably snap and start yelling at you. And no doubt it’ll be my fucking fault again.’

She flinched.

‘You want to know who I am, Carla?’ He was leaning across the Land Rover towards her, in her face. ‘You really want to know? I’m your fucking meal ticket. Just like I always have been. Need new clothes? Need tickets to Norway? Need a handout for Daddy? Need to move out of the city and live somewhere nicer? Hey, that’s okay. Chris has got a good job, he’ll pay for it all. He doesn’t ask much, just keep the car clean and the odd blow job. It’s a fucking bargain, girl! ’

The words seemed to do something coming out. He felt tearing, somewhere indefinable. He felt dizzy, suddenly weak in the numb quiet that swallowed up what he’d said. He propped himself back away from her and sat waiting, not sure what for.

The silence hummed.

‘Get out,’ she said.

She hadn’t raised her voice. She didn’t look at him. She hit the central locking console and his door cracked open.

‘You’d better be sure about—’

‘I warned you before, Chris. You called me a whore once. You don’t get to do it twice. Get out.’

He looked out at the deserted parking area, the darkness beyond the Land Rover’s lights. He smiled thinly.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why not? Been coming to this for long enough.’

He shouldered the door fully open and jumped down. The night air was warm and comfortable, edged with a slight breeze. It was easy enough to forget where you were. He checked he still had the Nemex in its holster, his wallet in the jacket pocket, still thick with cash.

‘See you then, Carla.’

Her head jerked round suddenly. He met her eyes, saw what was in them and ignored it.

‘I’ll be at the office. Call me if the bills need paying, huh?’

‘Chris—’

He slammed the door on it.

He strode away without looking back, aiming only to get beyond easy hailing distance. Behind him, he heard the Land Rover put in gear and moving. He wondered briefly if she’d come after him at kerb-crawl speed across the car park, and what, in that ridiculous scenario, he would do. Then the high beams washed once over him and fled left, away across the white boxed acreage of the parking area. The engine lifted through the gears as she picked up speed.

He felt a single stab of worry, that she might not be safe getting home on her own. He grimaced and slammed a door on that as well.

Then she was gone. He turned, finally, to look, and was in time to catch the tail lights of the Land Rover disappearing amidst the low-rise huddle of housing on the other side of the car park. A few moments later the engine noise faded into the vehicle-free stillness of night in the zones.

He stood for a while, trying to get his bearings, geographical and emotional, but it was all utterly unfamiliar. There was nothing recognisable on the skyline in any direction. The supermarket faced him with its wrecked frontages, and he felt a sudden insane desire to lever loose some of the boarding, use the butt of the Nemex to do it, and slip inside, looking for—

He shivered. The dream marched through his head in neon-lit pulses.

sudden warm rain of blood

falling

He shook his head, hard. Turned his back on the facade. Then he picked an angle across the car park at random and started walking.

Up on the roof, the tube metal reindeer watched him go through eyes empty of anything except the cool evening wind.

Saturday night, Sunday morning. The cordoned zones.

He’d expected trouble, had even, with some of the same twisted joy that had driven his actions at the Brundtland, been looking forward to it. The Nemex was a grab away beneath his jacket. His hands were Shotokan-toughened and itchy with the desire to do damage. Worst-case scenario, his mobile would get him a police escort out, should he really need it.

Rather coldly, he knew he’d have to be literally fighting for his life before he’d make that call.

Anything less, he’d never live it down.

He’d expected trouble, but there was nothing worthy of the name.

He walked for a while through anonymous, poorly-lit estates, emerging once or twice onto main thoroughfares to take his bearings from scarred and vandalised road signs and then plunging back in, heading what he estimated was east. TV light flickered and glowed in windows, game-show noise escaped through the cheap glazing. Occasionally figures moved within. Outside, he saw children perched on walls in the gloom, sharing cigarettes, two-litre plastic bottles and crudely home-made solvent pipes. The first set he ran across spotted the clothes and came jeering towards him. He drew the Nemex and met their eyes, and they backed off, muttering. He kept the gun where it could be seen after that, and the other groups just watched him pass with bleak calculation. Whispered invective slithered in his wake.

Eventually, he came out onto a main road that looked as if it might run due east. Between the buildings on his left he thought he could make out the vaulted march of the M40 inrun converging from the north, which suggested he was somewhere near Ealing. Or Greenford, if he’d miscalculated how far out Carla had dumped him. Or Alperton. Or

Or you’re lost, Chris.

Fuck it, you don’t really know this part of town, so stop pretending you do. Just keep moving. Pretty soon the sun’s got to come up, and then you’ll damn well know if you’re heading east or not.

Keep moving. It had to be better than thinking.

He started to see signs of nightlife. Clubs and arcades at intervals along the street, in various stages of turnout. Junk food carry-outs, most of them little more than white-neon-blasted alcoves in the brickwork. The low-intensity stink of cheap meat and stale alcohol, laced once or twice with acid spikes of vomit. Little knots of people in the street, eating and drinking, shouting at each other. Turning to stare at him as he passed.

It couldn’t be helped. He lengthened his stride, kept the Nemex lowered but clearly in view. Kept to the centre of the street.

In theory, he could have tried to call a cab. He had landmarks now, identifiable club frontages and, if he was prepared to look hard enough in the gloom, street name plaques. In practice, it was probably a waste of time. The companies his mobile knew numbers for mostly wouldn’t come more than a few hundred metres the wrong side of the cordons, especially at this time of night. And those few that would tended to follow an esoteric driver’s mythology on exactly which streets were safe to pick up from. Get the wrong configuration in this tarot of zone codes, and you could wait all night. Hearing a location they didn’t like - better yet hearing some idiot raving about the corner of Old Something Smudged street, some nameless club and a pink neon rabbit with tits and a top hat - individual drivers were going to chortle grimly, ignore the controller and shelve the fare. There just wasn’t enough zone custom to push things the other way. You went to the zones, you drove. Or you walked home.

He caught eyes, made no attempt to look away. He remembered Mike’s demeanour on their previous expeditions to the zones, and aped it.

Be who you are, and fuck ’em if they don’t like it.

The gun helped.

No one wanted to push it any further than a curled lip. No one came close. No one said anything.

Outside one of the clubs, two crack whores broke his run of luck. They registered the clothes and stumbled across the road towards him like kids wading into cold water on a shingle beach. Their bare legs worked as if badly jointed, their feet were wrenched on ludicrous stiletto heels. They wore push-up bras and black mesh microskirts cinched savagely tight. Their make-up was sweat-streaked and caked, and their eyes looked bruised half shut. One was skinnier than the other, but otherwise the pre-dawn whore’s makeover rendered them uniform, wiped difference away.

They were all of fourteen years old.

‘You want to get sucked?’ asked the skinny one.

‘You got a place we can go?’ The other was clearly the brains of the outfit, the forward thinker.

Chris shook his head. ‘Go home.’

‘Don’t be harsh, baby. Just want to do you good.’ The skinny girl amplified her sales pitch with a finger-licking display. She stuck the wet finger inside one cup of her barely necessary bra and rubbed it back and forth with a fixed little smile. Chris flinched.

‘I said, go home.’ He raised the Nemex where they couldn’t miss it. ‘You don’t want anything to do with me.’

‘Baby, that’s a big gun you got,’ said the skinny girl.

‘You want to put it somewhere warm?’

Chris fled.

He came through the westward cordons at Holland Park, an hour before dawn. The checkpoint detail gave him some strange looks, but they said nothing and once his Shorn card swiped clear, they called him a cab. He stood outside the cabin while he waited for it to arrive, staring back across the barriers the way he’d come.

His mobile queeped. He looked at it, saw it was Carla and turned it off.

The cab arrived.

He had the driver take him to work.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

This early on a Sunday, the Shorn block was in darkness above the mezzanine level and the shutdown locks were still in place. He buzzed security, and they let him in without comment or visible surprise. He supposed, rather bitterly, that it couldn’t be entirely unheard of for a Shorn exec to come in before dawn at the weekend.

He thought briefly about grabbing a few hours’ sleep in the hospitality suites, then dismissed the idea out of hand. Outside, it was already getting light. He wouldn’t sleep unaided now. Instead, he rode the lift all the way up to the fifty-third floor, made his way through the cosy dimness of corridors lit at standby wattage and let himself into his office.

On his desk, the phone was already flashing a message light.

He checked it, saw it was from Carla and wiped it. He stood afterwards with his finger on the stud for a while, reached once for the receiver but never made it. Reached for the lighting control on the datadown but changed his mind. The grey pre-dawn quiet the office was steeped in had an oddly comforting quality, like a childhood hiding place. Like a pillow under his cheek and a clock in front of his face showing a good solid hour before alarm time. Without the lights, he was in limbo, a comfortable state in which decisions did not have to be made, in which you didn’t have to move forward any more. The sort of state that just couldn’t last, but while it did—

He muted the phone’s ring tone, went to the built-in cupboards by the door and took down a blanket. Crossing to the sofa-and-coffee-table island in the corner of the office, he shucked his jacket, shoulder holster and shoes and then lowered himself onto the sofa. Then he covered himself with the blanket and lay staring at the white textured ceiling, waiting for the slow creep of morning to soak across it.

Back down at reception, the younger of the two security guards made bladder excuses and left his colleague while he went up to the mezzanine. He pushed through the swing doors of the toilets, locked himself in a cubicle and took out his phone.

He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced and punched out a number.

The phone purred beside a wide, grey-sheeted bed in a space lit by hooded blue softs. A massive picture window in one wall was polarised to dark. On a table under the sill, a chess set of ornate figurines stood next to a screen that displayed the state of play in silver, black and blue. Grecian-effect sculpture stood around the room on plinths in the shadows. Beneath the sheets, the curves of two bodies moved against each other as the ringing tone penetrated layers of sleep. Louise Hewitt poked her head up, reached for the receiver and held it to her ear. She glared balefully at the time display beside the phone.

‘This had better be fucking important.’

She listened to the hastily apologetic voice at the other end, and her eyes opened wide. She twisted, struggled free of the sheet and propped herself up on one elbow.

‘No, you were right to call me. Yes, I did say that. Yes, it is unusual, I agree. Of course. No, I won’t forget this. Thank you.’

She cradled the receiver and turned over onto her back. Her gaze was dreamy on the blue-tinged ceiling, her tone thoughtful.

‘Chris just rolled into work on his own. In a cab. Four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Looks like he’s been up all night.’

The slim form beside her stirred fully awake.

Chris was dreaming about the supermarket again, but this time he was watching the whole scene from outside, and the car park was insanely, impossibly full of cars. They were everywhere, every colour under the sun, like spilled sweets, and all in motion, cruising and parking and reversing out like some immense robotic ballet, and he couldn’t get through them. Each time he took a step towards the supermarket and the people in its brilliantly-lit interior, a car rolled into his path and stopped with a short squeak of brakes. He had to go round, he had to go round, and his time was running out. The people inside didn’t know. They were shopping in anaesthetised warmth and content and they had no way of knowing what was coming.

Up on the roof, tube metal groaned and clanked in protest as the reindeer shook its head.

And the cars, he suddenly saw, were all empty. There were no shoppers in them, no one driving, no one loading, no one anywhere. Everybody was inside. Shopping. Fucking shopping.

He made it to the doors and tried to open them but they were closed up with impact plastic boarding and metres of heavy steel chain. He tried banging on the windows, shouting, but no one heard him.

The shots, when they came, rippled the glass under his hands. And as always, they drilled into his ear like something physical.

He yelped and woke up, fists clenched under his chin.

For a moment, he cringed there, curled defensively at one end of the sofa. He’d twisted the blanket up in his sleep and now it barely covered half his body. He blinked hard a couple of times, breathed out and sat up. Dawn had come and gone while he slept, and the office was full of bright sunlight.

He got up from the sofa and found his shoes. Bending to put them on, he felt his head throbbing. He’d drowsed himself into a low-grade headache. He shambled to the desk and opened drawers with myopic clumsiness, looking for painkillers. The phone flashed at one corner of his vision. He fumbled a snarl and checked numbers on the piled up messages. Carla, Carla, Carla, fucking Carla—

And Liz Linshaw.

He stopped dead. The call had come in an hour ago. He grabbed a foil of speed delivery codeine tabs out of an open drawer and hit ‘play’.

‘Chris, I tried you at home but your wife didn’t know where you were.’ A wry curl to the voice - he could see the faint smile that went with it. ‘She, uh, she wasn’t too helpful but I got the impression you might be coming into work today. So listen, there’s a breakfast bar in India Street called Break Point. I’m meeting someone there at eight-thirty. I think you might want to be there too.’

He checked his watch. Eight-twenty.

Jacket, Nemex. He chewed up the codeine tabs on his way down in the lift, swallowed the powder and went out hurriedly into the sun.

It took him a little longer than he expected to find India Street. He remembered the breakfast bar from a damage limitation strategy meeting he’d had there once when he still worked at Hammett McColl. But because he associated the place with the reinsurance brokers at the meeting, he misremembered the address and found himself in an alley off Fenchurch Street with the wrong name. He cast about for a couple of minutes, blurry with the onset of the codeine, before the mistake dawned on him. Working off the new memory, he plotted a vague eastward course and set out again through the tangle of deserted streets.

He was walking north up the glass-walled canyon curve of Crutched Friars, when someone yelled his name.

‘Faulkner!’

The word echoed off the enclosing steel and glass walls, bounced away down the curve of the canyon. Chris jerked around, sludgily aware he was in trouble. About twenty metres away, blocking his way to the right turn into India Street, five figures stood spread out across the width of the road. All five wore black ski-masks, all five hefted weapons that to his untutored eye looked like shotguns. They were faced off against him in the ludicrous cliché stance of a Western gunfight, and despite it all, despite the abrupt knowledge of his own rapidly approaching death, Chris felt a smirk creep out across his face.

‘You what?’

Maybe it was the codeine. He laughed out loud. Shouted it.

‘You fucking what?’

The men facing him shifted, apparently discomforted. They glanced inward to the figure at the centre. The man took a step forward. Hands pumped the shotgun’s action. The clack-clack echoed along the street.

‘Go foah it, Faulkner.’

The knowledge hit Chris like cold water. He opened his mouth to yell the name, knew he would be shot before he could get it out.

‘Just a minute.’

Everyone looked round at the new voice. Mike Bryant stood at the mouth of a side alley about ten metres behind Chris, panting slightly. He raised his left hand, right floating close to his belt. Gripped in the upraised fist was a thick wad of currency.

Makin faltered behind his mask. The shotgun lowered a couple of degrees.

‘This has got nothing to do with you,’ he called.

‘Oh, but it does.’ Mike ambled out of the alley and drifted up the street until he was lined up beside Chris. There was a thin beading of sweat across his brow, and Chris remembered he couldn’t be more than a day out of the hospital. He still held the wad of cash before him like a weapon. ‘You take down one Shorn exec in the street, where’s it going to end? Eh, Nick? You’re breaking the fucking rules, man.’

And out of the corner of his mouth, he muttered to Chris.

‘You carrying?’

‘Yeah, I’m carrying.’

‘Loaded this time?’

Chris nodded tautly. A surge of adrenalin punched through the codeine vagueness, a savage pleasure at the comradeship in the man at his side and the will to do harm together.

‘Good to know. Follow my lead, this is going to go fast.’

‘We only want Faulkner,’ shouted Makin.

Mike grinned and raised his voice again. ‘That’s too bad, Nick, because you got me too.’ It was the bright, energetic tone Chris had last heard when Bryant crippled and blinded Griff Dixon in his own living room. ‘And before we start, gentlemen, just look at tonight’s wonderful prizes.’

He held up the fistful of bank notes again. His voice resonated in the steel canyon acoustics, loud and game-show fruity.

‘For the winners! Twenty thousand euros, in cash! Lay down your weapons and walk away with it all! Tonight! Or, take the gamble, lose and die! Ladies and gentlemen, you decide!’

He hurled the money up and outward. It was bundled together with a thick metallic band that glinted as it turned end over end, high in the bright morning air.

‘Now,’ he snapped.

After that, it all seemed to be happening on freeze-frame advance. Chris tugged out the Nemex. It felt appallingly heavy in his hand, appallingly slow to bring round and point.

Beside him, Mike Bryant was already firing.

Makin’s contingent were still staring up at the money. Mike’s first slug took the man on Makin’s right under his back-tilted chin, tore through his neck and dropped him in a shower of arterial blood.

The remaining four scattered across the perspectives of the street.

Chris held the Nemex out, memories of a hundred shooting-gallery hours like iron tracery in his right arm. He squeezed the trigger, felt the kick. Squeezed again. One of the men ahead of him staggered. Hard to see blood against the dark canvas clothes. He squeezed again. The man folded forward and collapsed on his face in the street.

A shotgun boomed.

He pointed and fired at Makin. Missed. Out of peripheral vision, he saw Mike Bryant stalking forward, face fixed in a grin, Nemex extended, shooting in an arc. Another of Makin’s men went down, clutching at his thigh.

Another shotgun blast. Chris felt a thin stinging of pellets across his ribs. He spotted Makin, pumping another shell in. He yelled and ran towards him, firing wildly. Makin saw him coming and took aim.

Another figure stumbled into Makin’s path, shooting across the street at Mike. The two men tangled. Chris shot indiscriminately into them both.

Makin got clear, raised the shotgun again. There seemed to be something wrong with his arm.

Chris emptied the Nemex into him. The gun locked back, breech open on the last shot.

And it was over.

The echoes rolled away, like trucks moving off down the street. Chris stood over Nick Makin and watched as he stopped breathing. Off to his left, Mike Bryant walked up to the shotgunner he’d hit in the thigh. The injured man flopped about weakly. Blood was leaking in astonishing quantities from his twisted leg. Beneath the mask, his head shifted back and forth between Chris and Mike like a trapped animal’s. He was making a panicked moaning noise.

‘Look, you’re going to bleed to death anyway,’ Mike told him.

The Nemex shell punched him flat. The ski-masked head jerked about with the impact. A new rivulet of blood groped out across the asphalt from the torn wool and gore of the exit wound. Mike knelt and checked his handiwork, then looked up at Chris and grinned.

‘Five to two, eh. Not bad for a couple of suits.’

Chris shook his head numbly. The Nemex hung at the end of his arm like a dumb-bell weight. He unlocked the opened breech, put the weapon away, fumbling with the holster. Post-drive shakes, setting in.

‘This is nice.’ Mike picked up the dead man’s shotgun and hefted it with approval. ‘Remington tactical pump. Fancy a souvenir?’

Chris said nothing. Bryant got up, tucked the shotgun casually under his arm. ‘’s okay, I’ll talk to the police, get one for both of us out of evidence, when they’ve finished with it. Something to show to your grandchildren.’ He shook his head, talking a little fast with the adrenalin crash. ‘Fucking unbelievable, huh? Like something off a game platform. Ah. See you got Makin pretty good then?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris looked incuriously at where the other exec lay, still masked. Up close, you could see the wounds in his chest and belly. His whole body was drenched with the blood. ‘Dead.’

Mike looked around judiciously.

‘I think they all are. Oh, wait a minute.’ He crossed to the man Chris had hit when he tangled with Makin. He crouched and put two fingers to the man’s neck, shrugged. ‘On his way out, I reckon. Still.’

He got up and pointed the Nemex down at the man’s masked face. He was already turning away as he pulled the trigger.

‘How did you know I’d be here?’ Chris asked him.

Another shrug. ‘Carla rang me this morning at home. In tears. Told me you’d had a row, you’d got out in the middle of the zones and now she couldn’t get hold of you. I came in looking for you. Had to break into your office. Sorry about that, I was pretty worried. Anyway, I spotted that message from Liz. Thought I’d catch you up. Took a while, my ribs are still killing me.’

Chris looked at him narrowly. ‘You just happened to be carrying twenty grand in cash?’

‘Oh, that.’ Mike grinned again and crossed to where the bundle of currency still lay on the street. ‘Improvisation. Look.’

He tossed the money across, and Chris caught it awkwardly with his left hand. The notes were twenties. There was a thousand euros in the bundle at most.

‘Best I could do on the spur of the moment. You really walk in from the zones last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Must have been some row.’

They stood amidst the carnage, the scattered weapons and spreading pools of blood, and very slowly Chris became aware that, amongst a small knot of people gathered at the end of India Street, Liz Linshaw was watching him.

He walked towards her.

‘Do you have any idea how bad this looks?’

Louise Hewitt stood stiff legged at the head of the conference table and gestured at the projection. Blown-up surveillance camera footage ran grainy and silent behind her, Mike Bryant giving the coup de grâce to the two masked gunmen still breathing.

‘Do you have any idea what this kind of brawling does to our image as a serious financial institution?’

Chris shrugged. His side was numb where the Shorn medic had dosed him with contact anaesthetic prior to digging out the shotgun pellets. The rest of him was past feeling very much of anything too. ‘You should be talking to Makin. He started it.’

‘This is not a fucking playground, Faulkner!’

‘Louise, you’re being unreasonable.’ Mike Bryant met Philip Hamilton’s eyes across the table and the other man looked away, towards Hewitt. Beside him, Jack Notley stared into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the storm building around him. ‘Makin called this one, all the way down. If I hadn’t been there, Chris’d be dead now and the blame’d be farmed out to zone gangwits. We wouldn’t even know we had a loose cannon aboard.’

On the projection screen, Chris walked away from the bodies and out of shot. It was odd, watching himself disappear, back into the past of three hours ago and the confrontation with Liz Linshaw.

You set me up.

She took it like a slap. For the first time he could recall, he saw open hurt in her face. The sight of it licked the pit of his belly.

You fucking set me up, you bitch.

No. She was shaking her head. Chris, I don’t—

And then Mike was there, and they both slid their masks back on. Passion sheathed. There was control, there were words that meant something factual, there was the long, verbal comedown. Explanations, talk and shots of rough, blended whisky in Break Point to combat the shakes. Sanity leaking into the nightmare aftermath like blood across asphalt.

I just got a call. This guy said he worked Driver Control, he knew what really happened to Chris on the M11, did I want to know too? Meet him here. Five grand in cash.

She brandished the money out of her wallet. Like proof of innocence.

When Mike went to the bathroom, she reached out across the cheap plastic-topped table and took Chris’s hand in her own. No words, only a cabled look, eye to eye. Spinning sudden vertigo, and then the flush of the toilet through cardboard-thin walls, and their hands leapt apart like matched magnetic poles.

Louise Hewitt was talking to him, but he couldn’t make it matter. He levered himself to his feet, faced her disbelieving fury.

‘I’ve had enough of this shit, Louise. It’s pretty fucking clear what happened here.’

‘Sit down Faulkner, I haven’t—’

‘Makin couldn’t hack the NAME account. I took it from him, and it hurt. He couldn’t take me on the road, so he hired a gangwit kid to do what he didn’t dare do himself. When that didn’t work—’

‘I told you to sit dow—’

He shouted her down. ‘When that didn’t fucking work, Louise, he hired some more sicarios and tried this. He couldn’t beat me playing by the Shorn rules, so he broke them. And now he’s dead. Everybody in fucking black.’

‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice didn’t seem to have raised much, but there was an edge on it that cut across the air like tyre screech. ‘You don’t talk to partnership like this. You’re overwrought, but that’s no excuse. Now get out.’

Chris met the senior partner’s eyes, and saw the man who had almost shot him dead in his own office a week ago. He nodded.

‘Fair enough.’

They watched him go in silence. Mike Bryant looked round the table again. He shook his head.

‘This isn’t right, Jack. I mean, it’s a fucking mess. But Makin called it. He’s been a fuck-up since he took over the NAME, he was way too impressed with himself from day one. I would have called him out myself, but what’s the point? Anyone could have seen he’d blink first.’

Hamilton blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You don’t have to drive against someone to know you’re better than they are, Phil. That’s crude. Sometimes you just know what the outcome’d be, and that’s enough. This kill-or-be-killed shit just gets in the way.’

The look ran between the partners like current. Up on the projector screen, the surveillance film had looped. The gun battle was starting again. Jack Notley cleared his throat.

‘Mike, perhaps you could give us some time to discuss this from a partner perspective. We’ll get back to you again on Monday morning.’

Bryant nodded. ‘Sure.’

When the door closed, Louise Hewitt spun on Notley.

‘Did you hear that? You know where that comes from, don’t you? That’s chess and bullshit neojap philosophy, courtesy of Chris bloody Faulkner. The man is a fucking toxin, Jack. He’s the real loose cannon around here.’

‘It doesn’t show up like that in the numbers, Louise.’

‘It’s not about the numbers.’

‘No?’ Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘Am I missing something here? Would you care to tell me what Shorn CI is about besides the numbers?’

‘Don’t be obtuse. It’s about an ethic. A corporate culture. A way of doing things. And if we let that go, this,’ she jabbed a finger at the surveillance film. Masked figures, collapsed like unstrung marionettes. Pools and snakes of blood. ‘Is what happens. Structural breakdown, anarchy in the streets. It’s axiomatic. Does anyone sitting round this table have any inkling why Nick Makin might have acted the way he did? Why he found it necessary, even believed perhaps that it would be acceptable, to breach Shorn etiquette like this? Think hard, Jack. Think about a certain major client, beaten to death in conference a week ago. Think about the way you rewarded Faulkner for that. Does anyone see a connection?’

For a fraction of a second, Jack Notley closed his eyes. When he spoke, there was a soft warning in his voice.

‘I don’t think we need to revisit that, Louise.’

‘I think we do, Jack. You gave Chris a green light for behaviour beyond any acceptable limits. And Makin learnt the lesson, resulting in this mess. And meanwhile we’ve got Bryant, our best driver, talking like a fucking ombudsman. Any way you look at it, Jack, you’ve destabilised what we’re about. And we can’t afford that.’

‘I wonder if Martin Page would see it that way?’

Hamilton and Hewitt traded a glance. Hewitt came to the table and seated herself carefully.

‘Is that some kind of accusation?’

Notley shrugged. ‘Let’s just say that your talk of loose cannons is selective, Louise. Page was a junior partner. What you did to him ran counter at least to an unspoken understanding of how partnership works here.’

‘I resent that, Jack. Page was a filed challenge.’

‘Yes, a challenge without a vacant post to justify it. Executive brawling at partnership level. An act of pure, equity share greed.’

‘Which you underwrote, as I recall.’

‘Retrospectively, yes. Because back then, Louise, you were the loose cannon, and I admired you for it.’

Hewitt smiled thinly. ‘Well, thank you. But I think there’s a limit—’

‘Oh, shut up. Don’t talk to me about,’ Notley gestured impatiently, ‘destabilisation, as if it’s something we have some kind of choice about. As if it’s something we can avoid. What we do here is built on instability. It’s a fucking prerequisite.’

Philip Hamilton cleared his throat. ‘I think what Louise means is—’

‘Yes, I thought it was about time you weighed in, you little sycophant. Christ, you’re beginning to sicken me, both of you.’

Notley stood up and strode to the head of the table. He stabbed the projector control with two folded fingers, and the wall behind him was abruptly blank. His voice was tight with leashed anger.

‘Louise, I helped you climb to the top of this pile, and now you’re up here all you want to do is surround yourself with low-threat colleagues like this bag of guts, and kick away the ladder in case anybody sharper gets to scramble up and destabilise things for you. Haven’t you learnt anything on the way up? Either of you? You can’t have stability and dynamic capital growth. It’s textbook truth. Come on. What transformed the stock market back in the last century? Volatility. Competition. Deregulation. The loosening of the ties, the removal of social security systems. What’s transformed foreign investment in the last thirty years? Volatility. Competition. Small wars. It’s the same pattern. And what ensures that we stay on top of it all? Volatility. Innovation. Rule-breaking. Loose cannons. Christ, why do you think I hired Faulkner in the first place? We need that factor. We have to keep topping up with it. Otherwise, we all just turn back into the same fat-fuck, complacent, country-club scum that nearly sank us last time around. Sure, men like Faulkner are unstable. Sure, they keep you looking in your rearview all the time. But that’s what keeps us hard.’

For a couple of beats, silence held the conference room. Nobody moved. Notley stared from Hewitt to Hamilton and back, daring them to dispute. Finally, Hewitt shook her head.

‘It may make you hard, Jack,’ she said with measured insolence. ‘But to me it’s just bad business. We have structures in place to ensure volatility and competition. I don’t think we need to go courting chaos into the bargain. I’m making a recommendation this quarterly that we let Faulkner go.’

Notley nodded, almost affably.

‘Alright Louise. If that’s the way you want it. But understand this. We’ve been courting chaos since the day we signed on for Conflict Investment. All of us. It’s what drives us, it’s what gets results. And I’m not going to watch you sell that out, just because you’ve got comfortable. You go on record with that recommendation, I will find reasons to call you out. Do you understand me? I will drive you off the road.’

This time no one broke the silence. Notley leaned his neck hard to one side and they heard it click in the stillness.

‘That will be all.’

When he had gone, Hewitt got up and went to stare out of the window. Hamilton pushed out a long breath.

‘Do you think he means it?’

‘Of course he means it,’ said Hewitt irritably.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She came back to sit on the edge of the table. She looked down into Hamilton’s face. ‘But I’m going to need your help.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Out in the corridor, Mike Bryant quizzed security. They told him Chris had taken a lift to the ground floor. Seemed pretty pissed off, admitted one of the guards. Mike called a lift of his own and bombed downward in pursuit.

He spotted Chris, already halfway across the sun-lit cathedral expanse of the lobby. The holos and fountains and subsonics were all switched off, and there was nobody about. In the Sunday afternoon emptiness that was left, the space felt suddenly steely and inhuman.

Mike cleared his throat and called across it.

‘Chris. Hey, Chris. Wait up a minute.’

‘Now’s not a good time, Mike.’ Chris flung it back over his shoulder, not stopping.

‘Okay.’ Mike jogged to catch up. Residual bruising across his chest made it painful. ‘You’re right, it’s not a good time. So why don’t we go and grab a drink somewhere?’

‘I’ve got to get my car back from Hawkspur Green. And then check into a hotel.’

‘You’re not going home?’

‘What do you think?’

Mike put out a hand, breathing heavily. ‘What I think is, you need to drink some of that seaweed-iodine shit you like, and talk about this. And, luckily, I’m here to listen to you spill. Alright? Come on, I saved your life out there, Chris. At least buy me a drink. Alright?’

Chris looked at him. An unwilling smile bent his mouth. Mike saw it and grinned back.

‘Alright. I’ll get the car.’

They found a tiny antique pub called The Grapes, tacked onto the Lime Street edge of Leadenhall Market, catering mainly to the insurance crowd and powered down to a single barwoman for the Sunday trade. Like most city-based hostelries, it opened seven days a week because the simple fact that it was always open was worth something in itself. Brokers knew they could get fed and watered there whatever day they were working, and the knowledge stuck. There was no room for five-day amateurs.

Three - or four? - whiskies in, Chris had drowned his fury and was slumped on a stool, watching dust motes dance in the streams of sunlight that fell in through the windows opposite the bar. A faint, pervasive odour of alcohol seeped up off the polished wood counter. The Laphroaig sat on top of the cheap three fingers he’d taken in Break Point, the codeine tabs and no food to speak of. He felt like a mud-smeared windscreen.

‘Look,’ Mike was saying. ‘It doesn’t matter what Hewitt thinks. You took Makin down. That’s what counts. Sure, it was unorthodox, but that’s the point isn’t it? It ups your don’t-fuck-with-me stock through the roof. Builds you the killer rep.’

‘Killer rep.’ Chris stared into his glass. He coughed up a laugh and shook his head. ‘You want to know something about me, Mike?’

‘Sure.’

‘My killer rep is a fucking accident.’

He saw how the other man’s gaze narrowed. He nodded, knocked back the rest of the Laphroaig. Grunted, like letting go.

‘’s right. I’m a fucking fake, Mike. Hewitt has me, cross-hairs and centred. She always did. She’s not wrong. I don’t belong here.’

Mike frowned, finished his vodka and gestured to the barwoman.

‘Same again. Chris, what are you talking about? You’ve been a fuel-injected killing machine since Quain, at least.’

‘Ah! Quain.’ Chris watched as the whisky rose two fingers in his glass. ‘Quain, Quain, Quain. You want to know about Quain?’

‘I already know about Quain. Chris, you left him smeared along thirty metres of asphalt. That’s pretty open and shut. You ran him over five fucking times, man.’

‘Yeah.’

He sat, remembering. Brilliant spring sunshine, and the crunching impact of his barely legal ten-year-old Volvo Injection against the smooth racing green flanks of Quain’s Audi. The light had gleamed so hard off the bodywork, he’d had to squint.

And Quain spinning out, finally, into the barrier, jammed onto a snapped section of uprights. What Chris had been trying for all through the difficult latter stages of the duel, well past the point when he’d actually won. Quain gaping, middle-aged and fearful, through the smashed-in driver-side window as the Volvo backed up, preliminary to ramming. Gaping as Chris killed the motor and got out.

He felt his face twitch with the memory.

He seemed to make the walk between the two cars at an immense distance from himself. The turnover of his pulse throbbed in his own ears. No Nemexes back then. He walked right up to the window and showed Quain the thing in his hand. The recycled raki bottle, the soaked rag. Perfume of petrol as he waved it back and forth. Snap of the lighter and the pale flame in the sunny air. Quain started babbling.

Get out, Chris told him, surprising himself. The plan had been to burn Quain alive. The plan had been to tell Quain why, and then throw the bottle with enough force to shatter on the floor between his feet. The plan had been to watch Quain turned into a shrieking, flailing, flame-armed thing, to listen to the screams and—

Get out and run, you fuck.

And Quain did.

Crazed, maybe, with fear of what he saw in Chris’s eyes, hypnotised by the blob of pale, dancing flame. Chris stood there and watched him go, groping about inside his own head for a reason. Something was happening in there, and he couldn’t make out what it was.

He threw the bottle into the Audi anyway, as much in frustration as anything else. It shattered on the dash and the flames sprang up. The sight seemed to switch something back on inside him. He sprinted back to the Volvo, kicked it alive and floored the accelerator. Fishtail waltz as he hauled the wheel over and his gaze sharpened on the portly, lumbering figure ahead on the road. Quain must have heard the engine and known what it meant. He was making for the central reservation as the Volvo came up on his heels. It wouldn’t have made any difference, Chris realised later. He would have driven straight through it to get to Quain.

He dropped a gear and the engine screamed. Quain looked back over his shoulder just before the Volvo hit. Chris saw his eyes. Then he was gone, a suddenly, impossibly aerodynamic body thudding and tumbling up off the hood, the windscreen, the roof. A flash of dark falling in the rearview as Chris braked the Volvo to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t enough.

He never knew if Quain was dead when he reversed back over him the first time. But he saw what emerged under the front wheels as he pulled up five metres back from the body.

It still wasn’t enough.

He did it again. And again.

Five times, before he realised it would never be enough.

‘He killed my father,’ he said.

And Mike Bryant, staring at him in the sifting dustlight. A look on his face Chris had never seen before. Stalled out, lost.

‘Your father?’

Chris sighed. Loading up for the long, tedious climb of explanation. ‘Not directly. Quain never met my father directly. My father worked for a reconstruction consultancy called IES - International Economic Solutions, but when you said it all together it sounded like Yes. Cute, huh? My mother said he used to.’

He clamped his mouth. Shook his head. Cleared his throat.

‘Uh, they modelled admin systems, infrastructure, things like that. They were into central Africa, the Middle East. Pretty small, but hungry and hard on the roads, as far as that went back then.’

Mike nodded. ‘Enough to just get there first, right?’

‘That’s what they say.’ Chris stared at a ray of dusty light falling across the bar top. A faint scarring of overlaid glass rings showed up in the wooden glow. ‘2018, Edward Quain was a hotshot young gun in Hammett McColl Emerging Markets. Couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. And he pulled off this cutting-edge piece of incursion for Hammett McColl in Ethiopia. Got backing for a major policy shift. Nothing dramatic by CI standards, this is more than thirty years ago, remember. But it was enough to bring down the government. A lot of high-ranking officials lost their jobs. And Quain’s new team publicly reneged on a stack of external contracts. Happened overnight, literally. IES couldn’t take the damage. They went under, bankrupted along with a dozen or so others, and about forty per cent of the low-end commercial sector in Ethiopia at the time. They say it precipitated the civil war.’

‘Ah yeah, I remember this.’ Mike snapped his fingers. ‘The Ayele Protocol, right? Read about it in Reed and Mason.’

‘Right. Quain walked away with a huge commission, Hammett McColl repositioned for regional dominance in the Red Sea zone, and my father woke up with a walletful of dead plastic he didn’t know about. He got shot the same day, arguing with a supermarket security guard. His card wouldn’t scan at checkout, they wouldn’t take him seriously and it got.’ Chris watched his knuckles whiten around the whisky glass with absent fascination, as if they belonged to someone else. ‘Out of hand. My mother says, said, if he’d been dressed better that day, it would never have happened. Hated suits apparently, my old man. Dressed scruffy as he could, outside the office. Maybe they thought he’d stolen the card or something. They tried to throw him out, it got rough. Blam. Some fat over-the-hill fuck with a dick extension blew his fucking head off.’

He looked at the whisky glass. Let go of it abruptly and stared at the palm of his suddenly liberated hand.

‘We lost everything. The house, both cars. Health insurance, savings. Stock options. My mother got rehoused in the eastern zones. My father’s friends helped out as much as they could, but most of them were going under too. They were all at IES or working in related firms.’ Chris picked up his drink again, knocked it back. ‘And then, even that early, they say you could see the domino coming if you were paying attention. It was still nearly a decade off, the worst of it, but people were already running scared, just hanging on with whatever they had. And Quain had just seen to it that we had nothing.’

‘You remember all this?’

‘Not really, no. I was two when my father was killed. I was there but,’ Chris shivered, dodging the dream. ‘I don’t remember it. I just remember growing up in the zones with this accent everybody hated. This vague sense that things were better once. Before. But I could have picked that up listening to my mother. No way you remember stuff from when you’re two years old.’

‘No. But.’ Mike gestured helplessly. ‘How the fuck did you. I mean, Quain. Didn’t he see you coming, the day you joined HM? How did you even get into HM, come to that?’

‘I changed my name. My father wasn’t called Faulkner, it was my mother’s maiden name. She died of thorn fever, when I was seventeen. I took her name, sold everything else we owned and cut myself a new identity. Got a gangwit datarat in Plaistow to fix my records. Probably did a shit job, the money I gave him, but it was what I could afford. I doubt it would have stood up to close scrutiny, but when you’re from the zones who the fuck cares. You’re just cheap, faceless labour. And by the time I got to Hammett McColl, I had five years of new identity behind me. I’d made a lot of money for Ross Mobile and LS Euro, I could drive. That’s all the HM recruiters cared about.’

‘Sloppy. Was that their own people?’

‘No, contracted out. Some cut-rate two-room outfit off Ludgate Circus. They tendered for HM on straight cost. No duel requirement. Lowest offer wins.’

Mike shook his head. ‘Fucking amateurs.’

‘Yeah, but you know what. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Quain wouldn’t have recognised my father’s name. Some guy he ruined twenty years ago, one name out of hundreds he probably didn’t even know back when it happened, let alone two decades on. What are the chances?’

‘Yeah, figures.’ Mike puffed out his cheeks. ‘Jesus, what a story. Does Carla know all this?’

‘No. She knows I grew up in the zones, she knows my parents are dead, but we don’t talk about it. I met her after Quain. I’d already buried it all. She used to ask, back when we started seeing each other. Think it might even have been some of the attraction for her, the zone connection. I told her I wasn’t interested in looking back.’ He stared down the receding perspectives of the memory. ‘Snapped her head off whenever she asked. She stopped asking after a while.’

‘Yeah, it’s true. You never talk about it, do you?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We’re all too flat-out fucking busy trying to make it big right now to talk about the past. You’d think none of us had parents, the way we live.’

‘Hey, I’ve got parents. I see them pretty often.’

‘Good for you.’

Mike shook his head again, a little blearily this time. ‘Still can’t believe it, man. It’s like a fucking movie. All the way back from the zones to take down Edward Quain.’

Chris finished his drink. ‘Yeah, well. Some of us have got what it takes, some of us haven’t. Remember.’

‘Ah, shit, Chris, I didn’t mean you. I’m not saying everyone in the zones deserves to be there, you know that. If I’d known, you know, about your parents and stuff, I wouldn’t have said—’

‘No? You must have known my background, Mike. You said yourself, that first day I met you in the washroom, Hewitt was batting my details about before I arrived. And it’s not a secret where I grew up. It’s on the résumé.’

‘What?’ Mike squinted at him. ‘Well, yeah, but I assumed. I don’t know, accidental son of some slumming exec and a bargirl, a dancer or something.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Fuck, I don’t mean. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, but I just assumed. It happens, you know. Seen it happen. Come close a couple of times, myself. I just figured, something like that, that’s how you got your break at Ross Mobile, maybe a leg up into LS as well.’

‘No.’ Chris smiled tightly. ‘I got Ross through an old friend of my father. Everything else I clawed down myself. Don’t worry about it, Mike. You were right. Some of us have got what it takes, and what it takes is hate. I had enough hate to paint a towerblock. I grew up hating. It was like fuel. Like food. You don’t need much of anything else when you’ve got hate.’

‘Look—’

‘And then one morning I woke up and I’d killed Edward Quain, and the world was still here. I had a job, I had a life, well, a lifestyle anyway. Hammett McColl had just promoted me. I had money, a lot of money, for the first time in my life.’ He tipped his empty glass horizontal. Looked into it and laughed. ‘It seemed a little ungracious not to go on living.’

The two of them sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Mike shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

‘Chris.’ He hesitated. ‘You, uh, you want to stay at my place tonight?’

‘No. Thanks, no. I’ve got to be alone for a while, Mike. There’s stuff I need to sort out. I’ll get a hotel. But thanks. And.’ He waved vaguely. ‘Thanks for, you know, saving my life and everything.’

Bryant grinned.

‘Shit, I always owed you for Mitsue Jones. Just call it even.’

The hotel would not hold him.

He poured himself a whisky - another fucking whisky - and stared at the phone as if it were poisonous. His mobile was still switched off. No one outside of Mike knew where he was. He’d have to pick up and dial.

He picked up the TV remote instead, and zapped through the channels. Endless, mindless, brightly-coloured shit and an upbeat report just in from Cambodia. He recognised the editing.

He shut down the TV’s painted window and went out on the balcony. Warm night air gusted over his face. A well-lit Kensington street angled past seven floors below. A couple walked along it, arm in arm. Laughter floated up. A cab idled by in the opposite direction, cruising for custom.

He retreated to the bedroom. He lay face up on the bed and stared at the perfectly moulded plaster ceiling. Tension itched down his limbs.

He prowled the suite and gnawed a thumbnail down to the quick.

He lit the laptop and tried to carry out simple database tasks.

He hurled the whisky glass across the room.

He grabbed wallet, Nemex, jacket, and he left.

She was waiting for him.

She must have heard the cab in the street outside. The door opened as he pressed the bell. She stood in the clothes she’d worn at Break Point, black leggings and a loose grey running top, face scrubbed clean of make-up, hair gathered back. They stood looking at each other, an arm’s reach apart.

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he started, but she shook her head.

She reached for him as he crossed the threshold. It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell freshly drunk coffee on her breath, behind that the swirl of female scent mingled with orange blossom. The kiss was an open-mouthed collision that squeezed tears into his eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips and hands on clothing below. She was laughing excitedly into his open mouth as they clinched and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force. He kicked the door shut and found a breast beneath the sports top, unsupported and surgically perfect - the porn segment sprang through his mind like sweat - hard under soft, a swath of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of arse cheek above it. He could not settle on any of it.

Her leg thrust between his and ground upward against his prick. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him down the hall, past the kitchen and bathroom and left into an untidy bedroom. Cluttered bedside unit, a teetering pile of books and a glass of stale water. A pale blue quilt crumpled across an unmade bed. He drank it in and the new intimacy was a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into his prior knowledge of the rest of the house. She let him go with a sudden motion as if he was hot, sank to the bed in front of him and peeled off her leggings in two single stripping motions. Fingers touched the mound beneath the white cotton thong she wore underneath, rubbing the groove up and down. She grinned up at him as she did it. Her free hand scrabbled across to the bedside table, ripped open a drawer and reached inside.

‘No, wait.’

He shed jacket and shirt, dropped to his knees beside the bed and buried his face in the white cotton, breathing in the undiluted scent of her. She gasped and sank back on the folds of the quilt. The heated heart of flesh between her thighs was moist. He slid his hands up the insides of her thighs, fingers first, pulled aside the cotton and sank his tongue into her. A hard spasm and her hands came to grip the sides of his head. Her legs lifted and folded over his back like wings. She was panting.

When she came, she ground up hard against him with a deep grunting sound, then flopped to twitching stillness. He shouldered his way gently out from under her legs and straightened up. In the drawer she had opened, he found the Durex can. He rolled its chilly length along the plain of her stomach, got another twitch as it touched her, then lodged it between her breasts and rolled it idly back and forth in the indelible cleavage surgery had given her. She raised herself on her elbows.

‘So what do you want now?’ she asked, mock tough.

‘I want to fuck you, Liz.’

She seemed to consider that for a moment, head tilted slightly. Then she sat up, tugged her hair loose of its binding and set about unfastening his belt buckle. She liberated the engorged length of his prick from the cloth it was trapped in, handling it with greedy care and sliding it back and forth into her mouth. Then she gripped it at base between thumb and forefinger, picked up the Durex can and sprayed him steadily from end to end.

It was a long time since he’d needed to use the stuff, and the sudden, cold tightening of the instant membrane was a shock. He gasped and Liz Linshaw grinned again as she heard it.

‘That’s just for starters,’ she said in the back of her throat and held up the can for his inspection. ‘This is cocktail-laced. Expensive stuff. You wait ’til the contact sensitisers kick in. You’re not going to last long.’

He reached for her and she scooted back on the bed, opening herself for him. He sank all the way into her with a groan, cupped one breast in both hands, working the flesh. He sucked in the nipple and it touched the roof of his mouth.

She was right. He didn’t last long.

‘Can you feel my heart?’ she asked him, later.

He nodded drowsily against her chest.

‘It’s still beating like a fucking drum, Chris. That’s with thinking about what you did to me. I want you to do it again.’

‘What, right now?’

She laughed. ‘Well, ideally yeah. But I can wait.’ She craned her neck to look at his face. ‘Are you staying the night?’

‘If you ask me to.’

‘Stay the night.’

‘No, I got to go.’

‘You bastard.’ She slapped at his flank. ‘That’s not funny. I want you to stay, Chris. I want access to you.’

‘You’ve got access to me. Look at me.’ But beneath the comfortable humour, he felt a vague stirring of alarm. Not at what she wanted. At what he might want from her.

‘So we’re going to do this again?’

He thought about Carla. Pushed the thought away again. Let go.

‘Yeah, we are. I’m living out of a hotel now, Liz. No more complications.’

And in the back of his head, something heard and lifted its throat to the sky, and laughed like a hyena.

Amidst the plinthed Grecian sculpture, Louise Hewitt sat on the edge of the grey-sheeted bed and stared past the white blast of a bedside halogen lamp. The room was silent around her. She had hung her jacket away with automated care on her way into the apartment, and now her shoulders slumped under the soft silk of her blouse. There was an unaccustomed ache in her throat.

She looked down at the bed and pressed her lips together. Then she lay sideways on the covers and lowered her face to the pillow. His scent came off the grey cotton and she clenched her eyes shut.

‘Oh Christ, Nick,’ she murmured, and her throat clicked as she swallowed. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you?’

She lay there for a while, and a single tear leaked out from under her right eyelid. It trickled jerkily to the edge of her face and soaked into the pillow.

When the second and third tear slipped out, she sat up abruptly and wiped them off her face with the angry gesture of someone ripping off a mask. She cleared her throat, got up from the bed and went through to the study. She stabbed the datadown awake and seated herself before its soft, multi-coloured glow.

She worked.

FILE#5:

Final Audit

CHAPTER FORTY

There were times over the next few weeks when Chris had to forcibly remind himself that this was his own life he was leading.

Partly it was the hotel. There was something insulated about living out of a box of high-class services long-term, something that felt like wearing thin rubber gloves. Household tasks he was used to performing himself happened distantly, almost invisibly. He put out his dirty laundry and it came back again pristine, as if cleaned by elves. Fresh towels, and little bottles of soap and shampoo appeared daily in the bathroom by a similar magic. He ordered food and it came to his door from a kitchen he never saw, or he fed himself in one of the hotel’s three internal restaurants. Either way, he was saved the tiny increments of physical and emotional effort involved in going outside to look for a place to eat.

At Shorn, he performed with a slightly numb, mechanical competence. The work piled up into account overload as Nick Makin’s abrupt departure took its toll on everyone. He cut a path through it like someone working through dense bush with a blunt machete. Focus ahead, swing, grab, clear and step, focus ahead, swing. Occasionally he sagged, but habit kept him on his feet.

The pellet wounds in his side healed, fading rapidly from actual pain to inconvenience to vague memory. Dreams of Carla stubbornly refused to follow the same path.

Covert reports came in from the NAME via Lopez. Barranco had taken his first dose of Shorn beneficence - three hundred Kalashnikovs plus ammunition, thirty of the Aerospatiale plane-killers, an even thousand King grenades, all brought ashore in the dead of night on some Pacific beach, courtesy of a privatised Epsilon-class Russian attack sub and her demobbed crew. The best international bulk-by-stealth couriers money could buy.

On the other side of the globe, Nakamura played Cambodia the way Vasvik had told him they would. Planning for the military coup lurched into motion. Chris had the relevant local tools to hand - he’d mustered them almost absently - days before the indesp intelligence came through. He pretended to study the reports, phoned through prearranged authorisation codes to Langley an hour later, sat and waited.

Explosions bloomed across Phnom Penh like a rash. A colonel and his family in a car bomb. A general in a restaurant. An air force commander in a whorehouse, shot three times with an uncharacteristic precision that made Chris suspect the place was a protected Langley franchise of some sort. A couple of others, drive-by and car bomb respectively. The remainder got the message. The coup fell apart before it could properly gain momentum, and Nakamura recoiled. Word came down to Chris from on high. Notley was impressed.

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation was launched into the mysterious disappearance of Nicholas Makin. No one outside the Shorn debriefing knew where he’d gone. His corpse was helicoptered out of Crutched Friars with the rest, still masked, still warm. No footage of faces, and no DNA trace - before they left, the rapid response crew Mike called had hosed down the bloody asphalt with chemicals that would defeat any tissue analysis. The firefight was written off as an overly ambitious gangwit incursion that had met with poetic justice. Carefully massaged media speculation arose that Makin had fallen solitary victim to the same gang before their luck ran out. Chris and Mike gave prepared statements and watched it all from the sidelines.

The media did its job, rather better than anyone had expected. Accurate detail dissolved rapidly in a splash of lurid full-colour, replayed from the surveillance cameras in Crutched Friars. The gunfighter chic of the thing caught and sold. Comp Drivers In Eastwood-Style Bloodbath! Zone Gangs Reap High Noon Whirlwind! Police Commend Shorn Heroes! Coverage went global, TV and the men’s magazines went crazy. Chris and Mike got their souvenir Remingtons, handed over by the chief of corporate police in a white gale of erupting flashbulbs. Everyone grinning into the teeth of the media storm. It made the triumph against Mitsue Jones and her team seem like relative obscurity. One morning Mike came into work and found a call on his phone from a Hollywood agent. Studios, the agent said, were queuing up. Options, offers, amounts of money that made even Louise Hewitt blink. There was talk of a book tie-in. A game. Action figures.

Sign nothing, said Notley with characteristic avuncular tolerance. Yet.

Corporate police units went into the zones looking for associates and relatives of the four men who had died with Makin. They kicked in doors and broke heads, bullied and bribed and ascertained that no one knew anything worth telling. Arrests were made. The media stood up on its hind legs and applauded. Shorn Leads Gang Crackdown! Law and Order Priority for Corporate Community! Drug Scum Will Be Stopped Says Shorn Partner! Safer Streets for Our Kids Promise Executives!

Ten days in, the original events surrounding Nick Makin’s death were gone. No one remembered anything but the quick-draw images of Chris Faulkner and Mike Bryant, outnumbered and outgunned, taking down five cold-blooded, cowardly, drug-dealing masked killers.

Reality blurred out in hype.

Chris gave interviews, looked into cameras. Fended off a spate of calls from the driving fanworld and the London Chamber of Commerce. Requests for after-dinner speaker engagements, pleas for worn pieces of the Saab’s engine and offers of bizarre sexual services all fogged into a single drag on his attention. Messages piled up once more on the datadown from the same wolfish-looking women with Eastern European names, and from drive sites like Road Rash and Asphalt Xtreme. He read movie treatments and CI reports with the dazed sense that some time soon he might not be able to tell the difference. He rolled out the official Shorn line, dictated policy down phones. He handled Cambodia, the NAME. Parana. Assam. Makin’s accounts in Guatemala, Kashmir, Yemen. More.

He took the Remington down to the firing range and took out some of the secreted stress on holotargets. There was a deep satisfaction to the scattered blast pattern it made that not even the Nemex could equal. He grew to like the weapon in a way he had never allowed himself with the pistol. He used the feeling like a drug.

In the evenings, in the anonymous seclusion of the hotel, he had Liz Linshaw, like a jagged sensory overload on the screen of his feelings. Sprawled elegantly naked across his bed, soaped slick in his shower, pressed against the walls of the room, legs wrapped around, tensed with orgasm, damp with sweat, grinning through her tousled hair.

Her too, he used like a drug. Like a materialised visitation from some soft-porn pay-channel reality the hotel had moored close to. When she wasn’t there - about every third night, just so we stay sane about this, Chris - he masturbated thinking of her. She helped him sleep, helped him avoid overly conscious introspection when at the ragged end of each day he arrived back in the hotel and found himself wondering if you really could live out a whole life this way.

Eventually, Carla came to the hotel.

She called first. Several times. He had her screened out of his mobile and the office phone, but somehow she’d got the hotel out of Mike. The first time she called, he walked into it, head-on. He hung at the end of the phone, weightless, making monosyllabic responses. After a while, she cried.

He hung up on her.

He rang the switchboard and got them to screen and announce all further incoming calls. Then he called Mike, furious. He got an apology of sorts, but what the other man was really thinking came through underneath, loud and clear.

‘Yeah, I know Chris. I’m really sorry. She’s been calling for days - I just couldn’t blow her off any more. She was upset, you know. Really upset.’

‘I’m fucking upset as well, Mike. And I could use a bit of solidarity here. It’s not like I go telling tales to Suki behind your back, is it?’

‘You need to talk to her, man.’

‘That’s an opinion, Mike, and you’re entitled to it. But you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me. Got it?’

There was a long pause at the other end.

‘Got it,’ Mike said finally.

‘Good.’ Chris cleared his throat, cranked down his tone a little. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at eight, then. Cambodia briefing.’

‘Yeah.’

‘’night, then.’

‘Yeah. Goodnight, Chris.’ There was a flat quality in Mike’s voice that Chris didn’t much like, but he was still too angry himself to care much either.

Liz emerged from the bathroom, naked, towelling her hair vigorously.

‘Who was that?’

He gestured. ‘Ah, Mike. Work stuff.’

‘Yeah? You look pretty pissed off about it.’

‘Yeah, well. Cambodia.’

‘Anything I should know?’

He forced a grin. ‘A lot of stuff you’d like to know, probably. But let’s talk about Mars.’

She threw the towel at him.

‘I’ll get it out of you,’ she promised, advancing.

The next morning on the way to work, Mike’s tone came back to him and he wondered if the other man was going to have another go after the Cambodia briefing. He rehearsed angry rejoinders in his head as the cab swung around Hyde Park Corner.

He never got a chance to use them. It was the day Hollywood chose to come calling and all Mike wanted to talk about were the hallucinatory figures involved and the possibility that they might get to watch themselves immortalised on screen by Tony Carpenter or Eduardo Rojas.

Carla called a couple more times that week, and then, suddenly, she was at the front desk, asking for him. Mercifully, it was a night Liz Linshaw had chosen not to show up. He thought briefly, cruelly, about telling the desk staff to send her away, then caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and grimaced. He changed into something freshly laundered, slipped on a pair of casual shoes and went down to face her.

She was sitting on one of the sofas in reception, immaculate in faded jeans he remembered buying with her, boots and a neat black leather jacket. When she saw him, she got up and came to meet him, trying for a smile.

‘So. I get an audience with the man of the moment. Feel good, being famous again?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Can we go up to your room?’

‘No.’

She looked elaborately around the quiet, well-bred bustle of the lobby. The hurt barely showed in her voice.

‘Have you got someone up there?’

‘Don’t be a fucking bitch. No, I haven’t got anyone up there. Jesus, Carla, this isn’t about someone else. You fucking left me.’

‘So I’ve got to stand here while you shout at me?’

He swallowed and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a bar through there, through that arch. We can sit in there.’

She shrugged, but it was a manufactured detachment. In the corner of the bar, she sat and stared at him out of eyes that shone with unshed tears. She’d been crying recently, he knew. He could tell. He felt a tiny thawing at the edges of his anger at the knowledge, a tiny, aching warmth. He crushed it out. A uniformed waitress appeared with an expectant smile. He ordered Laphroaig for himself, asked Carla whether she’d like something to drink, and watched the formality of his tone stab her through. She shook her head.

‘I didn’t come here to drink with you, Chris.’

‘Fair enough.’ He nodded to the waitress and she went back to the bar. ‘What did you come for?’

‘To apologise.’

He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Go on then.’

She managed a smile. Shook her head. ‘You bastard. You’ve turned into a real bastard, Chris. You know that?’

‘You left me in the middle of the fucking zones, Carla. At two o’clock in the fucking morning. You’ve got some apologising to do.’

‘You called me a whore.’

‘And you called me.’ He gestured helplessly, not remembering how the row had stoked so high. ‘You said—’

‘I said I couldn’t recognise you any more, Chris. It wasn’t an insult, it was the truth. I don’t recognise you any more.’

He shrugged. Ignored the tiny acid drip at the centre of his chest. ‘So why come here at all? I’m a write-off, I’m unrecoverable. Tender trash. So why waste your time?’

‘I told you why I came.’

‘Yeah, to apologise. You’re not making a very good job of it.’

The Laphroaig came. He signed for it, sipped and put it down on the table between them. He looked back up at Carla.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t come to apologise for leaving you in the zones.’ He opened his mouth and she made a slashing gesture to silence him. ‘No, listen to me, Chris. I’d do it again if you spoke to me like that again. You deserved it.’

She stared away across the bar, assembling what she wanted to say. Absently, she reached across the table for the whisky tumbler, recognised the automatic intimacy for what it was and stopped herself rigidly. She blinked a couple of times, fast.

‘That’s not what I have to apologise for. I have to apologise because I should have left you a long time ago. I’ve spent the last year, the last two years, I don’t know maybe even longer than that, trying to turn you back into the man I thought you were when we first met.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘And you don’t want to be that man any more, Chris. You aren’t that man any more. You’ve found something harder and faster, and you like it better.’

‘This is crap, Carla.’

‘Is it?’

Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whisky instead. She found a wipe in her jacket.

‘I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.’ She gestured at the hotel around them. ‘You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t just the job you do any more, that fucking tower you run your remote control wars from. It’s everything. Twenty-four, seven, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place, if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?’

She got up abruptly. He sat staring straight ahead, out of the windows of the bar to the street outside.

‘You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try and turn it around.’

She gave him a bright, brittle smile. ‘You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—’

‘And where are you going to go?’ It came out ugly.

‘I’m going to stay with,’ she laughed a little. ‘Not that it’s anything to do with you any more. I’m going to stay in Tromsö for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is is worth what you’re paying.’

He shrugged. ‘Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit-card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?’

She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’

She turned to go. Paused and turned back.

‘Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab. Some time soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit-job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.’

She walked away from him.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Liz Linshaw came over the following evening, and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No post-coital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.

They unplugged and lay apart.

‘Thanks,’ she said, staring at the ceiling.

‘Sorry.’ He rolled towards the juncture of her thighs. ‘Come here.’

She pushed his head away. ‘Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.’

‘You don’t want to hear it.’

‘Yes I do.’

He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘Carla came to see me,’ he said finally.

‘Great.’ She sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. ‘Fucking great. You seeing her again?’

‘Told you you didn’t want to hear it.’

She looked down at him, angry. ‘You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?’

‘Doubt it.’

He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.

‘Nice.’

‘Yeah.’ Chris stared off into a corner of the room. ‘Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.’

Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean, the way she knew that—’

‘That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit-job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you very much.’

‘Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.’ He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. ‘Christ, you’re beautiful, that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit-job, wasn’t she.’

Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. ‘You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.’

‘No?’ A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. ‘So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?’

She stared at him. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?’

‘No, I did.’ Something in her face had changed. ‘Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.’

‘Liz, you fucking sent it to me.’

‘No, Chris. I didn’t.’

‘You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blonde bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?’

She sighed and sank back against the headboard. Her gaze rolled out to the middle distance. She seemed to curl into herself.

‘Donna’s Dominion,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry?’

‘Donna’s Dominion. That’s what it was called, that particular piece of classy erotic art. I was Donna Dread, gym training world dominatrix.’ She smiled without much mirth. ‘Pretty infantile stuff, huh?’

Chris gestured uncomfortably. He was pretty sure he was blushing. Liz Linshaw nodded.

‘Got you hard, though. Right?’

‘Uh.’ He looked away.

She sighed again. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. Stuff’s made to get you hard. As a male, you’d be practically dysfunctional if it didn’t. Youthful tits are supposed to turn you on, and there you’ve got four of them on screen, all rubbing up against each other, and all blown up to hyper-real proportions. You might as well get embarrassed about four lines of uncut NAME powder keeping you awake all night. It’s just another drug, Chris. Refined, maxed-up, bang-on-the-nail sex-chemistry trigger dust.’ Another weary smile. ‘So you liked me, huh?’

He cleared his throat. ‘You, uh, were you really into, you know?’

‘Girls?’ She shrugged. ‘Not really, no. I mean, get someone licking your clit for you, that’s not unpleasant, whatever sex the person doing it is. Once you get used to the six or seven people watching you off camera, that is. And you’d be surprised how quickly you do get used to that. But no, I was never a try-out lesbian, not even a try-out bi. It’s pure theatre, Chris. Just a job. Oh, yeah, and if you stick to girl-on-girl, your health insurance premiums go way down. Less risk, less general wear and tear on the works.’

‘Why did you, I mean, how did you get into it?’

This time her smile seemed genuine. Her posture unwound. She shook her head, reached over the edge of the bed for her bag, and started going through it. ‘Well I wasn’t kidnapped into it by white slavers, if that’s what you mean.’

She found a bent and crumpled ready-rolled spliff, a lighter. Sat back against the headboard again and lit up. She coughed and waved little eddies in the sudden cloud of smoke.

‘You want some of this? No? Sure?’ She pulled down a lungful of smoke, held it for a moment and let go. She looked critically at the embered end of the spliff. ‘Thing is, you listen to some twisted evangelical fuck like Simeon Sands, you’d believe we are all sex slaves by any other name, kidnapped, trapped by drugs, victims of our own unclean, incest-aroused lust - I think guys like Sands like that one especially, you hear the way they trot it out. One hand on the pulpit, one hand below, eh.’ She grinned crookedly. ‘But it just ain’t so, Chris. I mean, it isn’t this other thing the industry wants to sell you either. You know, we’re all dripping wet sluts, just can’t wait to get our orifices stuffed. Forget that. You want clinical and jaded, go watch a porno shoot. It’s work, Chris, pure and simple. More or less professional, depending on who you’re working for, better or worse paid ditto. But no one ever put me under pressure to do stuff I wasn’t happy with, and no one tried to stop me when I quit.’

‘Do you think you were typical?’

Liz held down more smoke. Frowned, then let it up. Shook her head. ‘Globally? No. I heard a lot of nasty stories coming out of Costa Rica and Thailand. Still do. But you don’t need me to tell you about that, Chris. This is what you do for a living. Enterprise zones, political instability. Market forces, weak governmental structure, the poor get fucked. Literally, in this case.’

‘Oh, right.’ The casual way she’d said it stung, made him snappish. ‘So everyone you worked with was smiling and happy were they?’

She plumed smoke, looked at him quizzically.

‘No. Even in Copenhagen, you’ve got some fucked-up girls working the trade. That blonde I was with in Donna’s Dominion? Renata something, I think she was Polish. She had some strange ideas, and those tits were just insane. She had to go to three different plastics guys before she found one who’d give her those implants and then she had on-and-off post-op trouble the whole time. So, yeah who knows? Maybe old Simeon was right in her case. Turned on to pornographic filth because her father abused her as a child. But, to be honest, I think she just wasn’t very bright. Yeah, Chris, there are going to be women doing porn who were fucked up by abuse when they were kids, it makes sense. But most of the ones I worked with were just like me - uninhibited, maybe overly exhibitionistic media wannabes, marking time while they looked for their big break. I went out to Copenhagen, looking for work with the pirate ’casters out of Christiania. I got into Danish porn instead. It was easier, there was a lot more of it about than pirate work, and it was better paid. It was a couple of years, it felt weird and different and maybe taught me a few things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise. And I saved a lot of money. End of story. And. Happy ending, yeah.’

‘But you need to smoke that stuff to talk about it.’

The quizzical look again. ‘Chris, you need to get a grip. You’re telling me you’ve really got some kind of moral problem with my career as a porn doll a decade ago? For a man who works in international finance, you’ve got some fucking nerve.’

‘I don’t have a problem with it. And I didn’t think you had a problem with what I do either.’ Spite gleamed through. ‘In fact, I thought it got you off.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What?’

‘Sure. You fucked Mike Bryant, now you’re fucking me. Spot the connection. Hey, I’m not complaining, Liz, but take a look at your own fucking motivations. This is textbook passenger-seat passion. Let’s be honest about it.’

She sat up abruptly, flicked ash off the spliff. ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, Chris. Let’s be honest. If you had a problem with me, you could have left me well alone.’

‘Left you alone?’ The injustice of it staggered him. It was like fighting with Carla, all over again. An opening well of curdled hurt. ‘You came on pretty fucking strong to me, as I recall. At Troy’s party. After the party, at Regime Change. You called me for that one.’

‘Oh, yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have sent me a copy of your wife’s flight times to Norway, then. Because you know Chris, as invitations go, that was pretty fucking blatant.’

Shock held him unstirring for a moment. She caught it, coiled back on the bed, face still tight with anger.

‘What?’

‘I. Liz, I didn’t send you anything.’

‘Right.’

‘No, fucking listen to me.’ He reached out for her with both hands. She gestured him away. Stared out of the window. ‘I didn’t send you that stuff. I didn’t even know Carla was going to Tromsö until about an hour before you called me. I. Someone’s fucking with us, Liz.’

Her gaze tracked warily back to him. She didn’t turn her head. Her whole body was closed to him again, limbs folded defensively.

‘I’m not a drive-site groupie, Chris.’

‘Okay.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Okay, you’re not a drive-site groupie. Whatever you say. But I’m telling you, I never sent you those flight details. And you’re telling me you didn’t send me Donna’s Dominion. So. Someone’s fucking with us, right? It’s got to be that.’

And he got her back. Limb by limb, line by line, the softening stole through her. The place in Carla he could no longer reach, the point of reconciliation abraded by years of impact along the same emotional front. She opened a little, turned to face him. Nodded.

A tiny shard of hope spiked him, unlooked for. A prickle across the underside of each eye and a sudden surge in the empty space he’d excavated in his own chest.

This time. He promised himself silently. This one, this time, this woman. I will not fuck this one up.

But the hyena was still out there, still prowling in silhouette on the sunset horizon of his thoughts.

And would not shut up.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

He got to work early, running on residual anger that still had no clear focus. The datadown rolled out its gathered screed of messages. Top of the line, Irena Renko, subject: need loading fast. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the name in the last week. Something snapped.

‘For fuck’s sake.’ He hit reply, and listened to the dial.

‘Da?’

‘Listen to me, you stupid fucking natasha. I do not need your whore’s services, now or ever. Just leave me the fuck alone.’

There was a pause, during which he nearly hung up. Then the accented voice came back, icy with controlled rage.

‘Just who fucking you think you are talking to? Fucking suit cowboy, think you will talk to me like this. I am Captain Irena Renko, commander of free sub freighter Kurt Cobain talking to you.’

‘I’m. Sorry?’

‘You should fucking be sorry. Fuck your mother! Four days I am here in Faslane, awaiting second loading. Four days! My crew drunk in Glasgow bars. What for you waste my time like this?’

‘I. Wait. The Cobain?’ Chris flailed across the desk and hit the datadown deck. Details fled up into a new window. ‘You’re loading for the NAME? Military hardware.’

‘No,’ purred the woman at the other end. ‘I am not loading, because I’m waiting four fucking days for cargo. Port Authority know nothing. I call Lopez, he also knows nothing. Normally, Cobain, she sails and fuck you all if this happens. But Lopez tells me, call you. You are sympathetic, he says. Not like other suits. Perhaps I have wrong man.’

‘No, no. Captain Renko, you have the right man. I, I apologise for my tone earlier. There’s a lot going on at this end.’

‘Well, at this end is nothing going on. No delivery, no data about delivery. And mooring charge is costing me—’

‘Never mind the mooring charge. I’ll cover that, plus ten per cent for your inconvenience. Go get your crew, I’ll get back to you.’

He cut the connection and stared across the office. The marbled chess board gleamed back at him, pieces frozen in a pattern that hadn’t changed in weeks. He called Mike.

‘Yeah, Bryant.’

Mike, listen, we’ve got a problem.’

‘I’ll say. I would have called you earlier, but I didn’t see the Saab. Didn’t know you were in.’

‘It’s still at home. I haven’t been back for it yet.’ A chilly quiet back down the line. ‘Mike, I just heard from our couriers to Barranco.’

‘We haven’t got time to worry about the NAME right now, Chris. Didn’t you catch the news this morning? Fuck, last night even.’

‘No, last night I.’ I was kiss-and-make-up fucking your ex-mistress. ‘I went to bed early. Headache. And I’m coming from the hotel in cabs at the moment, I don’t get the radio either. What’s going on?’

‘Some fucking junior Langley aide just came down with a bad dose of conscience. He’s promised covert reports from the last two years to ScandiNet and FreeVid Montreal.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Yeah. What I said.’

‘Cambodia?’

‘We don’t know yet. This gutless wonder at Langley worked archive, so could be the Phnom Penh stuff is too recent to show up. But we can’t rely on that. There’s no telling what he’s going to give them.’

‘Can’t we just have the guy wiped?’

‘Oh, what do you think Langley are trying to do right now? Chris, he worked for them. He was on the inside. You don’t think he’s going to have covered himself? He’s grabbed the discs and gone underground.’

‘Okay, so get someone else, someone better than Langley. Special Air, or one of the Israeli contractors.’

‘Same applies, Chris. First they’ve got to find the fucker. And meanwhile ScandiNet and FreeVid are leaking this fucking stuff like vindaloo diarrhoea. We’re going to have the UN charter people all over us by end of the week at the outside.’

‘Well, look.’ Chris frowned. Something didn’t fit here. ‘Calm down. They don’t have any power of access. All they can do is make a noise. We fight them in the courts, the whole thing boils down to two years’ paperwork and legal wrangling. What are you getting so bent out of shape about?’

‘It’s bad for fucking business, alright. Leakage of any sort. Kind of publicity we don’t need.’

‘Yeah, well, speaking of bad for business, you’d better get onto your pal Sally Hunting. I’ve just had a Russian sub commander yelling at me because she’s been waiting four days at Faslane for a NAME shipment that hasn’t turned up.’

There was a beat of silence. ‘What?’

‘You heard. Barranco’s Mao sticks have gone walkabout. No one at Faslane can find them.’

‘That can’t be.’ There was an odd strain in the other man’s voice.

‘Can be. Is. Look, I’m going to ring Lopez in Panama. See if he knows anything. You get onto Sally, then call me back.’

Lopez wasn’t answering. Chris hung up and was about to try again when the datadown lit with an incoming video call from Philip Hamilton. He frowned again and picked up.

‘Yeah?’

Hamilton’s soft features resolved on the screen. ‘Ah. Chris. There you are.’

‘Yeah.’ Still the vague sense of something out of place. He’d had almost no dealings with the junior partner since he joined Shorn. Some of the Central American stuff he’d inherited from Makin brushed up against Hamilton’s accounts, but—

‘What can I do for you, Philip?’

‘Well, Chris.’ The junior partner’s tone was silky. ‘It’s more a case of what I can do for you, I think. You’ve no doubt heard about the Langley crisis.’

‘Yeah. Mike t—’ He just stopped himself. ‘I was just talking to Mike about it. Archive material, they reckon. Suggests the Cambodia stuff might not be included.’

‘That’s correct.’ Hamilton nodded. His chins folded. ‘In fact, we just got confirmation. Good news for everybody. Louise will probably forward it down to you shortly. But, ah, it seems there is one covert operation that will crop up, and unfortunately it has your name on it. I’m talking about the action you took against Hernan Echevarria’s security forces in Medellín.’

Now the sense of wrongness was quick and jagged. Like the floor cracking apart under him.

He covered it with drawl. ‘Yeah. So?’

‘Well, I think under the circumstances, and given recent developments with the Echevarria regime, the best thing would probably be if you were removed from the NAME account, at least for the time being.’

Chris sat up. ‘You can’t fucking do that.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What developments are you talking about, Philip? Last I heard, the Echevarria regime was a corpse walking.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Hamilton fingered his jowls. ‘This also is new. Perhaps you’d better come along to the briefing this afternoon. I’d invited Mike, and assumed he could pass on detail to you later. But, yes, perhaps it’s better if you’re there. Main conference, two 0’clock.’

Chris stared at him. ‘Right. I’ll be there.’

‘Marvellous.’ Hamilton beamed and cut the link. His face inked out, still smiling.

Chris tried Lopez again. Still nothing. He windowed up an indesp site he had the keys to and checked the Langley data. Nothing solid. The whistleblower’s face grinned out of an employee file thumbprint that was five years stale. He looked young and happy, and blissfully unaware of what his just-acquired job was going to do to him a few years down the road.

Because they’re going to fucking crucify you, son, Chris told the thumbprint silently. They’re going to take you apart for this.

The datadown chimed. Audio call from Mike. He grabbed it.

‘Talk to me, Mike. What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know, Chris. I wish I did. Sally says the order still went through, but it’s been diverted to some surface shipping contractor out of Southampton. Standard cross-Atlantic rate, she’s getting a cashback bonus for the difference in cost.’

‘Surface?’

‘I know, I know. I don’t get it either. It’s not like Barranco can wander into Barranquilla docks and just sign for it.’

‘That’s—’ He stopped. Abruptly, the spinning chaos of the last ten minutes locked to a halt in his head. He saw the sense.

‘Mike, I’ll call you back.’

‘Wait, you—’

He snapped the line across, sat staring at the datadown for a full thirty seconds while the sudden weight in his guts settled. Has to be, he knew. Fucking has to be. He felt physically sick with the knowledge.

He placed another call to Lopez, got the busy signal and fired an override down the connection. There was a brief electronic squabble on the line, as Shorn’s intrusion software fought with the Panama City net, then Lopez came through, still talking to someone else in furious Spanish.

‘—de puta, me tienen media hora esperando—’

‘Joaquin, listen to me.’

‘Chris? Como has podido—’ The Americas agent stopped as his language caught up with the change of call. ‘Listen, Chris, what are you fucking playing at over there?’

‘I don’t know, Joaquin, I don’t know. This shit only just landed on me, and I don’t know what it is. Talk to me, man. I’m blind here. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘What’s going on,’ said Lopez, rage spurting from every syllable, ‘is that you’ve sold me just like your fucking amigo Bryant. Arena challenge, Chris. That mean anything to you. I just got the word. Shorn-approved tender, I got some fucking favela-born sicario calling me out for a half per cent fee reduction. He’s twenty years old, Chris. Priority challenge, two weeks’ notice. Shorn-fucking-approved, man.’

‘Alright, listen.’ Chris felt the sudden clarity of drive time set in, the suspended icy seconds of adrenalin injection. ‘Joaquin, listen to me carefully. That’s not me. The tender, it’s not authorised by me. I’m going to fix it for you, it’s dead on the datadown. I promise you. You’ll never have to fight. Meantime—’

‘Yeah, you say that. You said—’

‘Joaquin, fucking listen to me. I got you out of Bogotá in one piece, didn’t I? I told you, I look after my people. Now, I don’t have much time. I need you to get onto Barranco.’

‘You want me to fucking work for you while—’

‘Fucking listen, I said.’ Whatever was in his voice must have got through. Lopez went quiet. ‘This is life or death, Joaquin. You get onto Barranco, and you tell him to stay away from that delivery beach next week. Tell him the rest of the arms aren’t coming, and most likely there’ll be an army death squad waiting for him instead. Tell him I’m under fire as much as he is, and it’ll take me time to sort it out. He’s got to fall back to safe ground, and stay there until he hears from me. Have you got that?’

‘Yeah.’ Lopez was suddenly calm, as if the same adrenalin shiver had crept down the line and touched him with its time-warping cold. ‘Got it. You’re in the arena too, huh?’

‘Yeah, looks that way.’ There was a finality about the way his own words sounded in his ears. ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘Chris.’

He held off the disconnect. ‘Yeah. Still here.’

‘Chris, listen to me. You going into the arena, you stab low, man. Stab low, where they won’t see it coming. And when you pull it out, you twist that fucker. Quadruples the wound. You got that?’

Chris nodded distantly. ‘I got it, Joaquin. Thanks.’

‘Hey, I’ll be praying for you, man.’

Philip Hamilton cut a surprisingly impressive figure in presentation. Somehow the softness of the man disappeared, became confident bulk and the resonance base for a rich baritone voice that gave his words a longevity way beyond the moment of their utterance. His evidence was compelling, it was set up that way, but more powerful was the echo of what he said in the minds of his listeners. Chris looked round the table and saw heads nodding, Mike Bryant’s included.

‘Thus we convert,’ Hamilton declared vibrantly, ‘the uncertainty of change, the certainty of post-land-reform unrest, and the probable budget deficit of the classic revolutionary regime, at a stroke, into a return to the profitable status quo we have enjoyed in the NAME for the last twenty years. It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that there is really no question or choice here, only a course of action that common sense and market return dictate. Thank you.’

Applause rippled politely round the table. Murmured comments. Hamilton inclined his head and stood back a couple of steps. Louise Hewitt stood up.

‘I think that’s pretty clear, thank you, Philip, but if there are any questions, perhaps we could have them now?’

‘Yes.’ Jack Notley raised a hand with completely superfluous deference. Every exec in the room shut up on the instant, and pinned their gaze on the grizzled senior partner. Louise Hewitt folded herself back into her chair, and Philip Hamilton moved to take up the space she had left him. It was, Chris thought bitterly, choreographed tightly enough to be a Saturday Night Special dance act.

‘Yes, Jack.’

‘The Americans,’ said Notley with heavy emphasis that earned a sprinkling of laughter. The old man’s nationalist eccentricity was well known in the division. ‘We know from Mike here’s painstaking research that Echevarria junior has, shall we say, a predilection for our transatlantic cousins and they are, unfortunately, far closer to him, both geographically and culturally, than are we. I appreciate, Phil, that you’re factoring in Calders RapCap with the liaison work, and obviously, Martin Meldreck, well he believes in a free market about as much as Ronald Reagan did.’ More laughter, louder this time. ‘So the secondary contractors he brings in will be exclusively US firms. That much is clear. My question is, will this be enough? Will it hold off Conrad Rimshaw at Lloyd Paul, for example? Or the Saunders Group, or Gray Capital Solutions, or Moriarty Mills & Silver? Francisco Echevarria has had close dealings with all these gentlemen, or at least their Miami officers, at one time or another. Can we be confident he will not bring them into play as soon as a budget review fails to please him?’

Hear fucking hear, sleeted through Chris. Glad someone in this bunch of fucking sycophants spotted it.

Hamilton cleared his throat.

‘That’s a fair concern, Jack. I think it’s indicative that the firms you’ve just named, with the exception of the Saunders Group, are all fast, hungry players from the New York corner. Sure, they’ll all bear watching. But the point with Calders is that they have the US state department’s ear. That’s long-term relationship - in the case of Senator Barlow, we’re talking fifteen years, and there are others with ties almost as old. And of course, as you say, the secondary contractors Calders RapCap’s people will bring in should have their own lobby network in place. If we combine all that pull with the influence we have on our own Foreign Office here in London, I feel sure we’re in a position to repel any prospective boarders.’

He got the laughter too. He beamed round the table.

‘Any more questions?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got a question for you.’ Chris climbed to his feet, trembling slightly. He stared at Hamilton. ‘I’m curious as to why the fuck you’re throwing away a guaranteed regime change, with a leader who is guaranteed one hundred per cent proof against US involvement of any kind - in favour of this. Fucking. Carve up.’

Sudden slither of shock around the table. Gasps, shuffling, the shaking of wiser heads. At his side, Mike Bryant was looking up at him in disbelief.

‘Ah. Chris.’ Hamilton smiled briefly, like a comic to his audience just before the straight man gets it. ‘Now before you go and get Mike’s baseball bat, could I just point out that we’re trying for a non-violent model here.’

A couple of sniggers, but battened down. Officially, no one below partner level was supposed to know what had really happened to Hernan Echevarria. Nick Makin would have talked, Chris knew, he would have made sure word got out, but just how far they could all go along with Hamilton’s indiscretion was unclear. Once again, gazes sought Jack Notley for his reaction, but the senior partner’s features could have been pale granite.

‘You stupid fuck,’ said Chris clearly, and the silence that followed it was absolute. ‘Do you really think Vicente Barranco is going to be stopped by some pissant cokehead dressed up in his old man’s uniform? Do you really think he’ll just go away?’

He saw Louise Hewitt on her way to getting up. Saw Jack Notley lay a hand on her arm and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Philip Hamilton spotted the exchange as well, and his mouth contracted to almost anal proportions.

‘Might I remind you, Mr Faulkner, that you are talking to a partner. If you can’t show the proper respect in this meeting, I will have you removed. Do you understand me?’

Chris’s eyes widened slightly, and an unpleasant smile floated onto his face.

‘Try it,’ he said softly.

‘Chris.’ Notley’s voice cracked across the room. ‘If you have anything to contribute, I’d like you to contribute it now, and then sit down. This is a policy meeting, not the Royal Shakespeare Company.’

Chris nodded. ‘Alright.’ He looked round the room. ‘This is for the record. I know Vicente Barranco, and I’m telling you, if you try to fuck him over like this, he’ll fade back into the highlands like he has before and he’ll take the disenfranchised of the NAME with him by the thousand. And then, some day, maybe five years down the road, maybe next year, he’ll be back. He’ll be back, and he’ll do what we were going to ask him to do in the first place, and when he’s sitting in the Bogotá parliament chamber, and Echevarria junior is facing a firing squad somewhere for crimes against humanity, we’ll find ourselves on the wrong fucking side. He’ll go to someone else, maybe Nakamura, maybe the Germans, and he will cut us out. No GDP percentage, no enterprise zone licences, no arms trade, no supply side contracts, no commodities angle, nothing. We’ll just have a roomful of angry Americans, and nothing to feed them with.’

More silence, glances up and down the table in search of where this was going. Chris jerked his chin at Hamilton and sat down.

Hamilton looked at Notley. The senior partner shrugged. Hamilton cleared his throat.

‘Well, Chris. Thank you for that, ah, academic insight. Of course, I appreciate you taking the time to come and give your view on an account you’re no longer working on, but let me just say, I think we can handle one disgruntled marquista and indeed there are already initiatives in place—’

Chris grinned like a skull.

‘He won’t be there, Hamilton. I already called Lopez, told him to steer Barranco well clear of the beach. When the Cobain doesn’t show up, and junior’s pet thugs do, either they’ll find nothing, or better yet Barranco’ll catch them in an ambush and slaughter them. After that, he’ll fade like a fucking ghost.’

The room erupted before he finished. Uproar from the gathered ranks of execs, half of them on their feet, pointing and shouting, not all wholly opposed to Chris, it seemed, Hamilton yelling across the mêlée of voices, something about fucking professional misconduct, Notley bellowing for order. The door burst open and security rushed the room, wielding non-lethal weaponry. Louise Hewitt went to stop them, hands and voice raised to make herself understood above the noise.

In the midst of it all, Mike turned to Chris, face distorted with shock and anger. ‘Are you fucking insane?’ he hissed.

It took ten minutes to clear the conference room, and even then security weren’t happy about leaving the partners with Chris. They’d heard their own set of rumours about the Echevarria incident.

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Notley. ‘Really, Hermione. I appreciate your diligence, but we’re all colleagues here. Just tempers flaring, that’s all. A bit of misplaced road rage. Just keep a couple of your people outside the door, that’ll be fine.’

He ushered the guard captain out and closed the doors, then turned back to the table. In the places they had occupied when the room was filled, Chris, Mike, Louise Hewitt and Philip Hamilton sat staring at their respective patches of polished wood. Notley came back to the head of the table and stood looking at them.

‘Right,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s sort this out, shall we?’

Louise Hewitt made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t see anything to sort out, Jack. Faulkner’s just admitted to gross professional misconduct—’

‘Yeah, that’s—’

‘Chris, you will shut up,’ roared Notley. ‘You are not a partner, nor will you ever be if you cannot behave in a civilised fashion. Do as you’re told and be fucking quiet.’

‘Louise is right, Jack.’ Hamilton’s voice was soft and calm, at odds with the rage he’d shown earlier. He was back on comfortable ground. ‘Warning Barranco has endangered a delicate piece of policy restructuring. At a minimum, it’s cost us a possible bargaining chip with Echevarria. At worst, it’s given succour to a terrorist who could provide us with insurgency problems for the next decade.’

‘He was a freedom fighter last week,’ muttered Chris.

Louise Hewitt turned a look of distilled contempt on him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Chris,’ she said lightly. ‘Would it be fair to say that you’ve become political where the NAME is concerned? That you’ve been contaminated by local issues?’

Chris looked at Notley. ‘Am I allowed to answer that?’

‘Yes. But you’ll keep your tone civil, and show some respect, is that understood? This isn’t some basement fight club in the zones.’

‘Yes, I understand that.’ Chris jabbed a finger at Hamilton. ‘What I don’t understand is our junior partner’s system of communication. Until this morning, I had no idea either that I had been relieved of duty on the NAME account, or that we were reversing our established client relationship.’

‘Echevarria is the established—’

‘Philip.’ Notley wagged a finger at the junior partner. ‘Let him finish.’

‘In fact,’ Chris saw the opening and accelerated into it. ‘The client change was news to me until this meeting, which wasn’t helpful. If I warned Barranco off, it was because I thought someone was running infiltration into the account—’

‘Oh, please.’ Louise Hewitt pulled a face. ‘This is your job on the line, Chris. Surely you can do better than that.’

‘This morning, Louise, I received a direct call from the captain of the sub freighter we’re using to ship Barranco’s arms. She’s stuck in Faslane, waiting for freight that isn’t coming because this,’ Chris indicated Hamilton, ‘genius has had it rerouted to the NAME military. Only he didn’t think to inform me of the fact, so all I can assume is outside interference. I act accordingly, I protect our client as best I can. I get slammed for it, when the real problem here is a lack of top-down communication.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Hamilton angrily. He also had seen the loophole.

‘Am I, Philip?’ Chris turned to gesture at Mike Bryant. ‘Ask Mike. He’s been as much in the dark as I have, he knows all about the sub freighter call, because the two of us were both trying to work out what the fuck was going on this morning. Right, Mike?’

Bryant shifted in his seat. For the first time ever that Chris could remember, he looked uncomfortable.

Notley’s gaze sharpened. ‘Mike?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Sorry, Phil. Louise. Chris is right. You should have told us earlier.’

Hamilton leaned across the table, flushed. ‘Bryant, you knew—’

‘I knew there was a policy meeting, and yeah, from the hints you dropped, I guessed the way it was going. But there was nothing solid, Phil. And nothing about the shipments. You know,’ a sideways glance at his friend, ‘I didn’t know what Chris was going to do, but I couldn’t tell him for sure what was going on either. I can see why he would have played it the way he did.’

The room was still. A glance crackled between Hamilton and Hewitt. No one spoke. Jack Notley steepled his fingers.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked quietly.

Louise Hewitt shrugged. ‘Only that what we’ve heard is a pack of lies designed to hide the fact that Chris has gone political on us.’

‘Anything constructive,’ asked Notley, still more softly.

‘Yes,’ said Chris, thinking of Lopez, tossed into the arena and up against a twenty-year-old blade sicario who’d be savage with favela poverty and sight of a way out. Thinking of Barranco, machine-gunned to death on a darkened beach, blood leaking into the sand under a shattering of glass shard stars. ‘I am not political. My reasons for backing Vicente Barranco have nothing to do with politics. And anyone who wants to call that into question can see me on the road.’

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

‘You are a lying motherfucker, Chris.’ Mike Bryant paced back and forth in front of the BMW, furious. His feet crunched in the hard shoulder gravel. Off to one side, a breeze stirred the grass beside the motorway ramp. He stopped and jabbed a finger at Chris. ‘You have turned political, haven’t you? Fucking Barranco got to you, didn’t he?’

Chris leaned on the still warm hood of the car, arms folded. The orbital stretched away below them, deserted as far as the eye could see in both directions. After the confines of the Shorn block, the sky over them seemed enormous. They’d driven for less than an hour, but it felt as if they stood at the edge of the world.

‘Oh, give me a fucking break. You’re accusing me of politics. A week ago, Barranco was the horse to back. Now suddenly, he’s unprofitable? What is that, Mike? That’s not political?’

‘The numbers make sense,’ said Bryant.

‘The numbers?’ Chris came off the hood of the BMW, taut with rage. ‘The fucking numbers? That shit is made up, Mike. You can make the numbers tell you any fucking thing you want them to. What about the numbers that made sense for Barranco? What happened to them? What are we, economists all of a sudden? You want to draw me a fucking curve? It’s got nothing to do with reality, Mike. You know that.’

Mike looked away. ‘That fact remains, Chris. You’re in way too close with Barranco. You’ve got to come off the account. Let Hamilton run with it, see what happens.’

‘Great. And meanwhile what happens to Joaquin Lopez?’

‘That’s not important!’ Bryant made fists, punched exasperatedly off into the wind. ‘Fuck Chris, pay attention, will you. You can’t get personal on this thing. It’s just business. Lopez has been undercut, that’s all there is to it. If this new guy can do the same work for a percentage point less commission, what the fuck are we doing still working with Lopez anyway?’

‘It’s a half per cent, Mike. And he’s a twenty-year-old sicario, straight out of the favelas. How do we know what he’ll do?’

‘If he’s hungry, he’ll do well. They always do.’

‘Oh, what the fuck are you talking about, Mike? You were at the briefing. This guy is cheap and aggressive, and that’s all we know. He could be fucking illiterate for all the background Hamilton’s shown us. This is a bad call, Mike. This isn’t business, it’s a fucking greed call. Can’t you see that?’

‘What I see, Chris, is that you’re cruising for a fall.’ Mike’s voice softened, but it was the gentle tug of a steel tow cable, taking up slack. He moved in, stood close. ‘I see why you’re acting like this, but it’s no good. You’re out of control. You’re unmanageable. And we can’t afford that, not in any of us. I’m sorry about what happened to your dad, really I am.’

Chris flinched away. Mike caught his arm.

‘No, I am. I’m sorry about the zones and your mum and everything that’s happened to you. But that’s the past, Chris, and it’s over. It doesn’t give you an excuse to fuck up everyone else’s life around here. Now I’m telling you, listen to me, Chris, I’m telling you, you’re off the NAME account. End of story. I’m the one that brought you aboard in the first place, and now I’m cutting you loose. It’s not like you haven’t got enough else to worry about. Fuck, Chris, why don’t you go home? Talk to Carla, sort your life out.’

Chris shoved him away, both palm-heels into the chest. For a flashpoint second, both men almost dropped into a karate stance.

‘I’ve told you before, Mike. I don’t need marital advice from you.’

‘Chris, you’re throwing away the best—’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ The yell lashed out, fury etched with pain. ‘What do you know about it, Mike, what the fuck do you know about it?’

‘I know—’

Chris cut across him savagely. ‘Try staying faithful to Suki for ten minutes, why don’t you? Try acting like a responsible father and husband for a change. Get your dick out of Sally Hunting and Liz Linshaw and whoever else you’re dipping it into these days. There. You enjoying this, Mike? Doesn’t feel good, does it?’

‘I’m not seeing Liz at the moment,’ said Mike quietly. ‘She’s got a lot of work on. And I haven’t fucked Sally Hunting in better than six years. You want to make sure of your facts before you start mouthing off.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

They stood twitchily, facing each other across one corner of the BMW’s hood. Very distantly, the sound came of a single vehicle on the orbital. Finally, Mike Bryant shrugged.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way you want it. But what I said before stands. You’re off the NAME account, you’re—’

His phone queeped for attention. He grimaced and fished it out, pressed it impatiently to his ear. ‘Yeah, Bryant. Out on the orbital, why? Yeah, he’s right here.’

He handed the phone to Chris.

‘Hewitt,’ he said.

Louise Hewitt sat behind her desk, hands spread on its surface as if she might find built-in weaponry there to blast Chris into grease on the carpet. Her tone was chilly.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re back from your picnic in the country. There are a couple of things we need to clear up.’

Chris waited.

‘Primarily, I’m concerned to get your files for the NAME transferred to Philip Hamilton’s desk as soon as electronically possible. He’ll need your Panama City contacts, the background data on Barranco, and any of the other insurgents you did work on for Hammett McColl.’ She offered him a thin smile. ‘Since we’re now back in the business of helping the regime flatten its opponents, anything you have will be of some value.’

‘Then maybe you should shut down the agency tender on Lopez. He knows the ground. That’s value, right there.’

She looked him up and down, like a specimen of something she’d thought was extinct. ‘Remarkable, Chris. Your capacity for inappropriate loyalty, I mean. Quite remarkable. However, I think we all agreed at the briefing that a clean break is essential. There’s no telling what inconvenient loyalties Lopez himself may have. Perhaps he has, uh, bonded with Vicente Barranco as strongly as you have. The man is, by all accounts, quite inspiring.’

Nothing. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

‘But I digress,’ Hewitt said smoothly. ‘In addition to the file transfer, I want you to prepare a formal statement of apology for your behaviour today. For posting on our intranet. First and foremost, that means an apology for your zone-mannered outburst in Philip’s briefing, but it’s not limited to that. There are other matters. I feel, and our senior partner concurs, that the apology had better also cover your failure to consult your colleagues before taking client-related decisions.’

‘Notley said that?’

The thin smile again. ‘He’s not on your side, Chris, whatever you think. Don’t make that mistake. Notley’s concerned wholly with the success of Shorn Conflict Investment, with maybe a side interest in waving the Union Jack when he gets the chance. Call it a hobby. That’s it, that’s the whole story. At the moment, he still thinks you’re a necessary component for the division to do well. Thus far, I’ve failed to persuade him otherwise, but I think, with your help today, he’s coming around. I told you once you’d disappoint him, and I think we’re closing on that.’

‘That’d make you happy, would it?’

‘What’d make me happy, Chris, is to take back our plastic from your lightly charred and broken corpse.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m unlikely to get that chance, of course. Policy doesn’t allow us to duel across partner-employee lines. But I will, I think, live to see you booted out of Shorn and back to the riverside slum existence you so eminently suit. I’ve told you before, and it’s becoming clearer by the day, you do not belong here.’

Oddly, the line made him grin. ‘Well, you’re not the only person who thinks that, Louise.’

It got him a sharp look, but Hewitt wasn’t biting.

‘Notley and I have also agreed that you’d better draft the apology to Philip’s specifications. A first draft by this evening. That’s a minimum requirement if you intend to continue with this firm. Philip’s in uplink conference right now, with Echevarria. But he’ll be done by six. Take it in for his approval then. You might like to add a verbal apology at the same time.’ She looked at him, grim amusement curled in the corner of her mouth. ‘A personal touch, say. A little bridge-building.’

He walked out, wordless. Louise Hewitt watched him go, and as the door slammed, the smile broadened on her lips.

It took him the walk to his own office to decide. Two flights of stairs and a corridor. He saw no one. He reached the door with his name on it, stood facing the metalled slab for ten seconds, and then turned away.

He was a dozen paces away and accelerating before it had properly dawned on him what he was going to do.

I look after my people.

He found his way almost absently, most of him thinking about Carla and how fucking delighted she’d be to see his life come tumbling down like this. The main door to the conference room was locked, but the entrance to the covert viewing chamber was on a code he knew. He let himself in. Peered through the gloom and the glass panel.

In the conference room, Philip Hamilton sat opposite a holo of Francisco Echevarria. The dictator’s son was dressed in his usual Susana Ingram splendour. He looked hard and implacable against Hamilton’s soft and light-suited untidiness.

‘—are aware that you have friends in Miami, and we have no desire to exclude them from the proceedings. You should certainly speak with Martin Meldreck at Calders, who will, I’m sure—’

Enough. He coded himself through the connecting door, stood abruptly behind Hamilton. Echevarria’s eyes widened as he stepped inside the pick-up field of the holoscanner and he knew that in the chamber on the other side of the world he had appeared, like a ghost at the feast.

Hamilton turned around in his chair.

‘Faulkner.’ He wasn’t worried yet, just surprised. Anger edged his cultured tones. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, interrupting me with a client?’

Chris grinned down at him. ‘You wanted a statement from me.’

‘Yes. In due course. At the moment, I’m busy. You can—’

Chris hit him. Open-handed, swinging from the shoulder. It took Hamilton across the side of the head and tipped him out of the chair.

‘First draft.’ Chris grabbed him up by the hair and hit him again in the face, this time with a fist. He felt the junior partner’s nose break. He punched him once more for security and let go. Hamilton slumped to the floor like a filled sack. He turned about, reached Francisco Echevarria with his eyes.

‘Hello, Paco.’ He got his breath back, straightened up the chair. ‘You don’t know me, do you? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m the man who beat your father to death.’

Echevarria’s face tightened. ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy, man? You di’n kill my father.’

Chris settled into the chair. ‘No, I did. The terrorist stuff was something we set up to cover what really happened. The CE—, those guys, they went with the claim because it gives them prestige. Your father was a sick fuck, and anyone killing him could claim they’d done a good day’s work.’

‘You gonna fuckin’ die for that, man.’ The dictator’s son was staring at him, transfixed. ‘You gonna fuckin’ die.’

‘Oh, please. As I was saying, there’s no way the, that bunch, are well enough organised to do something like that on the streets of London and get away with it. So, as I said, I killed your old man. I beat him to death, in this very room, with a baseball bat. All part of a day’s work for the Shorn corporation. Check with Mike Bryant if you don’t believe me, I’m a colleague of his.’

Echevarria’s voice came out strangled. ‘ You—’

‘It’s what we do here, Paco. Neoliberal commercial management. Global mayhem, remote-control death and destruction. Market Forces in action. If you don’t like it—’

Hamilton charged him from the side.

He had time to be impressed - fat fuck didn’t look like he had it in him - then the chair went over and the junior partner was on top of him, bloodied nose spattering down into his face, soft hands digging into the cords of his throat with surprising strength.

Chris wasted no time struggling. He got a grip on the little finger of Hamilton’s right hand, curled it back and snapped it. Hamilton yelped and let go. Chris came up from the floor like a hinge and punched the partner in the throat. Hamilton lurched back, just on his feet, clutching at the point of impact. Somewhere on the other side of the world, Echevarria was yelling in Spanish. Chris got to his feet, stalked towards Hamilton. The partner’s eyes widened. Chris threw a punch, Hamilton ducked and fended with a rusty boxing move, the other hand still at his throat. There wasn’t much strength in it, and he came up panting. Impatiently, Chris repeated the punch, snagged Hamilton’s wrist with an aikido hold he knew and jerked the partner off balance towards him. He punched low into the expansive gut, and as Hamilton spasmed, he grabbed him round the neck and yanked up and round.

It had the fury of the whole day behind it.

It snapped Hamilton’s neck.

Chris heard the muffled crack, and as the partner went limp in his grip, the rage drained out of him. He let go and Hamilton hit the floor. He turned back to Echevarria and the suited aides who were crowding into the holocast around him. They stared at him like frightened children.

He cleared his throat. ‘Now—’

Something cold and jagged slapped him. He blinked and raised one arm to look at the mass of silvery wire mesh that had come out of nowhere and wrapped around his side. He was starting to turn to the door behind him, when the stungun web sparked and went off with a smell like scorching plastic. The jolt flung him hard against the table, where he clung for a moment, staring.

In the open doorway, Louise Hewitt stood with the stungun still levelled and watched him collapse.

The last thing he saw was her smile.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The cell measured about three metres on a side, and smelled very faintly of fresh paint, thick pastel layers of which coated the walls. There was a comfortable steel frame bed against one such wall, a three-drawer desk under the window and an en suite bathroom capsule in one corner. Next to the capsule, plain white towels hung on a heated rack and next to that there was hanging space and boxed shelving for his clothes. The fixtures were good-quality wood and metal, and the window looked out over the river through glass that only betrayed its toughened qualities with the tiny red triangle logo in one corner. The whole place was no worse than some hotels Chris had seen on placement, and it was in considerably better condition than any of the rooms in Erik Nyquist’s Brundtland estate apartment.

As far as he could work out, he was the only person in the block.

Guest of honour, he thought vaguely as he went to sleep the second night. Full run of the facilities.

The truth was, the corporate police didn’t seem to know what to do with him. They’d taken his phone and his wallet on arrival, but beyond that basic security measure, they appeared to be making it up as they went along. They weren’t used to holding executives for anything more serious than drunken affray or the occasional white-collar accounting misdemeanour. Most of their duties went the other way - investigation of crimes and apprehension of suspects where the victims were corporate but the criminals were not. Anyone of that stripe who made it to custody alive would be summarily handed over to the conventional police so that grubby business of state law enforcement could be set in motion.

Here, the victim was corporate but so was the offender.

Say what?

Murder, they were saying, but hell, don’t these guys off each other on the road practically every month.

That’s different.

It was confusing for everybody. In the ensuing vacuum, Chris was accorded a status somewhere between cherished celebrity and dangerous lunatic. The first role at least, he was learning how to play.

The days inched along, like slow, bulky files downloading.

He got meals in his cell at three appointed times daily, delivered on a tray by two uniformed officers, one of whom watched from the door while the other set down the food on the desk. An hour after each meal, the tray was removed by the same team, but only after all items of cutlery and crockery had been checked off on a palm-pad. Both men were friendly enough, but they never let the conversation get beyond pleasantries and they watched him warily all the time.

Impotence was two clenched fists and a fizzing wire through the head. Lopez, Barranco, the NAME account. Nothing he could do.

A different team, also all male, escorted him out of the cell for an hour’s exercise after breakfast and lunch. They marched him along well-cared-for corridors and down a stairwell that let out to an internal quadrangle. There was a profusion of plants and trees planted in shingle beds, a complex step-structured bronze fountain and a high, angled glass roof covering a third of the open space. His escort left him alone in the quad, closed the doors and watched him from a glassed-in mezzanine gallery above. The first couple of times, he paced back and forth aimlessly, less out of any real inclination than from a vague sense of what was expected of him. Once he realised this, he stopped and spent most of his allocated hour sitting on the edge of the fountain, lost in the noise it made, knotted, hopeless plans to save Joaquin Lopez from the arena, and daydreams of driving the Saab.

When it became apparent he wasn’t leaving any time soon, he got clothes. Three changes of good-quality casuals in dark colours and a dozen sets of cotton underwear. He asked the woman who came to fit him how she wanted him to pay, cash or cards and she looked embarrassed.

‘We bill your firm,’ she admitted finally.

He got no visitors, for which he was obscurely grateful. He wouldn’t have known what to say to anybody he knew.

Between meals, the hours stretched out. He couldn’t remember a time when less had been expected of him. One of his warders offered to let him have some books, but when the promised haul arrived, it consisted of a bare half-dozen battered paperbacks by authors Chris had never heard of. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

He was asked if he wanted paper and pens and said yes, reflexively, then didn’t know what to do with them. He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton’s death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he’d written and start further back. When his first line read my father was murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and instituted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched.

He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn’t think of anything worth telling her.

The week ended. Another started.

Shorn came for him.

He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the glass roof. His escort had obligingly dragged a bench out from somewhere for him, and now he sat at one end of it and stared out at the curtain of rain falling a half metre away.

The plants, at least, seemed to be enjoying it.

The door to the quad snapped open and he flicked a surprised glance at his watch. He’d only been there twenty minutes. He looked up and saw Louise Hewitt standing there. It was the first time he’d seen her since she shot him with the stungun. He looked back at the rain.

‘Morning, Faulkner. Mind if I sit down?’

He stared down at his hands. ‘I guess they’ll stop me if I try to break your neck.’

‘Try to lay a fucking finger on me, and I’ll stop you myself,’ she said mildly. ‘You’re not the only one with karate training, you know.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’

He felt the bench shift slightly as she lowered herself onto it at the other end. They sat a metre apart. The rain fell through the silence, hissing softly.

‘Liz Linshaw says hi,’ Hewitt told him, finally.

It jerked his head around.

‘Well,’ she amended. ‘That’s paraphrase. Actually, she says, you fucking bitch, you can’t hold him without charges this long, I want to see him. She’s wrong about that, of course. We can hold you pretty much indefinitely.’

Chris looked away again, jaw set.

‘We don’t plan to, though. In fact, your release papers should come through some time tomorrow morning. You can go home, or back to that expensive hotel fucknest you’ve been maintaining. Want to know how come?’

He locked down the urge to ask, to give anything. It was hard to do. He was hungry for detail from outside, for anything to engage the frantically spinning wheels in his head.

‘So I’ll tell you anyway. Tomorrow’s Thursday, you should be out by lunchtime at worst. That gives you the best part of a day before you drive. We’ve posted for a Friday challenge, it’s traditional at Shorn. Gives everyone the weekend to get used to the result.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Hewitt?’ The insolence shrouded the question enough that he could justify breaking his silence. ‘What challenge?’

‘The partnership challenge. For Philip Hamilton’s post.’

He coughed a laugh. ‘I don’t want Hamilton’s fucking job.’

‘Oh yes, you do. In fact, you issued a formal notice of challenge just before you killed him. Citing unprofessional conduct over the NAME account, ironically enough.’ She reached into her jacket and produced a palm-pad. ‘I can show you it if you like.’

‘No thanks. I don’t know what shit you’re cooking up, Hewitt, but it won’t start. You know the policy, you told me yourself last week. No partner/employee crossover.’

‘Well, yes, granted your actions were unorthodox. But, as you know, our senior partner is a big fan of policy-making by precedent. He’s agreed that we can blur the distinction in this case. Apparently, he’s had you in mind for partner status for quite a while. You or Mike Bryant, of course.’

And then it all came crashing down on him, like a slum clearance he’d watched as a kid. Explosions ripping through what he thought was solid from one side to the other, clean straight lines of structure tipping, curtseying and dissolving into a chaos of tumbling rubble and dust while a huddled crowd watched. He couldn’t see the resulting wreckage clearly yet, but he sensed its outlines.

‘Mike won’t drive against me,’ he said without conviction.

Hewitt smiled. ‘Yes, he will. I’ve talked to him. More precisely, I’ve talked to him about equity, capital wealth, partner-safe status, professional versus unprofessional behaviour and the dangers of unmanageability. Oh, and the identity of your mystery hotel guest over the last couple of weeks.’

‘The fuck are you talking about?’ But as he said it, the sliding sense of despair was overwhelming, because he already knew.

‘Don’t be obtuse, Chris. I’ve got indesp microcam footage from Liz’s house and the hotel too. Should have seen Mike’s face when he saw that stuff.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘No,’ she said almost kindly. ‘I’ve been modelling this one for months, Chris. I mean, come on. Who do you think sent you Donna Dread’s little performance in the first place?’ She waited for a response, saw she was getting none and sighed. ‘Okay, Linshaw was already leaning pretty hard in your direction, she’s such a little tart with the driving thing anyway. But even so, I think I deserve some credit. If it weren’t for me, you’d probably still be grinding through the same stale old fidelity numbers with your Norwegian grease monkey.’

Chris nodded to himself. The shock was still coming, in waves. ‘You set me up with Hamilton, didn’t you? You knew what I’d do.’

‘It seemed likely.’ Hewitt examined her nails modestly. ‘To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I’d get a result this good. Putting you and Hamilton on a collision course was an obvious no-lose strategy, the Lopez/Barranco stuff looked likely to pull you in, you proved that with Echevarria senior. Little favour called in at the Langley end, tip you off the account and off we go. But even so, Chris, I was impressed . You really managed to fuck up beyond my wildest dreams. I don’t know what you were thinking. If you were thinking.’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Chris said distantly.

‘No, I do understand. You’re hooked on Barranco’s shiny new dream - actually, it’s a pretty grubby, old dream, but let’s leave that - and some macho loyalty thing for Joaquin Lopez. I just wonder what you think trashing Hamilton was going to achieve.’

It was a ray of light, worth an almost-grin. ‘You’re wrong, Louise. Trashing Hamilton was incidental. He was just in the way. The point is, your deal with Echevarria is fucked. He’ll never touch Shorn again.’

‘Well, that remains to be seen. He’s a smarter young man than you give him credit for, and if we can show him your charred corpse with Mike Bryant’s boot on it, well, who knows?’

He folded his arms. ‘I’m not doing it, Louise.’

‘Oh, yes you are.’ Her voice turned momentarily ugly. ‘Because if you don’t drive, then Phil Hamilton’s death is just murder, and you’ll be getting a swift ride to the organ bank. Those are your choices, Chris. Die on the road or die strapped to a gurney at St Bart’s. Either way is fine with me.’

She leaned closer. Close enough that he could smell her perfume under the rain, clean and sharp and lightly spiced. Her voice was a serrated murmur.

‘And whichever it is, Chris, when it happens, as you’re going under, you just remember Nick Makin.’

Chris looked at her, not really surprised. ‘Makin, huh?’

‘That’s right.’ She sat back again. ‘Makin.’

‘So I called it from the beginning. Your toy boy got bumped for me, and you sent him to kill me.’ He shook his head. ‘Him and his gangwit proxies. That was brave of you.’

‘There’s no sent about it, Chris. He hated you for free. If anything,’ she closed her mouth, looked away. She blinked. ‘If anything, I tried to talk him down because I knew it wasn’t necessary. I knew you’d fuck up sooner or later. And don’t talk to me about brave, Chris. Not with Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage. Not with the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands. You’re no fucking different to me in the end.’

‘No?’ He spotted the weak spot and stabbed at it. He mimicked her savagely. ‘Tried to talk him down? Come on, Louise, if you’d wanted to stop Makin, you could have. He wasn’t that strong. You let it happen because it suited the play. Tell yourself what you like in the wee small hours, but don’t try and sell that shit to me. In the end, he was just another pawn.’

‘Pawn. Ah, yes, the chess player.’ Her colour was hectic again, but her voice had evened out. ‘You know, I play a little chess myself, Chris. I never made a big splash about it, like some people, but I play. And it’s a very limited game. In the end, it’s just you and the other guy. That’s not a good model for what we do, Chris. Not a good model for life in general. Of course it’s very male, one-on-one combat, nice and simple. But it isn’t real. You need to upgrade, play something like AlphaMesh or Linkage. Something multi-sided, something with shifting alliances.’

‘Yeah, that sounds more like your speed.’

‘It’s the speed of the world, Chris. Look around you. See the chess players? Sure you do, they’re the stupid third-world fucks sending out their pawns to kill each other over a fifty-mile strip of desert or what colour pyjamas God likes to wear. We’re the AlphaMesh players, Chris. The investment houses, the consultants, the corporates. We shift, we change, we realign, and the game keeps flowing our way. We move around these horn-locked back-and-forth testosterone dickheads, we play them off against each other and they fucking pay us for the privilege.’

‘Thanks for the insight.’

‘Yeah well.’ She got up to go. ‘Here’s another one. When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens, just remember. You didn’t lose to him, you lost to me.’

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

It rained on and off through the night and into the next morning. The last of the showers sputtered out as Chris was eating breakfast, and by the time he finished, the sky was brightening. His release order came through about an hour later. The meal tray detail turned up, looking unusually cheerful, and told him he could leave whenever he wanted. They’d brought his phone and wallet, a small black carry-all for his clothes, and the one who’d loaned him the books said he was welcome to keep anything he was still reading. Chris said he couldn’t possibly.

Outside, the city was still damp from the rain, and the air smelled rinsed. The weather had cleared the streets of people, leaving a forlorn Sunday feel on everything. A moisture-beaded Shorn limousine was waiting for him at the kerb, engine idling.

‘We’ll need to hurry, sir,’ the chauffeur told him. ‘The press release said four this afternoon, but you never know. Even the corporate cops have been known to leak. Always a price for drive data, eh?’

In the event, his cynicism proved unfounded. The drive to the hotel was uneventful, and the chauffeur left him alone. Only once, as his passenger was getting out, did the man’s professional lacquer crack. He waited until Chris started up the steps to the hotel, then climbed half out of the driver-side door and leaned across the roof of the limo.

‘Good luck, sir,’ he said.

Chris turned to look at him. ‘Not a Bryant fan, then?’ he asked, not quite steadily.

‘No, sir. Didn’t want to say anything before, in the car, in case you thought I was brown-nosing. But I’ll be watching you tomorrow, sir. Betting on you too.’

‘That’s. Very kind of you.’ The attempt at irony wavered away, unnoticed. ‘Any particular reason you’re not backing Bryant?’ Because he sure as fuck is a better driver than me.

The chauffeur shrugged. ‘Can’t bring myself to like the man. ’course, you didn’t hear me say that, sir.’

‘Say what?’

The chauffeur grinned. ‘Like I said, sir. I’ll be watching.’

Chris watched him drive away, gripped by a powerful desire to exchange places with the man. Secure service job, preferential housing as likely as not. Modest means, a modest life and a probable future measured in decades, not days. Look at him, not a care in the fucking world.

Suddenly, he felt sick.

When he got up to his room, the sense of unreality was complete. The only visible change since he left for work the day he murdered Philip Hamilton was the absence of Liz Linshaw’s sleeping form curled into the bedclothes.

And the document pouch on the desk.

He ripped off the seals and skimmed through the paperwork - standard challenge documentation, agreement to waive normal legal protection, itemised rules and references to the 2041 (revised) corporate road charter. Duel envelope details, satellite blow-ups and recent road surface commentary from the relevant service providers. It was the M11 run, practically from his front door, down through the underpass and up over the vaulted section, the Gullet, across the north-eastern zones and down. The old favourite. No motorway changes, no ramps, just into the pipe and drive. Brutal, simple stuff.

In his jacket pocket, the mobile queeped. After ten days without the phone, it took him a moment to realise what it was. He took it out, identified a video call from Liz and accepted.

‘Chris.’ She stared out of the tiny screen at him, a little haggard around the eyes, he noticed, and couldn’t help being slightly flattered. ‘Thank Christ for that, you’re out.’

‘You must be paying a lot for your tips.’

Her smile was strained. ‘Tricks of the trade, Chris. Journalism, I mean. You know what’s happening, I take it.’

‘Yeah, I got a full briefing yesterday. Has Mike been in touch?’

‘Yeah.’ She winced. ‘Not a conversation I want to repeat.’

Chris tried to think of something vaguely intelligent to say. ‘I guess he was a lot more serious about you than he liked to show.’

‘Yeah, and about you too, Chris. That’s what really hurt, apparently. As far as I could make out between the expletives.’

‘Yeah, well.’

A long pause.

‘Chris, are you really going to—’

‘I don’t really want to talk about it, Liz.’

‘No. Right.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want me to come over?’

Again, the pitching sickness in his stomach. The sheer fucking disbelief at what was going to happen. A rising, swelling bubble of fear.

‘I, uh . . .’

‘Fine. It’s okay, I understand.’

‘Good.’

The conversation fizzled for a few more seconds, then died. They said goodbyes that were almost formal, and he hung up.

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the phone for a while. Finally, he called Mike.

‘Hello, Chris.’ There was a flatness in Bryant’s voice and eyes that told him everything he needed to know. He could have hung up there and then.

He gave it a shot.

‘Mike, you can’t be serious about this shit.’

‘What shit is that, Chris? The trail-of-bodies-in-Shorn-conference-chambers shit? The political-alignment-with-terrorists shit? Or did you mean the fuck-your-best-friend’s-woman shit?’

‘Hey. You’re married to Suki, not Liz.’

‘Do the words you don’t fucking make my marital decisions for me sound familiar?’

‘Listen Mike, I’m coming in to the office. We’re going to talk about—’

‘No, we’re not. I’m taking a half day today. Spending it with Suki, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

‘Then I’ll come and see you there.’

‘You do and I’ll kick your fucking teeth down your throat on the doorstep.’ Mike’s top lip drew back from his teeth. ‘You just stay where you are and fuck Liz a couple more times, while you’ve still got the chance. If you can get it up right now, that is.’

Chris snapped.

‘Ah, fuck you then. Asshole! I’ll see you on the fucking road!’

He hurled the phone across the room. It hit the wall and bounced, undamaged, to the floor.

He made one more call. Two, to be completely accurate, but when he called the house in Hawkspur Green, no one answered. He shrugged philosophically and dug Erik Nyquist’s number out of the phone’s memory. Leaking oil in a head-on collision. It could hardly hurt more than what he’d already swallowed.

The Norwegian was curiously gentle with him.

‘She’s not here, Chris,’ he said. ‘And honestly, even if she was, I doubt she’d talk to you.’

‘That’s fine, I uh, I understand. Uh, do you know if she’s gone home? To the house, I mean. I tried her there, not to talk to, only to warn her I’m coming, I mean.’ He heard the choppy stumbling of his own speech and stopped. He rubbed at his face, glad Erik didn’t have videophone capacity. ‘I’m going out to collect the Saab this afternoon. I didn’t want to surprise her, you know, if she didn’t want to, uh, to see me.’

‘She hasn’t gone to the house,’ said Nyquist, and Chris knew then she was there, maybe standing next to her father in the cramped, damp smelling confines of the hall, maybe off in the kitchen, back to it all, trying not to listen.

‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat of an unlooked-for obstruction. ‘Listen, Erik. Tell her. When you see her, I mean, tell her she needs to stay resident in the UK for the next six months. Otherwise, uh, the terms of my will are invalidated. You know, the share options and mortgage insurance on the house? If she’s gone, back to Norway, Shorn’ll get the lot. So, uh. Makes sense for her to stick around, you know.’

There was a lot of silence before Erik answered.

‘I’ll tell her,’ he said.

‘Great.’

More silence. Neither man seemed ready to hang up.

‘You’re going to drive then?’ Nyquist asked him finally.

Chris was relieved to find he could still manage a laugh. ‘Well, let’s just say the other options aren’t great.’

‘You can’t run?’

‘Shame on you, Erik. Run, from the filthy corporate monsters of Conflict Investment?’ He grew abruptly serious, fighting the up-bubbling fear. ‘There’s no way, Erik. They’ve got me checked, filed and monitored. That fucked-up system you’re always raging about? That system’ll be locked up against any move I try to make. Plastic selectively invalidated, corporate police checking ports and airports. To put not too fine a point to it, if I don’t roll out the wheels tomorrow, I’m a common criminal on my way to the jag gurney.’

Nyquist hesitated. ‘Can you beat him? Carla says—’

‘I don’t know, Erik. Get back to me tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have an answer for you.’

The Norwegian chuckled dutifully. Chris felt his own face take up the echo. He was suddenly, almost tearfully thankful for the older man’s unhostile presence on the line. The instinctive male solidarity, the shoring up of his desperate bravado. He suddenly understood how badly he had failed to do the same thing for Erik at the crisis points in his father-in-law’s life. How he’d taken the Norwegian’s own cornered bravado at face value, failed to see it for what it was, berated him for it and cut him loose to suffer alone. With the realisation, something lodged in his throat.

‘From what I understand,’ Nyquist was saying, ‘we’ll all know by then. In fact we’ll all be watching you crack open the champagne. The networks have been ad-screaming about full coverage since yesterday. Sponsored by Pirelli and BMW, they say.’

Chris’s grin melted into a grimace. ‘So. No prizes for guessing who they think’s going to win, then.’

‘Almost worth beating him just to piss them off, huh?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He could feel another bubble of fear coming up. He cleared his throat again. ‘Listen, Erik. I’ve got to go. Things to do, you know. Got to get ready for all that publicity tomorrow. Interviews, fame, all that shit. It, uh, it isn’t easy being a driving hero.’

‘No,’ said Nyquist very gently. ‘I know.’

He signed the challenge documentation, got the hotel to courier it across to Shorn and sat waiting for receipt confirmation. He studied the route blow-ups and the surface reports with desultory attention, tried vaguely to imagine his way inside something resembling a strategy.

He could not focus on anything. He kept skittering off into daydreams. His thoughts slowed down, fragmented to useless shards.

He heard Carla’s voice.

Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

Hewitt’s voice.

When Mike Bryant drives you off the road on Friday, Mr Chessman - and he will, because he’s harder and faster than you - when that happens—

He remembered Bryant’s driving. Bryant’s chess playing. Headlong, full on, joyous in its savagery.

Bryant and the car-jackers. The boom of the Nemex, the tumbling bodies.

Bryant and Griff Dixon. Implacable, precise.

Bryant and Marauder, daring the gangwit forward, grinning into the possibility of it.

Bryant on Crutched Friars, walking empty handed into the duel against five men with shotguns.

He stared at it all, behind the curtain of his closed eyes.

And heard Hewitt again.

—Mitsue Jones shot through the head at close range while she was injured and trapped in wreckage—

—the blood of an eighty-year-old man on your hands—

You’re no fucking different to me in the end.

He wondered if she was right.

Recoiled automatically as soon as he thought it.

Found himself lying face up on the bed an hour later, exploring the idea gingerly, like a broken bone or a gaping wound he didn’t dare look at directly.

Caught himself, finally, hoping it might be true.

Because, in the absence of the consuming hatred that had driven him after Edward Quain, he didn’t know what else he could summon to keep him alive tomorrow.

He had the cab leave him at the end of the drive.

It felt strange to walk up the gravel S-curve and see the house emerge gradually through the trees. Just being there felt odd enough - he hadn’t seen the place in weeks, and even then, before his life broke in half, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d walked from the road. One weekend, one evening, out with Carla in the village maybe. Back at the start of the summer. He couldn’t remember.

He reached the turning circle at the top, and the Saab was there, quiet and sequined with rain. He wondered if Carla had looked at it recently, wondered in fact when it had last been moved. He’d need to road-test it. Check it for—

A memory arrowed in past his defences - Carla under the Saab post test-drive, calling out questions about handling, while he stood with a whisky in his hand, watching her feet and answering. Warmth of shared knowledge, shared involvement.

He stared at the Saab, throat aching. The urge to get in and drive somewhere was overwhelming. He stood for a full twenty seconds, like a starving man faced with a large animal that he might just conceivably be able to kill with his bare hands and eat raw. He only moved when the straps on his bags began to cut deep enough into his palms to be painful.

Not yet.

He dumped the bags at the front door while he fished the recog tab from his pocket and showed it to the lock. Shouldered the door aside and moved across the threshold. Inside was cold with the lack of recent occupancy and everything had the skin-thin unfamiliarity of return home after long absence. He stood in the lounge, bags dropped once more at his feet, and Carla’s departure came and hit him like a hard slap across the mouth.

She’d taken very little, but the holes it had left felt like wounds. The green onyx woman-form she’d bought in Cape Town was gone from its place by the phone deck. Two blunt little metal stubs protruded from a suddenly naked patch of wall where the flattened and engraved Volvo cylinder head from her mechanic’s graduation had once hung. On the mantelpiece, something else was gone, like a pulled tooth, he couldn’t remember what it was. The framed photos of her friends and family on the window ledge had been weeded out from others of Chris and Carla or Chris alone, and the remaining crop looked stranded on the white wood like yachts run aground. The bookshelves were devastated, the bulk of their occupants gone, the rest fallen flat or leaning forlornly together in corners.

He had no stomach for the rest of the house.

He unpacked his bag across the sofa, slung the Nemex and his recently acquired Remington into an armchair. The sight of the weapons brought him up short. He’d never brought the Nemex inside before this, he realised. Even when they went to the Brundtland that fucking night, he’d had to get it from the glove compartment of the Saab. It felt as alien now, perched on the soft leather of the armchair, as the absences where Carla had taken things away. It felt, in an odd way, like an absence of its own.

He picked up the shotgun, because it delayed the time when he’d have to go upstairs to the bedroom. He pumped the action a couple of times, deriving a thin satisfaction from the powder-dry clack-clack that it made. He lost himself in the mechanism for a while, put the thing to his shoulder and tracked around the room like a child playing at war, pausing and firing on the spaces Carla had left and, finally, on the image of himself in the hall entrance mirror. He stared for a long time at the man who stood there, lowered the Remington for a moment to get a better look, then pumped the action rapidly, threw the shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger again.

He went out to the car.

Later, as evening was falling, he parked again and went back into the house for the second time. With darkness shading in outside and the lights on, the blank absence of things and Carla seemed less brutal.

He’d already eaten. He locked the door and went straight up to the bedroom. Carla had taken her scrubbed granite analogue clock from the bedside table and the only other time-piece in the room was on the dressing table, an old Casio digital alarm they’d bought together at some antique auction years back. Chris lay in the dark for a long time staring at its steady green numerals, watching the seconds of his life turn over, watching as the last minutes of the day counted down to zero and the new morning of the duel began.

He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t see the point.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

They were talking about him as he turned on the TV.

‘—for a driver of that rank. It’s not really what you expect, is it, Liz?’

‘I think that depends, Ron.’ She was resplendent in a figure-hugging black scoop-necked jersey, light make-up, hair pinned carelessly up. Looking at her made him ache. ‘It’s true Faulkner’s form since Quain has been variable, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I know from interviewing him myself that he simply doesn’t see blanket savagery as an asset.’

‘Whereas Mike Bryant does.’

‘Well, again, I think you’re simplifying. Mike’s form is more consistent, more conservative you might say, and yes, he certainly isn’t afraid to go foot to the floor when it counts. But he’s not cast in the same thug mould as, say, someone like Yeo at Mariner Sketch or some of the imported drivers we’ve got from Eastern Europe. That’s savagery as a default setting. That’s not Bryant at all.’

‘You know them both quite well.’

She made a modest gesture. ‘Mike Bryant was one of the main sources for my book, The New Asphalt Warriors. And I’ve been working with Chris Faulkner, among other drivers, on a follow-up. I hate to plug so blatantly, but—’

‘No, no. Please.’

Mannered laughter.

‘Well, then. It’s called Reflections on Asphalt - Behind the Driver Mask, and it should, my workload permitting, be out some time in the New Year.’ She grinned professionally into the camera. ‘It’ll be a great read, I promise.’

‘I’m sure it will.’ Face to camera. Pause, and. Cue. ‘So now, let’s go over to our live-coverage crew at the Harlow helideck. Sanjeev, can you hear me?’

‘Loud and clear, Ron.’ The inset screen sprang up. Maximised. Windswept backdrop, rotors and the location anchor sweeping dishevelled hair out of his eyes as he spoke.

‘So what’s the weather like up there?’

‘Uh, looks as if the rain’s still holding off, Ron. Maybe even some chance of sun later on, the forecast people tell me.’

‘Good driving conditions, then?’

‘Yes, it looks like it. Of course, we won’t be allowed over the envelope until twenty minutes or so after the duel ends, but I’m told the roads have more or less dried out. And with the summer repairs on this stretch completed well ahead of schedule, this promises to be—’

He told the TV to sleep, finished his coffee and left the espresso cup standing on the phone deck. Brief existential shiver as he looked at it and realised it would still be there tonight, untouched, whatever happened on the road today. Wherever its owner was.

He shook off the chill and settled his jacket on his shoulders. In the hall mirror, he put on his tie with a languid, frictionless calm that was just the right side of panic. His hands, he noted, were trembling slightly, but he couldn’t decide if it was fear or caffeine. He’d dosed himself pretty heavily.

He finished the tie, looked at himself in the mirror for what seemed like a long time, checked for keys and wallet, and went out to the car. He pulled the door of the house closed and breathed in, hard. The morning air was still and damp in his lungs.

Gravel crunched to his left.

‘Chris.’

He spun, clawing at the shoulder holster. The Nemex came out.

Truls Vasvik stood at the edge of the house, hands spread at waist height. He smiled, a little forcedly.

‘Don’t shoot me. I’m here to help.’

Chris put up the Nemex. ‘You’re a little late for that.’

‘Not at all. This is what I believe you English guys call the nick of time.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Chris shoved the Nemex back into the shoulder holster, spoiling the blunt gesture a little as the gun failed to clip in. He pushed a couple more times, then left it. Clicked the car key with his other hand and the Saab’s lights winked at him as the alarms disabled. He stepped towards it.

‘Wait. Chris, wait a minute.’ Vasvik moved to block him, hands still held placatory at his sides. ‘Think this through. Bryant’s going to kill you out there.’

‘Could be.’

‘And - what? That’s it? The great macho sulk? Kill me and be done with it. See if I fucking care. What does that achieve, Chris?’

‘I don’t expect you to understand.’

‘Chris, I can get you out of here.’ The ombudsman pointed. ‘Back that way, through the woods. I’ve got a three-man team back there and a covered van. Sealed unit, medical waste documentation. It’ll get us through the tunnel without checks. You get your million dollars, you get the job. All you’ve got to do is come with me.’

Out of nowhere, Chris found he could grin. The discovery made his eyes prickle, and put a ball of sudden, savage joy in the pit of his stomach.

‘You’ve not been keeping up on current events, Truls,’ he said. ‘I’m globally famous these days. My face is right up there with Tony Carpenter and Inez Zequina. Everybody knows who I am. What kind of ombudsman is that going to make me?’

‘Chris, that isn’t important. We can—’

‘What are you going to do then, give me a new face?’

‘If necessary. But—’

‘And the million dollars, well.’ Chris tutted regretfully. ‘That just isn’t such a lot of money any more, Truls. I’m up for junior partner. That’s equity. Capital wealth. Several millions, plus benefits.’

‘Or cremation later today.’

Chris nodded. ‘There’s a risk of that. But you know what, Truls. The thing you guys will never understand. That risk is what it’s all about. Risk is what makes winning worth it.’

‘You aren’t going to win, Chris.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ll see if I can live up to it. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’

He stepped forward. Vasvik stayed where he was. Their faces were a handsbreadth apart. Eyes locked.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, Chris.’ The ombudsman’s voice was low and taut. ‘You think this is going to pay off what you’ve done to Carla, and everybody else? Don’t be a fucking child. Being dead doesn’t solve anything. You’ve got to live if you’re going to make a difference.’

Chris grinned again. ‘Well, that’s about as good a defence of cowardice as I’ve ever heard. I guess you need that, working where you do.’

He saw the flare in Vasvik’s eyes.

‘Yeah, that’s it, Truls. Back the fuck off. Go file a report or something. You came and asked, and I turned you down.’

‘You’re a fool, Chris. You’ve pissed away your marriage, pissed all over your wife—’

The Nemex came out again, smoother this time, and he jammed it under Vasvik’s chin.

‘Hey. That’s my fucking business.’

The ombudsman smiled with one corner of his mouth. He went on talking as if the Nemex wasn’t there. ‘—and now you’re going to piss your life away too. Just to make Carla Nyquist cry over your corpse.’

Through gritted teeth. ‘I told you—’

‘And she will.’ Vasvik saw the change in his face, and reached up for the Nemex. He curled his fingers around the barrel and pushed it away. His eyes were icy with disgust. ‘Yeah. She’ll cry for the next ten years of her fucking life over you, Chris. But then, she would have done that anyway. Whatever happened. Whether you were dead like you’re going to be, or just dead inside like you already are.’

Chris gave him a fixed little smile and stowed the Nemex again.

‘Get out of my way.’

‘My pleasure.’

Vasvik stood aside and watched him climb into the Saab. The engine awoke with a rumble like distant thunder. Chris closed the door and put the car in gear. As he let out the clutch and the Saab began to crawl forward, something in the ombudsman’s face made him crank down the window.

‘Oh, yeah, Vasvik. Speaking of millions, I forgot. You heard they’re going to make a movie about me?’

‘Yeah.’ The Norwegian nodded sombrely. ‘I heard. Make a great ending if you and Bryant managed to kill each other both.’

Gravel crunched under the wheels. ‘Fuck you.’

‘No, really. I’d go and see it.’

He hit the turn for the ramp going too fast, ignored the bounce and accelerated down onto the motorway. Vasvik’s offer was gone, like Vasvik himself, like conscious long-term thought, bundled up and flung out behind him, flapping on the road in the rearview. Over and out of reach. There was only the road ahead and his hold on the car around him. The Saab snarled throatily to itself as he picked up the centre lane and flipped on the comset.

‘Driver Control.’

‘This is Chris Faulkner, driver clearance 260B354R.’ His voice was even in his own ears. He felt a quickening of the joy in the pit of his stomach. He felt armoured. ‘Inbound on M11 for partnership challenge. I’m looking for the duel envelope.’

There was a brief pause. He wondered suddenly if any of the same crew that had worked the gangwit car-jack fiasco were on today.

‘Got you, Faulkner. You’re about twenty kilometres off the northern edge. We will advise when you breach. Leave the channel open.’

‘Traffic?’

‘Executive traffic has been disallowed until nine-thirty. You have two automated bulk transporters currently inbound within the envelope, moderate loads, and maintenance vehicles at junction eleven. Please note that collateral damage to said vehicles is not permitted within the duel protocol.’

‘Noted. So where’s Bryant, then?’

Another pause. You could hear the outrage.

‘That information is classified under duel protocol. Please do not request it again.’

‘Noted. The sense-of-humour failure, I mean.’

‘Please also note that selective jamming is in effect within the envelope. You will be unable to receive outside transmissions other than our own.’

‘Thank you, Driver Control. I have done this before a couple of times.’

He settled into his speed. The overgrown margins of the motorway flashed past on either side in a bumpy green blur. The asphalt fed thrumming under his wheels and fled in his wake. The sense of power grew, feeding off the caffeine and adrenalin. Dying suddenly seemed a long way off, a ridiculous rumour he didn’t believe, something he wouldn’t get round to.

Reality was the road.

He hit the duel envelope, tore through it at a hundred and sixty. Driver Control squawked the fact, whole seconds late. Peripheral glimpses of huddled vehicles on the bridge and ramps. Police lights, news crew vans and a rising boil of activity as the Saab slammed past them. He thought he felt the lenses of the cameras swing hungrily to follow.

No, you’ve just had way too much coffee.

A slightly hysterical laugh sat behind the thought. He forced it down and watched the hurrying perspective of the road, keyed up for the evening-blue flash of Mike’s BMW. His speed sank to a more cautious hundred and thirty. The ghost of strategy floated up behind his eyes. Retained knowledge of the route from the blow-ups, sense of how Bryant drove.

Bryant! He grinned wolfishly. Folded away his misgivings, gave in to the pure hot flow of too-fucking-late-now.

Come on, you motherfucker. I took Liz off you, now let’s see about that pretty blue car. Let’s see about your plastic.

Lopez. Barranco. The men and women in the gunship-tortured highlands of the NAME. But most of all Bryant, Bryant and his craven fucking, keep-the-rain-off-me need for Hewitt and Notley and all the rest of it.

He mapped the faces over - Bryant into Quain. Just another murderous fucking suit. Just another—

The Saab hammered down towards junction ten. The first of the automated transporters blew up in his vision, nailed to the centre lane. Chime from the proximity alert, as he swung the Saab out and past. Gut-deep satisfaction as the car swayed and then straightened out under his hands. The high metal wall slid away on his left and he swung back in.

The road ahead—

Impact!

He was still swimming in the warm gutswirl of car control. Flash of twilight blue in one wing mirror, metallic screech of impact from the rear. Jolt of the crash, the seatbelt webbing grip across his chest. He braked instinctively, remembered the transporter and slewed the Saab hard right. The automated vehicle’s collision alert split the air, blaring banshee outrage above and behind him. He didn’t have time to see if it had braked. Mike Bryant’s BMW shot past on the left, shedding speed and hauling across to stay with the Saab. Forcing the duel, right here, right now, right under the grille of the transporter.

He swam the blind spot, Chris knew numbly. Shadowed the automated vehicle from the front until he spotted Chris in the depths of the wing-mirror, falling back on the left as Chris overtook right, timing it on instinct, pinning the Saab’s blind spot as it emerged ahead of the transporter, getting up close for the ram—

Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.

He’s harder and faster than you—

Chris saw the BMW coming side-on and hauled over savagely. The two cars met with a shriek. Flayed paint and sparks in the crushed air between. Counterforce tried to push them apart again. Chris kept the clinch, steering against the other car so the grating scream ran on like nails down a blackboard. Bryant rode it, forcing him back and closer to the central reservation. The BMW’s greater weight was telling, the plan loomed massively clear. Side impact at this speed would smash the barrier down but not clear it. The wreckage would kick the Saab into the air like a toy.

Options.

Behind them somewhere, the automated transporter came on, an unknown quantity Chris didn’t have time to look for.

Desperation crept out, flicker-tongued in his guts.

He floored the accelerator, but the BMW’s nose already had him blocked. Bryant had locked with careful malice, a half metre ahead of neck-and-neck, enough to cut off any escape forward. Now, through both side windows, he looked over at Chris and ripped a cocked thumb across his own throat. He was grinning. The crash barrier—

Chris hit the brakes with everything he had.

The Saab staggered. Jerked free of the sparking, sandpapering fury on its left flank. There was time for a flash glimpse of the transporter coming up and he hauled hard left across Mike’s rear, across the centre lane and out of the automated vehicle’s path. Another blaring of machine rage and the transporter thundered past on his right cutting off vision of the BMW and what it was doing. Chris gritted curses and let them both go. Junction eight. His speed bled down to an unsteady ninety. Adrenalin reaction sloshed in his guts.

He caught a distant glimpse of the BMW disappearing down the incline towards the underpass.

It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was coming.

He had about a minute, he reckoned. After that—

After that, somewhere down in the gloom of the tunnel, Mike Bryant would have executed his one-hundred-and-eighty degree crash-stop turn, would be barrelling back up the road towards him for the head-to-head chicken.

That old number. The Mike Bryant profile - fearless, headlong, savage. Conservative to the end.

Chris built speed. Cranked his nerves back up to drive tension. He passed the transporter again. Head buzzing with calculation.

Two outcomes for this. The head-to-head kills the duel, one way or another. Saab or BMW out of the game, turned too hard, too late and tumbled, into the path of the long-suffering transporter maybe, or maybe both cars, clipped against each other, tossed effortlessly apart with kinetic energy raging off at all angles, looking to shed itself in impact and flame. Or—

Or we both make it, and you’re south, up and into the Gullet, no way to fight but slow down and let him ram you off into space like Hewitt did to Page, or try for the turn, a hundred and eighty screaming degrees on a vaulted highway only two lanes across.

He thought of this. He thought it out. Three-stage play, the crash barrier, the head-to-head, the end game in the Gullet.

And he knows you can’t make that turn.

The BMW bloomed in the road ahead.

Up out of the tunnel ramp. Very fast.

He had time for a glance at the speedo, saw a hundred and something insane, doubled it in his head for Bryant’s share of the speed, saw the BMW’s armoured snout coming at him, rock steady and directly ahead—

He’s harder and faster than you—

—and yelled, and hauled hard right.

The BMW flinched fragments of a second later. Flashed past.

Was gone.

Chris floored the accelerator and the Saab dived for the tunnel. Again, he had a minute at best. Not the time he needed, he’d have to make some more. The tunnel flew past in the hollow roar of the Saab’s echoed passing. Up, out of the gloom and into sudden, watery sunlight. The Gullet flung itself down at him like a massive asphalt loading ramp. He rose to meet it, took the first curve at the very edges of his driving ability. Felt his heart stumble as the Saab palpably gathered enough sideways momentum to skid. He dared not brake, there wasn’t time. He needed the straight at speed. He unhinged the angle of the turn a miserly couple of degrees, slewed back across the double lane, fishtailing, muttering imprecations to the car. The Saab came back to him. He picked up the long rise-and-fall of the straight and ran for the next curve.

Almost to the end of the gut-tickling swoop, almost on the curve, he choked off his speed and threw the Saab into a shrieking, gibbering handbrake turn.

For one very long moment, he thought he’d fucked up. Thought he’d lose a tyre and then the car and plunge with it through the crash barrier into the zones below. The car slithered, tripped drunkenly across a badly mended pothole, screamed protest and tyre smoke he could suddenly smell—

And stopped.

Not the hundred and eighty. Just a ninety-degree sprawl across both lanes, blocking the Gullet like a bone in the throat.

Back along the straight, the BMW came over the rise.

He grabbed the shotgun from the passenger side footwell, threw open the driver side door and tumbled out of the car. Found his feet, found the BMW and cranked the action of the tactical pump.

Curiously, now that the situation was drawn, everything seemed very quiet. The Saab had stalled out in the turn, and the BMW’s engine noise seemed almost inaudible past the distant ocean roar of his own pulse in his ears. The wind came and tugged at his hair, but gently. The sprawl of cordoned zone housing below seemed to be holding its breath.

He let Bryant come on for another second, then put the first shot into the driver-side half of the windscreen.

The familiar boom - he’d done a solid hour down in the armoury firing ranges, a final tuning of his earlier unexpected love affair with the long gun.

The BMW’s windscreen cratered and crazed. He saw the splinter lines.

No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle. The parchment-dry conclusion of the legal board of inquiry after the Nakamura playoff. No substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. Provided these directives are adhered to—

Bryant’s windscreen was armoured glass. Even with the state-of-the-art vehicle shredder load the armourer had shown him, care of Heckler and Koch - the roadblock ammunition of choice for all your urban enforcement needs - even with that, at this range there’d be no substantial destruction.

He pumped the action, fired again. The spider-webbed screen resplintered, almost to opaque.

It was pushing the envelope, pushing it the way Jones and Nakamura had done, pushing it the way Notley liked.

The BMW came on. Behind the ruined screen, Bryant had to be almost blind. Chris pumped in another round, ran sideways to get the angle. Went after the leading tyre.

The shotgun kicked. The tyre blew into shreds.

No substantial—

The BMW slewed violently across the road, brakes shrieking protest, scorching rubber into the road and the wind.

Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts.

In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works.

The BMW careered past him, ploughed through the crash barrier and plunged over. It took less than a pair of seconds. Chris had time for one glimpse through the side window, Mike still fighting the wheel for control, then the big car was gone, and there was only the ragged gap in the barrier to mark its passing.

Breath held.

A flat, oddly undramatic metallic crump from below. Then nothing.

Done. Won. Finished.

Emptied out.

Nothing.

It coursed through him like current, that nothing. Emptiness, building to ecstasy. He threw back his head and screamed at the sky. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get it all out. He screamed until his throat felt ripped and his lungs locked up on empty. Until he gagged, finally, to a halt.

It wasn’t enough.

Echoes rippled out across the cityscape below, chasing each other off towards the cluster of glass and steel towers on the skyline.

Overhead, even the clouds seemed to hurry away from the sound.

Behind them, the sky was a flawless, vacant blue. Against all the odds, it was going to be a beautiful day.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

You bring back their plastic.

Stranded atop the marching pillars of the Gullet, listening to his own pulse and the echo of his screams, Chris heard Hewitt’s words with hallucinatory clarity. It was as if the woman was standing next to him in the wind.

You go in and you finish the job. If you can, you bring back their plastic.

He peered down on the zone sprawl below. As far as he could tell, the BMW seemed to have fallen through the roof of a decaying commercial unit. He scanned the surroundings in both directions and spotted his access point. Fifty metres further along the Gullet, a caged staircase wound down around one of the concrete support pillars and came out at the end of a shabby residential street. It looked as if there might be a foot passage through from the street to the commercial units. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes.

He jogged slowly along the road to the top of the staircase. There was an ancient padlock on the rusting iron cagework. He levelled the shotgun, remembered the jagged vehicle-shredder load and thought better of it. He reached for the Nemex and found an empty holster.

Fuck.

He remembered the way the gun had refused to clip in while he talked to Vasvik. Remembered tumbling out of the Saab with the shotgun. He looked back along the road to where the car was slewed. No sign of anything on the asphalt, but it could have skittered away under the belly of the vehicle. Or fallen while he was still inside.

Well, that’s it. You can’t get down. Have to leave it for the clean-up squad. Not like they’ll take long to get here.

The relief gusted through him. Duel etiquette forbade outside approach for a regulation fifteen minutes, except in medical emergencies. But they’d reel the situation in on satellite blow-up, see the way it had played out and be here pretty soon. All he had to do was sit at the edge of the road and wait.

But he knew what Hewitt would say. Knew how the whisper would run among the junior analysts on the floor below. Yeah, sure, Faulkner’s some natty driver. But the way I heard it, no stones when it comes to the consequences. Too soft to pick a corpse’s pocket.

Fuck it.

He locked on the Remington’s safety, reversed the weapon and pounded at the rusted lock until it gave. Dull clank of metal on metal. Orange flakes of rust scattered around his feet. The lock snapped and hung, severed. He levered the cage door open and picked his way down the steps.

At the bottom, it was the same story. Another grilled iron door, another rusted lock, this time on the inside, as if a retreating army had fought a rearguard action out of the zones and up onto the highway. Weeds had grown up to shoulder height on the other side of the grille, effectively hiding the bottom of the staircase from outside view. From the inside, you could barely see the twinned row of black brick-terraced housing beyond. Chris craned his neck and stared through the nodding heads of the weeds, listening, trying to get some sense of whether there was anybody nearby.

Nothing stirred.

He started hammering at the lock. Slipped a couple of times, scraped his hand on the rusting iron. It was hard to manoeuvre the shotgun in the confines of the cage, hard to get a working angle. When he finally stepped out through the weeds, he was sweating and sticky inside his suit.

The street beyond was empty.

He scanned the frontages - the only motion was the flap of plastic sheeting over a broken upper window. A wrecked and rusted Land Rover, one of the late models modified to burn alcohol, was beached on its axles about twenty metres down the street. It was skeletal, stripped of everything that would come off, the frame scorched molotov-cocktail black where rust had not yet crept in. He spotted the passageway a couple of houses beyond on the left and moved cautiously out into the street. Unrepaired potholes gaped in the cracked asphalt, some of them wide enough to take the whole front end of the Saab.

He moved a couple of steps at a time, painfully aware of the windows looking down on either side, pausing to listen every two metres. Belatedly, he remembered the Remington’s safety and thumbed it off. Pumped out the last spent shell. The harsh metal noise it made shattered the quiet.

Suit and shotgun, he reasoned nervously. It ought to keep the flies off long enough.

He swung wide around the burnt-out Land Rover, feeling slightly ridiculous as he covered the angles. He cleared the corner of the passageway. Moved down past high brick walls topped with broken glass. Detritus crunched under his feet. The passage came to an end amidst shallow mounds of weed-grown rubble and a clutch of leaf-canopied trees. He climbed the first mound with difficulty, burying his Argentine leather shoes to the ankle in little avalanches of sliding soil. From the top he saw the corrugated metal side of the commercial unit and a loading bay door, rusted open on empty square metreage beyond. In the gloom he could make out half of the BMW lying on its back. A qualified relief at his own navigational skills seeped—

Motion.

He whipped around, finger tightening on the Remington’s trigger.

And snatched it away again, as if the metal was hot. On the down slope of the next mound, two children around four or five years old were playing a game with the slaughtered limbs and torsos of plastic dolls. They froze when they saw him, then scrambled to their feet and started shouting.

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit! Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit!’

He shook his head, lowered the shotgun and wiped a hand across his mouth. This close, the vehicle-shredder load would have—

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-SHIT!’ Elfin faces distorted with the force of the chant.

A woman’s voice came from one of the houses, raised and harsh with anxiety. The children vectored in on it, looked at each other for a moment that was almost comical, and then darted away like spooked animals. They scrambled across the mounds of rubble and through a hole in a wall he hadn’t seen. He was left looking at the plastic carnage of dismembered dolls.

Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck Louise Hewitt and her fucking plastic.

But he went on, over the rubble mounds, up to the loading bay door and through.

Inside, it was cold. Water dripped ceaselessly from the girder-laced roof and puddled along the lines of unevenly-laid concrete flooring. The BMW lay under the hole it had made, nose to the floor with the weight of engine and armour, back end in the air. There was a faint hissing from the front, and steam curled out through a gap where the hood had crushed out of true. Otherwise, it looked remarkably undamaged. The armouring had stood up.

Chris moved crab-wise to the driver-side door, hesitated a moment and then hooked it open. Bryant tumbled out like a bundle of unwashed clothes. Suit bloodied, eyes closed and mouth open. One arm trailed across the floor at an impossible angle to the rest of the body.

Nausea. The rising tide of delayed reaction from the duel. Chris pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and knelt beside the body. He stowed the shotgun under his arm and flapped back one side of Bryant’s jacket. The wallet gleamed gold-cornered from the inside pocket. He took it between thumb and forefinger and tugged it free. Flipped it open. The photo of Suki and Ariana smiled up at him opposite Mike’s racked plastic.

A hand closed around his leg.

Chris almost vomited with the shock. The shotgun clattered across the floor. He stumbled away from the car, broke the grip and saw. Bryant was still alive, eyes wide and staring up out of his inverted face. His good arm made feeble motions. His mouth opened and closed silently, like a landed fish. It was impossible to tell if he recognised Chris or not.

You go in and you finish the job. You don’t take them to the hospital afterwards.

He remembered Bryant’s gesture as the two cars ground against each other - the cocked thumb ripping across the throat. The grin. His mouth tightened and he picked up the Remington again.

You don’t take them to the hospital, Chris.

You finish the job.

He stepped back and raised the weapon. Bryant saw it and flailed desperately about on the concrete. A broken moaning came out of his mouth. It looked as if he was trying to bring his working arm up to his shoulder holster and the Nemex, but he didn’t have the strength. Chris clamped his mouth tighter, took another step back and levelled the shotgun. Jagged motion, quick, before he could give it thought. He’d stopped breathing.

Finish the fucking job, Chris.

He squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

No click, no detonation, no kick. No spray of blood and tissue. The trigger gave soggily through half the pull and stuck. Chris pulled harder. Still nothing. He worked the action and jacked a perfectly good unfired shell out into the air. It hit the concrete and rolled away, cheerful cherry red.

Mike’s face, pleading up at him.

Squeezed again. Nothing.

‘Fuck.’ It gritted out of him, as if he was afraid to be overheard in the empty warehouse. It still seemed to echo off the walls. ‘Fuck, fuck!’

The padlocks - hammering at the padlocks until they snapped and came loose. He remembered the savagery he’d brought to the action, the haphazard angles he’d been forced to use in the cage at the bottom of the stairs.

He’d jammed the mechanism, jolted something, maybe broken something inside, irretrievably.

He stood looking at Mike Bryant. Wiped his mouth and swallowed.

Finish it. Fucking finish it.

He stalked closer, staring fascinated into the other man’s eyes. Bryant gaped up at him, twitching. He made noises that sounded like the name Chris, the word please.

For some reason, it was enough.

‘Fuck you, Mike,’ he said quickly. ‘You had your chance.’

He turned the injured man’s head with one foot, reversed the Remington and jammed the butt of the weapon into Bryant’s exposed throat. Leaned his full weight on the gun.

‘Fuck you, Mike!’ Now he was spitting it, bent over and glaring into Bryant’s face. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, all of you suited fuckers!’

It seemed to take forever.

At first Bryant only made choking sounds. Then, from somewhere, he found strength to get his undamaged arm up and grab the Remington around the trigger guard.

Chris kicked the hand away and stood on it. He was panting.

Mike’s choking sounds grew frantic. He twisted his head against the concrete. He curled his trapped fingers around the edges of Chris’s shoe, nails clawing at the Argentine leather.

Chris leaned harder. Tears sprang out in his eyes and streamed down his face. He lifted his foot and stamped down hard on Mike’s hand. He heard the dry snap as one of the fingers broke. He leaned harder. His whole weight lifting on the braced shotgun, taking his body almost off the floor.

Something crunched. Mike stopped moving.

Afterwards, Chris could barely get himself upright. It was as if the shotgun had suddenly become indispensable, as if he’d been afflicted with a sudden muscular disease. He limped back from the corpse, trembling so violently his teeth chattered. He made less than a dozen steps. He bent suddenly double and, finally, threw up. A thin helping of vomit and bile - he’d barely eaten that morning, but what he had came up. He dropped to his knees in a puddle, retching.

The sound of boots through the wet.

He looked up, only vaguely interested, and saw the men. Big, blocky forms in the filtering light from outside, like knights in armour from some mediaeval fantasy.

He blinked to clear his eyes.

There were nine of them, dressed in the cordoned zone gangwit ensemble. Cheap, grimed clothes, loose canvas trousers, bulky padded jackets, shaven heads and workboots. Hands held crowbars, wrenches, sawn-off pool cues and a variety of other items too jagged to identify. Faces were scarred with streetfight souvenirs. Eyes watchful on the scene they’d just interrupted.

He got unsteadily to his feet. One of the men stepped forward. He was near two metres tall, heavily muscled under a sleeveless T-shirt scrawled red with the legend I am the Minister for the Redistribution of Health. The lettering was splattered to make it look bloody. His face was scarred from the corner of the left eye and down the cheek. It gave him an oddly mournful look.

‘Finished, have you? Is he dead?’

Chris blinked and coughed.

‘Who are you?’ he asked harshly.

‘Who are we?’ Laughter rasped out, first from one throat, then building to a rattling echo off the metal roof. It died out as abruptly. The gangwit spokesman was swinging a short black-enamelled prybar softly and repeatedly into his left palm. His gaze seemed welded to Chris, playing up and down the clothes, the hair, the shotgun. He smiled and the scar tissue tugged at his face. ‘Who are we? We’re the fucking dispossessed, mate. That’s who we are.’

There was no laughter to follow this time. The men had tautened, waiting for the leash to slip. Chris suppressed another cough and lifted the Remington as convincingly as he could manage.

‘That’s close enough. The police are on their way, and there’s nothing to see here.’

‘Yeah?’ The spokesman for the group gestured at the BMW and Mike Bryant’s corpse. ‘From what we’ve seen so far, I beg to differ. This is prime time. Mr Faulkner.’

Chris pumped the action on the Remington.

‘Alright, I said that’s close enough.’

Mistake.

The unspent shell leapt in the air, hit the concrete and rolled towards the other man. For a moment, they both looked down at it. Then the gangwit looked back up at Chris and shook his head.

‘See, that’s a perfectly good round, mate. And to judge by your manner of execution back there a moment ago, I’d say—’

Chris flung the shotgun in his face and ran.

Back to the upturned BMW and Mike Bryant’s corpse. He heard booted feet behind him, more than one pair. The gangwit’s voice rang exasperated above the clatter.

‘Well don’t fucking stand there. Get him!’

He dived and landed on Mike in a kind of embrace. Scrabbled under the jacket, felt the butt of the Nemex in his hand. Proximity sense told him the first of his pursuers was almost on him. Shadows blocked out the light. The smell of old leather and cheap aftershave swamped him. A hand grabbed at his jacket.

He rolled free and came up with Mike’s gun almost touching the gangwit’s chest. He saw the man’s eyes widen. A pool cue smashed down on his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger.

The Nemex thundered. The shot kicked the man off his feet and back across the concrete. He crumpled and lay still.

‘Toby!’ It was a howl of anguish. The gangwit spokesman. ‘Fucking zek-tiv piece of shit!’

The second gangwit was two paces behind his fallen comrade, but the gun brought him to a dead halt. The others were converging, but now they stopped and began to back away, left and right. Chris got himself upright, grinning fiercely.

‘That’s right, back the fuck off.’

Something black whipped through the air and hit him a numbing blow across the elbow. The Nemex went off, firing wide into the concrete floor. Chris clutched at his arm and tried to bring the gun to bear as the spokesman, leaping in after the hurled prybar, hit him from the right. Below the elbow, his muscles were water. He snapped off a panic shot. It went wide. The gangwit snarled a grin and grabbed the arm, twisting. Chris felt his hand spasm open. The Nemex spun away, splashing into a puddle. He threw a punch left-handed and saw his opponent ride it with a streetfighter’s impatient grunt. Desperate, he reached and grappled. The Minister for the Redistribution of Health punched him in the chest with shattering force. He collapsed backwards, fending weakly, tripping on Mike’s corpse. The gangwit let him go, let him fall against the body of the upturned BMW and turned to scoop up his prybar. Stalked forward, still grinning. Chris saw the attack coming and rolled weakly left, along the BMW’s flank. The crowbar arced down and clawed a long dint in the twilight-blue bodywork where he’d been. The metal screeched. Chris came off the car yelling, delivered a hooking left-handed punch to the Minister’s temple. The gangwit threw up a block that didn’t quite cover and staggered slightly with the impact. He grunted again, shook his head and whipped the crowbar round. Chris caught it across the side of the head.

Multi-coloured light rang in his skull. The ceiling waltzed by overhead. He reeled and fell. Something snagged his arm, he looked muzzily and saw the Minister had him, was holding him up. Comfortably.

‘Fucking piece of shit driver,’ the man was yelling in his face. ‘Come into the fucking zones with your suit, will you?’

The crowbar slammed into his ribs. He screamed like a baby and twisted. There were others around him, holding him up for the spokesman, cuffing him back and forth across the head.

‘Come into the fucking zones, will you? Hold him.’

Another blow, another rolling tide of numbness. He thought he felt a rib crack this time. He yelled, but weakly. The grip on his arm let go and he slumped into a ring of supporting grasps. He saw a fist coming, heavy with dull metal rings. It split his vision apart, sent shards of it spinning away against a roaring darkness. He felt part of his face tear, felt blood streaming down into his collar.

‘Show you what we think of—’ the Minister was telling him between blows, but the rest was carried away on the roar in an opening tunnel of darkness.

Oddly, in the bottom of it all, he heard Carla.

So! You just want to fuck me and leave me. Is that it?

Her hands on him. She was smiling. For some reason he couldn’t pin down, he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

I’m. Already sliding headlong into the dark. Not going anywhere.

But he was.

And a sound like distant thunder.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Driver Control helicopters held the sky over the vaulted highway where Chris Faulkner had slewed the Saab to its shrieking sideways halt. Bright sunlight winked off underslung camera lenses and the clustered barrels of the gatlings. At a prudent distance beyond, news crew aircraft circled like sharks waiting for something to give up and die. There were police vehicles scattered up and down the stretch, equipment set up and armed figures hurrying about. Louise Hewitt stood talking to a ranking tactical-force officer and her mobile at the same time. She looked up and shielded her face as a new, twilight-blue helicopter drifted in through the black-and-green Driver Control machines and settled to the asphalt, twenty metres away. Jack Notley climbed down from the cabin, settled his suit a little more firmly on his shoulders in the gale of the rotors and strode towards her.

‘I’ll call you back,’ she told the phone, and snapped it shut. ‘And Captain, if you could just give me a moment.’

The officer saw who was coming and stepped back. Notley reached Hewitt and stared at her. ‘Well?’

‘I expect you’ve heard.’

‘That’s why I’m here.’ Notley looked grim. ‘What have you got?’

Hewitt shrugged and nodded towards the crane and winch system at the edge of the Gullet. ‘We put in the tacs. Apparently they’re bringing them both up now. Not a pretty sight, is what I was told.’

Notley looked away, up and down the stretch of highway. ‘Four miles,’ he said. ‘Four miles from where Page went off. You realise that?’

‘Four?’ Hewitt frowned. ‘Oh, miles, that’s what, about six kilometres? Yeah, probably about that. And not far from where Barnes learnt to fly, come to that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Exciting stretch of road.’

The winch whined into action. Both partners turned to watch as it brought up a sheet-covered stretcher. Tactical-force corporate police swarmed around the load, swinging it in and lowering it gently to the road. The covering was white and blood had soaked through in small patches. A medic crouched, turned back the sheet and winced visibly. The winch swung back down. They watched the cable unwind.

‘Going to be a lot of questions,’ observed Hewitt when it stopped. ‘Lot of precedent to be hammered out.’

Notley grunted. ‘Good. Kind of thing that keeps us sharp.’

‘Keeps the lawyers sharp, you mean. They’re going to be arguing this one back and forth for months at our expense.’

‘While we go ahead and get on with doing things anyway.’

‘Ethics after the event.’ Hewitt offered him a crooked smile. ‘My favourite kind.’

Notley raised an eyebrow. ‘Are there any other sort?’

The winch swung up again. More activity, another stretcher settling to the asphalt. More blood stains on white.

‘Not in this world.’

‘I’m glad—’

Amidst the weaving of the tactical-force uniforms, commotion. Uniforms milling. And Chris Faulkner, climbing off the stretcher like the living dead. Pushing his way clear. A ragged cheer floated over him like a banner.

Hewitt froze.

Notley blinked.

Then the senior partner was striding rapidly towards the new arrival, a grin broadening on his face. He only faltered as he got closer and saw the damage. Chris’s face was a mask of blood and bruising. One eye swollen almost shut, ribbons of torn flesh around the mouth and both cheeks ripped, blood from a nose that looked broken. The way he moved under the abused and bloodied suit screamed cracked ribs.

‘Chris! Jesus fuck, you’re alive. I thought. You had me worried for a moment there. Congratulations!’

Chris stared at him. Stared past him, like the zombie he so closely resembled. Notley grabbed his shoulders.

‘You’ve done it, Chris. You won. You’re a partner at thirty-three years old. Fucking unprecedented. Congratulations! You know what this means?’

Chris looked sideways at him. Focused.

‘What does it mean?’ he whispered.

‘What does it mean?’ Notley was almost burbling. ‘Chris, it means you’re at the top. From here on up, there’s nothing you can’t do. Nothing. Welcome aboard.’

He thrust out his hand. Chris looked down at it as if the gesture didn’t make sense. He made a coughing noise that it took Notley a moment to realise was laughter. Then he stared up into the senior partner’s face and off past it again. The Saab. Hewitt.

‘Uh, Chris—’

‘Excuse me.’

He pushed past Notley, pacing a steady line for Hewitt. She saw him coming and tensed. A brief nod to the tactical captain, and the man was at her shoulder. Chris came to a halt a metre away, swaying a little.

‘Louise,’ he husked.

She manufactured a small smile. ‘Hello, Chris. Well done.’

‘This is for you, Louise.’

He held it out. The Shorn Associates card, Mike Bryant’s name engraved and streaked across with new blood.

‘I don’t think now is—’

‘No, it’s for you.’ Chris took another, sudden step in and tucked the card into Hewitt’s breast pocket. He nodded to himself, already turning away. ‘For you. Because that’s the way we do things around here, right?’

Hewitt’s smile was frozen on. ‘Right.’

‘I’ll see you on the road, Louise.’

He walked away, dipping in his pocket for keys. The door of the Saab was still wide open. Driver Control personnel busied themselves around it, measuring and photographing. When he tried to get in behind the wheel, one of them barred his way.

‘Sorry sir, we’re not finished here ye—’

He backed up as Chris looked at him.

‘Get. Out of my way.’

The man retreated. Chris eased himself into the seat, teeth clenching up as his hastily taped ribs grated with the move. The medics had shot him full of something warm, but the pain was still getting through in flinty little flashes. He sat for a while, breathing it under control. He thought it would probably be manageable.

He closed the door. Reached for the ignition.

The Saab fired up growling. Around him, up and down the Gullet, activity stopped at the sound. Heads turned. He saw people gesturing.

No one seemed interested in stopping him.

He moved his head, a little awkwardly. Coughed and tasted blood. Checked the rearview and cut a smooth circle in reverse, so the car was pointing southward, towards Shorn. He shifted gear, let the vehicle start to glide forward.

‘Sir, wait.’ Muffled through the seal of the closed doors and windows. A uniformed tactical hurried across and rapped on his window. He cranked it down and waited, foot light on the clutch, barely holding the Saab back. The tac hesitated.

‘Uhm, sir, it’s just. The shooting down there. Well, we arrived sort of in the nick of time, sir, so it was a bit rushed. Just trying to get them off you, you know.’

‘Yes.’ His voice still wasn’t working properly. It had taken him whole minutes, lying there on the concrete, to make sense of the thunder, the screams of men dying and then the urgent voices of the tacs as they circled him. The ring of concerned faces peering down. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Yes, well, uhm. Thing is, a firefight like that, you don’t always get everyone dead centre, and now it looks like at least a couple are going to live. I, well, I assume you’re going to be pressing charges, sir.’

‘Yes, alright.’

‘Well, I’ll need a number for you, sir. For the statement. Obviously, we can get you at Shorn, but we like to provide a full personalised service in cases like this. Victim support, one-to-one interviews, we can come out to you any time. And I’m the officer assigned, so. Do you, uh, have a home number, sir?’

Chris closed his eyes briefly. ‘No, not really.’

‘Oh.’ The tac looked at him for a moment, puzzled. ‘Well, anyway. I’ll get you at Shorn, then.’

‘Yes.’ He tried to curb a flooding tide of impatience. He wanted to be gone. ‘Is that all you need?’

‘Oh. Yes sir. But, uh, you know, congratulations. The duel and everything. My whole family were watching it. Well done. Fantastic driving. Uh, my son’s a huge fan, sir.’

He fought down the urge to cackle. Hid it in a cough.

‘That’s nice.’

‘I expect you’ll be on the screen a lot the next few weeks. Probably even get an interview with that Liz Linshaw, eh?’ The tac saw the look on his face and stepped back. ‘Anyway, I’ll. Let you go, sir. Thanks.’

‘No problem.’

He let the Saab roll forward. People got out of the way. He moved past Louise Hewitt and then Jack Notley, gathering speed. By the time he passed the last of the uniforms and the parked police vehicles, he was closing on ninety. The Saab took the curve on a rising growl. He hit a pothole, but the suspension and the onset of the painkillers damped it out. He reached for the phone, jabbed it on. Winced only a little this time as his cracked ribs jarred. He placed a forward call to Joaquin Lopez in Panama, ten minutes ahead. Then he dialled Shorn’s priority client operator and told them to get him Francisco Echevarria immediately.

They didn’t like it. They didn’t know if—

‘Tell him it’s a national emergency,’ Chris suggested.

It took a couple of minutes, but Echevarria grabbed the call. He wasn’t pleased. Chris got the impression the ride in the last week had been bumpy.

‘Bryant? That you? Now fuckin’ what? What national fuckin’ emergency you talkin’ about?’

‘The one that’s going to put you in front of a fucking firing squad, you piece of shit. This is Chris Faulkner.’

Strangled silence, then fury. ‘You motherfuckin’—’

‘Shut up and listen, Paco. I don’t know what line of shit they’ve been handing you in my absence, but things just changed for the better. Mike Bryant is dead.’

‘You’re lyin’.’

‘No, I’m not. I killed him myself. With my bare fucking hands. So I’m now junior partner at Shorn Conflict Investment, which means executive partner for the NAME account. Which means you, Paco. And I’m telling you, I’m going to have Vicente Barranco in the streets of Bogotá by the end of this fucking month. So if I were you, I would gather up as much of your father’s stolen loot as you can get in a Lear jet, and I would fuck off out of the NAME right now, while you can still walk to the plane.’

Echevarria lost English in the storm of his fury. Spanish washed down the line, beyond Chris’s ability to follow. He cut across it.

‘You’ve got forty-eight hours, Paco. That’s it. After that, I’m sending Special Air to put a bullet in your face.’

‘You cannot do this!’

This time, Chris really laughed. Across the pain in his broken ribs, across all the pain. The drugs were numbing him nicely.

‘You still don’t get it, do you, Paco? From where I’m sitting, I can do whatever the fuck I want. Men like me, there’s nothing you can do to stop us any more. Understand? There is nothing you can do any more.’

He killed the call.

Fed power to the Saab and watched as his speed climbed.

Gave himself up to the snarl of the engine, the spreading numbness of the drugs in his system, and the onrushing emptiness of the road ahead.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Market Forces has had a long and varied evolution, from nasty idea to short story, to screenplay, to the novel you now hold in your hands. Along the way, it (and its author) has incurred a few debts. In chronological order, then, so near as I can recall:

Thanks to Simon Edkins for the original thought-provoking sneer: they think they live in a jungle, don’t they?, and to Gavin Burgess for sharing his knowledge of some of the more feral business training procedures out there. Thanks to Sarah Lane for seeing the potential in a moth-eaten unpublished short story, for pushing me into building a screenplay around it, and for all the unflagging enthusiasm and hard work she poured into the project along the way - great movie producers are made of this, or should be. Thanks also to Alan Young for substantial anecdotal inspiration over the years, and for reading the raw product with an economics consultant’s beady eye. Thanks, as always, to my agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and my editor, Simon Spanton, for excellence in the field of making me pay attention to detail. Thanks to everyone on the Gollancz team for making the fifth floor a great place to hang out. And finally, most of all, thanks to my recently acquired wife, Virginia Cottinelli, for her patience in sharing with me the contents of a Master’s programme in Development at the University of Glasgow, the getting of which was already costing her more grief than any paying student should have to put up with.

A list of books that proved inspirational during the writing of Market Forces is appended at the end of the novel, should the reader be interested. They are too many to list or talk about here, but they are too important not to mention at all. On a lighter note, Market Forces also owes a rather obvious debt of inspiration to the ground-breaking movies Mad Max and Rollerball, both of which made a massive impact on me at an age when legally I shouldn’t have been watching either.

BOOKS CONSULTED

Note: the views expressed in Market Forces are in no way intended to represent the views of any of the authors listed above.

Black Man

RICHARD MORGAN

Orion

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART I - Down in Flames

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

PART II - OFF THE HOOK

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PART III - AWAY FROM IT ALL

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

PART IV - OUT TO SEA

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

PART V - HOME TO ROOST

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CODA PISTACO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother

MARGARET ANN MORGAN

Who taught me to hate bigotry, cruelty and injustice
with an unrelenting rage, and to despise the hypocrisy
that looks away or makes comfortable excuses when those
same vices crop up closer to home than we’d like.

I miss you

‘It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie for control.’

John Gray Straw Dogs

‘Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.’

Richard Dawkins A Devil’s Chaplain

PROLOGUE: HOMEWARD BOUND

Gleaming steel, gleaming steel . . .

Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the retrieval cot as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of déjà vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.

... not again . . . ?

‘Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.’

That’s odd. She’s not expecting another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanised process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong . . .

So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?

She isn’t - her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the déjà vu. But still . . .

... more than three ...

... it is not more, it is not . . .

The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realisation that there’s someone in the house with you, someone that you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.

This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.

Gleaming stee-

The retrieval cot bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end over end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t-

Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.

Then she realises where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the cot slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And, look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.

But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won’t let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog worrying at an anaesthetised limb.

She rolls her head sideways on the cot, and sees him.

More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.

Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bullet-proof glass, surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions, that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long march of evolution had gifted you with.

It could be the same man. Here, now.

He’s propped against a tall corner cabinet, staring at her, ropesinewed arms folded across a cage-gaunt chest whose ribs she can see even through the T-shirt he wears, long straight hair hanging either side of narrow features drawn even thinner with pain and want. His mouth is a clamped line, etched in between the sharp chin and blade-boned nose. Hollows cling under the bones in his cheeks.

Her heart surges sluggishly in her chest as she meets his eyes.

‘Is it-’ And, with the words, an awful understanding is welling up inside her now, a monstrous recognition that her conscious mind is still sprinting hard ahead to evade. ‘Is it my knee? My leg?’

Out of somewhere, abruptly, she finds strength, she props herself up on her elbows, she forces herself to look.

Sight collides with recollection.

The scream shrills up out of her, rips momentarily through the cobwebby drapery of the drugs in her system. She can’t know how weak it sounds in the cold dimensions of the surgery; inside her it seems to splinter in her ears, and the knowledge that comes with it is a blackening of vision that threatens to suck her away. She is not, she knows, screaming at what she can see.

Not at the neatly bandaged stump where her right thigh ends, twenty centimetres below her hip; not that.

Not at the stabbed home comprehension that the ache in her knee is a phantom pain in a limb she no longer owns; not that.

She’s screaming at memory.

The memory of the cot ride along the quiet corridor, the soft bump and turn into the surgery, and then, veiled in the drug haze, the rising whine of the saw blade, the grating slip in tone as it bites, and the small, suckling sizzle of the cauterising laser that comes after. The memory of the last time, and the sickening, down-plunging understanding that it’s all about to happen again.

‘No,’ she husks. ‘Please.’

A long-fingered hand presses warmly down on her forehead. The Turin shroud countenance looms above her.

‘Shshshsh ... the cormorant knows why . . .’

Past the face she sees movement. Knows it from memory for what it is. The stealthy, unflexing spider-leg motions of the autosurgeon as it awakes.

Gleaming steel . . .

PART I

Down in Flames

‘Above all, the hard lessons of this century have taught us that there must be consistent oversight and effective constraint, and that the policing systems thus required must operate with unimpeachable levels of integrity and support.’

Jacobsen Report August 2091

CHAPTER ONE

He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez. It wasn’t a bad cover in itself, and it probably would have stood standard scrutiny. Security checks in the prep camps were notoriously lax; the truth was that they didn’t much care who you’d been before you signed up. But there were still a few obvious signs you could look for if you knew how, and Carl, with a methodical intensity that was starting to resemble desperation, had been looking for weeks. He knew that Gray was up on the altiplano somewhere, because the trail led there from Bogota, and because where else, ultimately, was a variant thirteen going to run. He knew this, and he knew it was just a matter of time before the traces showed up and someone called it in. But he also knew, with induction programmes everywhere skimping and speeding up to meet increasing demand, that time was on the other man’s side. Something had to give, and soon, or Gray was going to be gone and Carl wasn’t going to get his bounty.

So when the break came, the tiny morsel of data finally fed back from the web of contacts he’d been plying all those weeks, it was hard not to jump. Hard not to dump his painstakingly constructed cover, fire up his Agency credit and badge and hire the fastest set of all-terrain wheels available in Copacabana. Hard not to tear across the border at Agency speed, raising road dust and rumours all the way to the camp, where Gray, of course, if he had any kind of local support, would be long gone.

Carl didn’t jump.

Instead, he called in a couple of local favours and managed to blag a ride across the border with a military liaison unit - some superannuated patrol carrier with a colony corporation’s logo sun-bleached to fading on the armoured sides. The troops were Peruvian regulars, drafted in from dirt-poor families in the coastal provinces and then seconded to corporate security duties. They’d be pulling down little more than standard conscript pay for that, but the interior of the carrier was relatively plush by military standards and it seemed to have air-con. And anyway, they were tough and young, a sort of young you didn’t see so much in the western world any more, innocently pleased with their hard-drilled physical competence and cheap khaki prestige. They all had wide grins for him, and bad teeth, and none was older than twenty. Carl figured the good cheer for ignorance. It was a safe bet these kids didn’t know the charge-out rate their high command was extracting from its corporate clients for their services.

Sealed inside the jolting, sweat-smelling belly of the vehicle, brooding on his chances against Gray, Carl would really have preferred to stay silent altogether. He didn’t like to talk, never had. Felt in fact that it was a much overrated pastime. But there was a limit to how taciturn you could be when you were getting a free ride. So he mustered some lightweight chat about next week’s Argentina-Brazil play-off and threw as little of it into the conversational mix as he thought he could get away with. Some comments about Patricia Mocatta, and the advisability of female captains for teams that were still predominantly male. Player name checks. Tactical comparisons. It all seemed to go down fine.

‘Eres Marciano?’ one of them asked him, finally, inevitably.

He shook his head. In fact, he had been a Martian once, but it was a long, complicated story he didn’t feel like telling.

‘Soy contable,’ he told them, because that was sometimes what he felt like. ‘Contable de biotecnologia.’

They all grinned. He wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t think he looked like a biotech accountant, or because they just didn’t believe him. Either way they didn’t push the point. They were used to men with stories that didn’t match their faces.

‘Habla bien el espanol,’ someone complimented him.

His Spanish was good, though for the last two weeks it was Quechua he’d been speaking mostly, Mars-accented but still tight up against the Peruvian original that had spawned it. It was what the bulk of the altiplano dwellers used, and they in turn made up most of the grunt labour force in the prep camps, just as they still did on Mars. Notwithstanding which fact, the language of enforcement up here was still Spanish. Aside from a smattering of web-gleaned Amanglic, these guys from the coast spoke nothing else. Not an ideal state of affairs from the corporate point of view, but the Lima government had been adamant when the COLIN contracts were signed. Handing over control to the gringo corporations was one thing, had oligarchy-endorsed historical precedent on its side in fact. But allowing the altiplano dwellers to shake themselves culturally loose from the grip of coastal rule, well, that would be simply unacceptable. There was just too much bad history in the balance. The original Incas six hundred years ago and their stubborn thirty-year refusal to behave as a conquered people should, the bloody reprise by Tupac Amaru in 1780, the sendero luminoso Maoists a bare century back, and more recently still the upheavals of the familias andinas. The lessons had been learnt, the word went out. Never again. Spanish-speaking uniforms and bureaucrats drove home the point.

The patrol carrier pulled up with a jerk and the rear door hinged weightily outward. Harsh, high-altitude sunlight spilled in, and with it came the sound and smell of the camp. Now he heard Quechua, the familiar unSpanish cadences of it, shouted back and forth above the noise of machinery in motion. An imported robot voice trampled it down, blared vehicle reversing, vehicle reversing in Amanglic. There was music from somewhere, huayno vocals remixed to a bloodbeat dance rhythm. Pervasive under the scent of engine oil and plastics, the dark meat odour of someone grilling antecuchos over a charcoal fire. Carl thought he could make out the sound of rotors lifting somewhere in the distance.

The soldiers boiled out, dragging packs and weapons after. Carl let them go, stepped down last and looked around, using their boisterous crowding as cover. The carrier had stopped on an evercrete apron opposite a couple of dusty, parked coaches with destination boards for Cuzco and Arequipa. There was a girdered shell of a terminal building, and behind it Garrod Horkan 9 camp stretched away up the hill, all single storey prefab shacks and sterile rectilinear street plan. Corporate flags fluttered whitely on poles every few blocks, an entwined G and H ringed by stars. Through the unglassed windows of the terminal, Carl spotted figures wearing coveralls with the same logo emblazoned front and back.

Fucking company towns.

He dumped his pack in a locker block inside the terminal, asked directions of a coveralled cleaner, and stepped back out into the sun on the upward sloping street. Down the hill, Lake Titicaca glimmered painfully bright and blue. He slipped on the Cebe smart lenses, settled his battered leather Peruvian Stetson on his head and started up the slope, tracking the music. The masking was more local cover than necessity - his skin was dark and leathered enough not to worry about the sun, but the lenses and hat would also partially obscure his features. Black faces weren’t that common in the altiplano camps, and unlikely though it was, Gray might have someone watching the terminal. The less Carl stood out, the better.

A couple of blocks up the street, he found what he was looking for. A prefab twice the size of the units around it, leaking the bloodbeat and huayno remix through shuttered windows and a double door wedged back. The walls were stickered with peeling publicity for local bands and the open doorspace was bracketed by two loopview panels showing some Lima ad agency’s idea of Caribbean nightlife. White sand beach and palm trees by night, party lights strung. Bikini-clad criolla girls gripped beer bottles knowingly and pumped their hips to an unheard rhythm alongside similarly European-looking consorts. Outside of the band - jet-muscled and cavorting gaily in the background, well away from the women - no one had skin any darker than a glass of blended Scotch and water.

Carl shook his head bemusedly and went inside.

The bloodbeat was louder once he got in, but not unbearable. The roof tented at second storey height, nothing but space between the plastic rafters, and the music got sucked up there. At a corner table, three men and a woman were playing a card game that required calls, apparently tracking each other’s voices without any trouble. Conversation at other tables was a constant murmur you could hear. Sunlight fell in through the doorway and shutters. It made hard bars and blocks on the floor, but didn’t reach far, and if you looked there directly, then looked away, the rest of the room seemed dimly lit by comparison.

At the far end of the room, a boomerang-angled bar made from riveted tin sections held up a half dozen drinkers. It was set far enough back from the windows that the beer coolers on the wall behind glowed softly in the gloom. There was a door set in the wall and propped open on an equally dimly lit kitchen space, apparently empty and not in use. The only visible staff took the form of a dumpy indigena waitress slouching about between the tables, collecting bottles and glasses on a tray. Carl watched her intently for a moment, then followed her as she headed back towards the bar.

He caught her up just as she put down her tray on the bartop.

‘Bottle of Red Stripe,’ he said, in Quechua. ‘No glass.’

She ducked under the hinged access section without comment and opened a cooler cabinet on the floor. Hooked out the bottle and straightened up, gripping it not unlike the criollas in the ad panels outside. Then she cracked it deftly open with a rust-spotted key that hung off her belt, and set it on the bar.

‘Five soles.’

The only currency he had on him was Bolivian. He dug out a COLIN wafer and held it up between two fingers. ‘Swipe okay?’

She gave him a long-suffering look and went to get the machine. He checked the time display in the upper left corner of the Cebe lenses, then took them off. They’d cycled for low light anyway, but he wanted clear eye contact for what was coming. He dumped his hat on the bartop and propped himself next to it, facing the room. Did his best to look like someone who didn’t want anything, like someone fitting in.

In theory, he should have checked in with the GH site manager on arrival. It was procedure, written into the Charter. Extensive previous experience, some of it sticky with his own blood, had taught him not to bother. There was a whole shifting topography of dislike out there for what Carl Marsalis was, and it touched on pretty much every level of human wiring. At the high cognitive end you had sophisticated dinner-party politics that condemned his professional existence as amoral. At a more emotive level, there was the generalised social revulsion that comes with the label turncoat. And lower still, riding the arid terminology of the Jacobsen Report but swooping into the hormonal murk of instinct, you could find a rarely admitted but nonetheless giddy terror that he was, despite everything, still one of them.

And worse than all of this, in the eyes of the colony corporations, Carl was bad press walking. Bad press and a guaranteed hole in finances. By the time someone like Gray was ready for shipping out, Garrod Horkan could expect to have ploughed several tens of thousands of dollars into him in varied training and mesh biotech. Not the sort of investment you want bleeding out into the altiplano dust under the headline Insufficient Security at COLIN Camp!

Four years previously, he’d announced himself to the site manager at a camp south of La Paz, and his target had mysteriously vanished while Carl was still filling out forms in the admin block. There was a bowl of soup still steaming on the kitchen table when he walked into the prefab, a spoon still in the soup. The back door was open, and so was an emptied trunk at the foot of the bed in the next room. The man never surfaced again, and Carl had to conclude, to himself and to the Agency, that he was now, in all probability, on Mars. No one at COLIN was going to confirm that one way or the other, so he didn’t bother asking.

Six months after that, Carl announced himself late one evening to another site manager, declined to fill in the forms until later, and was set upon by five men with baseball bats as he exited the admin office. Fortunately, they weren’t professionals and in the dark they got in each other’s way. But by the time he’d wrested one of the bats free for himself and driven his attackers off, the whole camp was awake. The street was lit up with torches and the news was spreading at speed; there was a new black face, an outsider, down at the admin block, causing trouble. Carl didn’t even bother braving the streets and streets of stares to check on the camp address he had for his target. He already knew what he’d find.

That left the fallout from the fight, which was equally predictable. Despite numerous passers-by and even one or two blatant spectators, there were suddenly no useful witnesses. The man Carl had managed to hurt badly enough that he couldn’t run away remained steadfastly silent about his reasons for the assault. The site manager refused to let Carl question him alone, and cut short even the supervised interrogation on medical grounds. The prisoner has rights, she iterated slowly, as if Carl wasn’t very bright. You’ve already hurt him badly.

Carl, still oozing blood from a split cheek and guessing at least one of his fingers was broken, just looked at her.

These days, he notified the site managers after the event.

‘Looking for an old friend,’ he told the waitress when she got back with the machine. He gave her the COLIN wafer and waited until she’d swiped it. ‘Name of Rodriguez. It’s very important that I find him.’

Her fingers hovered over the punch pad. She shrugged.

‘Rodriguez is a common name.’

Carl took out one of the hardcopy downloads from the Bogota clinic, and slid it across the bartop at her. It was a vanity shot, system-generated to show the client what they’d look like when the swelling went down. In real time, that soon after surgery that cheap, Gray’s new face probably wouldn’t have looked amiss on a Jesusland lynching victim, but the man smiling up out of the clinic print looked uninjured and pleasantly unremarkable. Broad cheekbones, wide mouth, an off-the-rack Amerindian makeover. Carl, eternally paranoid about these things, had Matthew go back into the clinic dataflow that night, just to make sure they weren’t trying to fob him off with an image from stock. Matthew grumbled, but he did it, in the end probably just to prove he could. There was no doubt. Gray looked like this now.

The waitress glanced incuriously down at the print for a moment, then punched up an amount on the wafer that certainly wasn’t five soles. She nodded up the bar to where a bulky fair-haired male leaned at the other end, staring into a shot glass as if he hated it.

‘Ask him.’

Carl’s hand whipped out, mesh swift. He’d dosed up that morning. He hooked her index finger before it could hit the transaction key. He twisted slightly, just enough to take the slack out of the knuckle joints. He felt the finger bones lock tight.

‘I’m asking you,’ he said mildly.

‘And I’m telling you.’ If she was afraid, it didn’t show. ‘I know this face. He’s in here drinking with Rubio over there, two, maybe three times a week. That’s all I know. Now you going to give me my finger back, or do I have to draw some attention to you? Maybe notify camp security?’

‘No. What you have to do is introduce me to Rubio.’

‘Well,’ she gave him a withering look. ‘You only needed to ask.’

He let go of her and waited while she completed the transaction. She handed back the wafer, beckoned and walked casually along her side of the bar until she was facing the blond and his shot glass. He tipped a glance at her, then sideways at Carl as he joined them, then back to her. Spoke English.

‘Hey Gaby.’

‘Hey Rubio. See this guy here?’ She’d switched to English, heavily accented but fluent. ‘He’s looking for Rodriguez. Says he’s a friend.’

‘That so?’ Rubio shifted his weight a little to look directly at Carl. ‘You a friend of Rodriguez?’

‘Yeah, we-’

And the knife came out.

Later, when he had time, Carl worked out the trick. The weapon had a cling-pad on the hilt and the blond guy had probably pressed it up against the barfront within easy reach as soon as he saw the waitress talking to the stranger. Carl’s careless approach - a friend of Rodriguez, yeah right - just closed the circuit. These two were Gray’s friends. They knew he’d have no others.

So Rubio grabbed the knife loose and stabbed Carl in the same blunt rush. The blade winked once in the low light as it came clear of the bartop shadow, ripped low through Carl’s jacket and slugged to a halt in the weblar beneath. Gene tweaked spiderweb mail, expensive stuff. But there was too much rage and hate behind the thrust to stop easily, and it was likely a monofil edge. Carl felt the tip get through and slice into him.

Because it wasn’t really unexpected, he was already moving, and the weblar gave him the luxury of not having to cover. He hit Rubio with a tanindo move - palm-heel, twice, short, stabbing strikes, broke the man’s nose, crushed his temple, sent him sprawling away from the bar to the floor. The knife tugged loose again - nasty, grainy intimacy of metal in flesh - and he grunted as it came out. Rubio twitched and rolled on the floor, possibly already on his way to dead. Carl kicked him in the head to make sure.

Everything stopped.

People stared.

Beneath the weblar, he felt blood trickle down his belly from the wound the knife had left.

Behind him, Gaby was gone through the kitchen doorway. Also pretty much expected, his source had said she and Gray were close. Carl scrambled over the bar - savage flash of pain from the newly acquired wound - and went after her.

Through the kitchen - cramped, grimy space, gas ranges with blackened pans left to sit, and a door to the outside still swinging wide with Gaby’s passage. Carl caught a couple of pan handles as he shimmied the narrow clearance, left clatter and clang in his wake. He burst through the door and out into an alley at the back of the building. Sudden sunlight blasted his vision. He squinted left. Right, and caught the waitress sprinting flat out up the hill. Looked like about a thirty-metre lead.

Good enough.

He took off running.

With the combat, the mesh had kicked in for real. It flushed him now, warm as the sun, and the pain in his side dropped to memory and a detached knowledge that he was bleeding. His field of vision sharpened on the woman running from him, peripherals smearing out with the brightness in the air. When she broke left, out of line-of-sight, he’d closed the gap by about a third. He reached the turn and hooked round, into another back alley, this one barely the width of his shoulders. Unpainted prefab walls with small, high-set windows, stacked sheets of construction plastic and alloy frames leaning at narrow angles, discarded drinks cans on the dirt floor. His feet tangled momentarily in a loose wrap of polythene from one of the frames. Up ahead, Gaby had already ducked right. He didn’t think she’d looked back.

He reached the new corner, and stopped dead, fighting down the urge to poke his head out. The right turn Gaby had taken was a main thoroughfare, paved in evercrete and loosely thronged with people. He squatted, dug out his Cebe lenses and peeked round the corner at knee height. With the relief of not having to squint in the harsh light, he picked out Gaby’s fleeing form amongst the crowd almost at once. She was glancing back over her shoulder, but it was clear she hadn’t seen him. There was no panic-stricken bolt, only a deep-drawn breath and then she started to jog rapidly along the street. Carl watched her go for a few seconds, let the gap open up to a good fifty metres or more, then slid out into the street and followed, bent-kneed to keep his head low. It earned him a few strange looks, but no one spoke to him and, more importantly, no one made any comment out loud.

He had, he reckoned with meshed clarity, about ten minutes. That was how long it would take news of the fight in the bar to reach someone in authority, and that someone to put a chopper into the air above the rectilinear streets of Garrod Horkan 9. If he hadn’t found Gray by then - game over.

Three blocks up, Gaby crossed the street abruptly and let herself into a single storey prefab. Carl saw her dig the matt grey rectangle of a keycard out of her jeans and swipe it in the lock. The door opened and she disappeared inside. Too far off to make out a number or name panel, but the place had hanging baskets of yellow-flowered cactus out front. Carl loped up to the near end of the ’fab, slipped into the alley between the building and its neighbour, and circled round to the back. He found a toilet window left open, levered it up and heaved himself over the sill. Vague pain from the stab wound, sliced muscle moving against itself in a way it shouldn’t. He narrowly missed stepping into the toilet bowl, hopped sideways instead and crouched by the door, grimacing.

Voices came through the finger-thin wall, bassy with resonance but otherwise clear. Soundproofing on ’fab shells was pretty good these days but if you wanted the same for interior partitioning, it cost. Not the sort of thing GH were going to provide at base, you’d have to buy the upgrade, and whoever lived here, Gaby or Gray, obviously hadn’t. Carl heard the woman’s accented English again, and then another voice he knew from filed audio playback.

‘You stupid fucking bitch, why’d you come here?’

‘I, you.’ Her voice stumbled with hurt. ‘To warn you.’

‘Yeah, and he’ll be right fucking behind you!’

A flat crack, open hand across her face. Carl caught the sudden jump of her breath through the wall, nothing more. She was tough, or used to this, or both. He eased down the door handle, cracked the door and peered through. A big form jerked across his sliver of vision. An upthrown arm, gesturing, there and gone too fast to see if there was a weapon in the hand or not. Carl reached under his jacket for the Haag pistol. Something weighty went over with a thump in the next room.

‘He’s probably tracking you right now, probably let you go so he could do it. You empty-headed cunt, you’ve-’

Now.

Carl threw the door open and found himself facing the two of them across a tiny lounge laid with brightly coloured rugs. Gray was half turned away, looming over a flinching Gaby, who had backed up and knocked over a tall potted plant by the front door. The reddened handprint was still visible on her face where he’d slapped her. More plants around the room, cheap, painted ceramics and Pachamama icons on shelves, a small statue of some saint or other on a shelf and a Spanish prayer in a frame on one wall. They were in Gaby’s house.

He pitched his voice hard and calm.

‘That’s it, Frank. Game over.’

Gray turned slowly, deliberately and, fuck, yes, he had a weapon, a big black cannon of a handgun that seemed welded in the fist at the end of his right hand. A tiny part of Carl, a subroutine immune to the mesh and the betamyeline flooding the rest of his system, identified it as the murder weapon, the ’61 Smith caseless. Better than forty years old, but they said you could lockvoid that gun in orbit, swing round and pick it back up and it’d still kill things like it just came out of the factory. For the first time in quite a while, he was grateful for the chilly bulk of the Haag in his own hand.

It didn’t help when Gray smiled at him.

‘Hello there, UN man.’

Carl nodded. ‘Put the gun down, Frank. It’s over.’

Gray frowned, as if seriously considering it. ‘Who sent you? Jesusland ?’

‘Brussels. Put the gun down, Frank.’

But the other man didn’t move at all. He could have been a holoshot on pause. Even the frown stayed on his face. Maybe deepened a little, as if Gray was trying to work out how the hell it had all come to this. ‘I know you, don’t I,’ he said suddenly. ‘Marceau, right? The lottery guy?’>

Keep him talking.

‘Close. It’s Marsalis. I like the new face.’

‘Do you?’ The Smith still hung loose in his grip, arm at his side. Carl wondered if Gray was meshed yet. It’d make a difference to his speed if he was, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the difference it’d make to Gray’s attitude. ‘Try to fit in, you know. Deru kui wa utareru.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No?’ And the slow, alarming smile Carl had hoped he wouldn’t see.

‘You were never going to get hammered down, Frank. None of us do, that’s our problem. And that’s an appalling Japanese accent. Want my advice, you’d be better delivering your folk wisdom in English.’

‘I don’t.’ The smile became a grin. He was going, sliding into the crack. ‘Want your advice, that is.’

‘Why don’t you put the gun down, Frank?’

‘You want a fucking list?’

‘Frank.’ Carl stayed absolutely still. ‘Look at my hand. That’s a Haag pistol. Even if you get me, I don’t have to do more than scratch you on the way down. It is over. Why don’t you try to salvage something?’

‘Like you have, you mean?’ Gray shook his head. ‘I’m nobody’s puppy, UN man.’

‘Oh grow up, Frank.’ The sudden snap of the anger in his own voice was a suprise. ‘We’re all somebody’s puppy. You want to get dead, go right fucking ahead and make me do it. They pay me just the same.’

Gray tautened visibly. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet they fucking do.’

Carl got a grip on his own feelings. He made a slow, damping motion with his free hand. ‘Look-’

‘Look, nothing.’ A mirthless grin. ‘I know my score. Three eurocops, couple of Jesusland state troopers. You think I don’t know what that means?’

‘It’s Brussels, man. They got jurisdiction. You don’t have to die. They’ll put you away, but-’

‘Yeah, they’ll put me away. You ever spend time in the tract?’

‘No. But it can’t be a lot worse than Mars, and you were going there anyway.’

Gray shook his head. ‘Wrong. On Mars, I’ll be free.’

‘That’s not what it’s like, Frank.’

Gaby ran at him, screaming.

There wasn’t a lot of space to cross, and she’d come more than halfway, hands up, fingers splayed like talons, when he shot her. The Haag gun made a deep cough and the slug caught her somewhere high in the right shoulder. It spun her completely around and knocked her into Gray, who was already raising the Smith. He got off a single shot, a sprung-sounding boom in the tiny lounge, and the wall blew apart at Carl’s left ear. Deafened, stung in the face and side of the head with impact fragments, Carl threw himself clumsily sideways and put four slugs into the other man. Gray staggered backwards like a boxer taking heavy blows, hit the far wall and thumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The Smith was still in his hand. He stared up at Carl for a moment, and Carl, moving cautiously closer, shot him twice again in the chest. Then he watched carefully, gun still levelled, until the life dimmed out of Gray’s eyes.

Biotech account - closed.

On the floor, Gaby tried to prop herself up and slipped on some of her own blood. The wound in her shoulder was leaking copiously down her arm and onto the gaily coloured rug under her. Haag shells were designed to stay in the body - the wall behind Gray was pristine - but they made a lot of mess going in. She looked up at him, making a tiny panicked grunting in the back of her throat over and over.

He shook his head.

‘I’ll go and get some help,’ he said, in Quechua.

He stepped past her to the front door and opened it.

Then, in the flood of light from outside, he swivelled quietly and shot her once more, through the back of the head.

CHAPTER TWO

They arrested him, of course.

Drawn by the gunfire, a squad of body-armoured camp security came scuttling up the street, clinging to the cover of building edges and stopped vehicles like so many man-sized beetles. Sunlight gleamed on their dull blue chest carapaces and the tops of their helmets, glinted off the barrels of the short, blunt assault rifles they carried. They were as silent as beetles too - in all probability, their GH-stamped riot gear and weaponry came with an induction mike and comms link package. He imagined it from their point of view. Hushed, shocked voices on the wire. Goggle-eyed vision.

They found Carl seated cross-legged on the steps up to the prefab’s front door, hands offered outward, palms up. It was a tanindo meditation stance, one he’d learnt from Sutherland, but he was anything but meditative. The effects of the mesh were ebbing now, and the pain from his injured side was beginning to creep back. He breathed through it and kept his body immobile. Watched intently as the security squad crept up the street towards him. He’d set out the Haag pistol and his Agency licence in the street, a good four or five metres away from where he sat, and as soon as the first armoured form nosed up to him, assault rifle slanting down from the shoulder, he lifted his hands slowly into the air above his head. The boy in the riot gear was breathing harshly and under the helmet and goggles his young face was taut with stress.

‘I am a genetic licensing agent,’ Carl recited loudly in Spanish. ‘Retained under contract by UNGLA. That’s my authorisation, lying there in the street with my gun. I am unarmed.’

The rest of the squad moved up, weapons similarly levelled. They were all in their teens. A slightly older squad leader arrived and took stock, but his sweat-dewed face didn’t look any more confident. Carl sat still and repeated himself. He needed to get through to them before they looked inside the ’fab. He needed to establish some authority, even if it wasn’t his. Inside the high-tech riot gear, these were conscripts just like the ones he’d ridden into town with. Most of them would have left school at fourteen, some of them even earlier than that. The European Court might mean next to nothing to them, and their attitude to the UN was likely to be ambivalent at best, but the Agency licence was an impressive looking piece of plastic and hologear. With luck it would weigh in the balance when they found the bodies.

The squad leader lowered his rifle, knelt beside the licence and picked it up. He tipped the holoshot back and forth, comparing it with Carl’s face. He stood up and prodded the Haag gun doubtfully with the toe of his boot.

‘We heard shots,’ he said.

‘Yes, that’s correct. I attempted to arrest two suspects in a UNGLA live case and they attacked me. They’re both dead.’

Looks shuttled back and forth among the young, helmeted faces. The captain nodded at two of his squad, a boy and a girl, and they slid to the sides of the prefab door. The girl called a warning into the house.

‘There’s no one alive in there,’ Carl told them. ‘Really.’

The two squad members took the door in approved fashion, swung inside and banged about from room to room, still shouting their redundant warnings to surrender. The rest of them waited, weapons still levelled on Carl. Finally, the female member of the entry team came out with her assault rifle slung, crossed to the captain and muttered in his ear. Carl saw how the squad leader’s face darkened with anger as he listened. When the girl had finished her report, he nodded and took off his sun-lenses. Carl sighed and met the customary stare. The same old mix, fear and disgust. And this young man was already unfastening a blue plastic binding loop from his belt. He pointed at Carl like something dirty.

‘You, get up,’ he said coldly. ‘Get your fucking hands behind your back.’

By the time they cut him loose again, his fingers were numb and his shoulders ached in their sockets from trying to press his wrists closer together. They’d drawn the loop savagely tight - even clenching his fists as they did it hadn’t won him much slack when he relaxed his hands again, and the tension in his arms tended to force his wrists apart so that however he positioned himself, the loop cut into flesh. On top of the stab wound in his side, it wasn’t what he needed.

They’d found the injury when they searched him, but they were more concerned with emptying out his pockets than treating him for damage. They didn’t take off the binding loop. As long as he didn’t die in custody, he guessed they didn’t much care what shape he was in. At the camp security centre, they cut his clothing back and a barely interested medic prodded around the wound, declared it superficial, sprayed it with antibac, glued it shut and taped a dressing to it. No analgesics. Then they left him in a lightly piss-scented plastic holding cell while the GH director pretended for two hours that he had more pressing matters to attend to than a double shooting in his camp.

Carl spent the time going over the confrontation with Gray, looking for a way to play it that didn’t leave Gaby dead. He measured the angles, the words he’d used, the way the conversation had developed. He came to the same conclusion a dozen times. There was only one sure procedure that would have saved Gaby’s life, and that was to shoot Gray dead the moment he stepped out of the bathroom.

Sutherland would have been pissed off, he knew.

No such thing as time travel, he’d rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you’ve done, and try in future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

Hard on the heels of the memory, Carl’s own thoughts came looking for him.

I don’t want to do this any more.

Finally, two members of the security squad, male and unarmoured, came and marched him out of the cell without removing the loop, then took him to a small office at the other end of the security station. The camp director sat on one corner of a desk swinging his leg and watched as they cut Carl loose without ceremony. The solvent squirt left a couple of drops on his skin that scorched. It didn’t feel accidental.

‘I’m very sorry about this,’ the director said, in English and without visible remorse. He was pretty much the type, a tall, mid-forties white guy in designer casuals that approximated light trekking gear. His name, Carl knew from previous research, was Axel Bailey, but he didn’t offer it, or his hand.

‘So am I.’

‘Yes, clearly you’ve been detained unnecessarily. But if you had identified yourself before running around my camp playing at detective, we might have avoided a lot of unpleasantness.’

Carl said nothing, just rubbed at his hands and waited for the pain as his hands renewed their acquaintance with blood flow.

Bailey cleared his throat.

‘Yes, well, we’ve confirmed that Rodriguez was in fact who you claim he was. Some kind of slip-up in vetting there, it looks like. Anyway, your office want you to contact them with a preliminary statement on the shooting, but since we won’t contest the jurisdiction, of course, there’ll be no need for more than that at this stage. However, I would like your assurance that you will file a full report with COLIN as soon as you get back to London, citing our co-operation. If that’s agreed, you’re free to go, and in fact we can assist you with transport out.’

Carl nodded. The first traceries of pain branched spikily out through the flesh of his fingers. ‘Got it. You want me gone before the press come looking for the story.’

Bailey’s mouth compressed to a thin line.

‘I’m having you helicoptered directly to Arequipa,’ he said evenly, ‘so you can get a connecting flight home. Think of it as a gesture of goodwill. Your gun and your licence will be returned to you there.’

‘No.’ Carl shook his head. Under the UNGLA mandate, he could in theory have commandeered the helicopter anyway. In theory. ‘You’ll give the gun and the licence back to me yourself, right now.’

‘I beg your-’

‘The Haag pistol is UNGLA property. It’s illegal for anyone unauthorised to be in possession of one. Go and get it.’

Bailey’s leg stopped swinging. He met Carl’s gaze for a moment, presumably saw what was there and cleared his throat. He nodded at one of the security guards, visibly reading his name off the lettering on the breast pocket of his uniform.

‘Ah, Sanchez. Go and fetch Mr Marsalis’s personal effects.’

The security guard turned to leave.

‘No.’ Carl peeled Sanchez a glance and watched him stop with his hand on the door. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He looked back at the director. ‘I said you go and get it for me.’

Bailey flushed. He came off the edge of the desk. ‘Listen to me, Marsalis, you don’t-’

Carl closed one painfully fizzing fist up with the other hand. He grimaced. The director’s voice dried up.

‘You go and get it for me,’ Carl repeated softly.

The moment held, and popped. Still flushing to the roots of his carefully styled hair, Bailey shouldered past and opened the door.

‘You watch him,’ he snapped at the security guards, and stalked out. Carl saw a grin slip between the two men. He rubbed at his fist some more, shifted to the other hand.

‘So which of you two humanitarians spotted me with the cuffmelt?’

The grin vanished into hostile watchfulness and a stiff silence that lasted until Bailey came back with his stuff and the paperwork to match.

‘You’ll have to witness for these,’ he said sulkily.

Camp security had bagged everything in a forty-centimetre-wide isolation strip, each item gripped tight in the vacuum-sealed plastic. Carl took the strip, unrolled it on the desk to check everything was there. He pointed at the storage key.

‘This is for a locker down by the bus park,’ he said. ‘My pack’s in it.’

‘You can collect it on your way to the helicopter,’ Bailey said and flicked the release form impatiently at him. ‘I’ll have my men escort you.’

Carl took the form and laid it on the desk, tore the activation cover off the holorecorder decal in the corner and leaned over it.

‘Carl Marsalis, SIN s810dr576,’ he droned, words worn smooth on his tongue with their familiarity, ‘UNGLA authorisation code 31 jade. I hereby state that the items on this list are the full complement of property taken from me by GH camp security on June 18th 2107, and now returned to me, date the same.’

He thumbed the disc to seal it and slid the form away from him across the surface of the desk. A curious suffocating sensation had settled over him as he recited the witness statement, as if it was he and not his personal effects that were vacuum-sealed in the transparent plastic.

I don’t want to do this any more.

No, that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw the way Bailey and the two security guards were watching him.

I don’t want to be this any more.

So.

Choppered out of camp, tilting across the brilliant blue of the lake and then on through bleak, mountainous beauty as they picked their way down from the altiplano to Arequipa. Helicopters like this had smart systems navigation that ran off a real-time satellite model of local terrain and weather, which meant the thing practically flew itself. Still, the pilot stolidly ignored him for the whole flight. He sat alone in the passenger compartment and stared out of the window at the landscape below, idly mapping it onto his memories from Mars. The similarities were obvious - it wasn’t just the thin air COLIN was up here simulating - but in the end, this was still home, with a sky-blue sky up above and the broad sweep of a big-planet horizon out ahead and the slow rolling weight of one full G pulling at your bones.

Accept no substitute. Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head. Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life here and a better world now.

In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage and chased it with something generic from a departure lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snow-capped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.

Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger ole, wiped his fingers and went.

He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-G quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new - just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear, just above the dead-hush whine of silence.

He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s announcement that they were starting their descent into Miami and that the airport was locked down under a security scare, so no connecting flights would be taking off for the foreseeable future. Local accommodation options could be accessed through-

Fuck.

The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Banners and his own bed under the tree-flanked eaves of the Crouch End flat. Could have drifted awake late the next morning to the sound of birds outside the window and cloud fractured sunlight filtering through the bright leaves. Some British summer downtime at last - with the wound, the Agency would have no choice - and the whole Atlantic between him and the emotional topography of MarsPrep.

Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two metre holoscreens that admonished Think it’s all Red Rocks and Airlocks; Think Again and We only send Winners to Mars. Miami was a transamericas hub, and that meant a hub for every company involved in the Western Nations Colony Initiative. Some colour-supplement journalist with access to more mainframe time than she deserved, estimating for a piece of inflight fluff he’d read a couple of years ago; at present every seventh person passing through Miami International does so on business related, directly or indirectly, to Mars and the COLIN programme. That figure is set to rise. These days it was probably more like one in four.

He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit - working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions which he then had to claim back as part of his fee - but with a worst-case couple of days left ’til he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.

Time to use it.

In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalogue of bruises he could feel through the thinning veils of codeine. The glued wound in his side tugged at him every time he moved.

He dried himself on big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

The in-house doctor was a personable young latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.

‘Been in Miami long?’ she asked him.

He smiled, shook his head. ‘It didn’t happen here. I just got in.’

‘I see.’ But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. ‘So, are you one of our illustrious military advisers?’

He switched to English. ‘What, with this accent?’

A tiny bend to the lips now, as she moved round to face him again. ‘You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought-’

‘Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers too.’ That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. ‘You got family in Venezuela?’

‘Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.’ She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a hand-held echo imager. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me about.’

Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogota a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

‘No, I would believe you,’ he said.

She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways slanted eyes at what had just happened.

‘There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,’ she said, a little hurriedly. ‘Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?’

‘Yeah, they did.’

‘Do you want anything for the pain?’

‘The pain’s under control.’

‘Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.’

‘I’ve just had a shower.’

‘Okay, well, in that case I can leave-’

‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’

She smiled then, properly.

‘I’m married,’ she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. ‘I don’t do that.’

‘Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,’ he lied.

‘No problem.’ She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. ‘Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.’

‘No, you’re all right,’ he said.

So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.

He went out.

It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.

An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open - LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from off-shore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beach-head-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone Carl would have blended in well enough - it was one of the few things he liked about Miami - but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes and a Bradbury Bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.

In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was seedy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the latina doctor - well, a close substitute for, anyway - in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the home straight to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s night-time home.

Well, you got the shadows, he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink - they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t - and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution, or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him, the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.

But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.

‘Hi. Give me a whisky cola. Lot of ice. Hey there.’

This last, Carl realised, was directed at him. He looked up from the dregs of his latest beer and nodded, trying to calibrate in the dim light. Trying to decide if she was working.

‘You don’t look like you’re having a whole lot of fun there,’ she said.

‘I don’t?’

‘No. You don’t.’

She was no doctora from the Marriott - her features were sharper and paler, her body curves less generous and her mestiza hair less groomed. No wedding band either, just a scatter of cheap and ornate silver rings across both hands. Bodice top made to look like it was sculpted metal too, clasping her to just below the armpits, mid-thigh skirt in dark contrast, the inevitable wrenching heels. There was taut coffee-coloured flesh on display, thighs below the skirt, shoulders and the slope of pushed-up breasts above the bodice, belly button slice between where the two garments didn’t quite meet - but no more than street standard in this heat, didn’t have to mean anything either way. Make-up a little on the heavy side, a little caked in the pores on the side of her nose. Yeah, she was working He stopped trying to kid himself, hung for a moment over his decision like a skydiver in the hatch, then let go.

‘I just got in,’ he said. ‘Business trip, I’m still kind of wired.’

‘Yeah?’ She tipped her head on one side, crossed her legs in his direction. The skirt slid up her thighs ‘You want some help with that?’

Later, elsewhere, and helped out of his tension like it was a tight pair of leather trousers he couldn’t take off alone, he lay slumped up against the headboard and watched her move about in the white-blasted cubic environment of the en suite. From the foot of the bed to the open bathroom door wasn’t much more than a metre, but it felt as if she’d stepped off into a parallel universe. Her actions seemed to be taking place at a profound distance and even the small bathroom noises, splash and swill of water, click of make-up utilities, were all somehow muffled as if he was staring through a thick-glassed observation panel into some cramped vivarium in an alien-world zoo.

Come see the humans.

See them mate in authentic surroundings.

A grimace twitched through him, too deeply buried to register in the muscles of his face.

See the female’s post-coital douching ritual.

Another buried tremor of intent told him to get up off the bed, get dressed and get the fuck out. There was really nothing else left to do. She’d run his wafer as soon as they got through the door - swiped it up the crack in the reader with the same clinical competence that she’d later employed to spray-coat his swollen cock and slot it inside her. Then he got some basic pay-per-view tricks - sucking her own fingers as he thrust into her, squeezing her own breasts as she rode him - a couple of well-timed posture changes and a crescendo of throaty moaning until he blew. Now street lighting and a tree outside made yellowish swaying shadows across the wall and ceiling of the darkened room, the alkaline smell of recent sex seeped out of the sheets tangled around his waist, and suddenly he felt old and tired and very slightly ill. The wound in his side had started to hurt again, and he thought the dressing might be coming off.

Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up and by the time she came out, he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

‘You going?’ she asked dully.

‘Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.’ He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. ‘I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?’

Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realised that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and half way into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

‘Listen,’ he said.

‘No, you go.’ The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he - idiot grin - was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she was accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

‘Well,’ he said experimentally. ‘I mean, can’t you. You know.’

Her shoulders shook. ‘This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.’

‘And there’s no one here who-’

‘Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal, man.’

A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. ‘Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.’

She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the street-light falling into the room. She snorted. ‘Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly:

‘How much do you need?’

Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritation at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand and he guessed she was terrified if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighbourhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighbourhood was low-end semi-residential and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the shop fronts and bright yellow decals announced the anti-tampering charges lurking in the metal. A couple of bars were still open, showing dim neon signs over corner doorways like weak urban lighthouses. Outside one, a flock of aspiring street thugs propped themselves against walls and perched on parked vehicles, staring dangerously at the few passers-by. Carl felt the mesh come gently, suggestively online. He ignored it and avoided gazes instead, put an arm around the girl’s shoulder and picked up the pace a little. He heard the boys talking about him in a densely arcane dialect of Spanglish as they fell behind. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was being said. Fucking tourists, fucking foreigners, fucking our women. The age-old plaint. He couldn’t really blame them. Then they were lost round a corner and instead music floated down from a window jacked open for the heat, clumpy Cuban jazz that sounded like someone playing the piano with their fists.

The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two metres tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.

The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair moulded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.

‘Hello sir,’ said the datapoint chattily. ‘Would you like to hear the customer options available to-’

‘No.’ Carl fitted the iris reader over his head, blinked a couple of times into the lens cups and waited for the chime that told him he’d been read. Idly he wondered what would happen if he ever had to do this with a black eye.

‘Thank you, sir. You may now access your accounts.’

He took the credit in ten limited-load wafers, reasoning that the girl wouldn’t want to trust a clandestine clinic with a single upfront payment. As he handed them to her in the cramped space, he realised that he didn’t know her name. A couple of seconds after that, the second realisation hit home, that he didn’t really want to. She took the wafers in silence, looked him up and down in a way that made him think she might try to give him a gratitude blow-job there in the cabin. But then she muttered thanks in a voice so low he almost missed it and he wondered if he was, after all, just one more sick-headed fuck with an overactive imagination. He thumped the lock stud again and the door cycled open on a compressed sigh. He followed her out.

‘Okay, boy! Get your motherfucking hands up where I can see them!’

The yell was off to his left, the shapes that jumped him came from both sides. The mesh leapt alive like joy. He grabbed an arm, locked it and hurled its owner towards the dying echo of the voice. Curses and stumbling. The other figure tried to grapple with him, there was some technique in there somewhere, but . . . he yanked hard, got a warding arm down and smashed an elbow into the face behind. He felt the nose break. Pain wrung a high yelp from his attacker. He stepped, hooked with one foot and pushed. The one with the broken nose went down. There was another one, coming back from the left again. He spun about, fierce grin and crooked hands, saw his target. Blocky, slope shouldered, fading pro-wrestler type. Carl feinted, then kicked him in the belly as he rushed in. Sobbing grunt and the solid feel of a good connecting strike, but the big man’s impetus carried him forward and Carl had to dance sharply aside to avoid being taken down.

Then someone clubbed him in the head from behind.

He heard it coming, felt the motion in the air at his ear, was turning towards the attack, but way too late to get clear. Black exploded through him, speckled with tiny, tiny sparks. He pivoted and went down in the crystalline light around the datapoint. His vision inked out, inked back in. Another blunt figure came and stood over him. Through the waltzing colours that washed up and down behind his eyes, he saw a gun muzzle and stopped struggling.

‘Miami Vice, asshole. You stay down or I’ll drill a hole right in your fucking head.’

They arrested him, of course.

CHAPTER THREE

6.13 a.m.

Low strands of cloud in a rinsed-out pre-dawn sky. Last night’s drizzle still sequined on the black metal carapaces of the rap-rep shuttles, evercrete landing apron damp with it, and spots of rain still in the air. Joey Driscoll came out of the canteen with a tall canister of self-heating coffee in each hand, arms spread wide as if he was trying to balance the weight, eyes heavy lidded with end-of-shift drowse. His mouth unzipped in a cavernous yawn.

The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake . . .’

For a moment he stood in weary disbelief - then the coffee canisters hit the evercrete and he was running resignedly for the tackle room. Above his head, the sirens made it to their first hitched-in breath and started the cranking whine all over again. Big LCLS panels on the hangar lintels lit with flashing amber. Off to the left, under the sirens, he heard the deeper-throated grind of the rapid response shuttles’ turbines kicking in. Maybe a minute and a half tops before they hit pitch. Two more minutes for crew loading and then they’d be lifting, dipping and bopping on the apron like dogs trying to tug loose of a tight leash. Anyone late aboard was going to get their balls cut off.

He made the tackle-room door, just as Zdena darted out of it, tactical vest still not fully laced on, helmet dangling off the lower edge, XM still long-stocked in her hand from standing in the rack. Wide-mouthed Slavic grin as she saw him.

‘Where’s my fucking coffee, Joe?’ She had to shout over the sirens.

‘Back there on the concrete. You want it, go lick it up.’ He gestured up in exasperation at the noise. ‘I mean, fuck. Forty minutes to shift change, and we get this shit.’

‘Why they pay us, cowboy.’

She snapped the XM’s stock down to carbine length and secured it there, shoved the weapon into the long stick-grip sheath on her thigh and focused on pulling the buckles tight on her tac vest. Joe shouldered past her.

‘They pay us?

Into the riot of the tackle room at alert. A dozen other bodies, yelling, cursing at their superannuated gear, laughing out the tension like dogs barking. Joe grabbed vest, helmet, T-mask off the untidy piles on the counter, didn’t bother putting any of it on. Experience had taught him to do that in the belly of the rap-rep as it tilted out over the Pacific. He gripped the upright barrel of an XM in its recess on the rack, struggled briefly with it as the release catch failed to give, finally snapped the assault rifle free and headed back for the door.

Forty fucking minutes, man.

Zdena was already sitting on the lowered tail gate of Blue One, helmet fitted loosely, unmasked, grinning at him as he panted up and hauled himself, ass-slithering, aboard. She leaned in to yell above the screech of the turbines.

‘Hey, cowboy. You ready for rock and roll?’

He could never work out if she was hamming up the Natasha accent or not. They’d not been working together that long, she’d come in with the new hires at the end of May. He figured - and etiquette said you never never asked - she was probably licensed outland labour, at least as legal as he was these days. He doubted she’d hopped the fence the way he had though. More likely she was across from the Siberian coastal strip or maybe one of those Russian factory rafts further south, part of that fucking Pacific Rim labour fluidity they were always talking about. Of course, for all he knew, she might even be west-coast born and bred. Out here, mangled English didn’t necessarily signify anything. Wasn’t like back in the Republic, where they blanket-enforced Amanglic, punished the kids in school for speaking anything else. In the Rim States, English was strictly a trade tongue - you learnt it to the extent you needed it, which, depending on the barrio you grew up in, didn’t have to be that much.

‘You gotta-’ Still panting from the sprint, no breath to yell. ‘-stop watching all those old movies, Zed. This is gonna be a, fucking punt around the deep-water mark. Scaring the shit out of some idiot, plankton farmer who’s forgotten to, upgrade his clear tags for the month. Fucking waste of time.’

‘I don’t think, Joe.’ Zdena nodded out along the line of shuttles. ‘Is four boats they got powering up. Lot of firepower for plankton farmer.’

‘Yeah, yeah. You’ll see.’

The dust-off went pretty smoothly, for their ship anyway, last month’s practice drills paying off, it seemed, despite the groans. Eight troops in, standard deployment strength, all webbed into their crash seats along the inner walls of the shuttle’s belly, grinning tension grins. Joe had his tactical vest all hooked up by then, vital signs wired in, though he wondered if anyone bothered to look at that shit any more now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a fire-fight, and in the final analysis the vest was somewhere to hang all the spare XM magazines and boarding tools.

Briefing came in over the comset in his ear, drummed from the speakers set in the roof of the shuttle like an echo.

This is a class two aerial breach incursion, repeat class two incursion, we expect no combat-

He leaned out and nodded triumphantly down the line at Zdena - told you fucking so.

-but maintain combat alertness nonetheless. Mask and gloves to be worn throughout mission, apply anticontaminant gel as for biohazard operations. Please note, there is no reason to assume a biohazard situation. These are precautions only. We have a downed COLIN spacecraft, repeat a downed COLIN spacecraft inside coastal limits-

Zdena shot him the look right back again.

‘Fucking space ship?’ someone yelped from the row of seats on the other wall.

-medical teams will stand by until Blue Squad completes a sweep. Be prepared to encounter crash casualties. Squad division in deployment teams as follows, Team alpha, Driscoll on point, Hernandez and Zhou to follow. Team beta . . . . . .

He tuned it out, old news. Current rotas put him at the sharp end of deployment for the next three weeks. Now, he couldn’t make up his mind if he was pissed at that, or glad. This was going to be a fucking trip. Outside of TV, and a couple of virtual tours of the COLIN museum in Santa Cruz, he’d never seen a real spaceship, but one thing he did know - they didn’t land those fucking things on Earth. Not since the nanorack towers went up everywhere, disappearing into the clouds like black and steel beanstalks from that stupid fucking story his gran used to tell him when he was a kid. The only spaceships Joe knew about outside of historical footage were the ones that occasionally cropped up at the slow end of the news feeds, docking serenely at the mushroom-top flanges of those fairytale stalks into the sky, their only impact economic. Just returned from Habitat 9, the haulage tug Weaver’s cargo is expected to make a substantial dent in the precious metals market for this quarter. Measures requested by the Association of African Metal-Producing States to protect Earth-side mining are still before the World Trade Organisation, where representatives of the Hab 9 Consortium contend that such restraint of trade is-

So forth. These days, spaceships stayed in space where they belonged, and everything they carried went up or came down on the ’rack elevators. Perfect quarantine, he’d heard some late-night talking head call it once, and extremely energy efficient into the bargain. A spaceship coming down was the scenario from some cheap disaster flick or even cheaper paranoid alien invasion experia show off the Jesusland channels. For it to happen for real could only mean that something, somewhere, had gone super wrong.

Oh dude - this, I’ve got to fucking see . . .

He was still applying the biosealant gel to his face when the shuttle banked about and the tailgate cracked open. Cold Pacific air came flushing in with the scream of the turbines and the grey dawn light. He unbuckled and shuffled down the line to the cable hoist. His pulse knocked lightly in his temples. Something that was too much fun to be fear coursed in his blood. He wrapped the T-mask across his face, pulled down the breathing filter to his chin, pressed the edges of it all into the bio-sealant. The wind whipped in off the ocean outside, chilling the newly pasted skin of his cheeks where they were still exposed at either side of the mask. There was an illusory sense of safety behind the curve of impact-resistant one-way glass and its warm amber heads-up projected displays, as if his whole body were sitting back here, instead of just bits of his face. They got warned about that shit all the time. Some crudely rendered virtual drill sergeant in the bargain basement Texan software that was all Filigree Steel Security’s training budget ran to. Inexplicably, the badly lipsynched figure had a British accent. Whole body awareness, you ’orrible li-uhl man, the construct was wont to bellow whenever he tripped one of the programme’s stoppers. Are your legs on loan? Is your chest a temporary appendage? Whole body awareness is the only fucking thing that will keep your whole body alive.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

He snapped the cable onto his vest, turned back to the belly of the shuttle and the observation camera fixed in the ceiling. He made the swab-O with finger and thumb. Coughed into the induction mike at his throat.

‘Point, ready to deploy.’

I hear you, point. On my mark. Three, two, one . . . drop

The cable jolted into motion and he fumbled his XM to readiness in both hands, leaning out so he could peer down at what lay below. At first, it was just the endless roll and whitecap slap of the Pacific, outward in all directions. Then he got a fix on the ship. Not what he’d been expecting, it looked like a huge plastic packing case, awash in the water, barely floating. The hull was mostly a scorched black, but he could make out streaks of white with the remains of nano-etched lettering, some kind of corporate insignia that he supposed must have skinned off in the heat of re-entry. He dropped closer, saw what looked like an open hatch set in a section that was still above water.

‘Uh, command. Are we sure this thing isn’t going to sink?

Affirmative, point. COLIN specs say she should stay afloat indefinitely.

‘Just, I’ve got an open hatch here, and with this wind and the waves, I figure she’s got to be shipping some water.’

Repeat, point. Vessel should float indefinitely. Check the hatch.

His boots hit the hull with a solid clank, about a dozen metres off from the hatch and a little downward. Ocean water swirled around his feet, ankle deep, then sucked back. He sighed and unclipped from the cable.

‘Understood, command. Off descender.’

Will maintain.

He crouched a little and worked his way up the shallow slope towards the hatch, peered down into it. Water had sloshed into the opening. He could see it glistening wetly on the rungs of a ladder that led down to a second, inner hatch which he assumed had to be the end of an airlock. As he watched, a fresh surge washed over the hatch coaming and rinsed down onto the ladder, dripping and splashing to the bottom of the lock. He peered a bit more, then shrugged and clambered down the ladder until he was hanging off the lower rungs just above the inner hatch. The water down there was about three fingers deep, slopping back and forth with the tilt of the vessel in the waves. Just below the surface, the mouldings of the hatch looked unnaturally clean, like something seen at the bottom of a rock-pool. There was a warning: caution; pressure must equalise before hatch will open.

Joe figured whatever pressure there was inside the hull must be pretty close to Earth standard then, because someone or something had already unsealed the inner hatch and it was hanging open just enough to let the water drain very slowly through the crack. He grunted.

Weren’t for that, fucking airlock’d be a quarter full already from the slop.

He tapped his mike.

‘Command ? I’ve got a cracked inner hatch here. Don’t know if that’s the systems or, uh, human agency.’

Noted. Proceed with caution.

He grimaced. He’d been hoping for a withdraw call.

Yeah, or failing that, some fucking back-up, command. This baby’s come from space, right, from Mars most likely. No fucking telling what kind of bugs might be loose in there. That’s what nanorack quarantine’s for, right?

For a moment, he thought about backing up anyway.

But-

You’re equipped, he could already hear the patient voice explaining to him. You’re masked and gelled against biothreat, which we don’t in any case anticipate. You have no valid reason to query your orders.

And Zdena’s voice: why they pay us, cowboy.

And from the others, jeers.

He shook off a tiny shudder, moved down a couple of rungs and put a boot through the water to press gingerly on the hatch. It gave, fractionally.

‘Great.’

Point?

‘Nothing,’ he said sourly. ‘Just proceeding with extreme fucking caution.’

He braced one hand flat on the wall of the airlock, stamped harder on the hatch, impatient now and-

-it caved in under his foot.

Hinged heavily down to the side, dumping the water through into a darkened interior with a long, hollow splash. The sudden drop caught him unawares, he lost his grip on the rung above. Fell, grabbed clumsily, with one flailing gloved hand, missed and clouted the side of his head on the ladder as he tumbled. He went right through the opened inner hatch, had time for one garbled yell-

‘Fuuuuuuahhhh-’

-and fetched up in a heap on what must be the side wall of the corridor below.

Shock of impact, his teeth clipped the edge of his tongue. Sharp bang in his shoulder, gouge in the ribs where one end of the XM jabbed him on the way down. He hissed the pain out through gritted teeth.

For the rest, he seemed to have landed on something soft. He lay still for a moment, checking for damage reports from his tangled limbs.

Total body awareness, right sarge.

He summoned a grin. Didn’t think he’d broken anything. Looking up, he figured it for not much more than a three-metre drop.

He blew a hard, chuckled breath of relief into the mask filter. Completed his expletive quietly.

‘Fuck.’

Point? Command came through, yeah, finally fucking concerned now. Report your status. Are you injured?

‘I’m fine.’ He propped himself up on one arm, squinted around in the gloom and snapped on the helmet light. ‘Just took a fall. Nothing to-’

The edge of the torch beam clipped something that didn’t make any sense. His head jerked around, the beam hit full on what he’d seen-

‘Ah, fuck man, you gotta be-’

And suddenly, with the flood of disbelieving comprehension, he gagged, vomit flooding up and into the mask, burning his nose and throat, as he saw for the first time exactly what the soft thing was that had broken his fall.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sevgi Ertekin awoke to the curious conviction that it was raining in dirty grey sheets, all over the city.

In June?

She blinked. Somewhere outside the open window of the apartment, she heard a siren calling her. Intimate and nostalgic as the sound of the ezan she still missed from the old neighbourhood, but freighted with an adrenalin significance the prayer call would never match. Rusted professional reflex surfaced in her, then rolled over and sank as memory came aboard. Not her call any more. In any case, the melancholy caught-breath cry of the cop car, wherever it was, was distant. Noises of commerce from the street-market six floors below almost drowned it out. There was shouting, mostly good-humoured, and music from stall-mounted sound systems, frenetic neo-arabesque that she was in no mood for currently. The day had started without her.

Against her own better judgement, she turned over to face the window. Glare from the sun hit her in the face and drove her to squinting. The varipolara drapes billowed in the breeze from outside, incandescent with morning light. It appeared she’d forgotten to remote them down to opaque again. An empty bottle of Jameson’s was partly hidden where the curtain hem brushed the floor. Someone - someone, yeah, right, Sev, who’d that be, then? - had rolled it away across the polished wooden boards of the living room when it had nothing left to offer. The same living room where she’d apparently slept fully clothed on the couch. A moment’s groggy reflection brought in corroborative memory. She’d sat there after the party broke up, and she’d killed the rest of the bottle. Vague recollection of talking quietly to herself, the smoky warmth of the whisky as it went down. She’d been thinking all the time, she’d just have one more, she’d just have one more, then she’d get up and-

She hadn’t got up. She’d passed out.

This is new, Sev. Usually, you make it to a bed.

She made a convulsive effort and heaved herself fully into a sitting position, then wished she hadn’t moved quite so rapidly. The contents of her head seemed to shift on some kind of internal stalk. A long wave of nausea rolled through her, and her clothing felt suddenly like restraints. She’d lost her boots at some point - they were keeled over on opposite sides of the living room, about as far apart as the dimensions of said room allowed - but shirt and slacks remained. She had a vague memory of rolling hilariously about on her back after everyone was gone, trying to tug off the boots and then the socks. In this at least, it seemed she’d succeeded, but obviously the rest had defeated her.

And now the shirt was rucked up and bunched under her arms, and her profiler cups had peeled and worked loose from her breasts as she tossed and turned. One seemed to have ended up in her armpit, the other was gone altogether. Some way below her waist, her slacks had somehow twisted about until they were no longer loose, and her guts were similarly tight. Her bladder was uncomfortably full and her head was settling to a steady throb.

And it’s raining.

She looked up, and a sudden, raw anger took hold as she traced the low hissing to its real source. In one corner of the living room, the ancient JVC entertainment deck was still on. Whatever chip was in had played to its conclusion, and the temperamental default system had failed to return to bluescreen. The monitor showed a snowdance of static instead and the gentle hiss of it filled up the base of hearing, below the sounds of the city outside. Filled up everything like-

Her mouth tightened. She knew what chip she’d been watching. She couldn’t remember, but she knew.

It’s not fucking raining, all right.

She lurched to her feet and stabbed the deck to silence. For a moment then she stood in her apartment as if it wasn’t her own, as if she’d broken in to steal something. She felt the steady flog of her pulse in her throat and she knew she was going to cry.

She shook her head instead, violently, trading the tears for an intense, sonar-pulsing pain. Stumbled through the bedroom to the en suite, fingers pressing to the ache. There was a plastic bottle of generic headache pills on the shelf there and beside it a foil of syn. Or more precisely, k37 synadrive - military-issue superfunction capsules, her share of a black-market trickle into NYPD way back when and several times the strength of anything the street liked to call syn. She’d used the caps a handful of times before and found them scarily effective - they stimulated synaptic response and physical co-ordination, sidelined pretty much everything else, and they did it fast. Sevgi wavered for a moment, realised she had things to do today, even if she couldn’t remember right now exactly what they were.

Whole fucking city self medicates these days anyway, Sev. Get over it.

She pressed a couple of the milissue capsules out of the foil and was about to dry-swallow them when a fragment of peripheral vision caught up with her.

She strode back into the bedroom.

‘Hey.’

The girl in the bed couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen. Blinking awake, she seemed even younger, but the body beneath the single sheet was too full for the waif-like look. She sat up and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had got too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.

‘Who told you you could sleep in here?’

The girl blinked again. ‘You did.’

‘Oh.’ Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. ‘Well get your stuff together, and go home. Party’s over.’

She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully and then, as if to emphasise her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.

When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.

Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone - as used by real MarsTrip personnel!! - programme was settling into oblivion like a deflating circus tent. The incriminating evidence of the neglect was right there. And you couldn’t take milissue slugs to make it go away like you could with pain. The ludicrously perfect flanks of the girl in her bed flitted through her mind. The jutting designer chest. She looked at the swell of her own breasts, gathered low on her ribs and tilting away to the sides.

Ah fuck it, you’re in your thirties now Sevgi. Not trying to impress the boys at Bosphorus Bridge any more, are we? Give it a rest. Anyway, you’re due, that always makes it worse.

Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her; cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.

The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war-zone. Every available worksurface was piled with used crockery. Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris - dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of sigara borek pastry, aubergine and tomato in oil gone cold, half a lamacun left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.

Good party.

A few of her departing guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It had been a good party.

Yeah - pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterwards.

Why was that, Sev?

She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.

You know why.

The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.

The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.

‘I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?’

Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.

She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.

The first wrong thing was the car.

Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sun-bathed on. He was grin-proud of the fucking thing too, which was odd, given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalising the catalogue of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland. Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.

Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realised it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.

Today, he wasn’t driving it.

Instead, as she let herself out onto the street - still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders - he unfolded from the back seat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognisably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of grey in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun, the tanned future-presidential-candidate Caucasian features that he swore were his own crinkled around pale blue eyes.

He gave her a trademark slanted grin.

‘Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘What time’d you wind it up in the end?’ He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.

‘Don’t recall. Late.’

She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.

‘What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?’

‘Not going to the office, Sev.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed yesterday. So why are we headed east?’

Norton grinned again. ‘Not going out to Kaku either. Change of plans. No freefall for you today.’

The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She’d really not been looking forward to the gutswooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state - with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero G and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below - already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.

‘Right. So you want to tell me where we are going?’

‘Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the 11 o’clock shuttle to SFO.’

Sevgi sat up. ‘What happened? Horkan’s Pride overshoot the docking slot?’

‘You could say that.’ Norton’s tone was dry. ‘Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.’

‘Splashed down? They’re not supposed to land those things.’

‘Tell me about it. From what I hear, only the main crew section made it down in one piece. The rest is wreckage along a line from somewhere in Utah to the coast or burnt up on re-entry. The Rim authorities are having what’s left towed back to the Bay area, where you and I will crack it open and dazzle them all with our lucid analysis of just what the fuck went wrong. Those are Nicholson’s words, by the way, not mine.’

‘Yeah, I guessed.’ Norton spoke four-letter words the way a miser spends wafers - when he was utterly inescapably driven to it or when they belonged to someone else. It seemed to be a linguistic rather than a moral quirk though, because he evinced no apparent embarrasment or distaste when he quoted other people like this, or when Sevgi swore, which was a lot of the time these days.

‘So how come you didn’t phone me earlier with this shit?’

‘Believe me, I tried. You weren’t answering.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, so I covered for you with Nicholson, if that’s what you were wondering. Said you were somewhere downtown chasing leads from the Spring Street bust, you were going to meet me at the terminal.’

Sevgi nodded to herself. ‘Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.’

She owed him more than one, quite a lot more over the last two years, but neither of them would ever acknowledge it. The debt lay unspoken between them, like complicity, like family. And Nicholson, anyway, they both agreed was an asshole.

‘You think any of them are still alive?’ Norton wondered.

Sevgi stared out of the window at the traffic, marshalling facts from the file. ‘Horkan’s Pride is a five series. They built them to survive crash-landing at the Mars end, and there aren’t any oceans there to do it in.’

‘Yeah, but that’s a lot less gravity to worry about on the way down.’

An NYPD teardrop cruised up alongside them, panels at opaque except for the driver window, which was cranked back. There was a young cop up front. She had the system at manual and was steering idly with one tanned arm leant on the sill. She was talking to someone, but Sevgi couldn’t make out if it was another occupant of the car or an audio hook-up. Under the peak of her summer-weight weblar cap, she looked casually competent and engaged. Memory twinged, and Sevgi found herself wondering about Hulya. She really ought to get back in touch sometime, see what Hulya was doing these days, see if she took the sergeant’s exam again, if she was still hauling her tight, man-magnet ass out to Bosphorus Bridge every Saturday night. Sit down somewhere for a good do-you-remember-when session, maybe crack a case of Efes.

At the thought of beer and the smell it had left in her kitchen, Sevgi’s stomach turned abruptly over. She shunted the nostalgia hastily aside. The NYPD car switched lanes and faded in the traffic. Sevgi took an experimental stab at some engaged competence of her own.

‘Cryocap fluid should absorb a lot of the impact shock,’ she said slowly. ‘And the fact it came down in one piece at all means it was some kind of controlled re-entry, right?’

‘Some kind of.’

‘Did we get any more out of the datahead before this happened?’

Norton shook his head. ‘Same request for standby at Kaku, same interval broadcast. Nothing new.’

‘Great. Fucking ghost ship to the last.’

Norton lifted hands with fingers draped wide and low, made phantasmal noises to match. Sevgi curled a grin under control.

‘It’s not fucking funny, Tom. Beats me why the Rim skycops didn’t just vaporise it soon as it crossed the divide. It wouldn’t be the first time those day-rate morons turned glitched air traffic into confetti when it didn’t answer nicely.’

‘Maybe they were concerned about loss of life,’ said Norton, with a straight face.

‘Yeah.’

‘Now I hope you’re not planning to bring that attitude with you, young lady. The locals probably won’t be over-friendly as it is. This is our tin can that fell out of the sky on them.’

She shrugged. ‘They pay COLIN taxes just like the rest of us. It’s their tin can too.’

‘Yeah, but we’re the ones supposed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why they pay their taxes.’

‘Have you talked to anyone at their end yet?’

Norton shook his head. ‘No one human. I tried to hook whoever caught the case just before I left. Got the machine. Standard phone interface. It said we’ll be collected at the airport by RimSec. Two of their plainclothes guys, Rovayo and Coyle.’

‘You get ID?’

Norton tapped the breast of his jacket. ‘Hardcopy download. Want to see it?’

‘Might as well.’

The Rim cops were a balanced sex and eth couple. Under the label Det. A. Rovayo, a dark young Afro-Hispanic woman stared out of her photo with jaw set and mouth thinned, trying rather obviously and without much success to beat a full-lipped, hazel-eyed beauty. Belying the severity of her expression, her hair coiled thick and longer than NYPD would have let her get away with. Below her on the same printout, Det. R. Coyle glowered up, blunt-featured, middle-aged, caucasian. His hair was shot with grey and shaved almost militarily short. The image was head and shoulders only, but he gave the impression of size and impatient force.

Sevgi shrugged.

‘We’ll see,’ she said.

They saw.

Coyle and Rovayo met them off the suborb at SFO with perfunctory greetings and an iris-scan. Standard procedure, they were told. Norton shot a warning glance at Sevgi who was visibly fuming. This wasn’t how visiting cops would have been treated on arrival in New York. Here, it was hard to tell if they were being snubbed or not; Coyle, every bit as big and laconic as his holoshot had suggested, showed them brief ID and did the introductory honours. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly calloused fingers, applied the scanner and then stepped back. It was all done with a detached competence and amongst the streams of arriving passengers, it had the intimate flavour of a European kiss on the cheek. Norton seemed to enjoy it, anyway. Rovayo ignored his smile, glanced at the green light the machine had given them and put the scanner away in the shoulder bag she carried. Coyle nodded towards a bank of elevators at the end of the arrivals hall.

‘This way,’ he said economically. ‘We got the smart chopper.’

They rode up in silence, hooked a walkway across the glass-bubbled, white-girder-braced upper levels of the building, then another lift that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red and white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery grey in the late afternoon sun. A ruffling wind took the heat out of the day.

‘So you guys are on the case?’ Norton tried as they clambered aboard.

Coyle offered him an impassive glance. ‘Whole fucking force is on this case,’ he grunted and tugged the hatch closed. ‘Badge coding 2347. Flight as filed. Let’s go.’

‘Thank you. Please take your seats.’

The autocopter had Asia Badawi’s voice, low and honey-coated, unmistakable even off the half-dozen syllables uttered. Sevgi vaguely remembered reading, in some mindless magazine-space moment while she waited to see the lawyers, an article about the software contract Badawi had signed with Lockheed. Big PR smiles and clasps all round, outraged fans protest. Yawn, flick. Would you like to come through now, Ms Ertekin? The rotors cranked in earnest, engine murmur rose to a dim soundproofed crescendo on the other side of the window and they unstuck from the pad. They settled into seats. The autocopter lifted, tilted and whirled them out over the bay.

Sevgi made an effort. ‘You get anything from the skin yet?’

‘Scanning crew are going over the hull now.’ The cabin had facing seats and Coyle was opposite her, but he was staring out of the window as he spoke. ‘We’ll have a full virtual up and running by this evening.’

‘That’s fast work,’ said Norton, though it wasn’t really.

Rovayo looked at him. ‘They’ve been busy inside, that kind of took priority.’

An eyeblink silence.

Sevgi exchanged a glance with Norton.

‘Inside?’ she asked, dangerously polite. ‘You’ve already cracked the hatches?’

A knowing grin went back and forth between the two Rim cops. Sevgi, fed up with being the least informed person in the room all day, felt her temper start to fray.

‘Horkan’s Pride is COLIN’s property,’ she said thinly. ‘If you’ve tampered with-’

‘Put your cuffs away, agent Ertekin,’ said Coyle. ‘Time the coastals got out to your property, someone aboard had already blown the hatches out. From the inside. Quarantine seal’s long gone.’

That’s not possible. Narrowly, she managed to stop herself saying it. Instead, she asked: ‘Are the cryocaps breached?’

Coyle eyed her speculatively.

‘It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself,’ he said.

The autocopter banked about and Sevgi leaned forward to peer out of the window. Below them in the bay, Rim Security’s Alcatraz station rose off its island base in pale grey platforms and piers. On the southern shoreline, a floating dry dock complex was laid out like a schematic, clean lines and spaces, people reduced to dots and vehicles to toys. The bulk of the Horkan’s Pride crew section showed up clearly in the centre dock. Even with the external structures ripped away, even scorched and scarred by the re-entry, it leapt out at her like a familiar face in a group photo. She’d seen sister ships in the orbital yards above the Kaku nanorack from time to time, and she’d had archive footage of Horkan’s Pride itself filed on her laptop ever since the ship stopped talking to COLIN control. In the frequent chunks of waiting-room time at the lawyers’ offices, in the sleepless still of the nights she didn’t drink, she’d stared at the detail until her eyes ached. A good detective eats, sleeps and breathes the details, Larry Kasabian had once told her. That’s how you catch the bad guys. The habit stuck. She knew the internal architecture of the vessel so well she could have walked it from end to end blindfolded. She had the hardware and software specs by heart. The names of the cryocapped crew were as familiar as product brands she habitually shopped for, and biographical detail from each popped into her head unbidden whenever she visualised one of their faces.

It’s really better if you wait and see for yourself.

And now, at a guess, they were all dead.

The autocopter settled with machine precision onto a raised platform at one end of the dock complex. The motors wound down and the hatch cracked open. Coyle did the honours again, levered the hatch back and jumped down first. Sevgi went next. Badawi’s honeyed tones followed her out into the wind.

‘Mind your step. Please close the hatch behind you.’

Coyle led the way down the steps off the platform. There was a reception committee waiting at the bottom. Three RimSec uniforms backing a plainclothes ranking officer whose face Sevgi recognised from a couple of virtual briefings she’d attended last year on geneprint forgery. Smooth Asian features that made him seem younger than she supposed he was, thick grey hair and a rumpled way with clothes that belied the level scrutiny in the eyes. From that gaze and other general aspects of demeanour, she’d suspected he was probably enhanced - Rim officials of any rank usually were these days - but she had never had more evidence than the hunch. In the social sessions after, he’d talked with quiet reservation, mainly about his family, and his eyes had barely flickered to Sevgi’s chest at all, for which she’d been quietly grateful. Now she scrabbled after a name and the syn handed it to her.

‘Lieutenant Tsai. How are you?’

‘Captain,’ he said dryly. ‘Promoted back in January. And I’m as well as can be expected, thank you, given the circumstances. I presume you’d like to view your vessel immediately. What’s left of it.’

Sevgi nodded glumly. ‘That’d be helpful.’

‘I’m told,’ Tsai made gestures at his uniforms and they sloped off across the dock, ‘that we’ll have a working virtual by about seven. Crews are finishing up with the hull now, but Rovayo probably told you about the hatches.’

‘That they were blown from the inside, yeah.’

‘Captain,’ Norton weighed in. ‘We’re concerned to know what state the crew of Horkan’s Pride are in. Specifically, whether the cryosystems were breached or not.’

Tsai stopped in the act of turning to follow the uniforms, and his gaze seemed suddenly to lengthen, dialling up, out across the dock and then the bay replaying something from memory that he’d maybe prefer not to. In Sevgi, the realisation hit home that behind the turf-proud cool of Coyle and Rovayo there was the same base edginess, and that driving it all was not the jurisdiction envy she’d assumed.

They’re scared, she suddenly knew. And we’re their only solution.

It was an epiphany Sevgi had had once before, back when she was still a rookie with the NYPD and dealing with a drugs-and-domestic abuse case. Talking to the bruised and still swelling face of the perpetrator’s mother, it hit her with the same sickening abruptness that this woman was looking at her as some kind of solution to her problem, that she expected patrolwoman Ertekin, age twenty-three, to do something about the shitstorm state of her family and her life.

So nice to be needed.

‘Breached,’ Tsai said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you could say that.’

The outer hatches themselves were gone, blown clear by the emergency bolts - by now they’d be somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific. The blackened stub of Horkan’s Pride had been propped in the dry dock, as close to a usefully even keel as her design would allow. Still, they had to clamber down into Access Four as if it were a well cut into the top of the crew section’s hull. A zero-G assist ladder took them to the bottom of the airlock chamber within, and from there they dropped heavily through the inner lock and onto the canted surface of the main dorsal corridor. Maintenance lighting glowed in soft blue LCLS panels along the sides of the passageway, but Tsai’s uniforms had set up high-intensity incident lamps by the airlock and further down. White glare bounced back off the grubby cream-coloured walls, and teeth.

Sevgi’s gaze caught it as she came down off the last rung of the ladder, skidded to a halt on the sight. The ripped-to-the-gums grin of a mutilated human head where it lay only loosely attached to the limbless torso sprawled on the floor.

‘You see what I mean?’ Tsai climbed down beside her.

Sevgi stood, managing her stomach. Leaving aside the hangover, it had still been a while. Even her last year with the NYPD had been mercifully short on gore; transferring from homicide to COLIN liaison hadn’t made her any friends on the force, but it had certainly put a brake on the amount of mangled human remains she had to look at. Now, she was vaguely aware that without the syn, she would have vomited up what little her stomach contained, all over Tsai’s crime scene.

Your crime scene, you mean.

This is yours, Sev.

She bent forward a little, peered at the dead man. Took possession.

‘Alberto Toledo,’ said Tsai quietly. ‘Engineer at the Stanley bubble, atmospheric nanotech. Fifty-six years old. Rotated home.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Biog detail bubbled up from ruined, sneering face, whispering like ghosts. Job specs, résumé, family background. This one had a daughter somewhere. The flesh of both cheeks had been sheared off up to the cheekbone, where stringy fragments of tissue still clung. The jaw was stripped. The eyes-

She swallowed. Still a little queasy. Norton joined her, put a hand on her shoulder.

‘You okay, Sev?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She locked onto facts. Horkan’s Pride hadn’t talked to them for almost the whole seven and a half months of its long fall back to Earth. ‘Captain, this . . . looks recent.’

Tsai shrugged. ‘Antibacterials in the shipboard atmospheric system, they tell me. But yeah, we’re guessing Alberto here was probably one of the last.’

‘The last?’

Sevgi glanced at Norton as he said it, and was pleased to notice that he looked as shaky as she felt. Distantly, she picked out the acidic tang of someone else’s vomit in the air of the closed space around her. It was oddly comforting, the knowledge that others before her had seen and reacted in same way she wanted to. It made it easier to hold on.

‘What happened to the limbs?’ she managed, almost casually.

‘Surgically removed.’ Tsai gestured up the corridor. ‘They’re still downloading the autosurgeon’s log, so we can’t be sure that’s how it was done, but it’s the obvious explanation.’

‘So how did he end up here?’

The captain nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s a little harder. Could be the impact threw the bodies about some. We found most of the cryocaps hinged open, nutrients all over the floor and walls. Looks like whoever did this wasn’t all that tidy, at least towards the end.’

‘The corridor locks should have engaged when she came down,’ Norton said shortly. ‘These ships compartmentalise under emergency conditions. There’s no way something could get flung from one end of this hulk to the other like that. No way.’

‘Well, it’s only a theory.’ Tsai gestured up and down the unobstructed corridor again. ‘But as you’ll see. Not a lot of compartmentalisation going on here. You want to look at the cryocap section?’

Sevgi peered along the passageway to where more incident lamps lit the environs of the sleeper racks. She could see figures moving about down there, heard a couple of voices. The brief rattle of a laugh. The sound carried her back, with a force that was almost physical, to her crime scene days with homicide. Black humour and hardened cameraderie, the quiet thrum of an intensity denied to anyone who didn’t work this beat and the layering on of a detachment that came with custom. So weird, the shit you can get nostalgic for, girl. It alarmed her a little, realising the extent to which, despite her quailing stomach, she did suddenly want to plunge back into that world and its dark procedural workings.

‘The other bodies,’ she said, as the syn lit up her head. ‘They’re all mutilated like this one, right?’

Tsai’s face was a mask. ‘Or worse.’

‘Have you found the limbs?’

‘Not as such.’

Sevgi nodded. ‘Just bones, right?’

Oh, Ethan, you should have been around to see this. It really has happened this time, just the way you always used to bullshit me it would.

‘That’s right.’ Tsai was looking at her like a teacher with a smart kid.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding,’ said Norton, very quietly.

Sevgi turned to look at him fully. It was reflex denial, shock, not objection.

‘That’s right.’

‘Someone chopped these people up with the autosurgeon-’

She nodded, still not sure in the bright spin of the syn and the shock of the understanding, how she felt, how she should feel.

‘Yes. And ate them.’

CHAPTER FIVE

It was like a landscape out of Dali.

The CSI virtual was a forensics standard Sevgi remembered from her time with the NYPD - pristine Arizona desert as far as the eye could see, blue sky featureless but for a ghost moon that carried the designers’ logo like a watermark. Each section of the investigation presented as a separate three-storey adobe structure, distributed across the landscape in a preternaturally neat semi-circular arc. The sectional homes were open on the facing side like cutaways in an architectural model, furnished with steps so you could walk up to each level. Labels floated in the air beside each structure, neatly lettered fonts announcing data anomaly; path labs; recovered surveillance; prior record. Much of the display space was still empty, data still to come, but shelved on the exposed floors of the path lab home, the mutilated corpses from Horkan’s Pride stood on their stumps like vandalised statues in a museum. Even here, not all the organic data was in yet, but the corpses had been scanned into the system early on. Now they posed in catwalk perfection, coloured and intimate enough to make your own flesh quail as you stared at theirs. Sevgi had already seen close up, had focused with irresistible fascination on neatly sectioned bone in the densely packed meat of an arm taken off centimetres from the shoulder, and then wished she hadn’t. The syn was wearing off, leaving queasy traces of hangover beneath.

The path lab n-djinn interface, a perfectly beautiful Eurasian female in tailored blue scrubs, narrated the nightmare with machine calm.

‘The perpetrator chose limbs because they represented the simplest transfer of the automated medical system’s functions from surgery to butchery.’ An elegant gesture. ‘Amputation is an established procedure within the autosurgeon’s protocols, and it is not life threatening. After each surgical procedure, it was a simple matter to return the subject, still living, to the cryogen units, thus assuring a ready and continuing supply of fresh meat.’

‘And the automed just let it all fucking happen?’ Coyle was staring angrily about him, male outrage deprived of targets. ‘What the fuck is that?’

‘That,’ said Sevgi wearily, ‘is selective systems intrusion. Someone got into the general protocol level and closed down the ship’s djinn. For a good datahawk, it wouldn’t be difficult. All these ships have a human override option anyway, and there’s a failsafe suicide protocol wired into the n-djinn. You just have to trick it into believing it’s been corrupted, and it shuts itself down. There are a whole series of secondary blocks to prevent that damage seeping down into the discrete systems, but like we’re hearing, he didn’t need to worry about that. He wasn’t telling the medical systems to do anything they weren’t already programmed for.’

‘He?’ Rovayo. Sevgi’d already pegged her as a staunch man’s woman and this looked like confirmation - umbrage taken at potential feminazi chauvinism. ‘Why’s it got to be a he?’

Sevgi shrugged. Because, statistically, that’s the way it fucking is, she didn’t say.

‘Sorry. Figure of speech.’

‘Yeah, ’til we get the swab breakdowns back, and find out it was a man,’ drawled Norton. He stepped past Rovayo’s mutinous look, closer to the white-walled, opened architecture of the path home and its exhibits. The lab ’face gave ground and stood in deferential silence, waiting to be directly questioned. Its higher interactional functions had apparently not been enabled. Norton nodded up at the exposed grin of a female corpse, and it leapt out at them. Visual distance was elusive in the construct, it bowed and swelled like a lens according to user focus. ‘Thing I don’t get is the mess. I can see killing them all, you don’t want witnesses left around, with or without arms and legs. But why the blood on the walls? Why mutilate the faces like that?’

‘Because he was fucking cracked,’ Coyle growled. ‘He probably ate that stuff as well, right?’

‘Difficult to say.’ The lab ’face kicked in again, pointing and pulling in a bubble of data display from one of the other file houses. ‘Evidence gathered from the kitchen unit suggests meat scraped from the skulls may have been cooked and ingested. This does not seem to have been the case with the eyes, which were gouged out and then discarded.’

Sevgi barely glanced at the yanked-in focus. It was in any case a little too abstract for easy human digest - sketched molecular traces and a scrawled sidebar summary about microwave effect. Later she’d tramp over to the file house and review it at her own pace. Right now she was still staring up at the ruined face of Helena Larsen. Demodynamic specialist, psychiatric assessor. Divorced, signed up for Mars not long after. COLIN got a lot like this. You split from all you’ve known, why not. Your life’s columnar supports are crumbling all around you, you probably need the cash. Three years, the minimum qualified professional tour of duty, seems suddenly reasonable. On Mars you earn big, and, for the short-timers at least, there’s fuck all to spend it on. You’ll come home wealthy, Helena Larsen. You’ll come home with tales of an alien skyline to tell the children you’ll someday have. You’ll have the cachet of the trip to trade off and the résumé potential it represents. You’ll have moved on. Got to be better than sitting in the ruins of your old life, right? Better than clinging to whatever fragments you-

‘Investigator Ertekin?’

She blinked. She’d missed what Coyle was saying to her.

‘Sorry, just thinking,’ she said truthfully. ‘What, uh-?’

‘I asked,’ said the cop, with the heavy emphasis of repetition, ‘whether you think it’s likely that whoever did this could still be alive?’

The air in the virtuality, already a breezeless sterile cool at odds with the desert landscape, seemed to slip a couple of degrees lower. Norton looked at Sevgi, and she felt the tiny, almost imperceptible nod come up from the roots of intuition.

‘Someone blew the hatches,’ Rovayo pointed out.

‘That could have been the automated systems.’ Coyle cast a hopeful glance at the two COLIN reps. ‘Right?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Sevgi said. ‘Until we see the damage to the automated systems and the n-djinn, it’s hard to know how the ship would behave on its own.’

But there was a steady thrum building in the back of her head now, like engines under decking, like the rumble of Ethan’s voice, reading to her the time she came down bad with the flu, passages out of Pynchon that came and went blurrily as she faded in and out of focus with the fever. She snapped the memory shut. Leaned into the cold sparkle of the syn, like wetting her face in a fountain. ‘Look, we’ll know if anyone got out alive when-’

‘The swabs come in,’ Rovayo finished for her. ‘Right. But in the meantime, what do you think? Give us the benefit of your COLIN specialist insight. Could someone have made it down in one piece?’

‘Outside of the cryocaps, it’s not likely,’ Norton told her. Habitual public statement caution, the COLIN watchword. ‘And even if they did, that still puts them a hundred kilometres off the coast. That’s a long swim.’

‘Maybe someone came to get them.’ Rovayo gestured at the empty levels of the recovered surveillance adobe. ‘We got no satellite stream data yet, no overhead incidentals. No way to know what went on before the recovery team got there.’

Coyle shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make sense, Alicia. Recovery scrambled as soon as they had the co-ordinates.’

‘Who’d they use?’ Sevgi asked, trying to sound neutral. NYPD had a long standing superiority complex when it came to the Rim’s contract-out policy on emergency services, an attitude born of, and largely borne out by, New York’s disastrous flirtation with similar schemes in the past.

Rovayo glanced at Coyle.

‘Filigree Steel, right? Or, wait.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Did they just lose the bid to ExOp?’

‘Nah, that was up in Seattle. Down here, it’s still the Filstee crew.’ Coyle looked round at Sevgi and Norton. ‘They’re pretty good, Filigree. Did the job well over spec. Aerial cover inside twenty minutes, drop teams deployed. No way there was time for anyone to get in first. Either this guy’s dead inside with the rest of them, or he took the plunge when the hatches came off, and just swam off into the sunset.’

‘Wrong direction then,’ said Norton dryly.

Coyle peeled him a glance. ‘I was using a metaphor there.’

‘He does that sometimes,’ Rovayo said, deadpan.

‘I don’t think he went into the water,’ said Sevgi. ‘You’d have to be suicidal or clinically insane to make that mistake.’

Coyle stared at her. ‘Were you there earlier today, Ms Ertekin? Did you see the in-flight cuisine? You’re trying to tell me this motherfucker might not be insane?’

Sevgi grimaced. ‘This motherfucker, as you put it, had spent the last several months completely alone in deep space. Alone, that is, apart from the sporadic company of fellow crewmembers revived long enough to carve edible meat from. At a minimum, he is mentally unbalanced, yes, but-’

Rovayo snorted. ‘No shit, he’s unbalanced. You’d have to be fucking unhinged to-’

‘No.’ The force in the single syllable closed the other woman down. Words marched out of Sevgi’s mouth, words she remembered Ethan saying, almost verbatim. A cold conviction was growing in her. ‘You wouldn’t have to be insane to do these things. You’d just have to have a goal and be determined to attain it. Let’s get this straight, early on. What we’ve seen aboard Horkan’s Pride are not the symptoms of insanity, they are only evidence of great force of will. Evidence of planning and execution shorn of any socially imposed limitation. Any mental problems this person was suffering by journey’s end are going to be a result of that execution, not a cause.’

‘Speaking of planning,’ said Coyle. ‘You going to tell me you guys don’t pack these colony transports with emergency supplies? You know, like food ? In case someone wakes up unscheduled?’

‘Nobody wakes up unscheduled,’ said Norton.

‘Well excuse the fuck out of me.’ The big cop looked around elaborately. ‘I’d say on this trip someone did exactly that. Woke up unscheduled and very fucking hungry.’

‘Or they stowed away,’ Rovayo suggested. ‘Would that work?’

‘That’d be next to impossible,’ said Sevgi. ‘There’s a lot of security written into the launch protocols. You’d have to hack it all in the time between the ship’s systems being enabled and the decouple.’

Rovayo nodded. ‘And how long is that?’

‘About forty-five minutes. It takes these older ships longer to boot up.’

‘Look, about this food.’ Coyle wasn’t letting go. ‘We all know the Colony Initiative don’t like to spend any of the cash they tax out of the rest of us on anything resembling people, but are you guys really so fucking tight you won’t spring for a box of survival rations? What happens if something goes wrong mid-flight?’

Norton sighed. ‘Yeah. Okay. All COLIN vessels have onboard contingency rations. But that’s missing the point. On each run, you’ll have two qualified spaceflight officers, cryocapped separately from the hu—the passengers.’

‘The hu what?’ Rovayo asked curiously.

Human freight, Sevgi finished Norton’s slip of the tongue silently for him. Yeah, we have some lovely terminology over at COLIN. Contractual constraint. Soft losses. Quiet facts. Profit Drag. Public Perception Management.

She weighed in. NYPD commandments. Fuck finer feelings and circumstance, you back your partner up. Brusquely: ‘What we’re telling you is that there are two systems. The passenger cryocaps are wired to default into frozen. There’s no point them being awake in an emergency. They’re civilians. What are they going to do, run around screaming oh no, we’re all going to die? Onboard air’s too expensive for that shit. They’ve got nothing to contribute in a situation like that. So anything goes wrong, the whole system locks. You can’t get it open until the ship docks.’

Coyle shook his head. ‘Yeah, and what if the thing that goes wrong is that it thaws out?’

‘How?’ Sevgi gave him one of her best only-an-idiot looks. ‘You’re talking about deep space. You know how fucking cold it is out there? There isn’t enough ambient heat anywhere in the vessel to bring that system up a single degree from emergency frost. The only thing that might is the reactor, and that’s programmed to jettison if it fails.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ Rovayo doing a little partner support of her own. Sevgi caught herself in sudden sympathy. It was like passing an unexpected mirror. ‘So what about this other system? The spaceflight guys. They’re wired to wake up, right?’

‘They can wake up.’ Norton picked up again. ‘Under certain circumstances. If there’s a navigational emergency. The trajectory fails or you get unscheduled activity from the drive datahead maybe. Then the ship brings those two capsules up. Your spaceflight guys fix the problem, or call in the recovery if they can’t.’

That’s spaceflight guy, singular, people. The sour voice in her head would not shut up. Because - you tax payers don’t need to know this of course - for about a decade now we’ve been cutting back on emergency personnel by fifty per cent. It’s just so fucking expensive, you see, wasting a perfectly good cryocap berth like that, after all this stuff almost never happens, right, and even if it does who needs two pilots to fix it, when one can manage. That’s just overmanning, right?

‘Right,’ said Coyle. ‘And these guys got to eat and drink, right?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Norton gestured. Sevgi let him get on with it. Maybe from the long stay in virtual, her head was starting to hurt. ‘There’s tanked water anyway, for fusion mass, for radiation shielding, for the coolant systems. Even in the back-up tanks, there’s more than two guys could drink even if they stayed out there for a couple of years. And obviously there’s food. But the supplies are calculated on the assumption that these two guys aren’t going to be up and about for very long. If it’s a simple problem they fix it and then go back to sleep. If it’s not, they’ll send an SOS and then go back to sleep until the rescue ship gets there.’

‘What if the system won’t let them refreeze?’ Coyle wasn’t going to be shaken loose of what was apparently an endemic lack of faith in technology. Maybe, Sevgi thought sourly, he’d grown up in Jesusland and immigrated to the Rim.

Norton hesitated. ‘Statistically, that’s so close to impossible that-’

‘Not impossible,’ said Rovayo lazily. ‘Because, my memory serves me right, that happened to some poor motherfucker about five, six years back. Exactly that. Woke up and couldn’t get refrozen, had to sit out the whole voyage.’

‘Yes, I remember that too.’ Norton nodded. ‘The cryocap spat him out and wouldn’t reset, some kind of systems glitch. Guy had to sit out the trajectory until the recovery crew got to him. See, if the transport is close enough to point of origin, emergency systems turn it around and send it back to meet the rescue ship, which cuts the retrieval time right down. If they’re closer to end of journey, they burn emergency fuel to speed up. However you cut it, you don’t need that much food to keep someone alive until they’re recovered.’

Well, Sevgi parenthesised to herself, not if you luck out and get a friendly orbital configuration anyway. But we don’t like to talk about that, guys. That’s what we in the trade like to call a Quiet Fact. Sort of thing even accredited COLIN staff won’t necessarily have pointed out to them. Sort of thing you might have to dig a little for.

But, as Horkan’s Pride fell silently, implacably homeward, Sevgi had done that digging. Detective Ertekin has a sound analytical approach to casework, her first year homicide report had come back one time, and shows energy and enthusiasm in absorbing fresh background detail. She has a talent for adjusting rapidly to new circumstances. She did her homework, they were trying to say, and here, nearly a decade later in the heart of COLIN, she did it again. Did her homework and found that the distance between Earth and Mars could vary by up to a factor of six. Mars, it seemed, orbited elliptically, and that plus the different orbital velocities of the two planets meant that they could be anything between about sixty and about four hundred million kilometres apart, depending on when you chose to span the gap. Even oppositions - Mars and Earth catching each other up, running temporarily neck and neck, so to speak - could vary by a million or more klicks. COLIN transit launches took some account of these variations, but since the cycle worked itself out over several years, you couldn’t just wait around and send all your traffic at the short end. That semi-famous unscheduled wake-up guy five, six years back had got lucky, hit somewhere near an opposition with the trajectory down well under the hundred million klicks.

This time around, their homecoming guy hadn’t got so lucky. Horkan’s Pride, at the thick end of the cycle, was coming home across more than three hundred million kilometres of cold, empty space.

And no lunch stops.

‘Okay,’ said Rovayo. ‘So there’s no SOS because the n-djinn is down. But there’s got to be provision for a manual back-up, right?’

Norton nodded. ‘Yes. It isn’t difficult to do, there are step by step instructions nailed up in the comms nest.’

‘And our guy chose to ignore them.’

‘So it appears, yes. He ran silent all the way home, and presumably from somewhere close to the Mars end. There’s not enough food on board to do that, not even for one person. You want to sit in silence and wait out the whole trajectory, you’ve got to find something else to eat.’

‘So the guy is fucking cracked.’ The tinge of told-you-so in Rovayo’s voice. Bending back to her original assumptions. Okay, so she’d let this be a man, but she wasn’t going to believe he could be sane. ‘Got to be. He didn’t need-’

‘Yeah, he did,’ Sevgi said it to the air, detachedly. Time to run this for everybody’s benefit. ‘He did need to run silent. He couldn’t call in the rescue ship, and he couldn’t get back in the cryocap, assuming that it would have let him, because both those options would have defeated his whole purpose.’

A flicker of quiet. She saw Rovayo shoot an exasperated glance at Coyle. The big cop spread his hands.

‘The purpose being?’

‘To get home free.’

‘Seems a little extreme,’ said Rovayo sardonically. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’

‘No, it’s not extreme.’ Sevgi could hear herself talking, but the words seemed suddenly heavy, hard to get out. The syn was deserting her, retreating from her speech centres, leaving her with the fading light of the inspiration but no clear way to get it across. She fumbled for clarity. ‘Look, spaceflight’s a closed system. You dock in orbit, that’s quarantine control, post-cryocap medical checks, ID download. A week usually, before they let you down the nanorack elevator and out. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t want to go through all that. He couldn’t afford to arrive cryocapped with the others, and he certainly couldn’t afford to be rescued. Both those options end at the nanorack. He needed to walk away unseen, unregistered. And this was the only way he could do it.’

‘Yeah, but why?’ Coyle wanted to know. ‘Six or seven months of cannibalism, isolation, probable insanity. Risking a splashdown at the end of it all. Plus hotwiring the crycocap, that’s got to carry some attendant risk, right? I mean, come on. How badly could you want to get home free?’

A wry grin from Norton, but he said nothing. Not for public consumption. Sevgi waved the diplomacy away.

‘That’s missing the point. It’s no secret that there are people on Mars who wish they’d never signed up, who’d like to come home. But they’re the grunts, the cheap labour end of the colony effort. This man was not a grunt. We’re talking about someone who’s at ease manipulating cryogen and medical datasystems, who’s able to operate the onboard emergency landing protocols-’

Yeah, that’s something else I don’t get,’ Rovayo, frowning. ‘The whole trip, this guy’s taking the passengers in and out of the cryocaps to feed off. Why not just kill one of them and stick himself in the empty freezer in their place?’

‘Kind of hard to explain when they take you out at the other end,’ said Coyle dryly.

His partner shrugged. ‘Okay, so you set the cryocap to wake you up a week out from home. Then-’

Norton shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. The cryocaps are individually coded at nano-level for each passenger, and they’ve got very rigid programme parameters. They’d reject a different body out of hand. You’d need to be a cryogen biotech specialist to get round that, and even then you probably couldn’t do it mid-transit. That kind of coding gets done while the ship’s in dock. They take the whole system down to do it. And you wouldn’t be able to recode an early wake up either, for much the same reasons. The whole point of what happened here is that it was all within the existing parameters of the automated systems. There’s programmed provision for bringing a passenger temporarily out of cryogen for medical procedures. There is no provision for swapping passengers about, or letting them wake up early. ‘

‘And he was smart enough, or skilled enough to know that,’ said Sevgi. ‘Think about that. He knew exactly which systems he could safely subvert, and he did it without tripping a single alarm in the process.’

‘Yeah, yeah, and he’s a mean hand at alternative cuisine,’ growled Coyle. ‘Your point is?’

‘My point is, anyone with the skills and strengths this man has shown would have gone out on a qualpro tour, which means a three to five year gig, no requirement to renew. He could have waited, come home cryocapped and comfortably wealthy.’ Sevgi looked around at them. ‘Why didn’t he?’

Rovayo shrugged. ‘Maybe he couldn’t do the time. Three years is a long stretch when you’re looking at it from the starting line. Ask the new fish up at Folsom or Quentin Two, and that’s just jail-time here on Earth. Maybe this guy gets off the shuttle at Bradbury, takes one look at all those red rocks and realises he made a big mistake, he just can’t go through with it.’

‘That doesn’t fit with the force of will he’d need to do this,’ said Norton soberly.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Sevgi agreed. ‘And anyway, he could have called in the rescue ships as soon as he was outside the Mars support envelope. He didn’t-’

‘Support envelope?’ Rovayo frowned enquiry, at Norton. ‘What’s that?’

Norton nodded. ‘Works like this. If you launch a COLIN transport from Mars to Earth and something goes wrong, something that requires a rescue, then it’s only worth the Mars people coming out up to a certain point. After that point, the transport is so far along the trajectory it would have made more sense to send help from the Earth end. Anyone wanting to get home would have to wait at least until the tipover point, otherwise it’s all for nothing. Mars rescue brings you back and you’re still stuck there, with whatever penalties COLIN chooses to enforce on top. You need the rescue to come from Earth, because that way, whatever else happens to you, you’ve at least made it home. They’re not going to waste the payload cost on sending you back again, just out of spite.’

‘Just out of curiosity,’ said Coyle. ‘What are those penalties you’re talking about? What do COLIN do to you if you step out of line on Mars?’

Norton shuttled another glance at Sevgi. She shrugged.

‘It works the same as anywhere else,’ Norton said with trained care. They’d all been drilled in acceptable presentation on this one too. ‘There’s a suite of sanctions called Contractual Constraint, but it’s what you’d expect, the usual stuff. Financial penalties set against your contract, incarceration in some serious cases. If you’re a short-timer, your jail time gets added onto the contract length without compensation. So if you’re homesick, it doesn’t pay to act up.’

‘Yeah.’ Rovayo cranked an eyebrow. ‘And if you do make it back to Earth? Unauthorised, I mean.’

Norton hesitated. Sevgi said it for him.

‘That’s never been done before.’

And she wondered vaguely why she was smiling as she spoke. Cold, hard little smile. Ethan stood there in her memory and grinned back at her.

‘Oho,’ said Coyle.

‘What, never ?’ Rovayo again. ‘In thirty years, this has never happened before?’

‘Thirty-two years,’ said Norton. ‘Over twice that if you count the original bubble crews back before the nanoforming really kicked in. Like Sevgi says, it’s a closed system. Very hard to beat.’

Coyle shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. He could have called in a rescue from the Earth end. Okay, he’d maybe do some time, but Jesus fuck, he did the time anyway, out there. How much worse could white-collar jail-time be than that?’

‘But he wasn’t looking at just a white-collar sentence,’ said Sevgi softly.

‘Look.’ Coyle wasn’t listening to her. He was still looking for somewhere to dump his anger. ‘What I still don’t get is this: why didn’t you people send out the rescue ship on spec, as soon as the n-djinn went down?’

‘Too fucking cheap is why,’ muttered Rovayo.

‘Because there wasn’t any point.’ Sevgi said evenly. ‘Horkan’s Pride was coming home anyway. As far as we knew, the crew were unharmed.’

‘Un-fucking-harmed ?’ Coyle again, disbelieving.

Norton stepped into the breach. ‘Yeah, I know how that sounds. But you’ve got to understand how this works. It was only the n-djinn that stopped talking to us. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicise the fact. We’ve had cases where the djinn goes offline temporarily, then blips back on a few days later. Sometimes they just die. We don’t really know why.’

He spanned an invisible cube with both hands, chopped downward. Sevgi looked elsewhere, face kept carefully immobile.

‘The point is, it doesn’t matter that much. The ship will run fine on automated modular systems. Think of the n-djinn as the captain of a ship. If the captain on one of those Pacific factory rafts dies, you don’t have to send out a salvage vessel to bring the raft in to port, do you?’ A self-deprecatory smile at the rhetorical question. ‘Same thing with Horkan’s Pride. Losing the n-djinn didn’t affect the ship’s failsafe protocols. Mars and Earth traffic control were both still getting the standard green lights from Horkan’s Pride. Shipboard atmosphere and rotational gravity constant, no hull breaches, cryocap systems all online, trajectory uncompromised, pilot systems active. The baseline machines were all still working, it’s just the ship itself that wouldn’t talk to us.’

Rovayo shook her head. ‘And the fact this hijo de puta was taking people out of the cryocaps and cutting them up, that didn’t register anywhere?’

‘No,’ admitted Norton tiredly. ‘No, it didn’t.’

‘Without the djinn, there was no way to know what was going on.’ Sevgi droned on, partly bored, partly trying to bury her own grim conviction that Rovayo had guessed right about COLIN’s real motives. Mid-trajectory retrieval was still a mind-numbingly expensive call for any flight project manager to make. ‘The baseline system is exactly what it sounds like. It tells us if something malfunctions. There was no visible malfunction, and since the whole crew was supposed to be in cryocap, that meant - logically - there was no way for them to be harmed. We had no way of knowing any different. And the ship was on course. In a situation like that, you wait. That’s how spaceflight works.’

Rovayo took the tutorial edge on the last comment without blinking.

‘Yeah? Well, if the ship wasn’t talking to you, how was it going to dock at the nanorack?’

Norton spread his hands. ‘Same answer. Autonomic engagement, the docking facility takes over from the pilot systems on approach. We had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen.’

‘Seems to me,’ said Coyle, ‘whoever did this knew your systems inside out.’

‘Yes, they did.’ And our miserable cost-cutting souls too. Sevgi shook off the thought. Time to get back on track. ‘They knew our systems, because they’d studied them and they were highly skilled at planning an intrusion into those systems, which means a high degree of raw intelligence and insurgency training. And they were utterly committed to their own survival above and beyond any other concern, which takes an extreme degree of strength and mental discipline. And yet this same person was so terrified of being registered on arrival that they did this to avoid it.’

Sevgi gestured around the virtuality. Aspects of the crime leapt out at them as the systems read focus in the wake of her sweeping arm. Outraged data, cut-and-splice code wounding marked in siren colours, frozen footage snaps of cryocap fluids spilled across pristine floors, blood spotted on walls and stripped-skull grins.

She drew a deep breath.

‘Now does anyone want to tell me what those pixels paint?’

She wasn’t that far ahead of them. Coyle’s eyes changed with the understanding, anger finally doused, damped down to something else. Rovayo went very still. Norton - Sevgi twisted to meet his eyes - just looked thoughtful. But no one said anything. Oddly, it was the path ’face that took up the challenge. It thought it had been asked a question.

‘The salients you describe,’ the confected woman said precisely, ‘are consistent with the perpetrator being a variant thirteen re-engineered male.’

Sevgi nodded her thanks at the ’face.

‘Yes. Aren’t they just.’

They all stood there while it sank in.

‘Great,’ said Coyle finally. ‘Just what we need, a fucking twist for a perp.’

CHAPTER SIX

The humidity loop on string seventeen went down, some time on Friday night, they figured, and once again the back-up protectives failed to come on line. Saturday came in foggy, so at first no one noticed when the dish covers stayed dialled up to full transparency. But when the California summer sun finally burned through the fog that afternoon and hit the glass, the incubating cultures got it full force. Sirens cut loose back at the wharf. Scott and Ren roared out there at panic speed in the Zodiac, but by the time they got into their wetsuits and into the water, they’d lost pretty much everything on the string. They paddled about a bit making sure, disconnected the system and phoned the detail in to Nocera. Then they powered back to the wharf in glum and dripping silence. Scott didn’t need to voice what they both knew. Seventeen was loaded to the roots - it had about a quarter of the month’s crop on it. When Ward got back from checking the deep trellis range and heard about this, he was going to go ballistic. It was the third time that summer.

‘What happens when you buy your software out of fucking Texas,’ grinned Nocera, feet up on the console while he and Scott sat waiting for some hired-down-the-wires San Diego machine consultancy to trace and fix the fault. ‘Ward’s never going to learn. You want Rim quality, you got to pay Rim prices.’

‘It’s not the software,’ Scott said, mainly because he knew it wasn’t, but also because he was getting tired of Nocera’s constant cracks. ‘It’s the seals.’

‘It fucking is the software. Ward got cheap and cheerful from a bunch of Jesusland hicks probably think altered carbon’s what you buy for indoor barbecues. Those guys are running five years behind the stuff coming out of the valley now, minimum.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the software,’ Scott snapped. ‘We had this same shit back in May and that was before the fucking upgrade.’ Before you hired on, he didn’t add. And then his own language caught up with him and he coloured with the shame. He’d never sworn like that before he started working out here.

‘Yeah. Same shit, same shit software.’ Nocera wasn’t going to shut up, he was on a roll. He gestured around the con room. ‘Ward buys his upgrades the same place he got the original system. Cow Tech, Kansas. Shat fresh out of a longhorn’s ass.’

‘You said Texas a minute ago.’

‘Texas, Kansas?’ Nocera made a dismissive gesture. ‘In the end, what’s the fucking difference? It’s all-’

‘Leave him alone, Emil. We all got to be born somewhere.’

Ren stood in the doorway of the control room, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth and hands in her coverall pockets. She’d stomped off as soon as she peeled her wetsuit, without a backward word. Scott knew by now not to go after her when she hit that mood. Not ’til she’d smoked it down a little, leastways.

Nocera sighed weightily. ‘Look, Carm, it’s not like that. I don’t get on Osborne here, just ’cause he’s a fence-hopper. Lot of people would round here, but not me. I figure a man’s got to make a living, even if he has to tunnel under a fenceline to do it. But he’s not going to sit here and tell me that cheap crap they spin up in Jesusland works as well as Rimtech. Because it just ain’t fucking so.’

Ren gave Scott a weary smile.

‘Ignore him,’ she said. ‘With Ward out of sight, there’s no telling how much custom-nasty shit Emil here’s put up his nose today.’

Nocera wagged a cautionary finger at her. ‘You pick your chemicals, Carm. I’ll pick mine.’

‘This?’ Ren removed the spliff from her mouth and held it aloft for general scrutiny. ‘This is a cheap drug, Emil. I won’t be the one coming round begging for a sub the week before payday.’

‘Hey, fuck you.’

She put the spliff back in her mouth, crushed the end to life between a calloused thumb and forefinger and drew hard. The ember flared up with an clearly audible splintering crack. She sighed out a cloud of smoke, looked at Nocera through it for a moment.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve had better offers this week.’

‘What, like from altar boy here?’

Scott felt himself flush again, hot on hot. Carmen Ren was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in the flesh, and since they’d been on field maintenance together, he’d been seeing a lot of that flesh. She stripped off in the tackle room with an utter lack of self-consciousness that he knew Pastor William would have called prideful and unwomanly. Scott politely turned his back whenever she got naked this way, but he still caught glimpses as she zipped herself into the wetsuit, or peeled unexpectedly to the waist in the Zodiac when it was hot. Her skin was like pale honey and the curves of her body were subtle but unmistakable even in the shapeless Ward Biosupply coveralls they all wore around the wharf. But more than all of that, Carmen Ren had long, straight hair that spilled like black water onto her shoulders whenever she unpinned it from the spiderform static clip that kept it up, and a curious, negligent way of tipping her head to one side as she did it. She had liquid dark, ironic eyes that lifted delicately at the corners and cheekbones like ledges on some Himalayan peak, and when she concentrated on something, her whole face took on a porcelain immobility that splintered his heart like the sound of that ember in the spliff.

The last few weeks, Scott had found himself thinking about Ren a lot when he went home at nights, and in a way that he knew was sinful. He’d done his best to resist the urges, but it was no good. She floated into his dreams unbidden, in postures and scenarios that made him flush when he recalled them during the waking day. More than once recently he’d woken tight and hard from the dreams, his hands already on himself and the taste of Ren’s name in his mouth. Worse still, he had the feeling that when Ren looked at him, she could see right through him to that sweaty core of desire, and despised him for it.

Now she was smoking, looking down on Nocera as if he was something that had just leaked out of the mulch vats.

‘You really are being a disagreeable little prick today, aren’t you?’ She turned to Scott. ‘You want to go get a coffee up on the wharf?’

‘Uh, with you, together, you mean?’ Scott bounced to his feet as she nodded. ‘Sure. Yeah. Great.’

‘Uhm, uh, with, uhm, you?’ Nocera sneered, made dying-insect-leg motions with his arms. Cranked up a joke-Jesusland accent from network comedy stock. ‘Duh, darlin’, how kin ah refuse such a laidy. Uhm, praise, uhm, th’ everlovin’ lord.’

Scott felt his fists clench. He’d been in enough scuffles back home to know he wasn’t much of a fighter, and to know from looking at Nocera that he was. He’d seen the scars when the older man was getting in and out of a wetsuit, read it also in stance and the blank challenge of the unkind eyes. It was like looking at a later edition of Jack Mackenzie’s older brother, the one who’d enlisted on his sixteenth birthday and come home a year later, sunburnt and full of scalp tales from places none of them had ever heard of.

Still, he’d taken about as much of Nocera’s Rim superiority as he -

Ren glided into the gap, almost before Scott realised he was turning to face the other man.

‘I said a coffee, Scott. Not a broken nose.’ She nodded at the door. ‘Come on. Leave this dickhead to play with himself.’

‘Be a lot more fun than playing with you, Ren.’ Nocera leaned past Ren’s hip, still in his chair, still grinning. ‘I’m telling you kid, I know her sort inside out. Been there, eaten the pussy. You will have more fun jerking off.’

Scott surged forward, fists raised. The new flush slammed through him, itching at the roots of his hair and burning across his cheeks. He saw the grin slide off Nocera’s face, replaced with a sudden, speculative interest. The other man’s boots swung unhurriedly off the console to the floor. Scott knew then he was going to get a kicking, but fuck it-

And suddenly he was pressed up against Ren. Flash scent of her hair, still damp, warmth of skin and soft curves right underneath his eyes, and then she pushed him firmly back towards the door. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.

‘Get out,’ she said, firm as the hand on his chest. ‘Wait for me upstairs.’

He went, stumbling a little, shame and relief pulsing through him in about equal quantities. The door closed behind him, shutting down whatever Nocera was sneering to a barely audible murmur. Ren’s angry tones trod it down. He wanted to stay and listen but . . .

He went quietly along the bulb-lit metal corridor, up the clanking metal steps to the topside offices and out into the late afternoon sunlight, still breathing tightly. He crossed to the rail on one of the wharf’s access gantries and gripped the carbon fibre weave in both fists, as if he could crush it. He stared down at his whitened knuckles.

... fucking Nocera, fucking Rim assholes, fucking place . . .

But he’d known, a small, calm part of himself came and reminded him. He’d always known what it was going to be like. He’d known because Uncle Leland, who’d been Rimside before he was born, had told him all about it. Pastor William had told him too, in bitten-off hellfire-tinged terms. His mother had wept and told him, again and again. His friends had jeered and told him.

Everyone had told him, because everyone knew what they thought of Republicans out on the godless Rim. Hard grind and hatred, it was all they’d offer him. They’d use him up, spit on him while they were doing it, and if the immigration bogies didn’t get him, then debt and the gangmasters would. He’d have no rights there, no one to turn to. He’d be nothing, worse than nothing, one of the silent service underclass that were cheaper than machines and had to be as quiet, as uncomplaining and efficient or else bang, your average hi-tech hi-demand Rim citizen there just went right ahead and junked them for something that’d do the job faster, cheaper, better.

Still, I won’t tell you not to go. Leland, the last week before Scott skipped, parked by Scott’s side on the split rail fence, watching sunset smear the sky up over the mountains. He didn’t know it, but Scott had already paid the handler in Bozeman the upfront half. He was due on the truck next Tuesday. I won’t tell you not to go, because there’s nothing here for you that’s better. People hate the Rim, and there’s a pot of good reasons for that, but there’ll be chances out there you won’t get here if you stay your whole God-given life. The money hasn’t settled like it has here. It’s still moving, it’s not all classed up and fossilised. You can track it out there, go where it is. Get lucky, you can maybe carve some off for yourself. And if you stay, get legal, get a family, then your kids can maybe have even more. You know, schooling’s free in the Rim. I mean, really free, and real schooling, not the bullcrap we get here.

They sat for a while and evening deepened the colours of the sunset. The air started to chill.

Why’d you come back then, Leland ? he’d asked finally.

Leland grinned and looked down at his work-worn hands. You always ask the good ones, Scotty. Why’d I come back? I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t strong enough to stay away. I missed this place something grim, you know. We both did, me and your pop. We always talked about coming back, and I think that’s what helped us stay away. Then when Daniel had his accident, there was no more talk, no one to talk to, and that missing started to really gnaw at me.

Scott knew the gnawing well. Sometimes he beat it, for days at a time, especially in the early days, the early shit jobs, when work wore him down and left him no strength or time for anything but itself and sleep. But the longing always came back, and now, now he had time, and money put away, he could feel the same crumbling that must have taken Leland. He said his prayers every night, the way he’d promised Mom he would, went to a Christian church when he could find one, but lately he was confused in the things he thought about praying for.

‘You okay now?’

He started. He hadn’t heard Ren come up behind him.

‘Where I come from,’ he said tightly, straight off, ‘you don’t talk that way in front of women.’

She inclined her head, gave him a gentle smile. ‘Well, where I come from we don’t segregate our speech. But thanks, anyway. It was a nice thought. Especially since Nocera would have walked all over you. He’s an asshole, Scott, but that doesn’t mean he can’t handle himself.’

‘I know that. I seen his type before.’

‘Have you?’ She examined him closely for a moment. Raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, you have, haven’t you? Well then, that was a very brave thing you tried to do.’

He felt the bloom of something inside. Felt it wither again as Ren shook her head at him.

‘Pretty fucking dumb, but very brave. Shall we go and get that coffee?’

Ward Biosupply had begun life as one of several marine biotech start-ups working off the Kwok commercial wharf complex, but over time it had absorbed a lot of the neighbouring competition and now sprawled across the north end of the complex in a patchwork collection of office prefabs, scaffolded sub docks and newly built warehousing. To find anything that didn’t belong to Ulysses Ward, you had to walk one of the narrow linking gantries over to the south side, where a run of eateries with sea views catered to the wharf’s workers.

They ducked into a place called Chung’s which was widely reckoned to be the best of the caffeine joints, and had a set of displays running club footage from the Singapore bloodbeat scene.

‘This is good,’ Ren said, gesturing at the screens with her coffee mug. ‘Beats that saccharine shit they pipe in on site.’

‘Yeah.’ Gruffly - he was still smarting a little from her calling him dumb. Besides which, he quite liked the on-site music. And he didn’t really approve of the massed writhing bodies rubbing up against each other’s all-but nakedness.

She drank, nodded appreciatively at the taste. ‘Yeah. Be good to be caffeinated too, come to that. If Ward’s going to shout at us, I want to be awake when he does it. I’ve been up since four this morning.’

‘Doing what?’

She shrugged. ‘Ah, you know how it is.’

By which he knew she meant she had another job. And was therefore illegal like him, because out here if you were legitimate, you’d get by pretty easily on a single wage. It was the standout difference between the Rim and the Repubic.

The hint of solidarity softened his sulk.

‘Things’ll smooth out when you’ve been here a while,’ he offered in return. ‘I was working every open-eye hour, three different places ’til I hooked this gig. Ward likes to run his mouth when things go wrong, but he’s a pretty good boss under that.’

She nodded.

‘I guess things must have been pretty grim where you’re from, right?’ she said shrewdly. ‘Where is that? I’m guessing Nebraska? The Dakotas, maybe?’

‘Montana.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Water war country. Man, that must have been tough growing up.’

‘They got it worse in other places,’ he said defensively, though he couldn’t have named any offhand. ‘Just, well, you know. Hard to get paying work, you don’t know the right people.’

She nodded. ‘Plus ça change.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She watched the screens. ‘Ward say anything to you about when he’d be back?’

‘Not really. Said it might be most of the day. I figure he’s got to be aiming on some serious overhaul work. Usually, trip like that, trellis check, he’d be out and back in not much more than a couple of hours.’ He hesitated. ‘Carmen, you mind if I ask you a question?’

‘Sure.’ It was said absently, she wasn’t really paying attention.

‘Where are you from?’

Sudden, sidelong glance. Now he had her attention.

‘That’s a long story, Scott.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘You sure you want to be that bored?’

‘I won’t be. I like hearing about places I haven’t been.’

‘Makes you think I’m from someplace else?’

But she grinned as she said it, in a way that said he was supposed to join in. He grinned back, flushing only a little.

‘Come on, Carmen. You wouldn’t be working for Ward if you were Rim born and bred. None of us would.’ He nodded around at the clientele, dropped his voice a prudent couple of notches. ‘Everyone in this place is from someplace else. I don’t figure you for any different.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Detective, huh?’

‘I just pay attention,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I guess you do.’

‘So come on - tell me. Where’d you swing in from?’

There was a long pause. Scott waited. He’d had these moments before with fellow illegals, the weightless gap before trust engaged, before each one shed the load of suspicion and talked together like two free Americans once would have done, back before the inter-nationalist scum and the Chinese - political Chinese, he reminded himself, you’re not a racist, Scott - broke apart the greatest nation on the face of the Earth and cast down the fractured remnants like Moses breaking the tablets.

‘Taiwan,’ she said, and his heart welled up with the knowledge that yes, she did trust him. ‘You heard of Taiwan?’

‘Right. I mean, sure.’ Falling over himself in eagerness. ‘That’s in China, right? It’s like, a Chinese province.’

Ren snorted. ‘They fucking wish. It’s an island, and it’s off the coast of China, you got that right. But we’re an independent state. Written that way into every Pacific Rim trade agreement and non-proliferation pact in the last hundred years. What you call a hothouse economy, same status as the Angeline Freeport, same hyperpowered output and no one wants to fuck with it in case they break it and the whole Rim feels the backwash. That’s where I grew up.’

‘So why’d you leave?’

She gave him a sharp look, for all it had been an innocent question. Scott couldn’t see leaving a place that was doing that well for any reason on Earth, not if it was your home, not if you grew up there.

‘I mean,’ he stumbled. ‘I guess you weren’t happy there, right? But, you know, it sounds like the kind of place a person would be happy.’

She smiled a little. ‘Well, it has its up sides. But even in hothouse economies, you got losers as well as winners. I mean, not everyone in the Freeport’s a movie star or a nanotech licensee, right?’

‘Got that right.’ He’d worked in the Freeport on and off, would never go back if he didn’t have to.

‘Okay, so like I said, winners and losers, if you’re the loser then-’

‘You don’t want to talk like that, Carmen.’ Scott leaned across the table, earnest. ‘You’re not a loser just on account of you gotta go somewhere else to make a better life for yourself. None of us are losers here, we’re just looking for that opportunity to get back on the horse.’

For a moment, it got him a blank look. Then, the confusion cleared from her porcelain face.

‘Ah, right. Culture gap. No, I’m not talking about losers the way you people do. I mean losers in the trade-off. Some win, some lose, the wheel goes round. That kind of thing.’

‘You people?’ He tried to hide the hurt. ‘What do you mean, you people?’

‘You know, guys like you.’ She gestured impatiently. ‘Old Americans, heartlanders. From the Republic.’

‘Oh, okay. But look, Carmen,’ he allowed himself a superior smile. ‘We’re not the old Americans, that’s the Union, that sell-out eastern scum, all their UN-loving pals. The Confederated Republic is the New America. We’re the Phoenix rising, Carm.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean, uhm,’ he stumbled again, looking for language that wouldn’t offend. ‘Look, I know probably you didn’t go to a church the same way I always did, guess for you it was some kind of temple or something, but in the end it’s the same thing, right?’ Pleased with himself for the way he’d eased out from under Pastor William’s unremitting Hellfire and One True Christ ranting, seen a better light in the succession of more moderate churches he’d had to make do with over the last couple of years. ‘I mean whatever you call God, if you accept that God as your guiding principle the way the Republic does, then any nation that does that has to succeed, right? Has to rise up in the end, no matter what Satan does to lay snares in our path.’

Ren looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Are you really a, uh, a Christian?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘So you belie-’

Her phone blipped at them. She fished it out and put it to her ear.

‘Yeah?’ Features tautening, the way he’d seen it that morning when the news about the humidity loop came through. ‘Got it. Be right there.’

She snapped the phone off again.

‘Ward,’ she said. ‘He’s back, and he’s pretty fucking pissed off.’

Pretty pissed off was about right. Scott could hear Ward’s bellowing through the metal walls of the con room while they were still at the far end of the corridor. He followed Ren along the narrow space, hurrying to keep up with her curiously long, rapid strides. He would have tried to get ahead of her, to go first in case Nocera was still behaving like an asshole, but there was no room to pass, and anyway . . .

The door sliced back to admit them. Ward’s rage boiled out, suddenly on full audio. Scott was used to the sound, but this time he thought there was an edge on the voice he hadn’t heard before, something that went well beyond anger

‘. . . the fucking point of all this planning, if we’re-’

He shut up as he saw them. Ulysses Ward was a big, bearish man, muscular from the constant sub-aqua and surface swimming time the business demanded, balding in a way you didn’t see so much of on this side of the fenceline. He flushed when he got angry, as he was now, and he punctuated his speech with aggressive motion of limbs and head. Scott had never seen him actually hit anyone, but he often gave off the impression that it wasn’t entirely out of the question. Nocera, perhaps wisely, had given him centre stage in the con room and he stood there now, fists clenched.

‘We’re back,’ said Ren superfluously.

‘So I fucking see.’ Ward seemed to notice Scott for the first time. ‘You, get down to the sub dock and take a look at the air scrubbers on Lastman. Felt like I was breathing farts and fumes the last hour back, I nearly fucking had to surface it got so bad.’

For about half a second, before he spotted the idiocy of it, Scott thought about refusing to leave Ren until Ward had calmed down. He swallowed instead, said: ‘Might be a compatibility problem, all that software we took out of, uh, Fell 8 was-’

Ward pinned him with a glare. ‘And can you fix that for me if it is?’

‘Well, no, but-’

‘No, that’s right. Because I didn’t fucking hire you as a software specialist. So why don’t you get the fuck down there like I asked you to, and take a fucking look at what you can fucking fix for me? All right? Simple enough for you?’

Scott looked at him, knowing he was flushing. Breathed in hard, nodded on clenched teeth and lips pulled tight.

‘Good, then why are you still standing here?’

Scott wheeled about and plunged back into the corridor, fury rising through him like heat. One more month, he promised himself silently. One more fucking month, and out. Before today, he’d thought Ward was okay, he’d thought the man was an American. Guy lost his temper now and then, but what real man didn’t. Point was, he knew where the lines were. But now, talking that way, treating Scott like he was some just-over-the-fence liability who’d fucked up, when all the time it was Scott had been warning Ward that if you were going to cannibalise plug-ins from one sub to another, you couldn’t just expect that the systems would fall in love with each other without you ran a whole slew of up-to-date compatibility patches.

He was on the stairs down to the dock, when he became aware that something had changed fractionally in the light in the corridor behind him.

He stopped on the first step, looked back.

Saw a tall, figure advancing down the passageway from the other end, darkening the view along the narrow perspectives as it passed under each overhead bulb and got between Scott and the light source. This guy really was tall, and big with it, and advancing with inexorable calm. Someone not used to being stopped, someone who must not have liked the signs all over the topside offices that asked you to buzz and take a seat while you waited, one of our staff will be with you shortly, must instead have decided to just come down anyway and find whatever he was looking for.

Scott lifted an arm and waved.

‘Uh, hey,’ he called.

The figure gave no indication that it had seen or heard him. It moved steadily along the corridor towards the con room door, seemed to be wearing a long coat and had one hand held stiffly down inside the folds of the garment-

And suddenly, out of nowhere, a lever tipped over in Scott’s guts. Something was wrong. This was trouble.

He hopped off the step and jogged back up the corridor, towards the newcomer. He didn’t call out again, there was no point. He knew from experience how voices boomed and echoed in the metal confines of the corridor - this guy had heard him well enough. And yes, there was definitely something in that coat-shrouded hand. He saw the way the material wrapped stiffly around it. He dropped the jog, kicked into a sprint.

They met at the door. Scott’s sprint died, puddled right out of him. What he had to say dried up in his mouth. He gaped.

It was the face. His mind seemed to gibber it. It was the face, the face.

Right out of the End Times comics they gave out every fourth Sunday in church, the ones the little kids got nightmares over and the older kids had to earn with red ticks in Pastor William’s Book of Deeds. Itwas the same hollow-cheeked privation and clamped mouth, the long, untidy hair hanging past the hard angled bones of cheeks and jaw, the same burning eyes-

The Gaze of Judgement. Right out of Volume II Issue 63.

His knees trembled. His mouth worked. He couldn’t-

The door hummed - he’d never noticed the noise before now - and slid back. Voices within, still angry.

The coat swirled, the stranger’s right arm came free, came up swinging. Something hit Scott in the side of the head and he stumbled, went down in an awkward, twisted-limb sprawl. Lightning switched through his head, left sparks and a wow and flutter effect in his ears. The Gaze lit on him briefly, then swung away again, left and into the opened con room. The stranger stepped through.

Yells erupted. Nocera and Ward, almost in unison. ‘This is private fucking property, asshole, what do you-’

A sudden silence that sang above the numbness in his head where he’d been hit. Then Ward again, raw disbelief.

‘You? What the fuck are you doing in here? What-’

Deep, soft cough - a sound he knew from somewhere.

And the screaming started.

Scott felt the shrieking wring sweat from his pores, turn his skin shivery-ticklish with horror. Like the time Aaron got his arm trapped in the teeth of Dougie Straker’s rock breaker, exactly the same feeling - the sound of agony, of damage so massive it ripped register and recognition out of the voice that made it, left only a flayed shriek of denial that could have belonged to anyone and almost anything.

Carmen!

Scott flailed about. Panic for her got him to his knees, got him to his feet. He felt blood trickling in his hair. He stumbled and almost fell, braced himself on the edge of the door just as it started to slide closed again. The mechanism trembled against his grip a moment, then gave and sank back to full open. Scott shoved himself upright and staggered through.

He had time for one flash-burnt glimpse.

Blood, everywhere, the siren colour of it shocked onto the consoles and wall, what looked like a couple of fistfuls of offal from the discount end of a butcher’s counter drip-sliding down the screens. Nocera was down, face turned awkwardly sideways, eyes open, cheek pressed hard to the ill-swept, dusty floor as if he was listening for rats in the understructure. More blood, a broad, wine-dark puddle of it leaking out around his midriff, tongues of the stuff twisting out through the scattered dust. Over his body, Ren and the stranger wrestled for a squat-barrelled weapon - Scott made the match with the soft impact he’d heard, one of the Cressi sharkpunch guns from the cabinet upstairs. Supposed to be locked, he was always telling Ward that, but-

Ward lay on his back beyond.

More blood again, the big man was thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tunnel - you could see right down to the molars and a trembling whitish yellow tongue - and the screams came up out of it in sickening waves. His eyes clawed onto Scott as he stood in the doorway, nailed him there. Wide and pleading, crazy with pain, Scott couldn’t know whether his boss knew him or not. He made to throw himself forward into the fray, threw up instead, with punishing, gut-wrenching force. Vomit splattered in Nocera’s pooling blood.

Carmen yelled, desperate.

Cough of the sharkpunch.

Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste, his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head-

Our father . . . deliver me not . . .

And black.

CHAPTER SEVEN

By evening, the news was all bad.

Genetic trace turned up a human occupant aboard Horkan’s Pride unaccounted for by any of the scattered corpses. It wasn’t hard to separate out the trace; it came with the full suite of modifications grouped loosely under the popular umbrella term variant thirteen. Or as Coyle had put it, a fucking twist.

They had a manhunt on their hands.

Recovered audiovid remained stubbornly the least filled section of the investigation model. There were scant fragments of satellite footage, from platforms busy about other business and nowhere near overhead. A weather monitor geosynched to Hawaii had taken some angled peripheral interest when Horkan’s Pride dumped itself into the Pacific, and the Rim’s military systems had registered the incursion while the ship was still in the upper atmosphere, but abandoned close interest as the COLIN dataheads passed on what they knew. Horkan’s Pride had jettisoned its reactor as part of the emergency re-entry protocols, carried no weapons and was plotted to land harmlessly in the ocean. One of the milsats watched the ship complete the promised trajectory and then promptly went back to watching troop movements in Nevada.

None of the recovered footage showed any sign of an attempted pick-up prior to the arrival of the coastal crews. Nor were there any helpful images of a lonely figure casting itself into the ocean. None of it was conclusive, even enhanced as far as state-of-the-art optics allowed, but nor did any of it provide anything approaching a useful lead.

They had a manhunt on their hands, and nowhere to start.

In the hotel, Sevgi sat with, and ate with Norton, food she didn’t want and made conversation she wasn’t up to. The restaurant’s romantic-low lighting scheme felt like darkness crowding her eyes at the edges. The syn had crashed, definitively.

‘How do you feel about this?’ Norton asked her as she picked disinterestedly at an octopus salad.

‘How do you think?’

It was deflection, something - yeah, the only fucking thing - she’d learnt from the department-paid counselling sessions after Ethan and the rest of the shit came down. The specialist sat across the room from her, smiling gently and pushing back every question she ever asked him with the same infuriating elicitation techniques. After a while she started to do the same thing to him. Not helpful, she supposed, but it had brought the sessions to a rapid close, which was what she wanted. I can’t help you if you won’t help me he’d said at the end, an edge of anger finally awake in his soporific, patient voice. He was missing the point. She didn’t want to be helped. She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.

‘Nicholson’s probably going to kick,’ Norton said quietly. ‘He’ll say you’re conflicted.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not enjoying your octopus, then?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Norton sighed. ‘You know we can let this one go if you want, Sev. Tsai’s guys don’t want us here anyway, and RimSec would just love the chance to flex its secessional muscle. If this guy didn’t drown in the Pacific, he’s on their land now. Added to which, the fact he’s a thirteen pretty much makes it a UNGLA matter. Why don’t we just step back and let the UN and the Rim fight it out for jurisdiction?’

‘No fucking way.’ Sevgi tossed her chopsticks onto the plate. She sat back. ‘I didn’t join COLIN for an easy ride, Tom. I needed the money is all. And this is as good a way to earn it as busting black market Marstech or chasing cultists away from the racks. Did you fucking see what he did to those bodies? Helena Larsen had a fucking life waiting for her when she got home. This is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in over two years. This is ours.’

Norton looked at her in silence for a moment. Nodded. ‘All right. I’ll have Tsai upload the CSI files to COLIN New York. That should take the ambiguity out of the situation. What do you want to do about Coyle and Rovayo?’

‘Retain them. Joint taskforce, indispensable local law enforcement support.’ She found energy for a grin. ‘Should play well with the Rim media. COLIN fucks up and spills one of their transports into the Pacific, West Coast cops ride to the rescue. It’ll open some doors for us.’

‘And save us some legwork.’

‘Well, there’s that. You know the Bay area pretty well, right? Got a sister here?’

Norton sipped at his wine. ‘Sister-in-law. Brother moved over here about fifteen years ago, he’s a special asylums co-ordinator with the Human Cost foundation. You know, screening, social integration programme. But it’s probably her you heard me talking about. Megan. We uh, we get on pretty well.’

‘You going to see them while we’re here?’

‘Maybe.’ Norton frowned into his drink. ‘How much of this are we going to let the media have?’

Sevgi yawned. ‘Don’t know. See how it goes. If you’re talking about the variant thirteen thing, I vote we keep a lid on it.’

‘If I’m talking about the variant thirteen thing? Gee, I don’t know, Sev. Do you think I could be? This is me, Sev. Do you think you could drop the say what casual act for a while?’

She stared off into the gloom of the restaurant. Her eye caught on an underlit motion ad from the fifties - some nanotech dream of change, a ripple of green and blue marches across Martian red to the horizon, a bright new sun rises in synchrony.

‘It’ll be enough to make him out a stowaway and a criminal,’ she said carefully. ‘Say that he murdered members of the crew, keep the details back to screen out all the crank calls we’re going to pull down. Bad enough that he’s back from Mars. Telling them he’s a thirteen as well is just asking for trouble. You saw the way Coyle reacted. Remember Sundersen last year? We don’t need another Abomination Amongst Us panic on our hands.’

‘You think they’d go that way again? After the spanking they all got from the Press Ethics commission?’

Sevgi shrugged. ‘The media likes panic. It boosts viewing.’

‘Are we going to give race type?’

‘If and when Organic Trace get it for us. Why?’

‘I’m wondering,’ Norton said softly, ‘if he’s Chinese.’

Sevgi thought about it for a moment. ‘Yeah. There’s that. Don’t want a replay of Zhang fever. That shit was fucking awful. Least with Sundersen, no one died.’

‘Apart from Sundersen.’

‘You know what I mean. You ever see that lynching footage? They made us watch it in school.’ Sevgi brushed fingertips to her temples. ‘I can still see it in here like it was fucking yesterday.’

‘Bad times.’

‘Yeah.’ She pushed her plate away and bridged her arms in the space it left. ‘Listen, Tom, maybe we should run silent on this whole thing. For the time being, anyway. Just tell the media everybody died in the crash, including this guy. It’s not like there’s a plausibility problem with that, after all. Shit, we still haven’t worked out how he survived.’

‘On the other hand, if we get a photo ID off the trace-’

‘Big if.’

‘-then broadcasting it’d be our best chance of nailing this guy.’

‘He can change his face, Tom. Any backstreet salon in the Bay area’ll do it for a couple of hundred bucks. By the time we get a face out to the media, he’ll have peeled it and gone underground. Gene trace is the only thing that’s going to work here.’

‘If the gene code is Chinese, and that gets out, then you’re up against the same problem.’

‘But it’ll be a specific code we’re looking for.’

‘It was a specific face they were looking for with Zhang. I don’t recall it making much difference. Hell, Sevgi -’ Out of nowhere, Norton burlesqued Nicholson for her. ‘You know those damn people all look alike anyway.’

Sevgi smeared a smile. ‘I don’t think it’s like that out here. This isn’t Jesusland.’

‘You got idiocy everywhere, Sev. The Republic isn’t running the only franchise. Look at Nicholson - New York born and bred. Where does he get it from?’

‘I don’t know. Faith Satellite channel?’

‘Hall-e-lu-jah! Praise the Lord, Jesus gonna come and cut my taxes.’

They both smirked a little more, but the laughter wouldn’t come. The bodies from the virtual still hung around them in the gloom. Presently, a busboy came and asked if they were done. Sevgi nodded, Norton asked to see the desserts. The busboy gathered the plates and headed off. It dawned slowly on Sevgi that he was peculiarly gaunt for his age, and that his speech had been oddly patterned, as if it hurt him to talk. His features looked northern Chinese, but his skin was very dark. The realisation hit her liquidly in the stomach. She stared after the retreating figure.

‘Think that’s one of your brother’s success stories then?’ she asked.

‘Hmm.’ Norton followed her gaze. ‘Oh. Doubt it. Statistically, I mean. Jeff told me they get a couple of thousand new black lab escapees a year, minimum. And he’s mostly in management anyway, trying to keep the whole thing together. They got nearly a hundred counsellors working, on and off, and they’re still swamped.’

‘Human Cost’s a charity, right?’

‘Yeah. The Rim gives them a budget, but it’s not what you’d call generous.’ A sudden animation flooded her partner’s voice. ‘And then, you know, it’s tough work. Kind of thing that wears you down. Some of the stories he’s told me about what comes out of those black labs, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t really understand how Jeff can. It’s weird. When we were younger, it always looked like I was going to be the one with the justice vocation. He was the power and influence man, not me. And then,’ Norton gestured with his wine glass, ‘somehow he’s out here doing charity work and I end up with the big job at COLIN.’

‘People change.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Maybe it’s Megan.’

He looked up sharply. ‘What is?’

‘Maybe that was what changed him. When he met Megan.’

Norton grunted. A waiter came by with the dessert trolley, but nothing appealed. They settled for gene-enhanced coffees, for which the place was apparently famous, and the bill. Sevgi found herself staring at the antique Mars motion ad again.

‘You know,’ she said slowly, because they’d both been skating around it all evening. ‘The real issue isn’t who this guy is. The real issue is who helped him get home.’

‘Ah. That.’

‘Trick out the fucking ship’s djinn? If he was capped and the capsule thawed him, that should have triggered some kind of alarm all by itself. Before he even woke up, let alone had time to start hacking the systems. And if he wasn’t capped, if he did stow away, then the n-djinn wouldn’t have allowed the launch in the first place.’

‘You think Coyle and Rovayo spotted that? I tried to steer past it.’

‘Yeah. That’s happened before on the Mars run, we just don’t like to publicise the fact. Sometimes they just die. Nice shot.’

Norton grinned. ‘True as far as it goes, Sev.’

‘Yeah. Maybe a dozen times in sixty odd years of traffic. And for my money, you’re talking hardware-based failures every time.’

‘You don’t think they’ll bite?’

‘What, the secret flaws of the n-djinn AI?’ Sevgi pulled a face. ‘I don’t know, it’s got appeal. Machine no match for a human, and all that shit. And everyone likes to be let in on a secret. Sell people a conspiracy, their whole fucking brain will freeze up if you’re lucky. Baby-eating secret sects, a centuries-old plot to enslave mankind. Black helicopters, flying eggs. Shit like that plays to packed houses. Critical faculties out the lock.’

‘And meantime-’

‘Meantime,’ Sevgi leant across the table, all humour erased from her face. ‘We both know that someone else on Mars with some serious machine intrusion skills had a hand in this. Our mystery cannibal was capped along with the others which means heavy-duty identity fraud, and then he was wired to wake up early which-’

Norton shook his head. ‘Thing I don’t get. Why wake him up so early he’s got to eat everybody else to survive? Why not just trigger the cap a couple of weeks out from Earth.’

Sevgi rolled another shrug. ‘My guess? It was a glitch. Whoever took down the n-djinn wasn’t so hot with cryocap specifics. Guy wakes up two weeks out from the wrong planet, journey’s start, not journey’s end. Maybe that shorts out the cryocap so he can’t get back in and refreeze, maybe it doesn’t but he stays out anyway because he can’t afford to arrive still capped and go through quarantine. But however you look at it, glitch or no glitch, he had some heavy-duty help. We’re not talking about a jail break here, Tom. This guy was sent. And that means whoever sent him had a specific purpose in mind.’

Norton grimaced. ‘Well, there’s a limited number of reasons you’d hire a variant thirteen.’

‘Yeah.’

They were both quiet for a while. Finally, Sevgi looked up at her partner and offered a thin smile.

‘We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

He caught the last ferry across the bay to Tiburon, hooked an autocab at the other end and rode out to Mill Valley with the windows cranked down. Warm, green-scented air poured in, brought him a sharp memory of walking under redwood canopies with Megan in Muir Woods. He put it away again with great care, handling the image at the edges like an antique photo he might smudge or a fragment of broken mirror. He watched the soft glow from passing street lamps and the lights in wood-frame homes built back from the roads, shrouded in foliage. It was as distant from Horkan’s Pride and her cargo of carnage as he was currently from home. You looked at the well-kept, scenic-sculpted roadways, all that quiet and residential greenery, and you didn’t want to believe that the man who’d crashed into the ocean that morning with only the corpses he’d mutilated for company could be out there under the same night sky.

Sevgi Ertekin’s words drifted back through his mind. The wan intensity on her face as she spoke.

We’d better find this guy fast, Tom.

The cab found the address and coasted gently to a halt under the nearest street lamp. Idling there, it made scarcely more noise than the breeze through the trees, but still he saw downstairs lights spring up in the house and the front door opened. Jeff stood there framed by the light, waved hesitantly. Must have been waiting at the window. No sign of Megan at his side.

Norton walked up the steep curve of the driveway, suddenly feeling the hours and the distance from New York. Cicadas whirred in the bushes and trees planted on either side, water splashed in the stone bowl fountain at the top. The house stood across the slope in rambling, porch-fronted spaciousness. His brother came down the steps to greet him, clapped him awkwardly on the shoulder.

‘You remembered where to find us okay?’

‘Took a taxi.’

‘Uh, yeah. Right.’

They went in together.

‘Megan not about?’ he asked casually.

‘No, she’s over at Hilary’s with the kids.’

‘Hilary?’

‘Oh, right. Haven’t seen you since, uh. Hilary, she’s our new legal adviser at the foundation. Got twins the same age as Jack. They’re having a sleepover.’ Jeff Norton gestured towards the living room. ‘Come and sit down. Get you a drink?’

The room was much the same as Norton remembered it - battered cloth armchairs facing a fire-effect screen set in a raw brick facing, northwest native art and family photos crowding the walls. Polished wood floors and middle-eastern rugs. Jeff served them vintage Indonesian arrack from a drinks cabinet made of reclaimed driftwood. Low-level glow from the screen flames and the Japanese-style wall sconces lit his profile as he worked. Norton watched him.

‘So, I guess you saw we made the feeds?’

Jeff nodded, pouring. ‘Yeah, just been looking at it. COLIN death ship in mystery plunge. That’s why you’re out this way?’

‘Got it in one. It’s a genuine class one nightmare.’

‘Well, I guess you had to start earning that big salary you pull down sooner or later.’ A brief, sidelong grin to show it wasn’t meant. Yeah, but somehow, Jeff, it always is, isn’t it? ‘How are things over at Jefferson Park these days? They treating you well?’

Norton shrugged. ‘Same as it ever was. Can’t complain. Got a new partner, hired out of NYPD homicide. She’s a couple of years younger than me, keeps me on my toes.’

‘Attractive?’

‘Not that it makes any difference, but yeah, she is.’

Jeff came across with the two glasses, handed him one. He grinned. ‘Always makes a difference, little brother. Think you’ll nail her?’

‘Jeff, for Christ’s sake.’ No real anger, he was too travel-worn and weary for it. ‘Do you really have to act like such a throwback all the time?’

‘Oh, what? Girl’s attractive, you don’t do the math, add up your chances?’ Still standing, his brother knocked back a chunk of the arrack, grinned down at him. ‘Come on, I can see it in your eyes. This one, you want.’

Norton pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. ‘You know what, Jeff, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. But it isn’t my primary concern right now. You think we could talk about something that matters for a change.’

He didn’t see the way the expression on his brother’s face shifted, the way the grin faded out, gave way to a watchful tension. Jeff backed up and dropped into the opposing armchair, thrust his legs out in front of him. When Norton looked at him, he met his gaze and gestured.

‘Okay, Tom, you got it. Whatever I can do. But it’s a long time since I had much pull in New York. I mean, I can maybe make some calls if they’re on your back, but-’

‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No, we’ve got pretty much an open brief on this one. Word down from on high, do what you want but clean up the mess.’

‘And what mess would that be, exactly? Feeds say everyone aboard is dead.’

‘Yeah. Since when did you trust what you see on the feeds? Truth is, we’ve got a live one, and he made it off the ship. This is confidential information I’m giving you, Jeff. Can’t go any further than this room, this conversation. Not even Megan.’

Jeff spread his hands. Slow smile. ‘Hey, since when did I ever tell Megan everything? You know me, Tom.’

‘Yeah, well.’ He held down the anger, old and accustomed like the kick he got out of the Cadillac when he downshifted without the brake.

‘So, come on. What’s the big secret?’

‘Big secret is that this guy is a variant thirteen.’

There was a small satisfaction in watching the way Jeff reacted. Eyes widened, mouth dropping to frame a response he didn’t have. Norton thought it came off a little phoney, but he’d grown used to that aspect of Jeff over the years, the actorly, slightly larger-than-life way he deployed himself for whatever audience there was. He’d always tried to see it, charitably, as the price of admission into the charmed power circle his brother had inhabited with such aplomb when they were both younger men - but now, now that his brother had apparently become charitable himself without losing any of that mannered polish, Norton was forced to consider that maybe Jeff had always been that way, always playing himself for the cheap seats.

‘You deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, Jeff,’ he said simply. ‘I need some advice here.’

‘Did you call UNGLA?’

‘Not yet. Way things are, it’s not likely we will.’

‘You want my advice? Call ’em.’

‘Come on, Jeff. COLIN wouldn’t even sign up to the Accords at Munich. You think they’re going to want the UN walking all over their stuff with big international treaty boots?’

Jeff Norton set his drink aside on a tall driftwood table, distant cousin to the cabinet. He rubbed hands over his face.

‘How much do you know about variant thirteen, Tom?’

Norton shrugged. ‘What everyone knows.’

‘What everyone knows is bullshit hype and moral panic for the feeds. What do you actually know?’

‘Uh, they’re sociopaths. Some kind of throwback to when we were all still hunter-gatherers, right?’

‘Some kind of, yeah. Truth is, Tom, it’s like the bonobos and the hibernoids and every other misbegotten premature poke at re-engineering last century’s idiot optimist pioneers saddled us with. Guesswork and bad intentions. Nobody ever built a human variant because they thought they were giving it a better shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of fucking happiness. They were products, all of them, agenda-targeted. Spaceflight programmes wanted the hibernoids, the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream of womanhood-’

‘Yours too, huh?’

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Are you ever going to let that go?’

‘Would Megan?’

‘Megan doesn’t know. It’s my problem, not hers.’

‘That’s big of you.’

‘No, it’s weak and masculine of me. I know that. Guess I’ll just never have your moral fucking rectitude, little brother. But telling Megan isn’t going to achieve anything except hurt her and the kids. And I won’t do that.’

He picked up his glass again and lifted it in Norton’s direction.

‘So here’s to living with your mistakes, little brother. Either that, or fuck you very much.’

Norton shrugged and raised his own glass. ‘Living with your mistakes. ’

And Megan flitted through his mind, sun-splashed hair and laughter amidst the redwood trunks, and later, naked body sun-dappled and straining upward to press against him on the sweat damp sheets of the motel bed.

‘So,’ he said, to drive out the vision, ‘if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?’

‘Variant thirteen?’ Jeff gave him the crooked grin again. ‘Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.’

‘You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there either.’

‘So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminised society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and super-virility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which in the end is suicide, just slower and a bit more fucking fun.’

‘I thought they criminalised that stuff.’

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Oh, yeah and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.’

‘I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk-show genetics, Jeff.’

‘Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a single social biologist who doesn’t count alpha male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood’ - the grin again - ‘so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas want to be soldiers, because hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes’ - Jeff ’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody - ‘they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking, the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep and breathe hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with them. See, a feminised open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.’

‘I didn’t ask for a class on the secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.’

‘Yeah, getting there.’ Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. ‘See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked and shut down with a halfway decent black market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a big-hearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship programme at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?’

‘Vaguely.’ He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high grey gloss that clashed with the rough matt finish to the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of shops on a sunblasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as grey as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. ‘I was what, five or six?’

‘If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toyset I had, but full size, smashing into the house, flattening Mum and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.’

‘Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.’

‘They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there any more except that fucking rock.’

‘I know.’

‘Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?’

‘Variant thirteen.’

‘Yeah, variant thirteen. Pre-civilised humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.’

‘Now you sound like the feeds.’

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. ‘Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.’

‘I fail to see,’ said Norton acidly, ‘how that gives us back our manhood.’

‘That’s because you live in New York.’

Norton snorted and drained his arrack. His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done.

‘I’m serious, Tom. You think secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?’

‘Among other things, yeah, it was.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Co-operation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table is pointing towards a future so feminised it’s just downright unAmerican.’

Norton laughed despite himself. ‘You should be writing speeches, Jeff.’

‘You forget,’ his brother said unsmilingly. ‘I used to. Now you think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re winning. No one knows exactly where they’ve come from all of a sudden, there’s a lot of deniability going around, but who ever gave a shit about that? What counts is that these guys are American soldiers, they’re fighting for us, and for once they’re carrying the battle. You just sit there for a moment, Tom, and you think what effect that had, in all those little towns you just flew over to get here.’

Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had levelled on his brother, looked into his glass and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.

‘That’s the way I read it, anyway.’

The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the drinks cabinet again.

‘Get you another?’

Norton shook his head. ‘Got to get back, get up early.’

‘You’re not going to stay the night?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Jesus, Tom. Do we get on that badly?’ Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. ‘Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way round the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?’

‘Jeff, it’s not-’

‘Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Norton said quietly. ‘But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him out.’

‘You didn’t catch me out. I fucking told you about it.’

‘Yeah, thanks for that.’

‘Tom, I’m your brother, for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?’

Norton shot to his feet. ‘I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.’

‘Tom, wait. Wait.’ Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. ‘I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my brother, don’t you think that means something to me?’

‘Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?’

‘Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not.’ He stopped, gestured helplessly. ‘It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for. Something. I don’t know, something fresh, something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.’

‘That’s how you see Mom and Dad?’

‘That’s how they are, Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.’

‘Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.’

‘Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean - ’ Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. ‘Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the e-motions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart any more, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s genetics, Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s just the way she’s wired.’

‘And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?’

Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. ‘Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the Foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a bonobo, that’s a bullseye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.’

‘So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.’

Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.

‘Okay, Tom,’ he said quietly ‘Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like . . .’

He shook his head.

‘Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.’

‘No.’ Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. ‘I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just . . . it’s been a long day.’

‘You sure?’

‘Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, we’re none of us saints. We’ve all done things’ - Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Towards the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting you motherfucker, oh you fucking motherfucker through gritted teeth. It will make him rock hard just thinking about it for weeks afterwards, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all - ‘Things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?’

Jeff gave him a searching look.

‘You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.’ He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. ‘I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one since. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you stand knowing that about your brother?’

I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened.

Norton put himself carefully back in the other armchair, gingerly, on the edge of the seat. Jeff’s words were like staples taken out of his heart, a sudden easing of a pain he hadn’t fully known he was carrying. The bright truth about his feelings for Megan welled up in the new spaces. He sat there trying to balance it all out for a moment, then he nodded.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I guess I can stand it. I guess I’ve got to.’ He shrugged, smiled faintly. ‘Brothers, right?’

Jeff matched the nod, vigorously. ‘Right.’

‘So, pour me another drink, big brother. Make up the spare room. What time’s Megan getting back?’

CHAPTER NINE

They slept in well-worn nanoweave survival bags - as used by real Mars settlers !, the fraying label on Scott’s insisted - but always inside. Too many eyes up there, Ren said sombrely as they stood at the hangar door on the evening of the second day and watched the stars begin to glimmer through in the east. It’s better if we don’t give them anything unusual to notice. The abandoned airfield buildings offered shelter from both satellite scan and desert sun; the heat built up inside during the day but long-ago-shattered windows and doorways mostly without doors ensured a cooling through-flow of air. The walls in the rooms they used were peeled of all but fragmentary patches of paint, stripped back to a pale beige plaster beneath, and none of the lights worked. The toilet facilities and showers, oddly enough, did seem to work, though again without the privacy of doors and only cold water. There was no power for the elevator up to the control tower, but the stairs seemed safe enough and once up there, you had long views over the surrounding tangle of ancient concrete runways and the flat open spaces beyond.

Ren spent a lot of her time up there in the tower, watching, he supposed, for signs of unwelcome visitors, and talking in low tones with the stranger, with Him. And that last part worried Scott, for reasons he could not entirely pin down.

He supposed, finally, it was lack of faith. Pastor William had always said it attacked the so-called free-thinkers first and worst, and God knew Scott had been away long enough to get contaminated, rubbing up against all the smut and doubt of West Coast life. He felt a vague, uncontrolled spurt of anger at the thought of it, the bright LCLS nights, the non-stop corrosive stimulus-ridden whirl of so-called modern living and no escape anywhere, not even in church, because God knew he’d gone there and tried. All that lukewarm, anything-cuddly-goes sermonising, all the meeting-house hand-holding circles and the flaky moist-eyed psychobabble that never went anywhere except to justify whatever weakling failures of moral vision the speakers had allowed themselves to fall into, three fucking years and more of it, clogging the certainty of his own vision, confusing the simple algebra of good and evil he damn fucking well knew was right, because that was the way it damn fucking well felt.

His head ached.

Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped round just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained, with luck it should fade in a few days.

Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.

He will return, Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew, you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgement, and that judgement going to be hard, hard on man and woman and child, hard on us all, because we are all sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgement because if you don’t then the Lord will, and the Lord don’t use no anaesthetic when He operates on your soul.

There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III, Issue 137, The Triumph In Babylon. Coat wrapped, the Saviour stalks the mirrorglass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money-changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee carton cups flying, screams. The capitalised crunch of broken bones.

Judgement!

Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d got off lightly after all.

In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren:

‘Is it really Him?’

She’d given him a strange look. ‘Who’d you think it is?’

‘Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.’ He swallowed, wet his lips. ‘Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?’

No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength. Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.

And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.

And then the waiting.

He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning - and, oddly, glimpsed in amongst Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again. He wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead, he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, half-heartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting which he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.

‘Won’t be much longer now.’

He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.

‘What you doing?’

‘Praying.’ Half defiant, because he’d certainly not noticed her doing it in the last few days.

She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.

‘We need to talk,’ she said, and he thought she sounded weary. ‘Why don’t you come over here.’

He nearly jumped again. ‘What for?’

‘I won’t bite you, Scott.’

‘I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here though.’

‘Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now come over here.’

Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat - he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, towards the ceiling and the tower above.

‘You know who that is up there,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t you.’

Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own.

‘It is, isn’t it.’

‘Yeah, it is.’ She sighed. ‘This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is ... very different to yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe our truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That,’ she shook her head. ‘I never considered that.’

He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.’

‘I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?’ Her eyes held his. ‘You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?’

He drew a deep breath. ‘This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.’

‘Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says’ - another upward tilt of her eyes - ‘that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the-’

‘The chaff?’

‘Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but-’

‘Satan has a thousand snares,’ Scott told her. ‘A thousand masks to wear.’

‘Right.’

He hesitated, looking at her. ‘Are you his,’ he tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. ‘His handmaiden?’

‘Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.’

He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.

‘You are. So worthy of it,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You’ll be filled with light.’

Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.

He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.

She gestured at the ceiling. ‘He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.’

‘No, it’s -’ Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. ‘It’s a, a sin, Carmen.’

He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe - he’d wonder about it afterwards - maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.

‘Carmen,’ he pleaded. ‘We can’t be sinners. Not now. Not here. It’s wrong.’

But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the moulded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the inner surface of each cup. She looked up again and smiled at him.

‘How can it be?’ she asked simply. ‘Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself. Don’t you feel it?’

And he did.

It had been a very long time.

He was not a virgin, not since the eleventh grade and Janey Wilkins, and Janey hadn’t exactly been the only one before he left for the Rim either, though he tried not to take pride in that because he knew pride in it was wrong. But the girls had always come to him, no way to deny it. Scott took after his mother, was tall and long-legged, and he’d hardened his upper body in early teenage, putting in all the part-time hours he could get stringing fences and river security for the big Bitterroot land parcels so later he’d be able to pay his own way through tenth to twelfth grade and not be a burden or have to sign up for a youth stint with the marines if he wanted to finish out his education. And then, for all his muscle and length of limb, he was still soft-spoken and kind, and it seemed from what Janey told him that that didn’t hurt too much either when a girl was looking.

But in the Rim, something happened to him.

Maybe it was the fact that sex was suddenly everywhere - perfectly toned and tampered-with bodies, impossible to know if they were real flesh or generated v-format interfaces, but there they were, twining round each other on the big LCLS billboards, on shop frontage display screens, on those high-end pixelated shopping bags the women carried in fistfuls like a harvest of some big, brightly coloured oblong fruit held up by the stalks and vines. There was flesh and liquid moaning on every non-faith channel he had viewing access to, in every ad-tagged piece of mail he opened, on the waste bins, for God’s sake, and even, once, when he was down in the Freeport, sketched holographically across the sky and booming out of massive speakers along Venice beach. Maybe it was that, the unending barrage, the overload of it all, or maybe it was just that he was heartsick for what he’d left behind. Whatever it was, by the end of the first year, the gentle confidence he’d enjoyed back home had gone wisping off him like steam off a morning coffee left out on the porch. Had left him lonely and cold.

Carmen Ren burned through his loneliness like a falling star. Months of half-denied fantasy boiled up inside him. Her flesh where he touched it, where she guided his hands, was warm and smooth, and her tongue in his mouth tasted of some dark, unfamiliar spice. She peeled one of the profiler cups for him, dropped the jellied weight of the breast beneath into his hand. It seemed to fit there as if made for him to hold, as if intended that way. Her hands went back to his belt, loosened it and slipped inside. He went rigid as she slid fingers around the shaft of his erection, he squeezed hard at her breast in reflex. She moaned into his mouth.

They worked each other out of the clothes piecemeal, stopping to kiss and touch until finally she lay back on the bedroll naked, brushed her own hands down her flanks and opened her thighs for him. He shifted on elbows and hands, a little awkward with lack of custom, and then gasped as he slipped into her. The evening air was cool and breezy against his skin and Carmen Ren was heated and wet inside. She smiled, shifted sideways lazily, did something with her vaginal muscles. He felt himself gripped along the length of his cock, a slippery, tugging intimacy and then she pulled him down on top of her, lifted her thighs and clamped them to his sides - they burned like branding in the cool - and he came, sudden and rushing unstoppable, jolting like there was current through him off some badly insulated cable.

He hung his head, stayed propped on his elbows.

‘I’m sorry.’

She smiled up at him again, wiggled a little and tensed her muscles around his fading hardness. ‘Don’t be. You know how it makes me feel, seeing you lose control like that?’

‘It’s just.’ He could feel himself flushing. ‘Been a long time, you know.’

‘Yeah, I guessed that. It doesn’t matter, Scott. We’ve got time. I like you inside me. We’ll go again when you’re ready.’ Another twitch of that coiled muscle, and a sudden widening of her eyes. ‘Oh. In fact.’

He didn’t know if it was the way she talked, casual as she lay there under him, as if they were sitting in a breakfast diner together, or maybe just the fact that he had her here, the culmination of so many damp, hopeless daydreams when he went home from Ward Biosupply alone. Or maybe it was that word, handmaiden, drumming around in his head, still on his lips like the dark spice taste of her. He didn’t know, truth be told didn’t much care either. He knew, because Janey had once told him, that he was uncommonly fast back in the saddle, but even for him this was something else. He felt himself hardening right there inside her, swelling against that thing she did with those muscles, and he knew this time it was going to be all right, was going to be a long, sweet ride.

Afterwards, they lay in a tangle of limbs on the bedroll, backs to the peeling wall, partially draped with the sleeping bag and Ren’s jacket, gazing at the slice of evening sky just visible through the empty doorway that led outside. Scott thought the stars had never looked so bright and kind as they did tonight, not even back home. They seemed like sentinels, vibrating gently in the soft blue black, wishing well. He told her that, and she chuckled deep in her chest.

‘Post-coital astronomy,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, letting her have her joke, but firm despite it. ‘This is special, Carmen. We’re blessed tonight.’

She made a small, noncommittal noise and stretched a little.

‘You know,’ she told him, a little later. ‘It could be for a long time, this hiding. It’s going to be tough.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Yeah.’ She rubbed a hand on the stubble of his cheek, mock roughly. ‘I imagine you’re used to tough, aren’t you.’

‘Will RimSec come after us?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her tone was thoughtful. ‘There are people I’ve called to tidy up back at the dock. They’ll cover our traces, that’ll be a start. We have friends, Scott. More friends than you’d imagine.’

‘And enemies,’ he said.

‘Yeah. Enemies too.’

He twisted his head to look into her face.

‘Tell me the truth, Carmen. Is this the End Times? When the world goes down in flames, and the beast rises from the ocean with the names of blasphemy written upon him? Is that who we’re up against? The beast?’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t think so. He hasn’t talked about that. But I do know this much: somewhere out there, there’s a dark man looking for him, and for us. This man is a servant of the darkness, and that’s who we have to guard against, Scott. Both of us, whatever happens, we’re servants of the light and we have to keep watch. The black man is coming. And when he comes, we have to be ready to fight, if necessary to the death. Are you ready for that?’

‘Of course I am. I’ll do anything. But...’

She shifted, pushing herself up against the wall so she could look him in the eye. ‘But what?’

Scott looked up at the ceiling. ‘Can’t He do anything about this black man?’

‘Not yet,’ she said gently. ‘At least, that’s what he tells me. It isn’t time. He has other concerns, Scott, other work to do. It’s complicated, I know, I don’t pretend to understand it all myself, but I know what’s been revealed to me, and all I can do is tell you the same. We have to have faith, Scott, that’s what he told me. That’s a Christian strength, isn’t it? Having faith, not questioning what’s revealed?’

‘Uh, yeah . . .’

‘And, yes, maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense right now, but if we have faith, I think it will. We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part. There’s a reckoning in the wind, and uh, a harrowing to come. Those who stand in its way will fall, those who follow in faith will be raised up.’

‘Then, that means . . .’ He squeezed her hand tightly. Blood thudded in him, he felt his groin stir faintly. ‘He has come in judgement. It is the time.’

And then, abruptly, he remembered the gaunt, hollow-eyed stare of the stranger, remembered how it felt to be fixed by those eyes at close range, and looking up at the ceiling again, he no longer felt the warm pulse of longed-for vindication, the affirmation of all he’d struggled to believe and hold true. Instead, out of nowhere, he remembered those eyes, that stripped-to-the-bone face, and all he felt was cold, and afraid.

A reckoning in the wind.

CHAPTER TEN

Fifty kilometres outside Van Horn, Interstate Highway 10 laid down a luminescent pale strip of grey in the desert night, stretching away towards low, horizon-hugging mountain ranges whose names the man calling himself Eddie Tanaka had never bothered to learn. Stars punctured the velvet blue black above like knife points, sharp white contrast to the dull red glowing orbs of the autohaul rigs below as they hammered along through the darkness in both directions, following the highway with insectile machine focus. Rising drone, blastpast rush of dark noise and wind, drone collapsing back into the distance. Passing the garish LCLS lights of Tabitha’s with a detachment no human driver could have mustered.

Well, maybe a gleech, he allowed sourly. They don’t got much use for this kind of merchandise.

He glanced up at the brothel’s skyline billboard - the name in vampiric spidery red lettering the original Tabitha would never have agreed to if she hadn’t sold up and moved to the Rim as soon as she had the capital. Behind the spiky-thin lettering, as if caged in by it, female figures switched back and forth in full flesh-toned colour, pixelled almost - but, legal requirements and all, not quite - up to human footage perfect.

Gleech wouldn’t be out here on the highway anyway. They don’t drive.

That you know of.

That Kenan knew of, and he fucking was one, smart guy.

Smart guy? Yeah, you’re some fucking smart guy, Max, out in the parking lot of Tabitha’s with whore’s snot on your jacket and not even a blowjob to show for it. All your plans and schemes, your carve-out-a-new-life bullshit, look where you’re standing still. Snot on your clothes and no blowjob. That’s how fucking smart you are, smart guy.

‘Smart guy . . .’

He heard his own mutter, final echo off the abrupt, tinny dispute he’d just mounted in his head, knew he was subvocalising again, knew why. Knew too why he hadn’t bothered, couldn’t be bothered to push Chrissie into blowing him.

Never can fucking leave it at just one shot, can you.

He’d dumped the synadrive into his eyes a couple of hours earlier, and the thing was, this was quality product, right out of his own stash, not the stepped-on shit he shifted to the kids in Van Horn and Kent on a Saturday night. So he fucking well knew he’d only need that single squirt - and initially that was what he settled for, just the one dropper load dribbled down onto the quivering surface of his left eye, what the kids called pirate dosage. But pirate shots always, fucking always, left him feeling weirdly unbalanced, and that was on a good night which tonight wasn’t and so as the synadrive came on, that feeling of fucked-up symmetry built and fucking built until it seemed like the whole right side of his body was just too slow and sleepy to bear, and so he gave in and tipped his head back one more time before he hit the road, and the fluid rolled down his right eyeball like tears.

Was a time, he recalled, you had the discipine. Discipline or self respect, either way something that wouldn’t let you do this to yourself.

He was remembering that time a lot these days, staring into mirrors at rooms he abruptly couldn’t believe he belonged in, wondering how he’d wound up here and where it had all leaked away to. That time when syn was a tool like any other, useful and used with a wired confidence that would have been arrogance if it hadn’t all felt so fucking clean and right. Back before it all turned to shit and a black pall of smoke across a Wyoming sundown sky.

Was a time ...

Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you’d never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max - get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let’s get where we’re at.

And here he was. Snot and no blowjob, out in the night.

He wiped a hand down his jacket, not bothering to look. The synadrive hooked in visual memory and sparked a link to neuro-motor precision, put the gesture right on target, and his fingers came away gummy with the snot. He rubbed them back and forth, grimacing. He didn’t need this shit right now, not the way things were. Not like he didn’t have enough stress. He told her, he fucking told her he had other stuff cooking, stuff that needed managing, not like this pimping shit was his main gig-

Yeah, right the syn told him crisply. How many years we been saying that, exactly? Smart guy?

Different this time. This pays off like it has been, this time next year we’re out. Out for good.

And if it doesn’t?

If it doesn’t, we’re already set up to cover. Quit worrying.

Set up to cover, yeah. And go on being a pimp for life. What you going to do about Chrissie then?

What he was going to do then, he reflected sombrely, was going to have to do about Chrissie then, was probably something violent. Should have seen that one all along - fucking bitch always had been high-maintenance, even back in Houston when she was still working street corners. Cotton-candy mane of blonde and that manicured fucking Texan drawl, and now the sub-cute tit work he’d got for her, he should have fucking known she’d start with the airs and graces as soon as she settled in at Tabitha’s. Acting just like she actually was the bonobo purebred they’d packaged her as. Calling him at all hours, or pushing Tabitha’s management so they called instead, bitching about how she wouldn’t work on account of some headache or stomach cramp or just plain didn’t like some fat fuck who’d paid good money to get between her legs, sitting there on the fucking bed, bright-eyed and whining Eddie this, Eddie that, Eddie the fucking other, forcing him to wheel out the whole nine yards of bully-threaten-cajole like it was some favourite comic routine she liked to see him do.

So why the fuck didn’t you just take Serena or Maggie for that sub-cute work instead. Either one’d be half the fucking trouble.

In the hyper-lucid blast of the syn, he knew why. But he turned on his heel and put the knowledge at his back along with the blink-blink carnal come-on of Tabitha’s skyline billboard. The relative gloom of the softly lit parking lot darkened his vision. He blinked hard to adjust.

‘Hello Max.’

The voice jolted him as he blinked, kicked him back to the Scorpion memories, to times and places so vivid he opened his eyes and almost expected to find himself back there, back before Wyoming in that other, cleaner time.

But he wasn’t.

He was still here, in the deserted parking lot of a second-rate Texas bordello, with a sassy whore’s snot drying on his fingers and too much syn for his own good sparking through his brain.

The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot’s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.

‘You?’

The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.

‘But . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You . . . You’re on fucking Mars, man.’

The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised towards a tentative hugging embrace.

‘When’d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?’

‘Don’t you know?’

He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. ‘No, man, I’ve got no fucking-’

-and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.

For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.

He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt—

He’d moved too close.

The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man’s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don’t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun-

The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt’s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and-

The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing-

And something flattened him to the ground again, something with godlike force.

Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you’d expect, hanging low, like they’d taken a sudden interest.

He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.

He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he’d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone. He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgement.

‘I figured you’d fight,’ said the voice. ‘But it’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it. Too long. Maybe that’s why.’

Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.

‘I think you’re done,’ said the voice.

He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet soft and more like the open void it really was.

Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck’s sake.

He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind’s eye the cosy red glow of its tail-lights accelerating away into the darkness.

He ran to catch up.

PART II

OFF THE HOOK

‘Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish between the genuine and quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences. ’

Jacobsen Report August 2091

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the end, it went down in the chapel, pretty much as he’d expected it would. Prisons like this didn’t offer many places free of surveillance, but Florida’s faith-based approach to rehabilitation meant that a man had a Charter-enshrined right to privacy in prayer at any hour outside of the night lockdown. No securicams, no invasive scrutiny. The theory was, presumably, that in the House of the Lord the corrections officers didn’t need to be watching you, because God already was. No one seemed to have noticed that the Lord was falling down on the job. In the three months since Carl transferred in from Miami, there’d been at least a half dozen bloody showdowns in the low-light arena of the chapel. Two ended in fatal injury.

Carl wasn’t sure if at some level prison staff were giving sanction to the fights, or if quiet and massive pressure from above kept the matter clean of investigation or review. In the end, it came to the same thing. No one wanted to buck the system, no one wanted to hear about it. Sigma Corporation, by invoking religious status for its operation, effectively sidestepped the bulk of what weak administrative oversight the Confederated Republic was prepared to endorse, and glowing testimonials at Congressional level pissed all over the rest. The bodies were taken away, shrink-wrapped in black.

See, niggah, you gotta put your trust in the Lord, grinned the Guatemalan when he sold him the shank. He nodded at the little oil lamp altar he had on a corner shelf, though it was the black-skinnned Virgen de Guadalupe behind the flickering flame. Like the governor always sayin’ at the assemblies, the Lord got your back. But it don’ never hurt to equalise, right.

The shank itself was a splinter of homegrown practicality that echoed the pragmatism in the Guatemalan’s words. Someone had taken the monofil blade off a workshop fretsaw and piece-melted an array of coloured plastic beads around the lower half to form a garish, pebbly-surfaced grip. The whole thing was less than twenty centimetres long, and the beads had been carefully selected for a surface that resisted fingerprinting. That left genetic trace of course, but the Guatemalan was thorough and he’d carefully anointed his customer’s hands from a tiny bottle he kept on the same shelf as the Virgen. Brief hi-tech reek of engineered molecules cutting through the fart-and-patchouli warmth in the cell as Carl rubbed the fluid in, then the volatile bulk evaporated and left a fading chill on his palms. For a good three or four hours now, any skin cells he shed from either hand would be useless to a gene sniffer. The hi- and low-tech mix sent a faint shudder of recollection through him. Going equipped among the night-time shanties of Caracas. The city centre spread out below him like a bowl of stars, the close warmth of barely lit streets up where he prowled. The confidence of well-chosen weaponry and what it would do.

Eventually, of course, the monofil would cut into the plastic enough to loosen the mounting and with time the blade would drop out. But by then the whole weapon would have been dropped through the grate on some basement ventilation duct. Like a lot of what went on inside the South Florida State Partnership (Sigma Holdings) Correctional Facility, it was strictly a short-term option.

It was also expensive.

Seventeen, the Guatemalan wanted. He liked Carl enough to add explanations. My boy Danny gotta run big risks down in the shop, puttin’ something like this together. Then I gotta hold it for you. Do your hands for you. Find the downtime for handover. Full service like that don’t come cheap. Carl looked back into the man’s polished coal features, shrugged and nodded. There was a degree of race solidarity operating in South Florida State, but it didn’t do to push it too far. And he had the seventeen. Had, in fact, nearly two dozen of the twenty-mil endorphin capsules that served the prison as a high denomination contraband currency. Never mind that he’d need them in a couple of weeks to trade against whatever debased form of griego Louie the Chem could swing for him this time around. Never mind that he might need endorphins for his own wounds a few hours hence. Short-term focus. Now, he needed the shank. Worry about the rest later, if and when he had the leisure.

Short-term focus.

It was a profoundly depressing feature of life in the prison that increasingly he caught himself thinking like his fellow inmates. Adaptive behaviour, Sutherland would have tagged it. Like finding himself masturbating to cheap porn, something he’d also done his share of since Florida’s penal system swept him up into its clammy embrace. Best, he’d found, to simply not think about it at all.

So he stepped out of the Guatemalan’s cell and went casually back down the B wing thoroughfare, right arm held slightly bent. Under his sleeve, the chill of the monofil strip warmed slowly against his skin. Grey nanocarb scaffolding rose on either side of him, holding up three levels of galleries and the tracks for the big surveillance cams. The wing was roofed in arched transparency, and late afternoon light sifted down into the quiet of the hall. Most of general population were out on Partnership work projects, paying their debt to society into Sigma’s corporate coffers. The few who remained in B wing leaned off the galleries in ones or twos, or stood in small knots across the hall floor. Conversation evaporated as he passed, eyes swivelled to watch him. On the lower right hand gallery, a grizzled longtimer called Andrews stared down at him and nodded in fractional acknowledgement. Suddenly, despite the sunlight, Carl felt cold.

It wasn’t the coming fight. Equipped as he now was, Carl was reasonably sure he could take Dudeck without too much trouble. The Aryans either weren’t hooked up outside the prison or just hadn’t done their research; all they knew about Carl Marsalis was that he talked funny for a nigger, was up from Miami on some foreign national retention loophole and, at forty-one, was old. Possibly, they thought he was some kind of terrorist, therefore foreign and a coward who had everything coming to him. Certainly, they believed that lean-muscled tat-covered twenty-something Jack Dudeck was going to rip his shit apart, whoever he fucking was. That nigger had to learn some respect.

It wasn’t the fight. It was the creeping sense of the trap that came with it.

Three months in this corporate newbuilt shithole, before that five weeks in the Miami High Risk unit. No trial, no bail. Release assessment dates set back time and again, access to lawyers refused. Appeals and diplomatic pressure from UNGLA summarily thrown out, no end in sight. He could feel the time getting away from him like blood loss. There was an on-going investigation that no one was prepared to talk about but Carl knew it had to do with Caracas and the death of Richard Willbrink. It had to be. Relations between the UN and the Republic had never been great, but there was no way the Florida state legislature would have held out against major diplomacy for the sake of a single low-grade vice bust that already screamed entrapment. No, somewhere in the processing when the foetal murder team took him downtown, his documentation had tripped a high-level wire. Connections had been made, whether in Langley or Washington or some covert operations base further south, and the national security beast was awake. Ghost agencies were looking for payback, cold covert vengeance for one of their own; they were going to make an example of Carl Marsalis, and while they tried to assemble the necessary legal toys to do it, he was going to stay safely locked down in a Republic prison. And if he shanked Jack Dudeck today as he fully intended to, they might not be able to pin it on him, but it was still going to put him back into Close Management and provide the perfect pretext for another lengthy extension of holding time, maybe even a subsidiary sentence. More than a few times in the last month he’d awoken with a panicky shortness of breath and a dream-like certainty that he would never get out of this place. It was starting to look like premonition.

He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-metre corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five metres along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie’s substandard griego chlorides.

All right, Jacky boy. Let’s fucking do this.

The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic grey T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews half way down on the right. He was chewing gum.

‘Hello, nigger,’ said Dudeck loudly.

Marsalis nodded. ‘Needed help, did you?’

‘Don’t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain’t disturbed.’

‘That’s right, nigger.’ The gum-chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.

Lock it down, soak.

It was depressing - the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude towards the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic. Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a duelling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be. That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defence, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.

Lock it down.

The gum-chewer came ponderously up the aisle towards him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan’s gaze as he came level, watched the man’s eyes for the move, if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn’t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.

But the other man was as good as Dudeck’s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn’t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five metres of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan’s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck’s eyes flickered to follow the move.

‘So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?’ Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. ‘The South will rise again.’

‘South already risen, nigger,’ blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. ‘Confederated Republic is the white man’s America.’

Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. ‘Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you.’

The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.

‘No call to get all riled up, Lee,’ he said softly. ‘This here-’

‘Jack!’ It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. ‘Jack! COs coming.’

The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had planned to fuck with the big Aryan’s head just enough to get him in Dudeck’s way, and then use the confusion to shank them both. Now-Footfalls at the back of the chapel.

‘Marsalis.’

Fuck.

He looked round. Three COs, two from the B wing day-crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and scanning the pews with seasoned calm. The other guy was a stranger, unarmed and the phone clip he wore at ear and jaw looked shiny new with lack of use. White male, forties or older. Carl made him for admin-side, and probably senior. There was grey in his hair and the face was lined with middle aged working weariness, but his eyes lacked the laconic watchfulness of the men who walked the galleries. The fact Carl didn’t know him wasn’t in itself of note - South Florida State was a big prison - but the appeal-and-counter game had taken him across to admin close to a dozen times now and he was good with faces. Wherever this guy worked, wasn’t somewhere Carl had been or seen.

‘Chew doin’ here, Marsalis?’ Foltz’s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth. ‘You ain’t no believer.’

It didn’t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands, they knew what went down in the chapel. Foltz’s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.

‘Findin’ racial harmony in the Lord, are we boys?’

Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia’s carbine almost at his ear.

‘That’s enough,’ snapped the new face. ‘Marsalis, you’re required in Admin.’

A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning. For someone to turn up this late in the week unannounced, it had to be progress. Had to be. Someone somewhere had found the key log in the Republican logjam of xenophobia and moral illusion. Pressure applied, it would break up the jam and set the whole legal and diplomatic process flowing downstream once more. The trigger line of code that would crack Carl Marsalis out of this fucking prison glitch and send him home.

Yeah, you’d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn’t have a clear angle of vision on where he’d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered and felt a faint chill at the thought. He didn’t have the finances or the juice to buy again, if this didn’t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon, he was probably going to get hurt.

Suddenly, the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.

Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.

He walked up the aisle towards the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan’s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.

‘Eyes front, Dudeck.’ Foltz had spotted the sparks. His voice came out rich with irony. ‘That ain’t how you pray, son.’

Carl didn’t look back to watch Dudeck comply. He didn’t need to. Whichever way Dudeck was now looking, it didn’t matter. Carl could feel the Aryan’s hatred at his back, pushing outward behind him like a vast, soft balloon swelling to fill the space in the house of worship. Faith-based prison charter. Each man to his own personal god, and Dudeck’s was white as polypuff packing chips.

Sutherland’s voice, deep and amused, like honey ladling down in the back of his head.

Nothing new in the hate, soak. They need it like they need to breathe. Without it, they fall apart. Thirteen’s just the latest hook to hang it off.

That supposed to make me feel better?

And Sutherland had shrugged. Supposed to prepare you, is all. What else were you looking for ?

The hope and despair played seesaw in his guts all the way out of B wing and across the exercise yard to the admin block. Florida heat clutched at him like warm, damp towels. The glare off the nailed-down cloud cover hurt his eyes. He squinted and craned his neck in search of omens. There was no helicopter on the roof of the building, which meant no high-ranking visitors in from Tallahassee or Washington today. Nothing in the grey-roofed sky either, and no sound or sense of anything going on in the car park on the other side of the heavy-duty double fence. No journalistic flurry of activity, no uplink vans. A couple of months back, not long after he was transferred up to Florida State, Andritzky had leaked details to the press in an attempt to generate enough public embarrassment for a quick release. The tactic had backfired, with the Republic’s media picking up almost exclusively on Carl’s UNGLA covert ops status and the death of Gabriella at the Garrod Horkan camp. UN connections, fruitful leverage in any other corner of the globe, here only played directly into a long-standing paranoia that Washington had carefully nurtured since secession and before. And it didn’t help that Carl was the colour of the Republic’s deepest atavistic fears. Served up through the id-feeding technicolour TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already a hundred and fifty years screen-ingrained.

Black male, detained, dangerous.

For now, that seemed to be more than enough for Republican purposes. Neither Sigma nor the Florida State legislature had seen fit to leak details of Carl’s genetic status so far - for which he was duly grateful. In the prison population here it would have been tantamount to a death sentence. There’d be a line out the fucking cell block for him, young men like Dudeck but of every race and creed, all filled with generalised hate and queuing up to test themselves against the monster. He wasn’t sure why they were holding back, they must have the data by now. It was no secret what he was, a little digging at Horkan Garrod camp, or into UNGLA general record, or even a trawl back eight years to the Felipe Souza coverage would have turned it up. He assumed the Jesusland media had backed off and muzzled themselves in time-honoured compliance at governmental authority, but he still couldn’t work out why. Possibly they were holding back the knowledge as a weapon of last resort against the UN, or were afraid of the widespread panic it might trigger if it hit the public domain. Or maybe some worm-slow process of interagency protocol was still working itself out, and as soon as it cleared, they’d have their vengeance for Willbrink via that long line of shank-equipped angry young men.

If he was still here by then.

Hope. Despair. The wrecking-ball pendulum swing in his belly. They went in through the steel-barred complications of admin block security, where Carl was prodded about, machine-swiped and padded down by hand. Harsh, directing voices, rough, efficient hands. Foltz bowed out, leaving Garcia and the stranger to lead their charge up two flights of clanging steel stairs, through a heavy door and into the abrupt thickly carpeted quiet of the prison’s offices. Sudden cool, sweat drying on his skin. Textured walls, discreet corporate logos, Sigma and SFSP in muted tones, the deep blue and bright orange that characterised the inmate uniform bleached out here to pastel shades. The soft, occasional chime from a desk as data interfaces signalled a task complete. Carl felt his senses prickle with the change. A woman moved past him in a skirt, an actual woman, not a holoporn confection, early fifties maybe, but fleshily handsome and moving for real under the clothing. He could smell her as she passed, scent of woman and some heavy musk fragrance he knew vaguely. Life outside prison came suddenly and touched him at the base of his spine.

‘This way.’ The CO he didn’t know gestured. ‘Conference Four.’

His heart dropped sickeningly into his guts. It was Andritzky. Conference Four was a tiny, one-window chamber, no room for more than two or three people round the small oblong table, certainly no room for the assembled worthies of state legislature or UN delegation. Nothing of consequence was going to go down in Conference Four. He had an hour with Andritzky, maybe some updates on the appeal, and then he was going back into general population and watching his back for Dudeck. He was fucked.

Lock. It. Down.

He breathed, drew in the new knowledge and started to map it. Sutherland’s situational zen. Don’t bitch, don’t moan, only see what is and then ready yourself. Here came the door, here came Andritzky and his attempts at camaraderie and comfort, none of it ever quite masking the obvious personal relief at not being where Carl was. Here came an hour of useless bureaucratic narrative, punctuated with awkward silences and bitten-back rage at UNGLA’s total fucking impotence in this Jesusland shithole. Here came-

It wasn’t Andritzky.

Carl stopped dead in the open doorway. Sutherland’s situational zen spiralled away from him, like a sheaf of papers spilled down a well, like gulls riding the wind. The anger went with it, bleeding out.

‘Good afternoon Mr Marsalis.’ The speaker was a white male, tall and smoothly elegant in a grey blue micropore suit that hung like Shanghai custom as he got up and came round the table, hand extended. ‘I’m Tom Norton. Thank you, gentlemen, that’ll be all for now. I’ll buzz you when we’re ready to leave.’

There was an electric silence. Carl could feel the exchange of glances going on behind his back. Garcia cleared his throat.

‘This is a violent-crime inmate, sir. It’s not acceptable procedure to leave you alone with him.’

‘Well, that’s curious.’ Norton’s tone was urbane, but abruptly there was an edge in it. ‘From my records, it seems Mr Marsalis is being held on a putative Dade County vice charge. And hasn’t even been formally arraigned yet.’

‘It’s against procedure,’ insisted Garcia.

‘Sit down please, Mr Marsalis.’ Norton was looking past him at Garcia and the other CO. His expression had turned cold. He took a phone from his jacket pocket, thumbed it, put it to his ear. ‘Hello. Yes, this is Tom Norton, could you put me through to the warden. Thank you.’

Brief pause. Carl took the seat. The table held a slim black dataslate, cracked open at a discreet angle. No logo, an ultimate in brand statements. Marstech. Hardcopy lay around, unfamiliar forms. Carl scanned upside-down text - the word release leapt out and kicked him in the heart. Norton offered him a small, distracted smile.

‘Hello, Warden Parris. Yes, I need your help here. No, nothing serious. I’m just having a little difficulty with one of your men over procedure. Could you? Ah, thank you, that would be ideal.’ He held out the phone to Garcia. ‘The warden would like to talk to you.’

Garcia took the phone as if it might bite him, held it gingerly to his ear. You couldn’t hear what Parris said to him, it was a good phone and the projection cone was tight. But his face flushed as he listened. His eyes switched from Carl to Norton and back like they were two parts of a puzzle that didn’t fit. He tried to say yes, but a couple of times, jarred to a halt on each attempt. Parris, it was clear, wasn’t in the mood for debate. When Garcia finally got to speak, it was a clenched yes, sir, and he lowered the phone immediately after. Norton held out a hand for it and Garcia, still flushing, slung it under the other man’s reach, onto the surface of the table. It made almost no sound on impact, slid a bare five centimetres from where it landed. A very good phone, then. Garcia glared at it, perplexed maybe by his failure to skid the thing off the edge of the table onto the floor. Norton picked the little sliver of hardware up and stowed it.

‘Thank you.’

Garcia stood there for a moment, wordless, staring at Norton. The other CO murmured something to him, put a hand on his arm, was propelling him out when Garcia shook off the grip and stabbed a finger at Carl.

‘This man is dangerous,’ he said tightly. ‘If you can’t see that, then you deserve everything you get.’

The other CO ushered him out and closed the door.

Norton gave it a moment, then seated himself adjacent to Carl. Pale blue eyes levelled across the space. The smile was gone.

‘So,’ Norton said. ‘Are you dangerous, Mr Marsalis?’

‘Who wants to know?’

A shrug. ‘In point of fact, no one. It was rhetorical. We’ve accessed your records. You are, let’s say, quite sufficiently dangerous for our purposes. But I’m interested to know what your perceptions are on the subject.’

Carl stared at him. ‘Have you ever done time?’

‘Happily, no. But even if I had, I doubt it would approximate your experiences here. I’m not a citizen of the Confederated Republic.’

Light trace of contempt in the last two words. Carl hazarded a guess.

‘You’re Canadian?’

The corner of Norton’s mouth quirked. ‘North Atlantic Union. I’m here, Mr Marsalis, at the behest of the Western Nations Colony Initiative. We would like to offer you a job.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

As soon as he walked through the door, Sevgi knew she was in trouble.

It was there in the looseness as he moved, in the balance of stance as he paused behind the chair, in the way he hooked it out and sat down. It smoked off the body beneath the shapeless blue prison coveralls like music cutting through radio interference. It looked back at her through his eyes as he settled into the chair, and it soaked out through the powerful quiet he’d carried into the room with him. It wasn’t Ethan - Marsalis had skin far darker than Ethan’s, and there was no real similarity in the features. Ethan had been stockier too, heavier muscled.

Ethan had died younger.

It didn’t matter. It was there just the same.

Thirteen.

‘Mr Marsalis?’

He nodded. Waited.

‘I’m Sevgi Ertekin, COLIN security. You’ve already met my partner, Tom Norton. There are a number of things we need to clarify before-’

‘I’ll do it.’ His voice was deep and modulated. The English accent tripped her.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Whatever it is you need me to do. I’ll do it. At cost. I already told your partner. I’ll take the job in return for unconditional immunity to all charges pending against me, immediate release from Republican custody, and any expenses I’m likely to incur while I’m doing your dirty work.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s quite an assumption you’re making there, Mr Marsalis.’

‘Is it?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not known for my flower-arranging. But let’s see if I’m assuming wrong, shall we? At a guess you want someone tracked down. Someone like me. That’s fine, that’s what I do. The only part I’m unclear on is if you want me to bring him in alive or not.’

‘We are not assassins, Mr Marsalis.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

She felt the old anger flare. ‘You’re proud of that, are you?’

‘You’re upset by it?’

She looked down at the unfolded dataslate and the text printed there. ‘In Peru, you shot an unarmed and injured woman in the back of the head. You executed her. Are you proud of that too?’

Long pause. She picked up his stare and held it. For a moment, she thought he would get up and walk out. Half of her, she realised, hoped he would.

Instead, he switched his gaze abruptly to one of the high-placed windows in the waiting room. A small smile touched his lips. Went away. He cleared his throat.

‘Ms Ertekin, do you know what a Haag gun is?’

‘I’ve read about them.’ In NYPD communiques, urging City Hall to issue tighter gun control guidelines before the new threat hit the streets. Scary enough that the initiatives passed almost without dispute. ‘It’s a bioload weapon.’

‘It’s a little more than that, actually.’ He opened his right hand loosely, tipped his head to look at it as if he could see the gun weighed there in the cup of his palm. ‘It’s a delivery system for an engineered immune deficiency viral complex called Falwell Seven. There are other loads, but they don’t get a lot of use. Falwell is virulent, and very unpleasant. There is no cure. Have you ever watched someone die from a collapsed immune system, Ms Ertekin?’

In fact, she had. Nalan, a cousin from Hakkari, a one-time party girl in the frontier bases where Turkey did its proud European duty and buffered the mess further east. Something she caught from a UN soldier. Nalan’s family, who prided themselves on their righteousness, threw her out. Sevgi’s father spat and found a way to bring her to New York where he had clout in one of the new mid-town research clinics. Relations with family in Turkey, already strained, snapped for good. He never spoke to his brother again. Sevgi, only fourteen at the time, went with him to meet a sallow, big-eyed girl at the airport, older than her by what seemed like a gulf of years but reassuringly unversed in urban teen sophistication. She still remembered the look on Nalan’s face when they all went into the Skillman Avenue mosque through the same door.

Murat Ertekin did everything he could. He enrolled Nalan in experimental treatment lists at the hospital, he fed her vitamin supplements and tracker anti-virals at home. He painted the spare room for her, sun bright and green like the park. He prayed, five times a day for the first time in years. Finally, he wept.

Nalan died anyway.

Sevgi blinked away the memory; fever-stained sheets and pleading, hollow eyes.

‘You’re saying you did this woman a favour?’

‘I’m saying I got her quickly and painlessly where she was going anyway.’

‘Don’t you think that should have been her choice?’

He shrugged. ‘She made her choice when she tried to jump me.’

If she’d doubted what he was at all, she no longer did. It was the same unshakeable calm she’d seen in Ethan, and the same psychic bulk. He sat in the chair like something carved out of black stone, watching her. She felt something tiny shift in her chest.

She tapped a key on the dataslate. A new page slid up on the display.

‘You were recently involved in prison violence. A fight in the F wing shower block. Four men hospitalised. Three of them by you.’

Pause. Silence.

‘You want to tell me your side of that?’

He stirred. ‘I would think the details speak for themselves. Three white men, one black man. It was an Aryan Command punishment beating.’

‘Which prison staff did nothing to prevent?’

‘Surveillance in the showers can be compromised by steamy conditions. Quote unquote.’ His lip curled fractionally. ‘Or soap jammed over lenses. Response time can be delayed. By extraneous factors, quote unquote.’

‘So you felt moved to intervene.’ She groped around for motivations that would have fitted Ethan. ‘This Reginald Barnes, he was a friend of yours?’

‘No. He was a piece-of-shit wirehead snitch. He had it coming. But I didn’t know that at the time.’

‘Was he genetically modified?’

Marsalis smirked. ‘Not unless there’s some project somewhere I haven’t heard of for turning out brainless addictive-personality fuck-ups. ’

‘You felt solidarity because of his colour, then?’

The smirk wiped away, became a frown. ‘I felt I didn’t want to see him arse-fucked with a power drill. I think that’s probably a colour-neutral preference, don’t you?’

Sevgi held onto her temper. This wasn’t going well. She was gritty with the syn comedown - no synaptic modifiers permitted in Jesusland, they’d taken them off her at the airport - and still fuming from the argument she’d lost with Norton in New York.

I’m serious, Sev. The policy board’s all over this thing now. We’ve got Ortiz and Roth coming down to section two, three times a week-

In the flesh? What an honour.

They’re looking for progress reports, Sev. Which means reports of progress, and right now we don’t have any. If we don’t do something that looks like fresh action, Nicholson is going to land on us with both feet. Now, I’ll survive that. Will you?

She knew she wouldn’t.

October. Back in New York, the trees in Central Park were starting to rust and stain yellow. Under her window as she got ready for work each day, the market traders went wrapped against the early morning chill. The summer had turned, tilted about like a jetliner in the clear blue sky above the city, sunlight sliding cold and glinting off its wings. The warmth wasn’t gone yet, but it was fading fast. South Florida felt like clinging.

‘How much has Norton told you?’

‘Not much. That you have a problem UNGLA won’t help you with. He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s Munich-related.’ A sudden, unexpected grin that dropped about a decade off his seamed features. ‘You guys really should have signed up to the Accords like everybody else.’

‘COLIN approved the draft in principle,’ said Sevgi, feeling unreasonably defensive.

‘Yeah. All about that principle, wasn’t it? Principally, you don’t tell us what to do, you globalist bureaucrat scum.’

Since he wasn’t far wrong, she didn’t argue the point. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No. I’m freelance. My loyalties are strictly for sale. Like I already said, just tell me what you want me to do.’

She hesitated a moment. The dataslate had an integral resonance scrambler, built to COLIN specs which made it tighter than anything any lawyer had ever carried into an interview room at South Florida State. And Marsalis was pretty clearly desperate for an out. Still, the habit of the past four months was ingrained.

‘We have,’ she said finally, ‘a renegade thirteen on our hands. He’s been loose since June. Killing.’

He grunted. No visible surprise. ‘Where’d he get out of? Cimarron? Tanana?’

‘No. He got out of Mars.’

This time she had him. He sat up.

‘This is a completely confidential matter, Mr Marsalis. You need to understand that before we start. The murders are widely distributed, and varied in technique. No official connection has been made between them, and we want it to stay that way.’

‘Yeah, I bet you do. How’d he get past the nanorack security?’

‘He didn’t. He shorted out the docking run and crashed the vessel into the Pacific. By the time we got there, he was gone.’

Marsalis pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.

‘Now there’s an idea.’

She let the rest out. Anything to take the smug, competent control off his face. ‘Before that, he had systematically mutilated the other eleven cryocapped crew-members in order to feed himself. He amputated their limbs and kept them alive in suspension, then, finally, began to kill them and strip the rest of their bodies for meat.’

A nod. ‘How long was transit?’

‘Thirty-three weeks. You don’t seem surprised by any of this.’

‘That’s because I’m not. You’re stuck out there, you’ve got to eat something.’

‘Did you ever think that?’

Something like a shadow passed across his eyes. His voice came out just short of even. ‘Is that how you found me? Cross-reference?’

‘Something like that.’ She chose not to mention Norton’s sudden enthusiasm for the new tactic. ‘Our profiling n-djinn cited you as the only other thirteen known to have experienced similar circumstances. ’

Marsalis offered her a thin smile. ‘I never ate anybody.’

‘No. But did you think about it?’

He was silent for a while. She was on the point of asking her question again when he got up from the seat and went to stand by the high window. He stared out at the sky.

‘It crossed my mind a few times,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew the recovery ship was coming, but I had the best part of two months to worry about it. You can’t help running the scenarios in your mind. What if they don’t make it, what if something crazy happens? What if-’

He stopped. His gaze unhooked from the cloud cover and came back to the room, back to her face.

‘Was he out there the whole thirty-three weeks?’

‘Most of it. From what we can tell, his cryocap spat him out about two weeks into the trajectory.’

‘And Mars control didn’t fetch him back?’

‘Mars control didn’t know about it.’ Sevgi gestured. ‘The n-djinn went down, looks like it was tricked out. The ship fell back on automated systems. Silent running. He woke up right after.’

‘That’s a nice little cluster of coincidence.’

‘Isn’t it.’

‘But not very convenient from a culinary point of view.’

‘No. We’re assuming the cryocap timing was an error. Whoever spiked the n-djinn probably planned to have the system bring him up a couple of weeks out from Earth. Something in the intrusion programme flipped when it should have flopped, and you get wake up two weeks out from Mars instead. Our friend arrives starved and pissed off and probably not very sane.’

‘Do you know who he is?’

Sevgi nodded. She hit the keypad again and pushed the dataslate round so they could both see the screen and the face it held. Marsalis left the window and propped himself in casual angles on the edge of the table. Light gleamed off the side of his skull.

‘Allen Merrin. We recovered trace genetic material from Horkan’s Pride, the vessel he crashed, and ran it through COLIN’s thirteen database. This is what they came up with.’

It was almost imperceptible, the way he grew focused, the way the casual poise tautened into something else. She watched his eyes sweep the text alongside the pale head-and-shoulders photo. She could have recited it to him from memory.

Merrin, Allen (sin 48523dx3814) - delivered (c/s) 26 April 2064, Taos, New Mexico (Lawman Project). Uteral host, Bilikisu Sankare, source genetic material, Isaac Hubscher, Isabela Gayoso (sins appended). All genetic code variants property of Elleniss Hall Inc, patents asserted (Elleniss Hall & US Army Partnership 2029).

Initial conditioning & training Taos, New Mexico, spec skills development Fort Benning, Georgia (covert ops, counter insurgency). Deployed: Indonesia 2083, Arabian peninsula 2084/5, Tajikistan 2085/7 & 2089, Argentina, Bolivia 2088, Rim Authority (urban pacification programme) 2090/1.

Retired 2092 (under 2nd UNGLA convention accords, Jacobsen protocol). Accepted Mars resettlement 2094 (COLIN citizenship record appended).

‘Very Christlike.’

She blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The face.’ He tapped the screen with a fingernail. The LCLS glow rippled around the touch. Merrin stared up under the tiny distortions. ‘Very Faith Satellite channel. Looks like that Man Taking Names animé they did for the Cash memorial.’

The smile slipped out before she could stop it. His mouth quirked response. He moved the chair a little, sat down again.

‘Saw that, did you? We get the reruns in here all the time. Faith-based rehab, you know.’

Quit grinning at him like a fucking news ’face, Sev. Get a grip.

‘You don’t recognise him, then?’

A curious, tilted look. ‘Why would I?’

‘You were in Iran.’

‘Wasn’t everybody?’ When she just waited, he sighed. ‘Yeah, we heard about the Lawmen. Saw them at a distance a few times in Iran, down around Ahvaz. But from what you’ve got there, it doesn’t look like this Merrin ever got up that far north.’

‘He could have done.’ Sevgi nodded towards the screen. ‘I’ll be honest with you, this is a pretty loose summary. Once you get into the mission records, it’s a whole lot less defined. Covert deployments, so-called “lost” documentation, rumour and hearsay, subject is understood to have, that sort of shit. Executive denial and cover ups round practically every corner. Plus, you’ve got a whole fucking hero mythology going on around this guy. I’ve seen data that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometres apart on the same day, eye-witness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories were true. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.’ Her disgust bubbled over. ‘I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking ghost.’

He smiled, a little sadly she thought.

‘We all were, back then,’ he said. ‘Ghosts, I mean. We had our own British version of Project Lawman, minus the delusional name, of course. We called it Osprey. The French preferred Department Eight. But none of us ever officially existed. What you’ve got to remember, Ms Ertekin, is that back in the eighties the whole thirteen thing was fresh out of the can. Everyone knew the technology was out there, and everybody was busy denying they’d ever have anything to do with it. UNGLA didn’t even exist back then, not as an agency in its own right. It was still part of the human rights commission. And no one was very keen on letting anybody else get a close look at their new genetic warriors. The whole Middle East was a testing ground for all sorts of cutting-edge nastiness, and all of it was operating on full deniability. You know how that shit works, right?’

She blinked. ‘What shit?’

‘Deniability. You work for COLIN, right?’

‘I’ve been with COLIN about two years,’ she said stiffly. ‘Before that I was a New York police detective.’

He grinned again, a little more genuine humour in it this time. ‘Getting the hang of it though, aren’t you? This is a completely confidential matter, we want it to stay that way. That’s very COLIN.’

‘It’s not a question of that.’ She tried without much success to get the stiffness out of her voice. ‘We don’t want a panic on our hands.’

‘How many has he killed so far? Here on the ground, I mean.’

‘We think it’s in the region of twenty. Some of those are unconfirmed, but the circumstantial evidence points to a connection. In seventeen cases, we’ve recovered genetic trace material that clinches it.’

Marsalis grimaced. ‘Busy little fucker. Is this all in the Rim States?’

‘No. The initial deaths were in the San Francisco Bay area, but later they spread over the whole of continental North America.’

‘So he’s mobile.’

‘Yes. Mobile and apparently a very competent systems intrusion specialist. He murdered two men at the same location in the Bay area on the night of June 19th and a man in southeast Texas less than a week later. There’s no trace anywhere in the flight records for that period, and nothing from Rim border control either. We had an n-djinn run face recognition checks on every cross-border flight and surface exit into the Republic for that week and we got nothing.’

‘He could have got his face changed.’

‘In less than a week? With matching documentation? Rim States fenceline is the toughest frontier anywhere in the world. Anyway the same n-djinn we used for the face recog had instructions to flag anyone with bandaging or other traces of recent surgical procedure to the face. All we got was a bunch of rich brats coming home from West Coast cosmetic therapy, and a couple of over-the-hill erotica stars.’

She saw him hold back all but the corner of a grin. It was irritatingly infectious. She concentrated on the dataslate.

‘The only options we are seriously entertaining are that either he was able to contact professional frontier-busters within days of coming ashore, or he left the Rim for some other, intermediate destination before flying back into the Republic. It would be a tight time frame that way, but still doable. Of course once it goes global like that, there’s no way to run a comprehensive face recog. Too many places that refuse to let the n-djinns into their data systems.’

‘I take it these are both confirmed kills, Bay Area and then Texas?’

‘Yes. Genetic trace material recovered at both locations.’

His gaze went back to the dataslate display. ‘What do Fort Benning have to say about it?’

‘That Merrin was never provided with substantial datasystems training. He could run a battlefield deck, anybody in covert ops could. But that’s it. We’re assuming he upskilled on Mars.’

‘Yeah. Or someone’s doing it for him.’

‘There is that.’

He looked at her. ‘If he had systems help getting aboard Horkan’s Pride, and he’s still getting it now, then this is bigger than just some thirteen baling out of Mars because he doesn’t like all the red rocks.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re out of leads.’

It wasn’t a question.

She sat back and spread her hands. ‘Without access to the UNGLA databases, we’re in a hole. We’ve done everything we know how to do, and it isn’t enough. The deaths keep coming, they’re steady but unpredictable. There’s no crescendo effect-’

‘No, there wouldn’t be.’

‘-but he’s not stopping. He’s not making any mistakes big enough to nail him or give us a working angle. Our enquiries on Mars have hit a wall - he obviously covered his tracks there, or, as you say, someone did it for him.’

‘And down here?’

She nodded. ‘Down here, as you’ve also so eloquently pointed out, we are not on hugely co-operative terms with UNGLA, or the UN in general.’

‘Well, I guess you can hardly blame them for that.’ He widened his eyes at her, grinned. ‘It’s not like you’ve been overly co-operative yourselves over the last decade.’

‘Look, Munich was not-’

The grin faded to a grimace. ‘I wasn’t really talking about the Accords. I was thinking more of the reception we get in the prep camps every time we have to operate in them. You know we’re about as welcome down there as evolutionary science in Texas.’

She felt herself flush a little. ‘Individual corporate partners in the colony effort do not necessarily-’

‘Yeah, skip it.’ A frown. ‘Still, UNGLA have a mandate requirement in circumstances like this. You report a loose thirteen, they pretty much have to show up.’

‘We don’t really want them to show up, Mr Marsalis.’

‘Ah.’

‘We need access to their datastacks, or failing that someone like you to talk to our profiling n-djinns. But that’s all. In the end, this is a COLIN matter, and we’ll clean our own house.’

Listen to you, Sevgi. Cop to corporate mouthpiece in one easy, well-paid move.

Marsalis watched her for a couple of moments. He shifted slightly in the chair, seemed to be considering something.

‘Are you running this gig out of New York?’

‘Yes. We’ve got borrowed space at RimSec’s Alcatraz complex, liaison with their detectives. But since this thing went continental, we’re back in the New York offices. Why?’

A shrug. ‘No reason. When I get on the suborb, I like to know where I’m going to be when I get off again.’

‘Right.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Well, if we’re going to make that suborb, we should probably get moving. I imagine my colleague will have finished with the warden by now. There’ll be some paperwork.’

‘Yes.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘Listen. There are a couple of people in here I’d like to say goodbye to before we go. People I owe. Can we do that?’

‘Sure.’ Sevgi shrugged carelessly. She was already folding up the dataslate. ‘No problem. It’s a COLIN perk. We can do pretty much anything we want.’

The Guatemalan was still in his cell, flat on his back in his bunk and blissed out by the look of him on some of his newly acquired endorphin. A half-smoked New Cuban smouldered between the knuckles of his left hand, and his eyes were lidded almost shut. He looked up, dreamily surprised, when Carl strummed the bars of the half-open door.

‘Hey, Eurotrash. Chew doin’ here?’

‘Leaving,’ said Carl crisply. ‘But I need a favour.’

The Guatemalan struggled upright on the bunk. He glanced up to the cell’s monitor lens, and the cheap interference slinger taped on the wall next to it. No attempt had been made to hide the scrambler, and it had hung there every time Carl had been inside the cell. He didn’t like to think what it cost the Guatemalan to have it overlooked on a permanent basis.

‘Leavin’?’ A stoned smirk. ‘Don’ see no fuckin trowel in your hand.’

Carl moved an African-carved wooden stool over to the bunk and seated himself. ‘Not like that. This is official. Out the front gate. Listen, I need to make a phone call.’

Phone call?’ Even through the endorphins, the Guatemalan was blearily shocked. ‘You know what tha’s gonna cost you?’

‘I can guess. And I don’t have it. Look, there are seven more twenty mil caps taped in plastic up in the U bend of my cell’s shitter. All yours. Think of-’

‘That ain’t gonna cut it, niggah.’

‘I know. Think of it as a down payment.’

‘Yeah?’ The stoned look was sliding away from the other man. He put the New Cuban in the corner of his mouth and grinned around it. ‘How’s that shit work? You walkin’ outta here, how you gonna settle your account? Down payment on what? Come to that,’ brow creasing, ‘you walkin’ outta here, why you need my little phone service?’

Carl gestured impatiently. ‘Because I don’t trust the people who are walking me out. Listen, once I’m outside, I’m going to have juice-’

‘Yeah, sounds like it. Juice with folks that you don’t trust.’

‘I can help you on the outside.’ Carl leaned in. ‘This is COLIN business. That mean anything to you?’

The Guatemalan regarded him owlishly for a moment. Then he shook his head and got off the bunk. Carl shifted aside to let him past.

‘Sound to me, niggah, like you ridin’. You sure those seven caps still in that shitter bend, not inside you? COLIN getting you out? What the fuck for?’

‘They want me to kill someone for them,’ Carl said evenly.

A snort from behind him. Liquid coursing, as the Guatemalan poured himself a glass of juice from the chiller flask he kept on a shelf ‘Sure. In the whole Confederated Republic, they can’t find one black man do their killin’ for them, they got to come flush some high tone Eurotrash out of South Florida State. You ridin’, niggah.’

‘Will you stop fucking calling me that.’

‘Oh yeah,’ The Guatemalan drank deep. He put the glass down and made a gusty, satisfied sound. ‘I’s forgettin’. You the only black man in here don’ seem to noticed what colour skin he got.’

Carl stared straight ahead at the cell wall. ‘You know, where I come from, there are a lot of different ways of being black.’

‘Well, then you one lucky fucking black man.’ The Guatemalan moved round to face him. His face was almost kindly, softened with the endorphins and maybe something else. ‘But see, blood, ’bout now, where you come from ain’t where you at. ’Bout now, you in South Florida State. You in the Confederated Republic, niggah. Roun’ here, they only got the one way of being black, and sooner or later that’s the black you gonna be. Ain’t no diversity of product in the Republic, they just got this one box for us, and sooner or later they gonna squeeze you in that box right along with the rest of us.’

Carl looked at the wall some more. He took the decision.

‘Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong.’

‘I’m wrong?’ The other man chuckled. ‘Look around you, blood. How the fuck am I wrong?’

‘You’re wrong,’ Carl told him, ‘because they already got me in a whole other box. It’s a box you won’t ever see the inside of, and that’s why I’m getting out, that’s why they need me. They can’t get anyone else like me.’

The Guatemalan propped himself against the cell wall and gave Carl a quizzical look.

‘Yeah? You got moves, trash, I give you that. And what I hear from Louie, you got some fucked up wirin’ inside you. But that don’ make you no stone killer. Two hours ago you walk out of here with my boy’s best shiv-work up your sleeve, but what I hear is Dudeck still walking around.’

‘We were interrupted.’

‘Yeah. By the nice people from COLIN.’ But there wasn’t much mockery in the other man’s voice now. He sucked thoughtfully on the cigar. ‘Shame about Dudeck, that birdshit coulda used some time in the infirmary. You want to tell me what that means, they can’t get anyone else like me?’

Carl met his eyes. ‘I’m a thirteen.’

It was like peeling a scab. For the last four months, he’d kept it hedged behind his teeth, the secret that would kill him. Now he watched the Guatemalan’s face and saw the final confirmation for his paranoia, saw the flicker of fear, faint but there, covered for quickly with a nod.

‘O-kay.’

‘Yeah.’ He felt an obscure disappointment, somehow he’d hoped this man might be proof against the standard prejudice. Something about the Guatemalan’s patient con math realism. But now abruptly he could feel himself through the other man’s gaze, sliding into caricature. Could even feel himself go with it, let go, take on the old skin of impassive power and threat. ‘So. About this phone call. What’s it going to take?’

He found Dudeck in the F wing rec hall, playing speed chess against the machine. Three or four others inmates were gathered round. One tat-stamped and certified AC brother, a couple of late-teen wannabe sycophants and an older white guy who seemed to be there just for the chess. No one from the chapel confrontation - Dudeck would have shrugged loose of them in the wake of the failed gig. Too many undischarged fight chemicals sloshing around, too much blustering talk while they leached back out of the system. Not what you needed at all after a walk-away.

No one paid any attention to the black man as he came up the hall. Dudeck was too deep in the game, and with full audiovid monitoring systems webbed up in the nanocarb vault of the hall, the others were loose and unvigilant. Carl got to within ten paces of the gathering before anybody turned round. Then one of the wannabes must have caught black in motion out of the corner of an eye. He pivoted about. Stepped forward, secure in the knowledge of how the monitoring system worked, puffed up with association and proximity to Dudeck.

‘Fuck you want, nigger?’

Carl stepped in and hit him, full force with one trailing arm and the back of his hand. The impact smashed the boy’s mouth and knocked him to the floor. He stayed there, bleeding and staring up at Carl in disbelief.

Carl was still moving.

He closed with the tat-marked spectator, broke down a fumbled defence and tipped the man into Dudeck, who was still trying to get up from the console. The two men tangled and went down, sprawled. The second sycophant hovered, gaped. He wasn’t going to do anything. The older guy was already backing off, hands spread low in front of him to denote his detachment.

Dudeck rolled to his feet with practised speed. A siren cut loose somewhere.

‘Got some unfinished business,’ Carl told him.

‘You’re fucking cracked, nigger. That’s monitored, unprovoked aggre-’

He let the mesh drive him. Dudeck saw him coming, threw together a Thai boxing guard and kicked out. Carl stamped the kick away, feinted the guard, rode the jab punch response and then broke Dudeck’s nose with a close-in palm heel. The Aryan went over again, explosively, backwards. The second serious AC member was staggering upright. Carl punched him in the throat to keep him out of the fight. He went down, choking. Dudeck had bounced up, hadn’t even wiped the blood from his nose. Old hand. His eyes were blank with fury. He came in like a truck, a flurry of blows, all simple linear shit. Carl beat most of it, winced on a stray punch that scraped his cheekbone, then snagged the other man’s right arm at the wrist. He locked up the arm, twisted it and slammed down with his own forearm. Dudeck’s elbow broke with a crunch, audible even over the sirens. The Aryan shrieked and went down for the last time. Carl kicked him as hard as he could in the ribs. He felt something give. He kicked again, twice, into the stomach. Dudeck threw up on the second impact, softly, like something rupturing. Carl stepped over the Aryan’s twitching body to avoid the pool of vomit, stamped in the man’s already bloodied face and then bent over him. He grabbed Dudeck’s head by one ear.

‘New rules, birdshit,’ he hissed. ‘I’m working for the man now. I can do what the fuck I want with you. I could kill you, and it wouldn’t make any fucking difference now.’

Dudeck foamed blood and spit. Fragments of a tooth on his smashed lower lip. He was making a low grinding noise somewhere deep in his throat.

Carl let go and stood up. For a moment, he thought he’d stamp on the crumpled form at his feet again, hard into the base of the spine to do some damage the infirmary wouldn’t easily put right, into the face again to destroy it utterly. Maybe go back for the ribs until they snapped inwards and punctured something. At least, he thought, he might spit on the Aryan. But the rage had drained abruptly away. He couldn’t be bothered. The Guatemalan had what he’d asked for. Dudeck was out, infirmary bound. Let the remainder of the Aryan’s shitty Jesusland life take him the rest of the way down. Marsalis didn’t need to see or inflict any more damage. He already knew, within parameters, how it would play out. They stacked men like Dudeck in cheap coffins five deep outside the poor fund crematoria across the Republic every Sunday. Most of them never made it out of their twenties.

At the far end of F wing, the gate clanged back and the intervention squad piled through. Body armour, stunwrap carbines and yells. Carl sighed, raised his hands to his head and walked down the siren-screaming nanocarb hall to meet them.

‘Cordwood Systems.’

‘Marsalis. Print me.’

‘Voiceprint confirmed. You are speaking to the duty controller. Please state your preferences.’

‘Jade, lattice, mangosteen, oak.’

‘Opening. What are your requirements?’

‘I’ve just been hired out of custody by the Western Nations Colony Initiative. They want me to run a variant thirteen retrieval outwith UNGLA jurisdiction.’

‘That is contrary to-’

‘I know. I’ll be in New York in a couple of days. Tell the perimeter crews to expect me. I’ll be dumping my newfound friends as soon as practically possible.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Did you have to fucking hospitalise him?’ He shrugged. He’d dumped his prison jacket earlier, stripped off shoes and socks too, and the beach sand under his feet was cool and firm. The night air brushed his neck and his bared arms like loose-drape silk.

‘Couldn’t see a good reason not to.’

‘No?’ Ertekin had not taken off her shoes. ‘Well, it would have meant we got home tonight, instead of staying in this dump. Ever think of that?’

Her gesture took in the floodlit clutch of low rise behind them, the comms tower and behind it like some Godzilla parent the endless upward loom of the Perez nanorack. The rack’s structure stood mostly in darkness, but red navigation lights blinked in dizzying stacked synchrony, dragging vision upward until the lights disappeared into the cloud cover.

‘It’s your dump,’ he said.

‘It’s leased.’

‘That must be heartbreaking for you. COLIN dependent on local state power. I’m surprised you don’t just topple the government. You know, like you did in Bolivia back in the nineties.’

She shot him a look he was beginning to recognise. Halfway to anger, locked down by something else. In another thirteen, he’d have read it as social aptitude training. Here, he wasn’t sure what it might mean. Only one thing was clear. Something was scratching at the edges of Sevgi Ertekin, and had been since he met her.

‘Marsalis, it’s late,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to get in a fight with you about something COLIN may or may not have done ten years before I joined them. The reason we’re in this dump is because you let your much-vaunted thirteen tendencies get out of hand, and it cost us another six fucking hours of phone calls and negotiation. So don’t push your luck. I’m close enough to sending you back as it is.’

He grinned. ‘Now you’re lying.’

‘Think so? The warden wanted to refer it all the way back up to Tallahassee and a convened Violent Crimes Committee assessment. He’d just love to have you locked down while that grinds through the legislature.’

‘I’d have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.’

‘Well, you’d be wrong. Warden Parris is an ex-marine.’ Sevgi shot him another glance. ‘Just like Willbrink.’

‘Will who?’

‘Yeah, right. Forget it.’

He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorisations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of care-takers and security.

Norton and Ertekin came and went, in and out of doors to offices he never got to see inside. They barely glanced his way. Shift change came and went. At one point, a CO came and took his picture, took it away without comment. Carl let it all wash over him. When they were all done, he signed the documents they gave him, changed back into his own clothes and, guessing it would be cold in New York, blagged an inmate jacket from the yawning night clerk. It was a use-faded grey black, not a bad colour in itself, but one sleeve was flashed with a line of orange chevrons and across the back was the customary Sigma logo and name in the same glaring colour. As with a lot of old stock, some tagging freak wit had taken a dye squirt to the lettering, dumping in a long jagged lower case t behind the S. He shrugged and took it anyway. Miami PD had impounded his gear from the hotel when they busted him, and he didn’t suppose he’d ever see it again. UNGLA were apparently still negotiating for the return of the Haag gun and its load. Point of principle, point of pride. No one really believed they’d win. He shouldered his way into the jacket, rolled up the short personal effects strip that went with the clothes he’d been arrested in, and walked out.

Fuck the accessories, Carl. You’re halfway home.

A grim-faced Norton stayed at his side all the way to the innocuous hired teardrop in the car park, opened the back seat for him and closed it again as soon as he was in. Ertekin came out of the admin block a couple of minutes later, muttered something to her partner and then got in behind the wheel. When Norton was in beside her, she fired up the engine and steered the car out of the prison gates on manual. Neither of the COLIN officers spoke to Carl at all.

Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.

A couple of hundred metres down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.

‘Hotel ?’ he’d asked Ertekin.

She shook her head ‘Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.’

Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowled back and forth in the gloom. The low-light head-gear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low budget stage show. Carl spotted COLIN insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.

Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time. He’d been here before a few times; the bridge of the Felipe Souza, crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full G; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d got her instructions wrong - and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.

‘Tell me something, Ertekin.’ The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply, just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. ‘You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?’

‘Two and a half.’

‘So who’s senior? You or Norton?’

He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘No? So how does it work?’ He gestured. ‘Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.’

The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.

‘Come on.’

‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’ She shook her head. ‘One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics. Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move, COLIN pay way over average, and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anti-corruption taskforcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.’

‘Not much serial homicide then.’

‘No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.’ She shrugged. ‘Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.’

‘But Norton still ranks you?’

Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.

‘What?’

‘Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it-’

She stopped.

For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach towards them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.

‘It what?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said evenly. ‘Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.’

‘So he defers to you?’

‘We co-operate.’ She left the sea and met his eyes. ‘Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.’

‘And a thick head of hair, right?’

The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of nappies at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black comic sly and London gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned - apparently - at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.

‘What’s his hair got to do with it?’

‘Well it’s hardly male pattern baldness, is it?’

‘Hardly . . .’ She got it. ‘Oh, you’re fucking kidding me. You can not be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male pattern baldness.’

‘No. But I’m not human.’

It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.

‘You quoting somebody there?’

‘Well, yeah.’ He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. ‘Your guys, for a start.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘My guys?’

‘Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?’

‘For your information,’ she said thinly, ‘the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.’

Carl shrugged. ‘Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, excuse fucking me.’ He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. ‘I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ’93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disembowelled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.’

‘The shahuda are not-’

‘Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.’

‘You’re talking about fanatical mino-’

‘Look, Ertekin.’ He found this time the laugh was genuine. ‘I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?’

‘I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.’

‘Good. Let’s not, then.’

They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white noise hiss as they sucked back.

‘How come you knew I was Turkish?’ she asked him finally.

He shrugged. ‘Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.’

‘What were you doing in Turkey?’

‘What do you think?’

‘The tracts?’

He nodded sombrely. ‘Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorised. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?’

‘No, I’m from New York.’

‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘Sorry. I meant-’

He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand towards them and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.

‘Toni Montes. Age forty-four, mother of two.’ The images flipped up in sequence on the conference room wall-screen as Norton talked. Vaguely handsome Hispanic woman, identity card shot, a strong-boned face fleshing out a little with age, henna-red hair cut short and stylish. flip. Body a graceless tangle in disarrayed skirt and blouse, limned in crime-scene white on a polished wood floor. ‘Shot to death in her home in the Angeline Freeport this evening.’ flip. Close-up morgue shot. Face bruised at the mouth, make-up smeared, eyes blown black by the pressure of the headshot that had killed her. The entry wound sat in her forehead like a crater. flip. ‘Children were out at a swimming class with the father. The house is smart, wired into a securisoft neighbourhood net and upgrade-paid for the next three years. Merrin either broke in with some very sophisticated intrusion gear, or Toni let him in.’ flip. Body detail, one mottled flank and the sexless sag of a breast. ‘There was a fight, he knocked her around, put her on the floor more than once. A couple of her ribs were broken, there’s substantial bruising pretty much everywhere. You saw the face. Blood traces everywhere too, CSI got it off the couch in the other room, the walls too in a couple of places.’ flip. Red smears on stucco cream. ‘Most of it’s hers. Seems like he really went to town.’

‘Did he rape her?’ Carl asked.

flip.

‘No. No detectable sexual assault.’

‘Same as the others,’ said Sevgi quietly. ‘Baltimore, Topeka, that shithole little town in Oklahoma. Loam Springs? Whenever he’s killed a woman, it’s been the same thing. Whatever this is about, it isn’t sex.’

flip.

‘Siloam Springs,’ Norton supplied. ‘Shithole little town in Arkansas in fact, Sev. Just over the state line, remember?’

‘No, I don’t remember.’ Ertekin seemed to regret the retort almost immediately. She gestured. The edge dropped out of her voice. ‘We wired in, Tom. It’s not like there was much chance to get to know the place.’

Norton shrugged. ‘Time enough to decide it was a shithole though, right?’

‘Oh, shut up. It’s all Jesusland, isn’t it?’ Ertekin rubbed at an eye and nodded at the projection wall. ‘Why’d they flag this one up?’

The sequence of images had frozen on another section of pale cream wall, Rorschach-blotched with blood and tissue. A tiny red triangle pulsed on and off in the corner of the screen.

‘Yeah, Angeline PD couldn’t work this one out.’ Norton prodded the dataslate on the table. On the screen, a block of forensic data floated down onto the picture. ‘When Merrin finally killed this woman, he shot her standing upright in the next room. High velocity electromag round, it went right through her head and into the wall behind. The angle suggests he was standing right in front of her. That’s what doesn’t fit. Dying on her knees when she’s finally got no more fight in her, yeah, that I can see. But standing up and just taking it, after the struggle she put up. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘Yeah, it does.’ Carl paused for a moment, testing the intuition, the lines of force it flowed along. He knew the shape of it, the way his hand knew the butt of the Haag gun. ‘She gave up before she was done, because he threatened her with something worse.’

‘Worse than beating her to death?’ There was an icy anger in the rims of Norton’s eyes as he spoke. Carl couldn’t tell if it extended to him as well as Merrin. ‘You want to tell me what that would be, exactly?’

‘The children,’ said Ertekin quietly.

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Probably the husband as well, but it’s the children that would have clinched it. Playing to her genetic wiring. He told her he’d wait until the children came home.’

‘You can’t know that,’ said Norton, still angry.

‘No, of course not. But it’s the obvious explanation. He got in through the house defences. Either Montes knew him and let him in, or he gutted the software, in which case he’d been scoping the house well enough to know the systems, so he certainly would have known that there were children, that they’d be back soon. That was his leverage, that was what he used.’

He saw the way a look went between them.

‘It works, up to a point,’ Ertekin said, more to herself than anyone else. ‘But all it does is turn the question around. If he was prepared to use a threat like that, why not use it from scratch? Why bother dancing round the furniture in the first place?’

Carl shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But to me, the shot looks like an execution. The fight must have been something else.’

‘Interrogation? You think this was about extracting a confession?’

Carl thought about it for a moment, staring into the border of glare and gloom where the side of the screen edged out on the wall. Recollection coiled loose like snakes - this woman seemed to dislodge memory in him practically every time she opened her fucking mouth. Back in the jail - did you ever think that? - it was the passageways of the Felipe Souza and the cold inevitability of his thoughts as he waited out the rescue. Now, she had him again. The hot, tiny room in a nameless Tehran backstreet. Blocks of sunlight etched into the floor, the shadow of a single barred window. Stale sweat and the faint aroma of scorched flesh. Discordant screaming from down the hall. Blood on his fist.

‘I don’t think so. There are smarter ways of getting information.’

‘Then what?’ pushed Norton. ‘Just straight sadism? Or is this some kind of ubermensch thing? Brutalism by genetic right.’

Carl met the other man’s eyes for a moment, just to let him know. Norton held his gaze. Carl shrugged.

‘Maybe it was rage,’ he said. ‘For whatever reasons, maybe this Merrin just lost control.’

Ertekin frowned. ‘All right. But then he just, what? Just calmed down and executed her.’

‘Maybe.’

‘That still doesn’t make much sense to me,’ said Norton.

Carl shrugged again, this time dismissive. ‘Why should it?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means, Norton, that at a basic biochemical level, you’re not like Merrin. None of you are. Down in the limbic system where it counts, across the amygdalae and up into the orbitofrontal cortex, Merrin has about a thousand biochemical processes going on that you don’t have.’ Carl had meant to come across calm and detached - social aptitude routines had his body language and speech locked away from confrontational. But outside it all, the weariness in his own voice astounded him. He finished abruptly. ‘Of course it doesn’t make sense to you. You don’t have a map for where this guy is right now.’

Quiet in the softly lit conference room. He could feel Ertekin’s gaze on him like a touch. He looked at his hands.

‘You said he’s killed twenty others apart from this one.’

Norton fielded it. ‘Seventeen confirmed, genetic trace material recovered at the scene. There are another four we’re not so sure about. That’s not including the people he murdered and ate aboard Horkan’s Pride.’

‘Yeah. You got this stuff mapped out? Where he’s been?’

He didn’t look up, but he felt the glance run between them again.

‘Sure,’ said Norton.

He worked the dataslate deck and the image of Toni Montes’ blood went away. In its place, continental North America glowed to life, stitched with highways and slashed red along the excision lines of the Rim States and the Union. The map was punched through with seventeen black squares and four grey, each checked against a thumb-nail victim photo. Carl got up and went to the wall for a closer look. The Angeline Freeport marker showed a laughing Toni Montes, hair styled up for some party and an off-the-shoulder gown. He touched it gently and detailed data scrolled down beneath. Mother, wife, real estate feed host. Corpse.

He looked at the other images pock-marking the map. They were mostly similar, careless snapshots, lives caught in the living. In a couple of cases, the image was an ID holoprint, but mostly it was smiles and squints for the camera, close-cropped to cut family members or friends from the frame. The faces looking down were a mix of races and a range of ages, mid-thirties all the way up to one old man in his late sixties. Married, single, with children, without. Work ranging from datasystems specialties to manual labour.

They had nothing in common but the continent they lived on and the fact they were dead.

He moved back to the West Coast. Norton did something to the dataslate and a Bay Area blow-up slid out on top of the main map. The Horkan’s Pride splashdown was marked in a not-to-scale box just off the coast, eleven faces and names stacked on top of each other beside it. Then three more red squares, all clustered around San Francisco and Oakland. Carl stared at the grouping for a moment, aware at some level, that something didn’t gel. He frowned, touched and read the scroll-down data.

Saw the dates.

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Ertekin moved up behind him. Abruptly, he could smell her. ‘He came back. Two kills, same day Horkan’s Pride hits the water. Then he’s gone, across the frontier into the Republic. Next stop Van Horn, Texas, June 19th. Eddie Tanaka, shot to death outside a cathouse on Interstate 10. And then he’s back in the Bay area again, nearly four months later, October 2nd. What does that suggest to you?’

‘He forgot his wallet?’

‘There you go. I knew there was some reason we hired you.’

Carl twisted and gave her a reproachful look. Something happened in the line of her mouth. He breathed in lightly, trying for her scent again. ‘He’s working off partial data. However he came up with this hit-list, he didn’t have all the names at the start. Why cross into Jesusland in June, when he’s got to come all the way back and do this guy, uh, Whitlock, later. And now we’ve got Montes, she’s down in the Angeline Freeport. That’s a short run down from the Bay, and no frontier checks. He’s making this up as he goes along.’

‘Right. What we figured too.’ Ertekin backed off a little, ended up close to where Norton was sitting. ‘If Jasper Whitlock had been another Eddie Tanaka type, you could maybe have sold me on Merrin not finding him first time around, needing to go back. But Whitlock was a medical services broker. All above board, upright citizen, pillar of the community, ran his own business. Not the sort of guy that’s too hard to find. Merrin shot him sitting behind the desk in his own office. So it’s got to be, Merrin didn’t know he had to kill this guy back in June. He found out later.’

‘Question is where from?’ Carl stared at the continental map, the scattered black flags. ‘He crosses the border to ice Tanaka, goes all the way to Texas. Any sign that he was after information there?’

‘No. Tanaka was strictly a small-time scumbag. Drugs, illicit abortions. The odd smuggled organ deal.’

Norton looked up from the dataslate, face deadpan. ‘In fact, the Jesusland version of a medical services broker.’

‘Well . . .’

Ertekin scowled. ‘We already chased that connection,’ she told Carl. ‘Tanaka’s got no official medical standing, in the Republic or anywhere else. He was a biohazard engineer by trade-’

‘Rat-catcher,’ supplied Norton.

‘Unemployed anyway for the last two years, living mostly off a string of women out of El Paso and points east. Before that, Houston, similar profile. Best guess is that’s how he got into the abortion provision in the first place. There’s a lot more money in it than-’

‘Catching rats.’ Carl nodded slowly. ‘Right. So I’m looking at this map, we’ve got southeast Texas, north Texas, western Oklahoma, then two in Colorado, one suspected in Iowa, Kansas one suspected one dead cert, Ohio, Michigan, two in Illinois, South Carolina suspected, Maryland suspected, Louisiana, Georgia and northern Florida. Have you got any ties between any of these victims? Anything that gels at all?’

The look on Ertekin’s face was answer enough. She was staring at the map too, and the scattered faces of the dead.

‘He could be getting them out of the phone book for all we know,’ said Norton soberly.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The sounds of shouting dragged her awake.

For a confused moment, she thought it was a theft or some excessive haggling down in the market. Then the rhythmic element in the voices made it through the wrap of sleep and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply in the narrow barrack-room bed. The inside of her head felt grimy with the lack of syn. On the other side of the room, dawn was seeping through at the edges of the moth-eaten varipolara curtain; pearl grey light lay across the ceiling and down the far wall in blurred stripes. She looked at her watch and groaned. The chanting outside was too muffled to make sense of, but she didn’t need to hear the words.

On the table beside the bed, her phone rang.

‘Yeah?’

Norton’s voice filtered into her ear. ‘Hear the fans?’

‘I’m awake, aren’t I?’

‘Good call, Sev. If we’d stayed in town, we’d be fucked. That nasty cop mind of yours saves the day again.’

‘So.’ She flapped back the sheet, swung her legs out of bed to the floor. The skin on her thighs goosefleshed in the cool air. ‘Parris has friends in Tallahassee after all.’

‘Better than that.’ There was a sour grin in Norton’s voice. ‘He went to the media feeds. We’re all over Good Morning South.’

‘Ah, fuck.’ Groping around on the floor with her free hand for clothes. ‘You think we can still get out of here okay?’

‘Well, not by suborb, that’s for sure. Whatever was keeping the lid on Marsalis’s genetic secrets at South Florida State is long gone now. He’s blown. Either Parris talked, or somebody leaked higher up.’

‘Got to be Parris.’

‘Yeah, well in any case, now you got Jesuslanders fifty deep outside both gates and backing up down the access road for a couple of klicks at least. Real Die-for-the-Lord types by the look of it. I just got off the phone to our press liaison in Miami and she tells me there are bible-thumpers lining up for airtime from here to Alaska.’ She could hear him grinning again. ‘We’re not just trying to evade Republican justice any more, Sev. We’re harbouring an abomination before the Lord.’

‘Great. So what do we do?’ Sevgi stuck an arm into a shirt sleeve. ‘Fly home the old-fashioned way? COLIN’s got to have a couple of flatline Lears down here, right? For short-hop VIPs.’

‘I would think so, yes.’

‘And they’re not going to shoot us out of the sky when we hit Republic air-space, are they?’

Norton said nothing. Sevgi remembered her profiler cups halfway through seaming her shirt shut. She split the seam back open, peered around on the floor.

‘Come on, Tom. You can’t seriously think-’

‘Okay, no, they probably won’t shoot us down. But they might force the pilot back to a landing at Miami International and take us off the plane there. We’re not popular in these parts, Sev.’

‘Not fucking popular anywhere,’ she muttered. She caught the translucent gleam of a p-cup at the foot of the bed. She fished it up between two fingers and pressed it up under the weight of her right breast. ‘All right, Tom. What do you want to do?’

‘Let me talk to Nicholson.’ He rode out her snort. ‘Sev, he may be an asshole, but he’s still responsible for operations. It doesn’t look any better for him than for us if we end up slammed in some Miami jail.’

Sevgi prowled the darkened room looking for the other p-cup. ‘Nicholson won’t get in a fight at State legislature level, Tom, and you know it. He’s too much of a political animal to upset people with that much clout. If Tallahassee gets in line behind this thing, we’re going to be left twisting in the wind down here.’

Another hesitation. Outside, the sounds of the crowd surged like distant surf. Sevgi found the cup under the bed, dug it out and fitted it awkwardly, left-handed under her left breast. She sat on the edge of the bed and started seaming her shirt shut again.

‘Tell me I’m wrong, Tom.’

‘I think you are wrong, Sev. Nicholson is going to see this as interference with his COLIN security brief, and at a minimum it’s going to make him look bad. Even if he doesn’t take on Tallahassee directly himself, he’ll kick it upstairs with an urgent action label attached.’

‘And meanwhile what? We sit tight here?’

‘There are more unpleasant places to be stranded, Sev.’ He sighed. ‘Look. Worst-case scenario, you get to spend the day on the beach with your new pal.’

‘My new . . .’ Sevgi took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. The little screen was an innocent matt grey. Norton hadn’t enabled the v-feed. ‘Fuck you, Tom.’

‘It was a joke, Sev.’

‘Yeah? Well next time you’re down on Fifth Avenue, get yourself a new fucking sense of humour.’

She killed the call.

From the landward observation tower, it didn’t look like much. Several hundred variously dressed men and women milling about in front of the facility gate, while off to the left a suited, white-haired figure declaimed from behind a portable plastic ampbox podium. A couple of amateurish, hastily scrawled holo placards tilted about in the air above the crowd. Teardrops and a few old style IC vehicles were parked back along the access road, and people leaned against their flanks in ones and twos. Early morning sunlight winked and glinted off glass and alloy surfaces. A couple of helicopters danced in the sky overhead, media platforms by the look of their livery.

It didn’t look like much, but they were a good two hundred metres back from the gate here, the noise was faint and detail hard to see. Sevgi had worked crowd control a few time as a patrol officer and she’d learnt not to make snap judgements about situations involving massed humanity. She knew how quickly it could turn. ‘. . . may have the form of a man, but do not be deceived by his form.’ The words rinsed up from the podium sound system, still relatively unhysterical. Whoever the preacher was, he was building up slowly. ‘Man is made in the image and love of God. This. Creature. Was made by arrogant sinners, by shattering the seed God gave us in His wisdom. The Bible tells us . . .’

She tuned it out. Squinted up at one of the helicopters as it banked.

‘No sign of the state police?’ she asked the tower guard.

He shook his head. ‘They’ll show up if those clowns start charging the gate, not before. And only then because they know we’re authorised to use lethal force if there’s a line breach.’

His face was impassive, but the sour edge in his voice was unmistakable. The name on his chest tag read Kim, but Sevgi guessed Korean American was close enough to Chinese for a common bitterness to find roots. Back before secession, the Zhang fever mobs hadn’t been all that selective in their lynchings.

‘I doubt it’ll come to that.’ She faked a breezy confidence. ‘We’ll be out of your hair before lunchtime. They’ll all go home after that.’

‘Good to know.’

She left him staring out across the COLIN defences at the crowd and made her way back down the caged staircase to the ground. There was an ominous quiet around the facility, in contrast to the noise outside. They’d suspended nanorack operations while the crisis lasted and the storage hangars were all closed up. Tracked freight loaders ten metres broad squatted immobile on the evercrete aprons and access paths, like massive, scalped tanks, abandoned at the end of some colossal urban conflict. Their mortar-board lifting platforms were all empty.

At the other end of the complex, the ’rack thrust up into the cloud cover like a god-sized fire-escape. It made everything on the ground feel like toys. They’d built Perez early on, back when Mars was still a barely scratched desert and Bradbury a collection of pressurised ’fabs. Now it looked used and grim, all mottled greys and blacks and over-stated support structure. Compared to the cheery, brightly coloured minimalism at Sagan or Kaku, Perez was a relic. Even for Sevgi, who didn’t like the ’racks whatever fucking colour they came in, it was a melancholy sight.

‘Ever been up?’

She looked round and saw Marsalis had got within two metres of her back without giving himself away. Now he stood watching her with a blank speculation that reminded her of Ethan so much it sent shivers up from the base of her spine.

‘Not this one, no.’ She nodded vaguely northward. ‘They trained me in New York. Kaku ’rack, mostly. I’ve been up Sagan and Hawking as well, and what they’ve built of Levin.’

‘You don’t sound overenthusiastic.’

‘No.’

It made him smile. ‘But the money’s good. Right?’

‘The money’s good,’ she agreed.

He looked away, towards the gate. The smile faded out.

‘Is all that noise out there for me?’

‘Yes, it is.’ She felt oddly embarrassed, as if the Republicans on the other side of the wire were acquaintances whose bad behaviour she had to cover for. ‘Blame your old friend, Parris. Apparently, he took exception to your departure after all. He’s fed the whole thing to the local media.’

‘Smart of you to bring us here last night, then.’

She shrugged. ‘I worked witness protection for a while. You learn never to take anything for granted.’

‘I see.’ He seemed to consider for a moment. ‘Are you people going to give me a gun?’

‘That’s not part of the deal. Didn’t you read the fine print?’

‘No.’

It brought her up short. ‘You didn’t?’

‘Ever spent time in a Jesusland justice facility?’ He put on a gentle smile, but his eyes were hard with memory. ‘It’s not the sort of place you quibble over detail if they come to let you out.’

‘Right.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Well, the fine print says that you’re retained by COLIN in an advisory capacity, not for actual enforcement. So ah, you don’t need a gun.’

‘I will if our Jesusland friends decide to storm the fences.’

‘That’s not going to happen here.’

‘Your confidence is inspiring. Can we fly out of here?’

‘It doesn’t look like it. Tom’s working the diplomatic angle, but it’ll be a while before we know if we can take the risk. In this part of the world, the Air Nationals tend to shoot first and sift wreckage afterwards.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard that.’ He turned away from the powered fences and the gate, looked out across the shimmering surface of the Atlantic. ‘Speaking of which, any idea why the skycops in the Rim didn’t shove a heatseeker up Horkan’s arse when it crossed the line? I hear those boys are pretty jumpy too, and it must have profiled pretty much like a threat.’

‘Local COLIN liaison talked them out of it, apparently.’

‘Yeah?’ Marsalis raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes. Relations with the Rim are pretty good these days. It’s not like down here. We negotiated a direct AI interface last year, high-level trust protocols, minimal buffering. The Sagan n-djinn mapped the trajectory, and shunted it straight to the Rim air authority. No blocks, no datachecks above basic. It cleared the buffers in a couple of nanoseconds.’ Sevgi spread her hands. ‘Everyone’s happy.’

‘Especially Merrin.’

She said nothing. The sporadic chanting at the gate reached them between gusts of wind coming off the ocean. After a couple of seconds Marsalis started away from her in the direction of the water. He didn’t speak or look back. It took her his first three steps to understand he’d been waiting for her to continue the conversation, and now she hadn’t he was leaving.

‘Where are you going?’ It came out a lot less casually than she would have liked.

He stopped and turned back to her.

‘Why?’ he asked gravely. ‘Am I in some kind of protective custody?’

Fuck it. ‘No, it’s just.’ She gestured awkwardly. ‘In case I need to find you later, in a hurry.’

He weighed it, the way he had the comment about her work for WP.

‘I’m going for another walk on the beach,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

‘Ah ... no.’ She hesitated. He was waiting. ‘I need to go over the Montes crime scene while we’ve got the time. See if there’s anything that jumps out.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘No, but you never know. I’ve been looking at Merrin’s handiwork for the last four months, Angeline PD haven’t. There might be something.’

‘No direct data interface there, then?’

‘No. Technically, they’re not part of RimSec. It’s the Freeport legislation, Angeline PD have autonomy, they work pretty much like any city police department over in the Republic.’

‘And you’re not sharing what you’ve got on this with any of those guys?’

‘No. I told you, we don’t want a panic on our hands.’ She threw out a weary signpost arm, towards the chanting. ‘Listen to that. How do you think people like that are going to react to the news that there’s a cannibal thirteen loose in North America, murdering selected citizens at his leisure. Remember Sundersen?’

‘Eric Sundersen?’ A shrug. ‘Sure. I spent a couple of months looking for him last year, just like everybody else.’

‘Then you’ll remember what it was like. Seven weeks, and we nearly had martial law declared in five states of the Republic. Media screaming off the screen about clone monsters. Armed mobs trying to break into the tract at Cimarron and slaughter everyone there. Emergency measures all along the Rim frontier. If Sundersen hadn’t broken cover when he did, it would have been Zhang fever all over again. And all he did was escape. He hadn’t killed anybody. With this one, the mobs would go fucking crazy.’

‘Yeah, mobs. You humans have got that trick down, haven’t you.’

Sevgi ignored the jibe.

‘We just don’t want another bloodbath,’ she said doggedly. ‘We make local police aware that we have an interest, and we give them what help we can. But we can’t afford anyone to know the whole picture.’

He nodded. His walk on the beach seemed forgotten. ‘So what picture are they getting?’

‘The cover story in the Republic is Marstech. A heist gang and a distribution network, squabbling over product.’ The words tasted stale on her tongue, as concocted and unconvincing as some corporate mission statement. She forced down a grimace and pressed on. ‘With scumbags like Eddie Tanaka that’s been easy to sell. Elsewhere, when the victim’s respectable, we’re playing the collateral damage angle. Innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, or cases of mistaken identity.’

‘Sounds a little creaky. What are you doing about the genetic trace?’

‘Taking it off their hands. The COLIN n-djinns have access to police datastacks right across North America, they fish out anything that fits the profile. That’s usually long before forensics get around to running a gene scan on the crime scene traces, so in most cases we get there before anybody knows there’s been a thirteen at the scene.’

‘Most cases?’

‘Yeah, been a couple of medical examiners we’ve had to lean on, get them to shut up.’ She looked away. ‘It isn’t hard to do that with COLIN authority.’

‘No, I don’t imagine it is.’

She could feel herself flush a little. ‘Look, I have to get over to the upload building. You want to hit the beach, that’s fine.’

‘No, it’s okay. I’ll walk with you.’

She gave him a sharp look. He looked innocently back.

‘May as well look at this Montes myself,’ he said. ‘Start earning my keep.’

So they crossed the apron from the observation tower together, headed for the main complex. There was some heat in the day now, and Sevgi’s own slightly stale scent pricked in her nostrils. She began to wish she’d had a shower before she tumbled out of the hospitality suite and into action.

‘So, you were saying,’ Marsalis prompted. ‘The Republic don’t know this is linked to Horkan’s Pride.’

‘No. The media coverage said there were no survivors. We let them have the cannibalism angle, and told them anybody still alive would have been killed on impact. We let them have pictures.’

‘Ah’

‘Yeah.’ Sevgi curled her lip. ‘Cannibal Ghost Ship Horror - click for further images. Worked like a dream, they ran with it, splashed it across every site on the net. They completely forgot to do any investigative journalism.’

‘Handy.’

She shrugged. ‘Standard. American media’s been taking sensation over fact for better than a hundred years now, and secession just loaded the trend. Anyway, it is a miracle Merrin survived the crash. I mean, he had to find some way to trick the systems into accepting him back into his cryocap, which is glitched to fuck so the cryogen protocol doesn’t work any more. So he’s got to beat that, he’s got to persuade the cryocap to fill with gel anyway, to drown a live, unsedated body-’

‘Not like he didn’t have the spare time to work it all out.’

‘I know. But that’s just the start. He’s then got to lie there and let the system drown him, unsedated. He’s got to breathe the gel, unsedated, awake, without his lungs revolting, for a good twenty minutes while Horkan’s Pride programmes its final approach, hits re-entry, course corrects and comes down in the ocean.’

A freight loader bulked dinosaur-like on their right, blocking out the angle of the early morning sun. Sevgi shivered a little as they stepped into the long shadow it cast. She looked across at Marsalis, almost accusingly

‘You want to think what that must have been like - locked in an upright coffin with that shit filling your nose and your mouth and your throat, pouring in and filling up your lungs, pressing in on your eyeballs, and all around you the whole ship feels like it’s shaking itself apart, maybe is shaking itself apart for all you know. Can you imagine what that would have felt like?’

‘I’m trying not to,’ he said mildly. ‘Do we know how he got ashore?’

She nodded. ‘First victim in the bay area, Ulysses Ward. You saw him on the map last night. Tailored microfauna magnate, he had culture farms all over the Marin county shoreline and a bunch of those tethered plankton trays about a hundred klicks off the coast. We don’t have the satellite footage to be sure, but it looks like he was out there doing maintenance when Horkan’s Pride came down. Got curious, got too close, got himself killed.’

‘Or he went out there specifically to pick Merrin up.’

‘Yeah, we thought of that too. RimSec did an n-djinn search, couldn’t find any links between Ward and Merrin. We went back forty years. Unless they knew each other in a previous life, this is exactly what it looks like - a bad-luck coincidence.’

‘How’d he kill him?’

‘Cressi sharkpunch. You ever see anyone killed with one of those things?’ Sevgi gestured graphically. ‘Designed to stop a great white shark through ten metres of water, it’s practically a hand-held disintegrator. Blew Ward’s belly out all over the surrounding furniture. Him plus another employee name of Emil Nocera, all in the same shot.’

‘Thanks for the ride.’

‘Right. CSI say there were another couple of employees around at the time, but they ran.’

‘Hard to blame them.’

‘Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently, a lot of the casual labour up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.’

‘Do they know what this is about?’

‘RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and nor can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.’

‘But the Rimcops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?’

‘They’ve been apprised, yes.’

‘Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.’

‘Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the hi-powered hi-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.’

‘What price technology without God on your side?’

‘Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh . . .’

‘A genetic monster?’ he asked gently. ‘A twist?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No. I guess you didn’t.’

‘The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of China, the black lab escapees.’ She shrugged again. ‘Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?’

‘Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.’

They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun, and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.

‘Something funny?’

His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. ‘Not really.’

She stopped.

After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her.

‘Something the matter?’

‘If you’ve got something to contribute,’ she said evenly, ‘then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.’

He looked at her for a long couple of moments.

‘It’s really not very important,’ he said easily. ‘I guess you’d call it a resonance.’

She stood where she was. ‘Resonance with what.’

He sighed.

‘A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a pistaco is?’

She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes.

‘Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?’

‘Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.’

‘Which is what?’

Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.

‘These days,’ he said, ‘the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such any more. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.’

He nodded towards the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.

‘Brought back from Mars.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.

Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus. Look at this, look at this. The colours above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.

She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.

‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’

The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders. He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.

Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect uberbitch.

More than slightly warm, in fact.

‘Uh, I’m waiting-’

‘For a colleague.’ The ’face nodded. ‘He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorisation?’

Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the colour, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d imagined it would when-

Stop that.

‘Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.’ Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. ‘Your colleague also.’

She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of grey in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way-

She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.

‘You took your time,’ she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.

He shrugged. ‘Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni ?’

The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. Primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.

‘My name is Cranston,’ said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. ‘If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.’

They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining-room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell, and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare. The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries. Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.

‘I hate that shit,’ said Sevgi, for something to say. ‘Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.’

‘You can probably disable it.’

‘Yeah.’ She made no move to summon Cranston. ‘Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.’

‘Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?’ But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.

‘I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitising. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.’

‘Right.’ He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.

Sevgi crouched beside him. ‘Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.’

He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. ‘Can we do that here?’

‘You want to?’

Another shrug. ‘We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?’

‘All right. Cranston?’

The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-millennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.

‘What can I do for you?’

Sevgi got up and gestured. ‘Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.’

‘No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room, that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?’

Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.

‘No, just the motions.’

‘Then if you’ll follow me.’

Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the lounge window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost - she shaded back to life in the centre of the room, feet still shod in mint and cream espadrilles that picked up the colours in her skirt and blouse. Her make-up was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.

A pace away from her, the system pencilled in the perpetrator.

It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardised body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backwards, tripped and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled towards upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled and staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.

The black figure stalked after her.

‘At this point,’ said the ’face, ‘the model estimates the killer force-marched Montes into the other room, threw her back against the wall and shot her through the head. Reasons for the change of tactic are still under consideration. It may be that he was concerned the killing would be seen through the window to the street.’

The black figure bent over Montes and hauled her to her feet by the hair. It pinioned her arm into the small of her back and shoved her struggling towards the connecting door to the dining room. At the threshold, the two figures froze in tableau.

‘Would you like to relocate to view the final sequence?’

Sevgi glanced at Marsalis. He shook his head. ‘No. Turn it off.’

Montes and her black cut-out killer blurred and vanished. Marsalis walked through the space where they’d been, left Sevgi in the front room. When she followed, she found him knelt once more by the corpse, apparently reading the scroll-ups.

‘See something you like?’ It was an old homicide joke, crime scene black humour. It was out of her mouth before she realised she’d said it.

He looked up and seemed to be scanning the room. ‘I’m going to need to see prior record.’

She blinked at him. ‘Prior record of what?’

‘Her prior record.’ He indicated the sprawled corpse. ‘Montes.’

‘Marsalis, she was a fucking housewife.’ Angry, she realised, with herself and the ease with which she’d slid back into crime scene macabre. She brought her voice down. ‘This is a suburban mother of two who sold real estate part-time. What record are you talking about?’

He hesitated. Got up and stared around the room again, as if he couldn’t work out how Montes had come to be living with this decor.

‘Marsalis?’

He faced her. ‘If this woman was a real-estate saleswoman, I’m a fucking bonobo. You want to get some air?’

She cranked an eyebrow. ‘In a virtuality?’

‘Figure of speech. There’s got to be a briefing level somewhere in this format. How about we go there?’

The briefing level was cut-rate, a mesa-top that you got to from anywhere in the construct by reciting a key code Cranston provided them with. The system switched without any transition you could feel to a viewpoint high up over the desert and the spread of datahomes on the plain below. Over time, it appeared various AFPD detectives had imported their own custom touches, and now the mesa-top was littered with favourite armchairs in clashing upholstery, a couple of tatami mats, a hammock strung on two thick steel hooks embedded, startlingly, in floating patches of brickwork, another slung more conventionally between two full-sized palm trees, a pool table and, for some inexplicable reason, a tipped-over antique motorcycle with an axe buried in its fuel tank.

It was very quiet up there, just the wind catching on edges of rock in the cliff-face below. Quiet enough that you thought if you listened carefully you might be able to hear the faint static hiss of the base datasystems turning over. Carl stared down at the adobe structures for a while, not listening for anything, thinking it over. The datahomes seemed very distant, and he supposed that was appropriate. There was nothing here he needed to interest himself in more than superficially. He wondered how much to bother telling Ertekin, how much co-operation he needed to fake to keep her cop instincts cooled.

‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘That fight they’ve modelled down there is bullshit. Montes wasn’t a victim, she fought this guy all the way. She knew how to fight. That’s why the slippers came off. She didn’t lose them in the battering, she kicked them off so she could fight better.’

‘And you’re basing this on what?’

‘Initially, instinct.’ He held up a hand to forestall her protest. ‘Ertekin, this isn’t some fucked-in-the-head serial killer we’re talking about. Merrin came all the way to the Freeport, just to kill this woman. That has to make her something special.’

‘Maybe so. But it doesn’t make her a combat specialist.’

‘No. But her hands do.’ He raised both his own hands now, palms towards his face, fingers loosely curled, halfway to a double fist guard. ‘There’s bone alloy marbling across the knuckles, you can feel it under the skin. Probably calcicrete. That’s combat tech.’

‘Or part of a menopausal support regime.’

‘At forty-four ?’

Ertekin shook her head stubbornly. ‘I looked through the file last night, there’s nothing about combat training there And anyway, it doesn’t gel with the genetic trace material under her fingernails. You really think a combat pro would bother scratching her attacker?’

‘No. I think she did that when she’d already given up. When she’d already made the decision to let him kill her.’

‘Why would...’

He saw the way it dawned on her, the way her brow smoothed out and the heavy-lidded eyes widened slightly. In the Arizona construct sunlight, he realised suddenly that they were irised in flecked amber.

‘She knew we’d find it,’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ He looked sombrely down at the datahomes again. ‘Toni here was gathering evidence for us. Just think about that for a moment. This is a woman that knows she’s about to die. A minute or less off her own death, she’s calculating how to take this guy down posthumously. Now that is either psychotic force of will, or training. Or a bit of both.’

They both stood in silence for a while. He glanced at her again and saw how the wind twitched her hair around the lines of her jaw. Tiny motion, barely there at all, but something about it set off an itching in the pit of his stomach. She must have felt some of it too, because she turned and caught him looking. He got the full sunlit force of the tiger eyes for a moment, then she looked hurriedly away.

‘Gene analysis says no enhancement,’ she said. ‘Standard chromosome set, twenty-three pairs, no anomalies.’

‘I didn’t say there would be.’ He sighed. ‘That’s the fucking problem these days. Anything extraordinary shows up in anyone, we all go running to the augment catalogue looking for correlation. Got to be something crammed into an Xtrasome, something fucking engineered. No one ever wonders if it might just be good old-fashioned heredity and formative conditioning.’

‘That’s because these days it mostly isn’t.’

‘Yeah, don’t fucking remind me. Anyone wins anything these days, they’re up there plugging some gene frame consortium as soon as the cameras roll.’ Carl lifted his arms in acceptance speech burlesque. ‘I‘d just like to say I couldn’t have done it without the good people at Amino Solutions. They truly made me what I am today. Yeah, fuck off.’

She was giving him an odd look, he knew.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Seems like an odd stance for you to be taking, that’s all.’

‘Oh, because I’m a thirteen I’ve got to like this pay-and-load excellence we’re all living with. Listen, Ertekin, they rolled the dice with me just like with you. No one dumped an artificial chromosome into me in vitro. I got twenty-three pairs, just like you and what I am is written all over them. There’s no optional discard for shit like mine. No knock-out sequencer in a hypo they can shoot me up with and make me safe to breed.’

‘In which case,’ she said quietly, ‘I’d have thought you’d see the Xtrasomes as a step forward. For the next generation at least,’

For a moment, he could feel the rolling weight of his own pointless anger, back and forth through his chest cavity like a punch-bag left swinging. Images from the past four wasted months flickered jaggedly through his head.

He put a clamp on it.

‘I’m a little short on that kind of outlook right now. But let’s stick with Montes, shall we? I’ll bet you this much: she’s got a combat history, at a minimum a combat training history. If it doesn’t show up in the prior record, then she hid it for some reason. She wouldn’t be the first person to wind up in the Angeline Freeport wearing a brand new identity. Wouldn’t be the first person to marry someone who knows nothing about who she used to be either, so you’re probably wasting your time talking to the husband.’

‘Yeah. Usually the way.’

‘How old were the kids?’

‘Four and seven.’

‘His?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ertekin reached up and made a gesture that split the virtuality open. She tugged down a data scroll, gently glowing text written on the air like some angelic missive. She paged down with delicate mid- and ring-finger motions while the index finger kept the scroll open. ‘Yeah. First birth’s Republic registered, looks like they moved to the Freeport shortly after. Second child was born there.’

‘So she’s from the Republic too.’

‘Looks like it, yeah. You think that’s relevant?’

‘Might be.’ Carl hesitated, trying to put the rest of it into words, the vague intimations he’d had while he watched the replay death of Toni Montes. ‘There’s something else. The children were the obvious leverage, the reason she let him kill her.’

Ertekin made a gesture of distaste. ‘Yeah, so you said.’

‘Yeah, so the question has to be why did she believe him. He could have killed her and then still waited around and murdered the rest of her family. Why trust him to keep his word?’

‘You think a mother put in that situation has a choice? You think-’

‘Ertekin, she was making choices all the time. Remember the genetic trace under the nails? This isn’t a civilian we’re talking about, this is a competent woman making a series of very cold, very hard calculations. And one of those calculations was to trust the man who put a bullet through her head. Now what does that say to you?’

She grimaced. The words came reluctantly.

‘That she knew him.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah. She knew him well. Well enough to know she could trust his word. Now where does your suburban housewife mother of two, part-time real-estate saleslady make friends like that?’

He went and sat in one of the hammocks while she thought about it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Norton was waiting for them when they surfaced.

Sevgi blinked back to local awareness and saw him watching her through the glass panel on the couch cover. It felt a little like staring up at someone from underwater. She thumbed the release catch at her side, propped herself up on her elbows as the hood hinged up.

‘Any progress?’ Her voice sounded dull in her own ears - hearing thickened with the residual hum of the soundproofing.

Norton nodded. ‘Yes. Of the slow variety.’

‘Do we get to go home?’

‘Maybe tonight. Nicholson pulled in Roth and there’s a fullscale diplomatic row in the making.’ He crimped a grin. ‘Roth is demanding a fully armed motorcade escort to Miami International, and fighter cover until we’re out of Republican airspace. Really wants to rub their faces in it.’

‘That’s our Andrea.’ Sevgi hauled herself off the couch and upright, groggy from the time in virtual and lack of k37. Despite herself, she felt a flicker of warmth for Andrea Walker Roth and the arrayed might of COLIN’s diplomatic muscle. She didn’t really like the woman, not any more than the rest of the policy board. She knew Roth was like all of them, first and foremost a power broker. But-

But sometimes, Sev, it’s good to have the big battalions standing behind you.

‘Yeah, well, my guess is the real pressure’s coming from Ortiz.’ Norton gestured at the other couch, where Carl Marsalis was just sitting up. ‘Secretary General nomination in the wind and all. He’s going to be full of UN-friendly gestures for the next eight months. Luck and a following wind, he could be your boss next year, Marsalis.’

The black man grimaced. ‘Not my boss. I’m freelance, remember.’

‘Fact remains, he’s our best hope of not having to spend another night down here. There’s a lot of COLIN subcontracting in this state. Lot of sensitive business community leaders who won’t want waves made. That’s the angle Ortiz will play while Roth goes down the wires to Washington.’ Norton spread his hands, turned back mostly to Sevgi. ‘My guess is we’ll wait ’til nightfall. Just a case of sitting tight.’

Marsalis got up off the couch and winced. He worked one shoulder round in circles.

‘Something the matter?’ Sevgi asked.

He looked at her for a moment, as if gauging the level of genuine concern in her voice. ‘Yeah. Four months of sub-standard betamyeline chloride.’

‘Ah,’ said Norton.

Marsalis flexed his right arm experimentally, a climber’s stretch, palm to nape of neck, elbow up beside his head. He grimaced again. ‘Don’t suppose you’d have any around?’

Norton shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely. Human traffic through Perez is down to a minimum these days. Not much call for mesh-related product. Can you hold on until we get to New York?’

‘I can hold on pretty much for ever. I’d just rather not, if it’s all the same to you. It’s, uh, uncomfortable.’

‘We’ll get you some painkillers,’ Sevgi promised. ‘You should have said something last night.’

‘It slipped my mind.’

‘Look, I’ll check with supplies anyway,’ said Norton. ‘You never know. There might be some mothballed stock.’

‘Thank you.’ Marsalis glanced between the two COLIN officers, then nodded towards the door of the v-chamber. ‘I’m going to go for a walk. Be on the beach if you need me.’

Norton waited until he was gone.

‘Excuse me? If we need him? Is it just me or is he the one that needs something from us right now?’

Sevgi held down an unexpected smile. ‘He’s a thirteen, Tom. What are you going to do?’

‘Well, not look very hard for his betamyeline is what comes immediately to mind.’

‘He did say thank you.’

‘Yeah.’ Norton nodded reluctantly. ‘He did.’

He hesitated and Sevgi could almost hear what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. She found herself, suddenly, inexplicably saying it for him.

‘Ethan, right?’

‘Look, I know you don’t like to-’

She shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter, Tom. I. You know, maybe I’m way too sensitive around certain topics. Maybe it’s time. Right? You were going to ask about Ethan? If he was like this?’

Small pause.

‘Was he?’

She sighed, testing the seals on her self-control. Breath a little shuddery, but otherwise fuck it, Sev, it’s four years gone, you need to ...

To what? Need what?

You need . . . something, Sev. Some fucking thing, you need.

Sigh again. Gesture at the door Marsalis just walked out of.

‘Ethan was a different man, Tom. Ethan wasn’t his gene code, he wasn’t just a jazzed-up area thirteen and a custom-wired limbic system. He-’

Another helpless gesture.

‘Do I see similarities? Yeah. Did Ethan have the same “hey, cut my fucking throat, see if I care”attitude? Yeah. Did Ethan make any normal male in the room itch up the way Marsalis is making you itch up? Yeah. Does that-’

‘Sev, I’m not-’

‘You are, Tom.’ She spread her hands, offered up the smile she’d repressed earlier. ‘You are. It’s how they built them, it’s what they’re for. And your reaction - that’s how they built you. It’s just it took evolution a hundred thousand generations to put you together, and it took human science less than a century to build them. Faster systems management, that’s all.’

‘What’s that, a quote from the Project Lawman brochure?’

Sevgi shook her head, kept the smile. ‘No. Just something Ethan used to say. Look, you asked me if Ethan and this guy are alike? How would I know? Ethan used to get up half an hour before me every morning and grind fresh coffee for us both. Would this guy do that? Who knows?’

‘One way to find out,’ said Norton, deadpan.

Sevgi lost her smile. Levelled a warning finger. ‘Don’t even go there.’

‘Sorry.’ There wasn’t much sincerity in the way he said it. A grin hovered in one corner of his mouth. ‘Got to get down to Fifth Avenue, sort out that sense of humour.’

‘You got that right.’

He grew abruptly serious. ‘Look, I’m just curious, is all. Both these guys do share some pretty substantial engineered genetic traits.’

‘Yeah, so what? Your parents engineered some similar genetic material into you and your brother way back at the start of Project Norton. Does that make the two of you similar?’

Norton grimaced. ‘Hardly.’

‘So why assume that because Ethan and Marsalis have some basic genetic traits in common, there’d be any similarity in what kind of men they are? You can’t equate them just because they’re both variant thirteen, any more than you can equate them because, I don’t know, because they’re both black.’

‘Oh, come on, Sev. Be serious. We’re talking about substantial genetic tendency, not skin colour.’

‘I am serious.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re flailing, and you know it. It’s not a good analogy.’

‘Maybe not for you, Tom. But take a walk out that gate and see what kind of thinking you knock up against. It’s the same knee-jerk prejudice, just out of fucking date like everything else in Jesusland.’

Norton gave her a pained look. His tone tugged towards reproach. ‘Now you’re just letting your Union bigotry run away with you.’

‘Think so?’ She didn’t want to be this angry, but it was swelling and she couldn’t find a way to shut it down. Her voice was tight with the rising pulse of it. ‘You know, Ethan tracked down his sourcemat mother once. Turns out she’s this drop-dead smart academic up in Seattle now, but she’s from here originally.’

‘From Florida?’

‘No, not from Florida.’ Sevgi waved a hand irritably. ‘Louisiana, Mississippi, someplace like that. Jesusland, however you want to look at it. She grew up in the southern US, before secession.’

Norton shrugged. ‘From what I hear, that’s pretty standard. They got most of the sourcemat mothers from the poverty belt back then. Cheap raw materials, fresh eggs for quick cash, right?’

‘Yeah, well she was luckier. She let some West Coast clinic harvest her in exchange for enough cash to set up and study in Seattle. Point is, I went across there with Ethan to see her.’ Sevgi knew she was staring off into space, but she couldn’t make herself stop that either. It was the last trip they’d made together. ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the shit she told us she went through, purely based on the colour of her fucking skin. And that’s a single generation back.’

‘You’re talking about Jesusland, Sev.’

‘Oh, so who’s pulling Union rank now?’

‘Fine.’ For the first time, anger sharpened Norton’s voice. ‘Look Sev, you don’t want to talk about this stuff, that’s fine with me. But make up your mind. I’m just trying to get a lock on our new-found friend.’

Sevgi held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. She sighed. ‘No, you’re not, Tom. That’s not it.’

‘No? Now you’re a telepath?’

She smiled wearily. ‘I don’t need to be. I’m used to this. From before, from when I was with Ethan. This isn’t about Marsalis. It’s about me.’

‘Hey, a telepath and modest too.’ But she saw how he faltered as he said it. She shrugged.

‘Suit yourself, Tom. Maybe you haven’t spotted it yet, maybe you just don’t want to see it. But what you’re really trying to get a lock on, is Marsalis and me. How I’m going to react to him, how I am reacting to him.’

Norton stared at her for a long moment. Long enough that she thought he would turn away. Then he gave her a shrug of his own.

‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘So how are you reacting to him, Sev?’

Norton was on the money, about going home, if nothing else. It took the rest of the day to get clearance, and when it finally came, the crowds were still at the gate. Someone had set up big portable LCLS panels along the road, jacked into car batteries or run off their own integral power packs. From the tower, it looked like a bizarre outdoor art gallery, little knots of figures gathered in front of each panel, or walking between. The chanting had died down with the onset of night and the eventual arrival of three cherry-topped state police teardrops. They were parked now, in amongst the other vehicles, but if the officers they’d brought were doing any crowd control, they were keeping a low profile while they did it. And the media had apparently all gone home.

‘Seen it before,’ said the tower guard, a slim Hispanic just on for the graveyard shift. ‘Staties usually chase them off, so there’s no adverse coverage if the shit hits the fan. Shit does hit the fan, everyone runs the same sanitised broadcast the next morning. Tallahassee got deals with most of the networks, privileged access to legislature and like that. No one breaks ranks.’

‘Yeah,’ rumbled Marsalis. ‘Responsible reporting. I’m going to miss that.’

The night wind coming off the sea was cool and faintly sewn with salt. Sevgi felt it stir strands of hair on her cheek, felt cop instinct twitch awake inside her at the same moment. She kept herself from turning to look at him, kept her tone casual.

‘Going to miss it? Where you going then?’

He did turn. She offered him a sideways glance, clashed gazes.

‘New York, right?’ he said easily. ‘North Atlantic Union territory, proud home of the free American press?’

She looked again, locked stare this time.

‘Are you trying to piss me off, Marsalis?’

‘Hey, I’m just quoting the tourist guide here. Union’s the only place they got Lindley vs NSA still in force, right? Still got their statue of Lindley up in Battery Park, Defender of Truth chiselled on the base? Most places I’ve been in the Republic, they’ve pulled those statues down.’

She let it go, let the cop twitch slide out of view for the time being, tagged for later attention. For the rest, she didn’t know if she’d misread the irony in his voice or not. She was irritable enough to have done, maybe he was irritable enough to have meant it. She couldn’t be bothered to call it either way. After a full day of waiting, none of them were in the best of moods.

She shifted to the other side of the tower, swapped her view. Out at the far side of the complex, partially occluded by the towering bulk of the rack, the landing strip lights burned luminous green. They were far enough off for the distance to make them wink, as if they were embers the sea wind kept blowing on. COLIN were sending a dedicated transport, flatline flight so they’d be waiting a while longer, but it was on its way and home was only a matter of hours away. She could almost feel the rough cotton sheets on her bed against her skin.

Marsalis, she’d worry about later.

After a couple of minutes, he left the tower top without comment, and clattered back down the caged stairs to the ground. She watched him walk away in the flare of ground lighting, off towards the shore again. Casual lope, almost an amble but for the barely perceptible poise in the way he moved. He didn’t look back. The darkness down to the beach swallowed him up. She frowned.

Later. Worry about it later, Sev.

She let her mind coast in neutral, watched the lights.

And presently, the COLIN jet whispered down from the cloud base towards them, studded sparsely with landing lights of its own. It kissed the ground, silent with distance, and taxied in like a jewelled shadow.

She yawned and went to fetch her stuff.

In-flight, she dozed off and dreamed about the Lindley statue. Murat stood with her in winter sunlight - as he had when she was about eleven, but in the dream she was an adult - and pointed at the chiselled legend in the base. From the discomfort of truth there is only one refuge and that is ignorance. I do not need to be comfortable, and I will not take refuge. I demand to know.

See, he was saying. It only takes one woman like this.

But when she looked up at the statue of Lindley, it had transformed into the black-sketched perpetrator from the Montes CSI construct, and it leapt off the base at her, fist raised.

She fell back and grappled, one from the manual, cross block and grab. The figure’s arm was slick in her grasp and now ended, she saw, not in a fist but a Greek theatre mask cut out of metal. As she wrestled with the sketch, she understood with the flash logic of dreams that her opponent intended to press the mask onto her face and that once that was done, there would be no way to get it off.

Across the park, a mother pushed a baby in a stroller. Two kids sat in the grass and duelled their glinting micro-fighter models high overhead, fingers frantic on the controls in their laps, heads tilting wildly beneath the blank-faced headsets. Her own fight went slower, sluggish, like drowning in mud. The construct murderer was stronger than she was, but seemed disinclined to tactics. Every move she made bought her time, but she could do no damage, could not break the clinch.

The mask began to block out the sun on her face.

I have done everything I can, said Murat wearily, and she wanted to cry but couldn’t. Her breath came hard now, hurting her throat. Her father was walking away from her, across the park towards the railings and the water. She had to twist her neck to keep him in sight. She would have called after him, but her throat hurt too much, and anyway she knew it wouldn’t do any good. The fight started to drain out of her, tiny increments heralding the eventual evaporation of her strength. Even the sun was turning cold. She struggled mechanically, bitterly, and overhead, the mask-

The plane banked about and woke her.

Someone had lowered the cabin lights while she slept, and the plane’s interior was sunk in gloom. She leaned across the seat to the window and peered out. Towers of crystalline light slid beyond the glass, red-studded with navigation flash. Then the long dark absence of the East River, banded with bridges like jewelled rings on a slim and slightly crooked finger. She sighed and sank back in her seat.

Home. For what it was worth.

The plane straightened out. Marsalis came through from the forward section, presumably on his way to the toilet. He nodded down at her.

‘Sleep well?’

She shrugged and lied.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the time they disembarked and came through the deserted environs of the private carriers terminal at JFK, it was nearly three a.m. Norton left them standing just inside the endless row of glass doors onto the pick-up zone and went to get his car out of parking. The whole place was full of a glaring, white-lit quiet that seemed to whine just at the edge of audibility.

‘So what’s the plan?’ Marsalis asked her.

‘The plan is get some sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll take you over to Jefferson Park and get you hooked up with our chain of command. Roth, Ortiz and Nicholson are all going to want to meet you. Then we’ll look at Montes. If your theory checks out, there’ll be some trace of a previous identity somewhere in the data record.’

‘You hope.’

‘No, I know,’ she said irritably. ‘No one disappears for real any more, not even in the Angeline Freeport.’

‘Merrin seems to be managing.’

‘Merrin’s strictly a temporary phenomenon.’

They went back to staring at averted angles around the terminal space until Norton rolled up in the snarl-grilled Cadillac. He’d held off putting the top up until a couple of weeks ago, but there was no way to avoid it now. The early-hours air beyond the terminal doors had a snap in it that promised the raw cold of the winter ahead.

‘Nice ride,’ said Marsalis as he got in.

He’d taken the front seat. Sevgi rolled her eyes and climbed in the back. Norton grinned at her in the mirror.

‘Thanks,’ he said, and gunned the magdrive as they pulled away. It didn’t quite have the throaty roar of the vehicles from the period road movies he occasionally dragged Sevgi to at arthouse theatres in the village, but the car thrummed pleasantly enough and they took the exit ramp at rising speed. Norton drifted them across into the curve of the citybound highway. The airport complex fell away behind them like a flung fairy crown. Norton raised his eyes to the mirror again. ‘What are we doing about accommodation, Sev?’

‘You can put me in a hotel,’ Marsalis said, yawning. ‘Wherever suits. I’m not fussy.’

Sevgi faked a yawn of her own and slumped back in the seat. ‘Let’s sort that out tomorrow. Too much hassle co-ordinating it all now. You can stay at my place tonight. Tom, I’ll bring him in and meet you at the office for lunch. Somewhere on the mezzanine. Say about twelve?’

Peripheral vision showed her Norton trying to make eye contact in the mirror. His face was the carefully immobile deadpan she associated with his witnessing of mistakes made. He used it a lot in briefings with Nicholson. She gazed steadfastly out of the side window.

‘He could stay with me, Sev. I’ve got the space.’

‘So do I.’ She made it come out casual. Still watching the dull metal ribbon of the crash barrier as it whipped smoothly along beside the car in the gloom. A teardrop taxi blipped past on the opposing side of the highway. ‘Anyway, Tom, it’d take you the best part of an hour just to clear out all that junk you keep in the spare room. All I have to do is crank down the futon. Just drop us off, it’ll be fine.’

Now she turned and met his eyes in the mirror. Matched him deadpan for deadpan. He shrugged and punched up some music on the car’s sound system, ancient secession-era punk no one played any more. Detroitus or Error Code, Sevgi never could tell the two bands apart despite Norton’s best efforts to instruct her. She settled back to the outside view again and let the vitriol of it wash over her, lulled by the familiar high stepping bass lines and the stuttering, hacking guitars. She found her mouth forming fragments of lyrics:

Got what you want at last, got your
Closed little world
Got your superhero right and wrong
And your fuckin’ flag unfurled

Marsalis stirred, leaned forward to read the player display and sank back again without comment. Guitar fury skirled out of the speakers. The car slammed on through the night.

When they pulled up outside Sevgi’s building, Norton killed the engine and got out to see them to the door. It was a nice gesture, but it felt wrong - Harlem hadn’t seen serious crime in decades and anyway, in amongst the carbon fibre skeletons of the market stalls, figures were already moving around with crates, setting up. The place would be coming to noisy life in another couple of hours. Sevgi made a mental note to make sure the windows were all tight shut before she slept. She smiled wearily at Norton.

‘Thanks Tom. You’d better get moving.’

‘Yeah.’

He hesitated.

‘See you on the mez, then,’ she said brightly.

‘Uh, yeah. Twelve o’clock?’

‘Yeah, twelve’s good.’

‘Where’d you want to eat? Henty’s or-’

‘Sure. Henty’s.’ Backing away now. ‘Sounds good.’

He nodded slowly and went back to the car. She raised a hand in farewell. He pulled out, looking back. They watched him out of sight before Sevgi turned to the door of the building and showed the scanner her face. The door cracked open on a hydraulic sigh.

‘Sixth floor,’ she said, hefting her shoulder bag. ‘No elevator.’

‘Yeah? Why’s that then?’

‘Period charm. You coming?’

They took the stairs at a trudge. LCLS panels blinked awake on each floor as they climbed, then died to dimness in their wake. The bright white glow shone on pre-secessional grafitoform murals and embedded holoshots of the building in its various stages of growth. Sevgi found herself noticing them for the first time in months as consciousness of the man at her back lit everything for her the same way as the LCLS. She bit back the impulse to play tour guide.

In the apartment, she went from room to room, showing him where things were. He went to use the bathroom as soon as she was done. She checked the windows while he was in there, set the locks, organised herself. Fetched sheets and a quilt from the cupboard in the en suite. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she took the bed linen down, and didn’t recognise the look on her face. There was a warm, irritable confusion rising in her as to how she should do this. Back in the living room, she powered up the futon and remote-extended it. She was putting on the sheets when he came out and joined her.

‘All yours,’ she said, finishing and standing back up.

‘Thank you.’

They stood looking at the crisp, clean sheets. He seemed to be waiting for something. Maybe in response, a circuit clicked closed somewhere inside her. She put her hands in her jacket pockets and hooked his gaze.

‘The door’s double-locked,’ she said. ‘It’s DNA coded.’

His brow creased. Silent query.

Ah fuck it, here we go. ‘You may as well know this now, Marsalis. You’re going to find out sooner or later, so it may as well come from me. My last relationship was a thirteen. He’s dead now, but I know how that shit works.’ She tapped fingertips to her temple. ‘I know how you work up here. Right now, you’re probably mapping the shortest possible route across town to East 45th and First.’

No visible reaction. She plunged on.

‘And you’re right, it’s not far. Three, four klicks and cross the lines, you’re home free. UN territory, right here in the heart of New York. I’m not sure how they’d get you out after that, but my guess is the powers-that-be here in the Union wouldn’t kick much. They’ve got a better working relationship with the UN than with COLIN most of the time. Truth comes down, they don’t like us much better than they do the Republic.’

‘That must be very upsetting for you.’

‘You’re too kind. So, like I said, I know what’s in your mind. I don’t even blame you much. It’s not like you’re a free actor here, you’re locked into something you’d probably rather not be a part of. You’re under duress, and I know how badly that plays in the thirteen mindset. You’re looking for a way to pick the locks or smash down the door.’

Ethan’s words. He used to grin as he said them, that something-burning grin.

She waited to see what he’d do. If he’d move.

He didn’t. He raised an eyebrow instead, looked down at the open blade of his right hand. She recognised the displacement training, and a faint shiver ran through her.

He cleared his throat.

‘Well, it’s nice to know I’m so well understood. But you see, Ms Ertekin, there seems to be a major flaw in your procedures here. If I’m the ravening, duress-shattering thirteen motherfucker you-’

‘I didn’t say-’

‘-have me down as, then what’s to stop me caving in your skull here and now, slashing you open to get some warm blood for your precious DNA locks, and then doing my pre-dawn sprint across town after all?’

‘The lock only works off saliva.’

He stared at her. ‘I could always scrape it out of your dead mouth.’

‘Do you think you’re going to scare me, Marsalis?’

‘I couldn’t care less if I scare you or not.’ For the first time since she’d met him, his voice tightened towards anger. ‘You were fucking some burnt-out genetic augment who said he was a thirteen, and you want to delude yourself I’m him, that’s your problem. I don’t know what I symbolise to you, Ertekin, what you want me to symbolise, but I’m not up for it. I’m not a fucking number, I’m not a fucking gene code. I’m Carl Marsalis, I think we met already.’ He stuck out his hand bluntly, mock-offer of a clasp, then let it fall. ‘But in case it hasn’t sunk in, that’s all I am. Got a problem with that, then fuck off and deal with it somewhere I don’t have to listen to you.’

They faced each other either end of the stare, a couple of metres apart. To Sevgi, the room seemed to rock gently on the axis of their locked gazes

‘This is my house you’re in,’ she reminded him.

‘Then book me into a fucking hotel.’ He held her eyes for a moment, then looked down at the extended futon. ‘One with room service that doesn’t lecture the guests.’ Another pause. ‘And an elevator. ’

Out of nowhere, the laugh broke in her. She coughed it up.

‘Right,’ she said.

He looked up again. Grimaced. ‘Right.’

She seated herself on one arm of the couch. Hands still tucked in her pockets, but she could feel the tension in her begin to ease. Marsalis raised an arm towards her and let it fall.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. It wasn’t clear if he meant it as an apology or information. ‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going to try and run out on you. I’m going to get some sleep and see if we can’t make a fresh start in the morning. Sound okay to you?’

Sevgi nodded. ‘Sounds good.’

‘Yeah.’ He looked around, fixed on the futon again. ‘Well. Thanks for making up the bed.’

She shrugged. ‘You’re a guest.’

‘Could I get a glass of water?’

She stood up and nodded towards the kitchen. ‘Sure. Chiller on the worktop. Glasses are in the cupboard above. Help yourself.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem. G’night.’

She went to the bedroom and hooked the door closed behind her. Stood there for a while, listening to him move about in the kitchen.

Then she took her right hand out of her jacket pocket, opened her palm and considered the Remington stunspike it held. It looked innocuous, a short thick tube in smooth matt grey. The charge light winked green at her from one end. Thrown hard or jabbed into the target by hand, it carried enough power to put anything human on the floor and leave it there for the best part of twenty minutes.

She hesitated for a moment, then slipped the spike under her pillow and began to get undressed.

He lay flat on his back on the futon, head pillowed on his crossed palms, and stared at the ceiling.

Still locked up, then.

Stupid fucking bitch.

Well, not really. She saw you coming a thousand metres out. That makes her pretty fucking smart.

He sighed and looked across at the window. Six floors up, probably jacked into the same security as the door anyway. Not a chance.

Could always-

Oh, fuck off. Weren’t you listening to Sutherland ? Only do what you are happy to live with. She made your bed, for fuck’s sake. You’re out of the Republic, you’re out of jail. How bad can it be? Sit it out, look at the case. Make some suggestions, let them get comfortable with you. If they want this to work, they can’t keep a leash on you twenty-four seven.

He reached over for the glass and propped himself up to drink.

So she’s an unluck-fucker. Doesn’t seem the sort.

The sort being? Zooly?

Come on, that was a one-off.

A twice-off. So far.

Zooly’s a friend.

Yeah, a friend who likes to fuck unlucks on an occasional basis.

Maybe it’s me Zooly likes to fuck on an occasional basis. Ever think of that? Maybe my genetic status has got fuck all to do with it.

Right. And maybe this Ertekin woman just liked to fuck her unluck boyfriend for who he was too.

Ah, go to sleep.

He couldn’t. The mesh sent rusty twinges through him, out of time with his pulse.

Better get that sorted tomorrow. Nearly four months of substandard chloride, you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t seize up on you soon.

Seemed to work on Dudeck and his pals.

Yeah, this isn’t some bunch of neo-nazi fuckwits you’re dealing with now, this is another thirteen. An adapted thirteen, by the sound of it. You’ll need to be wired all the way right if you’re going to-

Hoy.

Going to what? Couple of days and a dropped guard, we’re out of here, remember.

He went back to staring at the ceiling.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A bad chloride twinge kicked him awake, bone-deep aching along his left forearm and sudden sweat from the intensity of the pain. He’d curled up around it instinctively in his sleep, and there was a faint whimper trapped in his throat as he woke. Aunt Chitra’s pain management training, the silent imperative. Take the pain, breathe, breathe it under control, and don’t make a fucking sound. He swallowed and rolled over, protecting the aching limb with his other arm.

Remembered he was in Sevgi Ertekin’s home, and relaxed. The whimper got free as a low groan.

The room was full of barely filtered light - there were varipolara drapes at the windows, and someone had forgotten to opaque them all the way down the night before. His watch said it was a little after nine. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his left hand, chased the pain to fading. The mesh, for reasons the Marstech biolabs apparently still didn’t understand, ‘remembered’ injury trauma and tended to overload the system in those parts of the body that had suffered it in the past. Fine so long as you fuelled the system right, the worst you got was a faint warmth and itching at the site of previous wounds. But with the shit he’d been buying from Louie over the last few months, the neuromuscular interfacing would be ragged and inflamed. And Carl had once stopped a Saudi opsdog with that forearm. Some monstrous engineered hybrid, ghost pale and snarling as it materialised out of the desert night and leapt at his throat. The impact put him on his back, the jaws sank in to the bone and even after he killed the fucking thing, it took them nearly five minutes to break the bite lock and get it off him.

He listened for sound through the apartment, heard nothing. Evidently Ertekin was still out cold. No chance of going back to sleep now, and the door was still locked. He thought about it for a moment, then got up, pulled on his trousers and padded through to the kitchen. A brief search of the cupboards produced coffee for the espresso machine in the corner. Olympus Mons Robusta blend - from actual Marstech gene labs! Yeah, right. He allowed himself a sour grin and set the machine up to make two long cups, then went to the fridge for milk.

There were a couple of long-life cartons open, one weighing in at about half full, the other a lot less. On impulse he sniffed at the torn cardboard openings on both. Pulled a face and upended each carton carefully one after the other over the sink. With the least full of the two, the contents came out slow and semi solid, splattered across the metal in slimy white clots. He shook his head and rinsed the mess away.

‘You and Zooly’d get on like a fucking house on fire,’ he muttered, and went back to the cupboards to find more milk.

‘Who you talking to?’

He turned with the fresh carton in his hand. The kitchen had filled with the smell of coffee and either that or the noise he was making rummaging in the cupboards had woken Ertekin. She stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes heavy-lidded, hair stuck up in clumps, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt several sizes too big for her and, as far as he could tell, nothing much else. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.

‘Singing,’ he said. ‘To myself. I made coffee.’

‘Yeah, so I fucking see.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re welcome.’

She looked back at him for a moment, impassively, then turned away. He caught the lines of her hips under the T-shirt, the length of her thighs as the about-turn brought her legs together.

‘What time is it?’

‘’Bout half nine.’

‘Fuck, Marsalis.’ Her voice trailed away, back towards the bedroom. ‘What you got, insomnia or something?’

Sounds of water splashing, a door closing it off. A sudden, unlooked-for image opened in his head. Sevgi Ertekin strips off her T-shirt and steps into the shower, hands gathered under her chin beneath the stream of warm water, arms pressing breasts flattened and—

He grinned wryly and derailed the internal experia script before it reached his groin. Finished making the coffee anyway. It came out rich and creamed with bubbles, steaming an aroma that kicked him straight back to the dusty bubblefabs of Huari camp. The ominous itch on his skin of sunlight through an atmosphere only recently made thick enough to breathe, the uneasy pull of Mars gravity, the loose grip of a planet that didn’t recognise him as its own and didn’t really see why it should hold onto him. Coffee in aluminium canisters, dust crunching underfoot and Sutherland at his shoulder, rumbling speech like the reassuring turnover of heavy plant machinery. Nothing human scale around here, soak. Just shade your eyes and take a look. And the staggering, neck-tilting view up massif Verne, to drive the other man’s point home.

He poured the coffee into two mugs, took one for himself and left hers to get cold on the kitchen worktop. Serve her fucking right. He sipped from the mug, pulled a surprised face. From actual Marstech gene labs was right. He hated it when reality bore out the clanging boasts of the hype. He went back to the living room and peered out at the market below. He didn’t know the city well, and this part less than most, but Ertekin’s building was a pretty standard nanotech walk-up and he guessed the open plaza below had been a part of the same redevelopment. It had the faintly organic lines of all early nanobuild. He knew parts of southeast London that looked much the same. Buildings in a bucket - just pour it out and watch them grow.

He heard her come out of the bedroom, heard her in the kitchen. Then he could feel her in the room with him, at his back, watching. She cleared her throat. He turned and saw her on the other side of the room, dressed and somewhat groomed, coffee mug held in both hands. She gestured with the drink.

‘Thanks.’ She looked away, then back. ‘I uh. I’m not great first thing in the morning.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Randomly, for something to fill the quiet between them: ‘Possible sign of greatness. Nor was Felipe Souza, by all accounts.’

Flicker of a smile. ‘No?’

‘No. Did all his molecular dynamics work at night. I read this biography of him, once I got back to Earth. Seemed appropriate, you know. Anyway, book says, when they took him on at UNAM, he refused to lecture before midday. Great guy to have as a tutor, right?’

‘Not for you.’

‘Well, my head starts to spin once you get past basic buckyball structure, so-’

‘No, I meant the morning thing.’ She gestured with the cup again, one-handed this time, a little more open. ‘You wouldn’t be-’

‘Oh, that.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the training. Never really goes away.’

Quiet opened up again in the wake of his words. The conversation, caught and scraping in the shallow waters of her continued embarrassment. He reached for something to pole them clear again. Something that had flared dimly in his mind the previous night as he finally arced downward toward sleep.

‘Listen, I’ve been thinking. You guys debriefed the onboard djinn for Horkan’s Pride, right? Back in June, when this all started.’

‘Yeah.’ Her voice stretched a little on the word, quizzical. He liked the sound it made. He fumbled after follow up.

‘Yeah, so who’d you have do it? In-house team?’

She shook her head. ‘I doubt it. We got transcripts handed down, probably some geek hired out of MIT’s machine interface squad. They handle most of our n-djinn work. Why, you think there’s something they’d miss?’

‘It’s always a possibility.’

A sceptical look. ‘Something you’d pick up?’

‘Okay, maybe not something they missed, as such.’ He sipped his coffee. Gestured. ‘Just something they weren’t looking for, because I wasn’t on the scene. A close link between Merrin and me. Something that’ll put me next to him.’

‘A link? You said you didn’t know him.’

‘I don’t, directly. Come on, Ertekin, you were a cop. You must know something about complexity theory. Social webbing.’

She shrugged. ‘Sure. We got the basics in our demodynamics classes. Yarashanko intuition, Chen and Douglas, Rabbani. All the way back to Watts and Strogatz, all that small-world networks shit. So what? You know, once you get out on the streets for real, most of that demodynamic stuff’s about as useful as poetry in a whorehouse.’

He held back a grin. ‘Maybe so. But small-world networks work. And the variant thirteen club on Mars is a very small world. As is Mars itself. I may not know Merrin, but I’m willing to bet you can link me to him in a couple of degrees of separation or less. And if those links are there, then nothing’s going to spot them out better than an n-djinn.’

‘Yeah. Any n-djinn. Why’s it got to be Horkan’s Pride?’

‘Because Horkan’s Pride was the last djinn to see Merrin alive. It stands to reason that-’

Soft chime from the door.

Ertekin glanced at her watch, reflexively. Confusion creased in the corners of her eyes.

‘Guess Tom just doesn’t trust the two of us together,’ Carl said, deadpan.

The confusion faded out, traded for a disdain he made as manufactured. She crossed to the door and picked up the privacy receiver.

‘Yes?’

He saw her eyes widen slightly. She nodded, said yes a couple more times, then hung up. When she looked at him again, there was a fully-fledged frown on her face. He couldn’t decide if she was worried or annoyed, or both.

‘It’s Ortiz,’ she said. ‘He drove here.’

He covered his own surprise. ‘What an honour. Does he collect all his new hires by limousine?’

‘Not since I’ve been working there.’

‘So it must be me.’

He’d intended it to come out light and supple with irony. But somewhere, sometime in the last four months, he’d lost the knack. He heard the weight in his own words, and so did she.

‘Yeah.’ She looked at him over her coffee mug. ‘It must be you.’

He’d met Ortiz a couple of times before, but doubted the man would remember him. Both meetings were years in the past, both had been swathed in the glassy-smile insincerity of diplomatic visits and Carl had been only one of several variant thirteen trackers in a queue of agency staff lined up to press the visiting flesh on arrival. Munich II was in train, there was talk of COLIN coming back to the table to approve the Accords, fully this time, and everyone was walking on eggs. Back then - Carl recalled vaguely, he hadn’t been that interested - Ortiz was a newly recruited policy adviser, fresh from a political career in the Rim States and not yet a major figure in the COLIN hierarchy. Detail had faded, but Carl remembered grizzled hair and a tan, a slim-hipped dancer’s frame that belied the other man’s fifty something years. A slight lift to the serious brown eyes that might have been Filipino ancestry or just biosculp to suggest the same to voters. A good smile.

For his own part, Carl was busy enjoying the comforts of his newly re-acquired anonymity at the time. The media focus attendant on his rescue and return from Mars and the Felipe Souza had died down, to his relief, the previous year; the celebrity machine, in the absence of any attempt on his part to restoke the fires of its interest, had grown bored with him and moved on. Sure, he’d made it back alive and sane from a nightmarish systems breakdown in deep space, but what else had he done recently? UNGLA was sealed up tight, bureaucratically impassive, not the kind of brightly confected media play the networks liked at all. The high-profile cases were still to come. Meanwhile, some adolescent son of African royalty was up and about on the Euro scene, deploying his Xtrasome capacity at a Cambridge college and his polished-jet good looks in the dj-votional clubs of west London. The Bannister family were settling, amid some local acrimony, into their Union citizenship. A Thai experia star was getting married. And so on. The unblinking media eye rolled away, and Carl felt its absence like the sudden cool of shade from the Martian sun.

They went down to the street. Cold struck through the thin fabric of the S(t)igma jacket he’d blagged in Florida.

Ortiz was waiting for them on the other side of the thoroughfare, leaned against the flank of the COLIN limo in a plain black topcoat, and sipping coffee from a stall up the street. Carl could see the yellow and black logo repeat, weak holoplay in the bright winter air of the market and again in stencilled micro on the styrofoam in Ortiz’s hand. Steam coiled up out of the cup and met the frost of the man’s breath as he raised the coffee to his lips. An unobtrusive security exec stood nearby, hands lightly clasped, scanning the façade from behind lens-sheathed eyes.

Ortiz spotted them and stacked his coffee casually on the roof of the limo at his side. As Carl approached, he stepped forward to meet him and stuck out his hand. No wince, no sign of the internal steeling Carl was used to when he made the clasp with someone who knew what he was. Instead, there was a loose grin on Ortiz’s lean bronzed face that shaved years off his otherwise sober demeanour.

‘Mr Marsalis. Good to see you again. It’s been a while, I don’t know if you’ll remember me from Brussels.’

‘Spring ’03.’ Carl masked his surprise. ‘Yeah, I remember.’

Ortiz made a wry face. ‘What a complete mess that was, eh? Two agendas, worlds apart and steaming steadily in opposite directions. Hard to believe we even bothered talking.’

Carl shrugged. ‘Talking’s always the easy part. Looks good, doesn’t cost anything.’

‘Yes, very true.’ Ortiz shifted focus with the polished smoothness of the career politician. ‘Ms Ertekin. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion. Tom Norton told me you’d be coming in, but I felt in view of the... unpleasantness, it might be as well to provide an escort. And since I was on my way across town anyway . . .’

You thought you’d swing the opportunity to curry some potential UN favour. Right. Or maybe just gawk at the thirteen.

But underneath the sneer, Carl found himself unable to summon much dislike for Ortiz. Maybe it was the relaxed handshake and the grin, maybe just the contrast with the past four months down in the Republic. He turned to catch Ertekin’s response, see what he could read in her face. The tiger eyes and-

-something invisible splits the air between them.

Carl was moving before he had time to consciously understand why.

-flicker of black motion in the corner of his eye-

He hit Ertekin with crossed arms, bore her to the paving and crushed her there. One hand groping for a weapon he didn’t have. Over his head, the air in the street erupted in spit-hiss fury.

Mag-fire.

He heard the coachwork on the limo go first, riddled from end to end - it sounded like a spate of sudden, heavy rain. Someone yelled, grunted as they were hit. Bodies tumbled behind him, dimly sensed. Screams. He was smearing himself on top of Ertekin, casting about for the-

There.

Out of the market, the pitch and panic of the surrounding multitude, three crouched black-clad forms, and the sashaying gait of skaters. They hugged the stubby electromag spray guns to their bellies, cradled low in both hands as they surfed the crowd. Shoulder work opened their path - Carl saw bystanders shunted aside and sprawling. The mesh made it seem like slow motion. Chloride clarity gave him the lead skater, stance shifting as he lifted the muzzle of the spray gun, eyes wide in the pale skin gap of the black ski mask. Half a dozen metres at most, he was going to make sure of his shot this time.

Carl locked gazes and came up off the floor snarling.

Later, he’d never know if it was the matched stare, the noise he made or just the mesh-assisted speed that saved his life. Maybe there was the edge of a flinch in the man’s face as he hurtled forward, the ski mask made it hard to tell. By then, Carl was already up and on him. Three - count them, one! two! three! - sprinted steps and a whirl of tanindo technique. The blade of his left hand slammed in under the lead skater’s chin, his right just added lift and vectored spin. The two of them went over together in a tangle of limbs. The spray gun dropped and skittered. Carl got on top of the skater and started hitting him in the face and throat.

The other two were sharp. The right wing leapt cleanly over the tumbled bodies in his path, came down tight with a solid plastic smack and kept going. Carl got a confused glimpse of the landing, was too busy killing the lead skater to pay real attention. But he felt the other wingman fuck up the same manoeuvre and catch one skate on Carl’s raised shoulder as he jumped. The black clad form went headlong, almost graceful, hit and rolled on the paving. Controlled impact, he’d be back up any second. The mesh strung moments apart like loops of cabling. Carl hacked down savagely with an elbow one more time and beneath him the lead skater went abruptly limp. As the tumbled wingman got almost back upright, Carl lunged, grabbed up the leader’s electromag, clumsily, left-handed, squirmed sideways, getting line of fire, and emptied the gun.

The mag-load sounded like seething water as it left the gun. No recoil - thank Christ - and pretty much point blank. Carl lay, awkwardly braced, and watched the slugs rip into their target. The wing skater seemed to trip forward again, but jerkily this time, no grace in it. He collapsed face down, twisted once and then didn’t move again.

The electromag’s feed mechanism coughed empty and stopped.

Sound filtered through; voices raised and hysterical weeping. Still frosted into the mesh, Carl heard it as if through a long pipe. He picked himself up warily, still not convinced at a cellular level that the third skater wasn’t coming back. He dropped the empty weapon, walked to the dead wingman. Crouched beside the body and tugged the man’s spray gun free. He checked the load, almost absently, on autopilot now, and surveyed the damage around him.

The limo was a write-off, coachwork pock-marked grey on black with the raking impact of the mag-fire. The windows were punched through in a couple of dozen places, powdered to white opaque in spiderweb lines around each hole. Incredibly, Ortiz’s coffee stood where he’d parked it, intact and steaming quietly on the roof of the limo. But Ortiz and his security were both down, tangled in each other’s arms and motionless - it looked as if the bodyguard had tried to get his boss to the ground and cover him there. Blood pooling on the moulded paving where they lay suggested he’d failed. Other bodies lay at a distance, shoppers and stall traders caught in the magfire. Ertekin was up on her knees, staring dazedly around at the mess. Her olive skin was smeared sallow with shock.

‘Got two of them,’ said Carl thickly, as he helped her to her feet. ‘Third one was too fast leaving. Sorry.’

She just stared at him.

‘Ertekin.’ He flickered fingers in front of her face. ‘Are you injured ? Are you hurt? Talk to me Ertekin.’

She shook herself. Pushed his hand away.

‘Fine.’ It was a bare croak. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m fine. We’d better get. An ambulance. Get these people . . .’

She shook herself again.

‘Who? Did you see . . .’

‘No.’ Carl stared away in the direction the last skater had disappeared. He could feel a decision stealing over him like ice. ‘No, I didn’t. But right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work and find out.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the opened rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.

‘Ms Ertekin?’

She looked up bleakly. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

‘Detective Williamson.’ He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue and gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.’

‘I’m fine.’ She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet, even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. ‘I used to be on the force, I’m fine.’

‘That so?’ Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.

‘Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then midtown homicide.’ She managed a shaky smile. ‘You guys are from the twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?’

‘Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.’ No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching the crime-scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. ‘Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.’

‘Yes.’ She was cursing herself for it now. ‘He is.’

‘And.’ Brief hesitation. ‘Is that filed with anyone here in the city?’

Sevgi sighed. ‘We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.’

‘All right.’ But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. ‘I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?’

The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.

‘No, he’s not uh, staying with me,’ she parodied. ‘He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?’

Williamson’s eyes flared.

‘That’d be just fine, Ms Ertekin,’ he said evenly. ‘The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now maybe this is just my paranoia running away with me, or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned cop instinct, but something about that doesn’t chime in time.’

‘He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.’

Williamson grunted. ‘Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient. ’

‘You do?’ Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. ‘Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.’

‘Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?’

She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.

No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.

‘And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?’

She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. ‘No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the floor-’

‘Where he threw you, right?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ The weight of his body on hers. ‘He probably saved my life.’

‘So he saw them coming?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

Williamson nodded. ‘I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.’

‘And I told you I don’t know.’

There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. ‘In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you.’

‘No. I saw one take off towards the boulevard.’ She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic, ‘And I can count.’

‘Description?’

She looked up at him for a long moment. ‘Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.’

Williamson sighed. ‘Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy.’

He gestured at the third bundle on the paving. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.

Sevgi shrugged.

‘Security.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘No. Not my section.’ It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.

Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. ‘So this guy covers Ortiz, right?’

‘Yes, apparently.’

‘Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there-’

‘Do you want to stop using that fucking word ?’

It got her a speculative look. The detective came back towards the limo. ‘All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?’

Sevgi shook her head wearily. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.’ Williamson paused deliberately. ‘Or their self sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.’

She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon to hand. Instead, she levered herself to her feet and faced him.

‘I’m done talking to you, detective.’

‘I don’t think-’

‘I said I’m done talking to you.’ No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armour. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. ‘Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.’

‘This is a murder investi-’

‘Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN security operation?’

His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

‘You back off, detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise, I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.’

Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.

She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.

COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure-transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the market place, parting the crowds with a low-intensity sub-sonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorised the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.

The Land Rover came to a halt at the edge of the crime scene, with scant regard for the incident barriers the NYPD had strung. One armour-swollen corner of its bodywork broke the bright yellow beams and set off the alarm. Police uniforms came running.

‘Subtle,’ said Marsalis.

The Land Rover’s forward passenger door cracked, swung open at a narrow angle. Tom Norton stood up on the running board behind it, scanning the crime scene. Even at a distance, Sevgi could see how ashen his face was.

‘Sev?’

‘Over here.’ She waved from the steps of the building and Norton spotted her. He swung his door wider, stepped down and closed it again. Brief words with the uniforms in his way, a display of badges, and they opened a path for him. Someone went to shut off the barrier breach alarm, and quiet soaked back into the street. The Land Rover backed up a couple of metres and sat there rumbling like the elegant tank it essentially was. The driver did not emerge.

‘Overreacting a bit, aren’t we?’ Sevgi asked as Norton reached them.

He grimaced. ‘Tell that to Ortiz.’

‘Is he okay?’

‘Relative to what? He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. They’ve got him hooked up to half the life support machines available over at Weill Cornell. Major organ damage, but he’ll have ready stock cultured somewhere. Family’ve been notified.’ Norton looked sick as he stared around at the shrink-wrapped corpses. ‘What the fuck was he doing over here anyway, Sev?’

She shook her head.

‘I think he was here to see me,’ said Marsalis, rising to his feet for the first time since the assault. He yawned cavernously.

Norton eyed him with dislike. ‘All about you, huh?’

‘NYPD are all over him, Tom,’ said Sevgi, defusing. ‘Detective in charge hardly gave a shit about Ortiz, all he wanted to talk about was how come we’d got an unlicensed thirteen on the streets.’

‘Right.’ Norton sharpened on the new task. ‘What’s this detective’s name?’

‘Williamson. Out of the twenty-eighth.’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘He’s already been talked to. That’s not what I meant. I think it might play better if we let this look like an attempt on Ortiz.’

‘You think it wasn’t?’ Norton blinked. He gestured at one of the dead assassins. ‘Skater crew, Sev. Track the limo through traffic, that’s standard gang operating procedure. Ten, twelve city murders a year the exact same way. What else are you going to make of this?’

Sevgi nodded at Marsalis.

‘Oh, come on. Sev, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been in town less than a day. Who knew we were here?’

‘Makes no sense the other way round either, Tom. These guys were street. A real ground-level hit squad. What are they doing coming after someone fiftieth-floor like Ortiz? Man wouldn’t know street if it bit him in the ass.’

‘It just did,’ Marsalis said, deadpan.

Norton spared him a hard look. Sevgi stepped in.

‘Look, whatever just went down here, we had more than enough publicity we didn’t need in Florida. Let’s not have a repeat performance. Ask the cops to kill the thirteen angle, make sure the media don’t run it. For public consumption purposes, Marsalis here can be just another heroic COLIN bodyguard, identity protected so that he can continue his good work.’

‘Yes,’ said Norton sourly. ‘As opposed to being a dangerous sociopath who hasn’t actually done any work for us at all yet.’

‘Tom-’

Marsalis grinned. It was like a muscle flexing.

‘Well, I did save your partner’s life for you. Does that count?’

‘As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to cut up rough about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.’

‘Now there’s an idea.’

Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.

‘Sounds good to me too,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Tom, can we wire up the n-djinn from Horkan’s Pride at COLIN? Run a direct interface?’

Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged.

‘Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.’ He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. ‘They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.’

‘But I don’t want.’ Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. ‘What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn.’

Norton stiffened. ‘So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?’

‘No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?’

‘Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be-’

‘Tom!’

‘-better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?’

Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realised was just outside Norton’s easy reach.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor-’

‘What’s wrong with me Sev, is that-’

Two-tone rasp - a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said quietly.

They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.

‘You don’t understand what you’re up against.’ The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. ‘You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an anti-social act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this; there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanised, segregated extra-tribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it - unless you can put me next to him.’

Norton shook his head. ‘You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.’

‘I know he fed off the passengers.’

‘No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.’ Norton took a steadying breath. ‘You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.’

It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.

‘Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,’ he said finally. ‘But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.’

Norton grinned mirthlessly. ‘Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.’

That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. ‘Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?’

CHAPTER TWENTY

The night sky lay at his feet.

Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead, the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded each other’s brilliance or studded the multi-coloured marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way, it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel grey, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.

Fucking ghosts in the machine.

No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses which made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.

Itwas Carl’s opinion, admittedly unfounded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punchline delivered.

In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.

‘Marsalis.’

The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.

It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.

‘That’s me. Been looking me up?’

‘You feature in the flow.’ The ’face lifted one arm and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in amongst it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.

‘Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.’

It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT - he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.

‘It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,’ the blue figure said gravely. ‘Re-enabling a nano-level artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.’

Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was and the downpour of images ran on. Carl gestured towards the display.

‘Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?’

‘Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalised reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemein called y-’

‘Yeah, fine. You can stop there.’ Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talked occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. ‘I came to ask you a couple of questions.’

The ’face waited.

‘Do you recall Allen Merrin?’

‘Yes.’ Merrin’s gaunt Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. ‘Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5th 2106, protocol code 55528187.’

‘Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?’

‘No. The system revived him at four hundred and fourteen hours of trajectory time.’

‘You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred and seventy-nine hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.’

‘Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.’

‘And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?’

The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.

It took about twenty seconds.

‘There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.’

‘Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?’

‘To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way, an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.’

‘So you dreamed Merrin.’

‘That is one way of describing it, yes.’

‘And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?’

The confetti streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really got the hang of human features.

‘Talk to whom?’

Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. ‘To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.’

‘If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.’

‘Often?’

‘I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two per cent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine per cent of his speech was apparently directed-’

‘All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?’

‘Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.’

‘Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.’

‘What referents do you wish employed for the curve?’

‘Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links; they’re not what I’m after.’ Carl wished suddenly that Matthew was here to handle this for him, to reach quick-silver swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here - Carl felt clumsy by contrast, the terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. ‘Cross reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.’

The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.

‘This will take time,’ it said.

Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.

‘Better get me a chair then.’

He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neoNordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something - his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism - or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.

Instead, he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.

The ’face had left him to his chair - a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him - and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place - at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three metres tall, two broad and angled slightly backward at the base, a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.

He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognisable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.

Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.

Saw him request a lateral viewport unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.

Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.

Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matt-textured metal of a bulkhead.

Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.

Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.

There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured - no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming - was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.

Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.

Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.

He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.

The floating, blue shredded figure returned.

‘There is this,’ it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her - just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in post revival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.

‘. . . not again,’ she pleaded vaguely.

Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking - to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening - speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.

‘Again, yes,’ Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. ‘The cormorant’s legacy.’

The image froze.

‘Cormorant,’ said Carl, memory flexing awake.

‘Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,’ said the djinn. ‘An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotas on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.’

Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides

‘Well, well, well,’ he said at last. ‘Gutierrez.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘Never heard of him.’

Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.

‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. ‘Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mid eighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In eighty-six, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution, it took them nearly a month to even realise he’d done it.’

Norton grunted. ‘Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.’

Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amidst the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth seven years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.

Time with the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.

So much for looking beyond.

‘Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez,’ he said neutrally. ‘But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn’t one of them’

‘So they offered him resettlement?’ Ertekin asked.

‘Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?’ Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. ‘He ended up in Wells, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn’t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian familias andinas. I think it paid better than the day job.’

Norton shook his head. ‘If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organised crime, then we’ve already run him and his association with Merrin.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed.

‘Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to-’

‘Contact the Colony Police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right.’ Carl nodded. ‘Yeah. Makes sense, I’d have done the same. Just that it wouldn’t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they’re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby’s arse. All you’ll be left with is some minor association with a low-level middle man like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who’s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That’s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you.’

‘And you know this how?’

He shrugged. ‘How do you think?’

‘Gutierrez did something for you,’ Ertekin said quietly. ‘What was it?’

‘Something I’m not going to talk to you about. The point is, in dataflow terms, my connection with Gutierrez no longer exists, and nor does Merrin’s. Any associative search Colony ran on Merrin would have stopped at Danvers. The Horkan’s Pride n-djinn only went further because it didn’t like the coincidence of two thirteens both making it back from Mars under uncommon circumstances and both having a separate, unrelated connection with a low-grade fence like Danvers. That’s Yaroshanko intuition for you. Very powerful when it works, but it needs something to triangulate off.’

‘I still don’t see,’ said Norton irritably, ‘how that gives you this Gutierrez.’

‘On its own, it doesn’t. But the recollections the n-djinn has of Merrin include a couple of references to a cormorant.’

Norton nodded. ‘Yeah, we saw that first time around. The cormorant legacy, leavings of the cormorant, wring that fucking cormorant’s neck. We had our own reference n-djinns go over it. Checked out Martian slang, and got nothing-’

‘No, it’s not a Martian term.’

‘Might be now,’ Ertekin pointed out. ‘You’ve been back a while. Anyway, we backed up into Project Lawman usage and thirteen argot in general. We still got nothing.’

‘It’s Limeño.’

Norton blinked. ‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a Lima underground term. Pretty obscure, and old. Your n-djinn probably would have discounted it as irrelevant. Goes back to the early seventies, which is when Gutierrez was a young gun on the Andes coast datahawk circuit. Have you heard of ukai ?’

Blank looks.

‘Okay, ukai is a form of fishing where you use trained cormorants to bring up your fish. It’s originally from Japan, but it got big in the Peruvian Japanese community about fifty years back when the whole designer breeding thing really took off. Ukai is done at night, and the cormorants dive with a ring on their throat that stops them swallowing the fish. They get fed when they bring the catch back to their handler. See the imagery?’

‘Contracted datahawking.’ Ertekin’s eyes lit up with the connection. ‘The familias andinas.’

‘Yeah. In those days the familias here on Earth were still a force to be reckoned with. Anyone starting out as a hawk on the south Pacific coast worked for the familias, or they didn’t work at all. You might end up a big-name halcon de datos. But you started life as a cormoran.’

Ertekin was nodding now. ‘Including Gutierrez.’

‘Including Gutierrez,’ he agreed, and something sparked between them as he echoed her words. ‘Later he got his rep, got his own gigs. Got caught.’

‘And when he got to Mars, he found the familias waiting for him all over again.’

‘Right. It’s like stepping back in time half a century there. The familias have a hold they haven’t had on Earth for decades. Apparently Gutierrez had to go right back into ukai work. Back to being a cormorant.’ Carl spread his hands, case closed style. ‘He bitched to me about it all the time.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d do the same with Merrin,’ Norton said.

‘Yeah, it does. Gutierrez had a thing about thirteens. A lot of people do on Mars, there’s a whole fetish sub-culture dedicated to it. It’s like the bonobo fan clubs here. Gutierrez was a fully paid-up member, fascinated by the whole thing. He had this pet analogy he liked to draw, between the thirteens and the Lima datahawks. Both supermen in their own right, both feared and hated by the herd because of it.’

Norton snorted. ‘Supermen. Right.’

‘Well, it was his theory,’ Carl said evenly. ‘Not mine. Point is, he went on and on about being reduced back to ukai status, about how I could understand that shit because of who I was, because of what I was. And he would have laid exactly the same line off on Merrin.’

‘So.’ Norton broke it up, stepped into the flood of light. ‘We call Colony, tell them to bring Gutierrez in and lean on him.’

Carl snorted. ‘Yeah, lean on him from a couple of hundred million kilometres away. Ten-minute comms lag each way. That interrogation, I want to watch.’

‘I didn’t say we’d lean on him, I said Colony would.’

‘Colony couldn’t lean on a fucking wall. Forget it. What happens on Mars doesn’t play this end. It’s not a human distance.’

Ertekin sank deeper into her chair, bridged her hands and stared across the office. Light from the tall window fell in on her like the luminous sifting sunset rains on Mars. Carl’s woken memories came and kicked him in the chest again.

‘If the familias andinas helped get Merrin out of Mars,’ she said slowly, and mostly to herself, ‘then they could be helping him at this end as well.’

‘Not the South American chapters,’ Carl observed. ‘They’ve had a war with the Martian familias for decades. Well, a state of war anyway. They wouldn’t be co-operating with anything at the Mars end.’

Ertekin shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t have to be. I’m thinking about the Jesusland familias, and what’s left of them in the Rim. They pay lip service to the altiplano heritage, but that’s about it. This far north, they run their own game, and a lot of it’s human-traffic related. I mean, the Rim squashed them pretty fucking flat after secession, ripped their markets with the drug-law changes, the open biotech policies. Sex slaves and fence-hopping’s about all they had to fall back on. But they’re still out there, just like they’re still here. And in-between, in the Republic, they still swing a hell of a lot of old-time weight.’

She brooded for a while.

‘Yeah, okay. They’ve got the human traffic software Merrin would have needed to get in and out of the Rim like that. Maybe they’ve got something going on with the Martian chapters, some kind of deal that gets them this Gutierrez’s services. The question is why? What’s their end of something like this? Where’s the benefit?’

‘You think,’ Norton ventured, ‘these are familia-sanctioned hits he’s carrying out?’

‘They bring a thirteen all the way back from Mars to do their contract killing for them?’ Ertekin scowled. ‘Doesn’t make much sense. Sicarios are a dollar a dozen in every major Republican city. Prisons are full of them.’

Norton flickered a glance at Carl. ‘Well, that’s true.’

‘No, this has to be something else.’ Ertekin looked up at Carl. ‘You said this Gutierrez did something for you on Mars. Can we assume you had a working relationship with the familias as well.’

‘I dealt with them on and off, yeah.’

‘Care to speculate on why they’d do this?’ She was still looking. Tawny flakes in the iris of her eyes.

Carl shrugged. ‘Under any normal circumstances, I’d say they wouldn’t. The familias run an old-time macho, conservative set-up, here and on Mars. They’ve got all the standard prejudices against people like me.’

‘But?’

‘But. About three years ago I ran into a thirteen who tried to forge an alliance with what’s left of the altiplano chapters. Guy called Névant, French, ex-Department Eight special insertion unit. Very smart guy, he was an insurrection specialist in Central Asia. Warlord liaison, counter-intelligence, all that shit. Given time, he might have got something working up there too.’

‘Might have,’ drawled Norton. ‘So it’s safe to say he wasn’t given time.’

‘No. He wasn’t.’

‘What happened to him?’

Carl smiled bleakly. ‘I happened to him.’

‘Did you kill him?’ Ertekin asked sharply.

‘No. I tracked him to some friends he had in Arequipa, pulled the Haag gun on him, and he put his hands in the air sooner than die.’

‘Bit unusual for a thirteen, isn’t it?’ Norton cranked an eyebrow. ‘Giving up like that?’

Carl matched the raised brow, deadpan. ‘Like I said, he’s a smart guy.’

‘Okay, so you busted this Névant, this smart guy, and you took him back.’ Ertekin got to her feet and went to stare out of the window. He guessed she could see where this was going. ‘So where is he now?’

‘Back in the system. Eurozone Internment Tract, eastern Anatolia.’

‘And you want to go and talk to him there.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘I think that’ll be more effective than a v-link or a phone call, yes.’

‘Will he see you?’ Still she didn’t turn round.

‘Well, he doesn’t have to,’ Carl admitted. ‘The Eurozone internment charter guarantees his right to refuse external interviews. If this were an official UNGLA investigation, we could maybe bring some pressure to bear, but on my own I don’t carry that kind of weight. But you know, I think he’ll see me anyway.’

‘You basing that on anything at all?’ asked Norton.

‘Yeah, previous experience.’ Carl hesitated. ‘We, uh, get on.’

‘I see. Three years ago you bust the guy, send him back to a lifetime in the Turkish desert, and as a result you’re the best of friends?’

‘Anatolia isn’t a desert,’ said Ertekin absently, still at the window.

‘I didn’t say we were the best of friends, I said we get on. After I busted him, we had to kill a few days in Lima, waiting for transfer clearances. Névant likes to talk, and I’m a pretty good listener. We both-’

A phone chirruped from Norton’s desk on the other side of the office. He shot a last glance at Carl, then strode across to answer the call. Ertekin turned from the window and nailed Carl with a mistrustful look of her own.

‘You think I should let you back across the Atlantic at this point?’

Carl shrugged. ‘Do what you like. You want to pursue another line of enquiry, be my guest and dig one up. But Névant’s the obvious lead, and I don’t think he’ll talk to me in virtual, because a virtual identity can be faked. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t trust it in his place either. Us genetic throwbacks don’t like advanced technology, you know.’

He caught the momentary twitch of her mouth, before she locked the smile reflex down. Norton came back from the phone call, and the moment slid away. The COLIN exec’s face was grim.

‘Want to guess?’ he asked.

‘Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,’ suggested Carl brightly. ‘And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.’

Norton nodded. ‘I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.’

‘Oh fuck.’ Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. ‘All we needed. How the hell did that happen?’

‘Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime-scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.’ Norton pointed. ‘Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion. Anyway, the geek rings up the twenty-eighth precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He either talked to someone really co-operative or someone really dumb.’

‘Fucking Williamson.’

Norton shrugged. ‘Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonising for them.’

‘Demonise?’ Carl grinned. ‘I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.’

‘And slaughtering two,’ said Ertekin wearily. ‘Don’t forget that part.’

‘They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the twenty-eighth may have stirred up.’

‘Oh thanks, Tom.’ Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. ‘A fucking press conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking media?’

Norton spread his hands. ‘It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?’

Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.

PART III

AWAY FROM IT ALL

‘The limited brief of this report notwithstanding, it is imperative to acknowledge that we are dealing here with actual human beings and not some theoretical model of human behaviour. We should not then be surprised to encounter a complex and potentially confusing mass of emotional factors and interactions, nor should it perplex us to discover that any genuine solution may well need to be sought beyond the current scope of our enquiry.’

Jacobsen Report August 2091

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled in amongst a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up. The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain at standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadikoy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stéphane Névant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.

The less official presence he can smell on you, the better, Marsalis told her. Névant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister.

The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karakoy terminal, where the ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding round via the bridge was going to take as long or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.

They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net, while the mid-afternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe. Norton, looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas. He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and downhome good humour.

Dan Meredith, Republic Today. Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?

No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption. Inclusive gesture to the whole room. I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one.

Ripple of muttering among the gathered journalists. Norton gave it just long enough, then squashed it.

Hypermale genetic tendency is, to put not too fine a point to it, autism. A hypermale would make a pretty poor security guard, Dan. Not only would he likely not recognise signs of an impending attack from another human being, he’d probably be too busy counting the bullets in his gun to actually fire them at anything.

Laughter. The footage swung momentarily to Meredith’s face in the crowd. He offered a thin smile. Ladled urbane southern irony into his voice.

I’m sorry, Tom. Leaving aside the fact we all know the Chinese have bred super-autists for their n-djinn interface programmes, that’s not what I meant. I was referring to variant thirteens, which most normal Americans would call hypermales. Hypermales like the one you admit was present at today’s attempt on Alvaro Ortiz’s life. Are you employing any of those as security guards?

No, we’re not.

Then-

But Norton had already raised his head to scan the crowd, already signalled for the next question.

Sally Asher, New York Times. You’ve described this variant thirteen, Carl Marsalis, as a consultant. Can you please tell us what exactly he is consulting on?

I’m sorry, Sally, I’m not currently at liberty to say. All I can tell you is that it has nothing to do with the tragic events of this morning. Mr Marsalis was simply a bystander who took the action any good citizen with the opportunity might.

Any good citizen armed with an assault rifle, maybe. Asher’s voice was light. Was Mr Marsalis armed?

Norton hesitated a moment. You could see the dilemma - data was out there, it was loose in the flow by now. Footage of the crime scene, eye-witness accounts, maybe even back-door gossip from the path labs. No way to tell what was or wasn’t known, and Norton didn’t want to get caught in a lie. On the other hand-

No. Mr Marsalis was not armed.

Quiet but rising buzz. They’d all seen the bullet-riddled limo, at least.

How can a man, an ordinary man, possibly-

Meredith again, voice pitched loud before Norton’s arm cut him off again, hauled in another question from the opposite side of the room. The feed didn’t show Meredith’s face, but Sevgi felt an ignoble stab of pleasure as she imagined the Jesuslander’s chagrin.

Mr Norton, is it true, I’m sorry, Eileen Lan, Rim Sentinel. Is it true, Mr Norton, that COLIN is training personnel on Mars in previously unknown fighting techniques?

No, that’s not true.

Then can you please throw light on this comment from an eyewitness at today’s events. Lan held aloft a microcorder, and a male voice rinsed cleanly through the speaker. The guy was like fucking wheel. I’ve seen that stuff on Ultimate Fighting tapes from Mars, that’s tanindo. That’s stuff they won’t teach back here on Earth, they say it’s too dangerous to let ordinary people get to know because-

The microcorder clicked off, but Lan left it upheld like a challenge. Norton leaned an arm across the lectern and grinned easily.

Well, I’m not really an Ultimate Fighting fan - polite laughter - so obviously I can’t comment accurately on what your eyewitness there is talking about. There is a Martian discipline called tanindo, but it’s not a COLIN initiative. Tanindo has emerged spontaneously from existing martial arts in response to the lower gravity environment on Mars. In Japanese, it means, literally, Way of the Newcomer, because on Mars, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, we are all of us newcomers. It’s also known in some quarters as Float Fighting and, in Quechua, as - you’ll perhaps forgive my pronunciation here - pisi llasa awqanakuy. Mr Marsalis has served time on Mars, and may for all I know be an aficionado of the style, but really a martial art designed for a low-gravity environment isn’t likely to be all that dangerous, or even useful, here on Earth.

Unless you’re inhumanly strong and fast, Sevgi qualified for him silently. Her gaze slipped sideways from the lap screen to Marsalis, dozing in the seat at her side. Norton had dug up fifty mil of COLIN-GRADE betamyeline and an inhaler just before they left, and Marsalis had dosed up in the departure lounge at JFK. He got some nosy sidelong glances, but no one said anything. Aside from a grunt of satisfaction as the chloride took, he made no comment, but as soon as they got to their seats, he’d closed his eyes and a beatific grin split his face with ivory. He was asleep not long after.

Bonita Hanitty, Good Morning South. You don’t feel that by liberating a condemned criminal from a Florida penal institution, COLIN are flouting the very concept of American justice?

More muttering, not all of it sympathetic. Republican journalists were a minority in the room, and the Union press wore Lindley vs NSA on its collective chest like a medal of honour. Cub reporters came up on the legend, senior staffers told pre-secessional war stories, and talked about their Republican colleagues with either snide pity or disdain. Norton knew the ground, and rode with it.

Well, Bonita, I think you need to be careful there talking about justice. As the briefing disc you’ll have received does specify, Mr Marsalis had not actually been charged with anything during his four months of incarceration. And then there’s the question of the initial alleged entrapment, no let me finish please, the alleged entrapment techniques used by the Miami police to arrest Mr Marsalis in the first place. And this is without mentioning that Republican and state law in the matter of pregnancy termination both run counter to well-established UN principles of human rights.

Choked splutters from several quarters, muted cheers elsewhere. Norton waited out the noise with a stern expression, then trod onward.

So what I’d say is that COLIN has liberated a man who is in all probability innocent, and whom the state of Florida didn’t really seem to know what to do with anyway. Yes, Eileen, back to you.

There was a lot more after that, of course. Hanitty, Meredith and a couple of other Jesusland reps trying to dig back into Marsalis’s prior record and the deaths in the Horkan Garrod camp. Mercifully nothing about Willbrink. Norton rode cautious and courteous herd on it all, didn’t quite shut the Jesuslanders down, but leaned heavily towards Union journalists he knew and trusted enough not to throw curves. Sevgi yawned and watched it to a close. Beside her in the suborbital, the object of all their fears and attentions dozed on unconcerned.

Sleep of her own was unforthcoming - the syn wouldn’t allow it. She was still buzzing a couple of hours later as she slumped in the cheap plastic seating of the ferry hall, watching the few other waiting passengers with a cop’s eye. The place was bare bones and draughty, lit from above by sporadic spot-lamps on the roof girders and at the sides by the ghostly flicker of a few LCLS advertising boards whose sponsors hadn’t specified particular time slots for activation. Efes Extra!!, Jeep Performance!!, Work on Mars!! The inactive panels between looked like long grey tombstones hung on the corrugated steel walls.

Through rolled-back shutter doors at the side, the white-painted superstructure of the moored ferry showed like a sliced view of another age. More modern additions to Istanbul’s diverse collection of water transport had a boxy, plastic look that made them out no more than the seabuses they were, offering nothing at journey’s end but the completion of the daily commute. But the high, wide bridge, hunched smoke stack and long waist of the antique ships still on the Karakoy-Kadikoy run spoke of departure to further-flung places, and an era when travel could still mean escape.

Marsalis came back from a prowl of the environs. She supposed in her grandfather’s time, he’d have got more looks for his skin, but now he stood out no more than the half-dozen Africans waiting around the dock as passengers and the two that stood in coveralls on the deck of the ferry beyond the shutters. No one gave him more than a glance, and that mostly for his bulk and the bright orange lettering on the inmate jacket he still wore.

‘Do you have to keep wearing that?’ she asked irritably.

He shrugged. ‘It’s cold.’

‘I said at the airport, I’d buy you something else.’

‘Thanks. I like to buy my own clothes.’

‘Then why didn’t you?’

Klaxons groaned in the girdered space over their heads. An LCLS arrow on a movable barrow lit up pointing to the cranked back shutters, destinations inscribed: Haydarpasa, Kadikoy. The two men on the ferry rolled out gangplanks, and a slow drift of humanity began towards the boat.

Impelled by memory of childhood visits, Sevgi moved along the starboard rail and seated herelf on the outward-facing bench near the stern, propped herself there with her booted feet on the rail’s bottom rung. Thrum of the ship’s motors through the metal at her back. The mingled reek of engine oil and damp mooring ropes carried her back in time. Murat’s hand ruffling her hair as she stood beside him at the rail, barely tall enough to see over the top rung. The soft, chuntered rhythms of Turkish pushing out the English in her head. The impact of a whole world she’d only previously seen in the photos, a city that wasn’t New York, a place that was not her home, but meant something vital - she sensed it in the way they looked around, exclaimed to each other, clutched each other’s hands at her eye level - to her parents. Istanbul had shocked her to her four-year-old core, and each time she went back, it did it again.

Marsalis dropped into the seat beside her, copied her stance. The rail clanked dully as it took the weight of his legs.

‘Now I’m really going to need this jacket,’ he said cheerfully. ‘See?’

The engine thrum deepened, became a roar and the stern of the ferry rose in a mound of seething water. Shouts from the crew, ropes thrown and a rapidly widening angle of space opened between the ferry and the dock. The boat thrashed about and picked up a vector out across the darkened water. Karakoy fell away, became a festooned knot of lights in the night. A chilly sea breeze came slapping at Sevgi’s face and hair. The city opened out around her, colour-lit bridges and long low piles of skyline, all floating on a liquid black dotted with the running lights of other ships. She breathed in deep, held onto the illusory sense of departure.

Marsalis leaned towards her. He pitched his voice to beat the engines and the wind of their passage.

‘Last time I came here, there was a delay at the suborb terminal, some kind of security scare. But I only found out about it after I’d checked out of my hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to get out to the airport.’ He grinned. ‘I spent the whole two hours doing this, just riding the ferries back and forth ’til it was time to go. Nearly missed my fucking flight. Out here, looking at all this, you know. Felt like some kind of escape.’

She stared at him, touched to shivering by the echo of her own feelings in his words. His brow creased.

‘What’s the matter? You getting seasick?’

She shook her head. Threw something into the gap.

‘Why’d you come back, Marsalis? Back to Earth?’

‘Hey.’ Another grin. ‘I won the lottery. Would have been pretty ungracious not to take the prize.’

‘I’m serious.’ Fiercely, into the wind between them. ‘I know it’s grim out there, but every thirteen I ever heard talk about it loved the whole idea of Mars. Escape to a new frontier, a place you can carve out something of your own.’

‘It isn’t like that.’

‘I know. But that doesn’t stop anyone believing it.’ She looked out across the water. ‘It’s where they’re all heading, isn’t it? The ones you hunt down. They’re heading for the camps and a one-way ticket to the Martian dream. Somewhere they’ve been told they’ll be wanted, valued for their strengths. Not rounded up and kept on fenced ground like livestock.’

‘Most of them try for the camps, yeah.’

‘You ever ask yourself why UNGLA doesn’t just let them run, let them hitch a cryocap ride out of everyone’s hair?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, primarily because the Accords say they can’t. The Agency exists to make sure every genetic variant on Earth is filed and monitored appropriate to their level of risk to society, and in the case of variant thirteens that means internment. If we start turning a blind eye to fence-breakers just because we think they’re going to skip for Mars, pretty soon some of them aren’t going to skip for Mars, they’re just going to hole up somewhere here on Earth and maybe start breeding. And that puts the whole fucking human race back to pre-Munich levels of panic.’

‘You talk as if they weren’t like you,’ she said, accusation rising in her voice. ‘As if you were different.’

‘I am different.’

Just like Ethan, just fucking like him. Her own despair guttered upward on its wick. Her voice sounded dull in her own ears. ‘It doesn’t matter to you that they’re treated this way?’

Another shrug. ‘They’re living the choices they made, Ertekin. They could have gone to Mars when COLIN opened the gates at Munich. They chose to stay. They could get on with their lives on the reservations. They choose to break out. And when I come for them, they’ve got the option to surrender.’

Jagged memory of Ethan’s bullet-ripped corpse on the slab. Called to make the identification, trembling and cold with the shock.

‘Choices, yes,’ she snarled. ‘Every choice a fucking humiliation. Give up your freedom, roll over and do as you’re told. You know full fucking well what kind of choice that is for a thirteen.’

‘It’s a choice I made,’ he said mildly.

‘Yeah.’ She looked away again, disgustedly. ‘You’re right. You are different.’

‘Yeah, I’m smarter.’

Another ferry passed them a hundred metres off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug towards the little island of lights and windowed warmth, the vaguely glimpsed figures moving about within. Then the stupidity of the situation came and slapped at her like the sea wind. Right behind her, pressing into her shoulders, were the window rims of an identical haven of lit and heated space, and she’d turned her back on it.

Yeah, much better that way, Sev. Turn away. Stay out in the cold and stare across the water at the fucking unattainable as it sails away from you.

Fucking idiot.

‘So he went down fighting?’

She snapped around to face him again. ‘Who did?’

‘The thirteen you were having a relationship with.’ The same mild calm in his voice. ‘You told me he’s dead, you’re angry about what I do for a living. Makes a certain kind of sense this guy got taken down by someone like me.’

‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘Not someone like you.’

‘Okay, not someone like me.’

He waited, let it sit between them like the darkness and the noise of their passage through it.

She clenched her teeth.

‘They sent the SWATs,’ she said finally. ‘A fucking dozen of them. More. Body armour and automatic weapons, against one man in his own home. They-’

She had to swallow.

‘I wasn’t there, it was morning and I’d already gone to work. He was off duty, just off a stack of night work. Someone in the department tipped him off they were coming, they found a call on the phone later, downtown number. He-’

‘He was a cop?’

‘Yeah, he was a cop.’ She gestured helplessly, hand a claw. ‘He was a good cop. Tough, clean, reliable. Made detective in record time. He never did anything fucking wrong.’

‘Apart from fake his ID, presumably.’

‘Yeah. He got himself Rim States citizenship back before the internments started. Said he saw it coming way ahead of time. He bought a whole new identity in the Angeline Freeport, lived up and down the West Coast for a couple of years building it up, then put in for official immigration to the Union. They still weren’t testing for variant thirteen then, and once he was in, he had the Cross Act to protect him, the whole right to genetic privacy thing.’

‘Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.’

‘Yeah?’ She gave him a smile smeared with pain. ‘That your professional opinion?’

‘For what it’s worth. I guess he was smart.’

‘Yeah, well. Like Jacobsen says - sociopathic tendency allied with dangerous levels of raw intelligence. That’s why we’re locking thirteens up, right.’

‘No. We’re locking thirteens up because the rest of the human race is scared of them. And a society of scared humans is a very dangerous thing to have on your hands. Well worth a bit of internment to avoid.’

She scanned his face for the irony. Couldn’t tell.

‘His name was Ethan,’ she said at last. ‘Ethan Conrad. He was thirty-six years old when they killed him.’

The other ferry was almost gone now, fading amidst the other flecks of traffic and the lights of the European side. She drew a deep breath.

‘And I was six months pregnant.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

On the Asian side, with Europe reduced to glimmering lights across the water, she got drunk and told him the rest.

He wasn’t sure why - it might have been a by-product of the alcohol, or a desired result. Either way, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d watched the way her mouth clamped shut behind the sudden admission of loss, and he recognised damage that wouldn’t be healing any time soon. They got off the ferry in Kadikoy without speaking, carrying a personal silence between them that deadened the clank and clatter of disembarkation. The same bubble of quiet stayed with them as they trudged the half dozen rising blocks up from the waterfront, following the street-finder holo in the keytab, until they reached the winding thoroughfare of Moda caddesi and the low-rise apartment tower that COLIN owned there. It was a residential neighbourhood, long since put to bed, and they saw no one along the way.

There was a strange, secretive feeling of release and refuge in it all. Quietly, quietly, up and away from the lights of the ferry terminal, past the shuttered frontages of a market and the curtained windows of the sleeping world, the glimmering map in the hollow of Ertekin’s palm and the pale bluish light it cast up into her face. When they arrived, she opened the door in from the street with exaggerated care, and they took the stairs rather than wake the machinery of the elevators. In the apartment - air infused with the slightly musty chill of no recent occupancy - they fetched up together in the kitchen, still without speaking, and found an open but barely touched bottle of Altinbas raki on the worktop.

‘You’d better pour me some of that,’ she told him grimly.

He searched out the appropriate long slim glasses, found them in a cabinet, while Ertekin filled a jug with water from the tap. He poured each glass half full with the oily transparent weight of the raki and watched as she topped the measures off from the jug. Milky, downward-tumbling avalanche cloud of white as the water hit. She grabbed up a glass and drank it off without drawing breath. Set it down again and looked expectantly at him. He poured again, watched her top up. This one she sipped at and carried through to the abandoned chill of the living room. He took bottle and jug and his own glass, and followed her.

They were on the top floor; broad picture window vantage opening out over the rooftops of Kadikoy with a couple of storeys’ advantage. With the lounge lighting dimmed back, they had a clear view right the way to the Sea of Marmara and the minaret-spiked skyline of Sultanahmet back on the European side. Staring at it, Carl had the sudden, hallucinatory sensation of leaving something behind, as if the two shores were somehow drifting apart. They sat in squashy mock-leather armchairs facing the window, not each other, and they drank. Out on the Sea of Marmara, big ships sat at anchor, queuing for entry to the Bosphorus straits. Their riding lights winked and shifted.

They’d killed well over half the bottle by the time she started talking again.

‘It wasn’t fucking planned, I can tell you that much.’

‘You knew what he was?’

‘By then, yes.’ She sighed, but it got caught somewhere in her throat. There was no real relief in the noise it made. ‘You’d think we’d have terminated it, right? Knowing the risks. Looking back, I’m still not really sure why we didn’t. I guess . . . I guess we’d both started thinking we were invulnerable. Ethan had that from the start, that whole thirteen thing. He always acted like bullets would have bounced off him. You could see it in him across a crowded room.’

Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.

‘And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is good, this is right, this is what’s supposed to be. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling you it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the airlock. You tell yourself the genetic privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails on you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD. You’re the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on your door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.’

‘You met Ethan through the force?’

It got him a sour smile. ‘How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialise much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cosy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.’

‘Not quite. You can always leave the police force.’

She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. ‘You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself. The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.’

‘And did you? Tear it all down?’

‘You mean, did we fuck?’

‘Actually, no. But-’

‘Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.’ She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again. Snac. ‘Like that. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blonde bitch worked datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organise a move across the river when I made midtown homicide. Just an old neighbourhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.’ Another frown. ‘Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.’

‘Had he told you what he was?’

‘Not then, no. I mean,’ she gestured again, more carefully this time. ‘Not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?’

‘Not generally, no.’

‘No.’ She nursed her drink for a while. ‘I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.’

‘What did he want?’

Her lip curled. ‘He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still above ground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while ’til he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.’

‘He recognised him? I’d have thought-’

‘Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim States, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.’ She clenched a fist in the low light. ‘He wouldn’t believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way. That’s not the way we do things, he kept saying. You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip.’

A darted look. ‘That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.’

‘It’s been known.’

‘Yeah, well, this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case - ’ She shrugged. ‘Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right? Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.’

Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out to sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.

‘So what happened?’ he asked finally.

She looked away. ‘I think you know.’

‘Ethan solved the problem.’

‘Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.’ Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. ‘Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned me, when Ethan wasn’t around.’

‘Did you tell Ethan about it?’

‘I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.’

She paused. Picking words.

‘But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth. There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?’

He shrugged. ‘So the psychomonster flicks would have us believe.’

‘Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, internal affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.’

‘Until.’

She nodded. ‘Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Skinned knuckles, finger gouges in his throat.’ A faint, weary smile. ‘And the house was cleaner than I’d seen it in months. Washed floors everywhere, bathroom like a screen ad, everything nanodusted. You could still hear the stuff working if you put your ear up close to the tub. He never cleaned up like that again in the whole time we were together.’

More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the raki bottle. Offered it to him.

‘You want?’

‘Thanks, I’ll pass.’

He watched as, a little unsteadily, she built herself a new drink. When she was done, she held the glass without drinking from it and stared out at the ships.

‘It seemed like we held our breath all summer,’ she said quietly. ‘Waiting to see. I knew a lot of cops in Queens from before I moved to midtown, I started hanging out with them again, on and off, to see if there was a missing persons filed, or if a body had turned up. We checked the NYPD links to UNGLA’s most wanted all the time for news. Keegan never made it onto the list. Ethan reckoned you guys had him down as such a fuck-up he wasn’t worth chasing, he’d dig his own grave soon enough if you’d just give him some time.’

Carl shook his head. ‘No, we like the stupid ones. They’re easy to track down, and that makes the Agency look good. If your guy wasn’t listed, the most likely thing is whoever helped him over the wire at Cimarron found some way to keep it quiet. Or whoever had the contract to run the place at the time just hushed the whole thing up to keep the statistics sweet. Oversight provision for Cimarron is pretty fucking weak, even by Jesusland standards, and if the contract was up for a renewal bid, well.’ He spread his hands. ‘Every lag on that reservation knows the best time to plan an escape is just before tender. They know the operating corporation is going to try like crazy to squeeze maximum efficiency out of badly paid staff and end up with riot-level tension instead, and they know that if they do make it over the wire, there’s going to be no public nationwide manhunt, because the contract holders can’t afford the publicity. It’s how half these guys keep getting away so easily.’

‘Fucking Jesusland,’ she slurred.

He gestured lazily. ‘Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s the sort of thing keeps me in work. Come to that, Jesusland isn’t the only place I’ve seen weak oversight.’

‘No. Only place they’re fucking proud of it, though.’ She peered morosely into her drink. ‘Still can’t fucking believe it sometimes, you know?’

‘Believe what?’

‘Secession. What America did to itself. I mean - ’ She made an upward groping gesture with her free hand. ‘We fucking invented the modern world, Marsalis. We modelled it, on a continental scale, got it working, sold it to the rest of the world. Credit cards, popular air travel, global dataflow. Spaceflight. Nanotech. We put all that in place, you know? And then we let a bunch of fucking Neanderthal bible-thumping lunatics tear it all to pieces? What the fuck is that, Marsalis?’

‘Don’t ask me. Little before my time.’

‘I mean.’ She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. ‘If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had come and just chased us out of the driving seat, you know I could maybe handle that. Every culture has to give way to something in the end. Someone fresher and sharper always comes along. But we fucking did this to ourselves. We let the grasping, hating, fearing idiot dregs of our own society tip us right over the fucking precipice.’

‘You live in the Union, Sevgi. That’s hardly the abyss, is it?’

‘But that’s just the fucking point. That’s what they always wanted, Marsalis. Separation from the north. Secession. Their own fucking mud puddle of ignorance to wallow in. It took them two hundred fucking years to do it, but in the end they got exactly what they wanted.’

‘Come off it. They lost the Rim States. That’s what, a third of American GDP?’ He couldn’t work out why he was arguing so hard with her. He knew the ground because anyone working for UNGLA had to, but it wasn’t like he was an expert. It wasn’t like he cared. ‘And look, from what I hear out of Chicago these days, they might not be able to hang onto the Lakes much longer either. Then you’ve got Arizona-’

‘Yeah, right.’ She snorted, and sank deeper into her chair. ‘Fucking Arizona.’

‘They’re talking about admission to the Rim.’

‘Marsalis, it’s Arizona. They’re more likely to declare an independent republic of their own than anything else. And anyway, if you think Jesusland is going to let either them or any of the Lake states secede the way the northeast did, you’re crazy. They’ll put the national guard in there faster than you can say Praise the Lord.’

Because he didn’t care one way or the other - right? - he said nothing, and the conversation closed up on her final words with a snap. There was a long pause. They both looked out at the ships.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered after a while.

‘Skip it. You were telling me about Keegan. Waiting to hear if his body turned up.’

‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the beginning. That was when we started getting confident. Started not worrying about the situation, just living as if there was no danger, as if Ethan was just some regular guy. Year or so of that and, bang, oops.’ She smiled bleakly. ‘Biology in action.’

‘And they took it away from you.’

The smile dropped off her face. ‘Yeah. Union law’s pretty progressive, but they won’t buck the consensus that far. No siring of offspring from variant thirteen stock, any and all incubated genetic material to be destroyed. I’ve got lawyers fighting it, claiming moral precedent from pre-secessional cases on late-stage abortion, right to life, all that shit. Been nearly five years now, and we’re still fighting. Appeal, block, object, counter appeal. But we’re losing. UNGLA have got all the money in the world to fight this one, and their lawyers are better than mine.’

‘Sort of thing that makes a COLIN salary very attractive, I imagine.’

‘Yeah.’ Her expression hardened. ‘Sort of thing that makes working for an organisation that doesn’t give a fuck about UNGLA very attractive too.’

‘Don’t look at me. I’m freelance.’

‘Yes. But it was someone like you in UNGLA liaison at city hall that came looking for Ethan, that put the SWATs onto him. It was someone like you that authorised inducing my fucking baby at six and a half months and sticking it in a cryocap until UNGLA’s legal team can get a ruling to have it fucking murdered.’

Her voice caught on the last word. She buried herself in her drink. Wouldn’t look at him any more.

He didn’t try to disabuse her of the jagged anger she’d fenced herself in with, because it looked like she needed it. He didn’t point out the obvious flaws.

In fact, Sevgi, he didn’t say, it probably wasn’t someone like me, because in the first place there aren’t that many like me around. Four other licensed thirteens working UNGLA that I know of, and none of them in a liaison capacity.

And more to the point, Sevgi Ertekin, if it had been someone like me hunting Ethan Conrad, that someone would have shown up in person. He wouldn’t have handed it to a mob of SWAT cudlips and stood on the sidelines like some fucking sheep hierarch supervising.

Someone like me would have done his killing himself.

Instead, he sat quietly and watched as Ertekin slid from brooding silence into a raki-sodden doze. Awareness of where he was made its way back into his consciousness, the darkened apartment in the cloven city, the distant lights, the sleeping woman at barely arm’s length but curled away from him now, the quiet-

Hey, Marsalis. How you been?

-the tidal fucking quiet, like swells of black water, the seeping silence and Elena Aguirre, back again, talking softly to him-

Remember Felipe Souza? Stars and silent, empty corridors and safely dreaming faces behind glass that locked you out in the alone. That little whining I made in the pits of your ears, the way I’d come up behind you and whisper up out of it. Thought I’d gone away, did you? No chance. I found you out there, Marsalis, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. You and me, Marsalis. You and me.

-and the ships out at anchor on the silent swell, waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

They kept him waiting at reception. Not entirely an unpleasant experience; like a lot of Rim States v-formats, the Human Cost Foundation’s site was subtly peopled with short-loop secondary ’faces, hardwired into the system to provide the environs with what product brochure enthusiasm liked to call a more authentic feel. Sitting across from him in the waiting area, a svelte young woman in a short business skirt crossed one long thigh over the other and gave him a friendly smile.

‘Do you work for the Foundation?’ she asked.

‘Uh, no. My brother does.’

‘You’re here to see him?’

‘Yes.’ The format sculpters had done their work well. He felt positively rude stopping on the dry monosyllable. ‘We don’t see each other that much these days.’

‘You’re not local then?’

‘No. Wiring in from New York.’

‘Oh, that is a long way. So how do you like it out there?’

‘It isn’t out there for me, it’s home. We both grew up in the city. My brother’s the one who moved.’ Tiny flicker of sibling rivalry riding a base of Manhattan exceptionalism, and the tiny adrenal shock as he recognised both. He began to see how the interface psychiatry he’d always sneered at might work quite well after all.

‘So, uh.’ The question rose to his lips, he tasted its idiocy but weariness let it through anyway, part challenge, part deflection from more talk about Jeff. ‘Where are you from?’

She smiled again. ‘That’s almost a metaphysical question, isn’t it? I suppose I’d have to say I’m from Jakarta. Conceptually, anyway. Have you ever been there?’

‘Couple of times, wiring in. Not for real.’

‘You should go. It’s beautiful now the nano-build is finished. Best to try and see it in ...’

And so on, effortlessly evading any conversational currents that might bring them up too hard against the fact of what she was. He guessed that this must be how high-class prostitution worked as well, but he was too tired to really care. He let go, let himself be lulled by the erudite flow of what she knew, the participative dynamic she ran the conversation on, the stocking-sheathed geometry of her elegantly crossed legs. There seemed to be a reactive sub-routine that measured how much he wanted to talk and adjusted the response output accordingly. He found, oddly enough, that he wanted to talk quite a lot.

He wasn’t aware of Jeff approaching, until his brother stood almost over him, smiling wearily.

‘Okay.’ He fumbled to his feet, recovered himself. ‘At last.’

‘Yeah, sorry. Whole boat-load of wash-ups came in from Wenzhou a couple of days ago, it’s going to put us way over budget for the quarter. Been negotiating with the legislature all fucking day.’ He nodded at the still seated woman. ‘I see you’ve met Sharleen.’

‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Lovely, isn’t she. You know sometimes I’ll come out here and talk to her just for the fun of it.’

Norton looked at the ’face. She smiled up at the two of them, head lifted, expression gone very slightly vacant, as if what they were saying was birdsong, or a played segment of some symphony she liked.

‘Need to talk to you,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘Sure.’ Jeff Norton gestured. ‘Come on through. Bye, Sharleen.’

‘Goodbye.’

She smiled over her shoulder as they left, then swivelled and sat immobile and silent as they passed out of trigger range. Jeff led him past the reception island and down a truncated corridor with a water cooler at the end. A half-dozen steps along, the passageway greyed out around them and became Jeff’s office. It was pretty much as Norton remembered the actual suite from a visit a couple of years back, a few décor differences in the pastel shades of the walls and fittings, maybe one or two ornaments on shelves that he didn’t recall. A photo of Megan on the desk. He drew a compressed breath and seated himself on the right-angle sofa facing the window and the skyline view of Golden Gate park. His brother leaned across the desk and punched something out on the deck.

‘So?’

‘I need some more advice. You heard about Ortiz?’

‘No.’ Jeff leaned against the side of his desk. ‘What’s he up to, more UN hand-holding tours?’

‘He’s been shot, Jeff.’

‘Shot?’

‘Yeah. It’s all over the feeds. Where have you been? I thought you’d know. I gave a COLIN press conference all about it yesterday afternoon.’

Jeff sighed. Shook his head as if it wasn’t working properly. He crossed to the adjacent angle of the sofa and collapsed into it.

‘Christ, I’m tired,’ he muttered. ‘Been on this Wenzhou thing for the last day and a half solid. I didn’t even go home from the office last night. Been in virtual most of this morning. Is he still alive?’

‘Yeah, holding up. They’ve got him wired into intensive-care life support over at Weill Cornell. Medical n-djinn says he’s going to be okay.’

‘Can he talk?’

‘Not yet. They’re going to patch him into a v-format once he regains consciousness, but that might be a while.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ Jeff gave him a haggard look. ‘So what’s this got to do with me? What do you need?’

‘For Ortiz, nothing. I don’t think you could help right now anyway. Like I said, he’s not even conscious. They’ve got family and close friends at the hospital but-’

His brother gave him the corner of a smile. ‘Yeah, I know. Not my world any more. Blew my chance at the Union power game, didn’t I.’

‘That’s not what I-’

‘Ran west and ended up a bleeding-heart charity chump.’

Norton gestured impatiently. ‘That’s not what this is about. I want to talk to you about Marsalis. You know, the thirteen we levered out of South Florida State?’

‘Oh. Right.’ Jeff rubbed at his face. ‘So how’s that working out?’

Norton hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You got problems with him?’

‘I don’t . . .’ He lifted his hands. ‘Look, the guy signed up okay. You were right about that much.’

‘What, that he’d bite your hand off for the chance to get out of a Jesusland jail ?’ Jeff shrugged. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘Yeah, well. I guess I owe you for the suggestion. And I’ve got to say, he lives up to the hype. He was there when they tried to hit Ortiz, and it looks like this guy’s the only reason Ortiz is still breathing. He took out two of the three shooters and chased the third one off. Unarmed. You believe that?’

‘Yes,’ said Jeff shortly. ‘I do believe that. I told you, these guys are fucking terrifying. So what’s the problem?’

Norton looked at his hands. He hesitated again, then shook his head irritably and raised his eyes to meet his brother’s curious gaze.

‘You remember I told you I’ve got a partner now? Ex-NYPD detective, a woman?’

‘Who you want to get horizontal with, but won’t admit it. Yeah, I remember.’

‘Yeah, well there’s something I didn’t tell you about her. She had a relationship with a renegade thirteen a few years back. Didn’t work out, and there were some, uh, complications.’

Jeff raised his brows. ‘Uh-oh.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t give it much thought, even when we hired this guy.’

‘Bullshit.’

Norton sighed. ‘Okay, I gave it some thought. But you know, I figured, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s got a handle on the situation. Nothing to worry about.’

‘Sure.’ Jeff leaned forward. ‘So what are you worrying about?’

Norton stared around the office miserably. ‘I don’t know.’ He threw up his arms. ‘I don’t know, I don’t fucking know.’

His brother smiled, sighed.

‘You ever chew coca leaves, Tom?’

Norton blinked. ‘Coca leaves?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What has that got-’

‘I’m trying to help here. Just answer the question. You ever chew coca leaves?’

‘Of course I have. Every time we have to go down to the prep camps for a Marstech swoop, they give us a big bag at the airport and recommend it for the altitude. Tastes like shit. So what has that got to do with-’

‘Do you get high when you chew coca?’

‘Oh, come on-’

‘Answer the question.’

Norton set his jaw. ‘No. I don’t get high. Sometimes, your mouth goes numb, but that’s it. It’s just to give you energy, stop you feeling tired.’

‘Right. Now listen. That energising effect is part of an evolved working relationship between humans and the coca plant. Coca gives humans medicinal benefits, humans ensure that there’s plenty of coca being cultivated. Everybody wins. And human physiology copes very comfortably with the effects the leaf provides. It’s a benefit that doesn’t interfere with any of your other necessary survival dynamics. You’re not going to do anything stupid just because you’re chewing those leaves.’

‘Why is it,’ Norton asked heavily, ‘that every time I come to you for help, you have to lecture me?’

Jeff grinned at him. ‘Because I’m your older brother, stupid. Now pay attention. If you extract the alkaloid from the coca leaf, if you take it through the artificial chemical processes that give you cocaine, and then you slam that stuff into the human brain, well then you’re going to see a whole different story. You do a couple of lines of that shit, and you surely will get high. You also probably do some stupid things, things that might get you killed in a more unforgiving evolutionary environment than New York. You won’t pay attention to the social and emotional cues of the people around you, or you’ll misread them. Fail to remember useful personal detail. You’ll maybe hit on the wrong woman, pick a fight with the wrong guy. Misjudge speeds, angles and distances. And long term, of course, you’ll put your heart under too much strain as well. All good ways to get yourself killed. What it comes down to is that we’re not evolved to deal with the substance at the level our technology can give it to us. Age old story, same thing with sugar, salt, synadrive, you name it.’

‘And variant thirteen,’ Norton said drearily.

‘Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look - by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.’

‘Apart from the kleptocrats.’ Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorising. ‘I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?’

Jeff shrugged. ‘Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profile for a kleptocrat and a thirteen doesn’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.’

‘Oh, come on. How are you going to measure something like that?’

‘Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the wash-ups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well - apparently before Jacobsen and the round-up, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-sized backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.’

‘Which means what?’

‘Well, what’s the pre-eminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?’

‘I don’t know. Networking skills?’

Jeff laughed. ‘You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.’

‘So were you, once.’

‘Charisma!’ Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. ‘Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their force-fulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.’

‘What if they are women?’

‘Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.’

‘I thought you were talking about now.’

‘Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.’

‘Apart from wiping out the thirteens.’

‘Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilisation getting an early start.’

Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. ‘Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?’

His brother sighed. ‘Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition towards charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us just quietly hate them, but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys stood for any elected post, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label winners every time. Why do you think Jacobsen wanted them interned and chemically castrated? The way he saw it, let them out into the general population and within a couple of decades they’d be running every democratic nation state on the planet. They’d demolish the democratic process, roll back everything feminised civil society’s achieved in the last couple of centuries. And they’d breed right back into base humanity like rabbits, because any woman who’s at all drawn to male sexuality is going to fall like a bomb for these guys.’ Jeff gave him another wry grin. ‘The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance. That what’s bothering you, little brother?’

Norton gestured irritably ‘No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to co-operate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.’

‘Well, how’s she doing?’

‘I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.’

‘Exotic Istanbul, huh?’

‘Oh, shut up.’

Jeff quelled his grin. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw-’

‘Great.’

‘-but wanting to fuck a guy’s brains out isn’t necessarily the same thing as switching your own brain off. I mean, look - the bonobo thing is similar. They’ve got an amped-up feminine appeal that’ll blast the average guy’s sexual systems like a cocaine hit everytime-’

‘Yeah, you’d know all about that.’

Jeff stopped and looked at him reproachfully. ‘Tom, I said I was sorry about the Istanbul crack. Give me a fucking break will you. What I meant was, you don’t see me leaving Megan and the kids for Nuying, do you? Risking divorce, separation from Jack and Luisa, maybe a lawsuit for professional misconduct, all because I’m crazy for some modified pussy. Those things are important to me, and I manage to balance them against what Nu does for me. And I come out ahead, Tom. In control, the best of both worlds. Sure, I’ve got a drug problem, and the drug is bonobo tendency. But I’m handling it. That’s what you do, you deal with your weaknesses. You take up the strain. If this woman you’re talking about really is professionally focused, serious about her work, knows who she is and what she’s about, then there’s no reason she can’t do the same cost benefit analysis and play the game accordingly. If anything, the genetic evidence suggests women are better at that shit anyway, so she’s got a wired-in head-start right there. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want to have to hand-wash the sheets in whatever Istanbul hotel they’re in right now-’

‘Oh Christ, Jeff.’

Jeff spread his hands. ‘Sorry, little brother. You want me to make you feel better, tell you the field’s clear for you to make your Manhattan urbanite move on this woman? I can’t. But if what you’re concerned about really is her professional grip on things - then I wouldn’t worry.’

They sat quietly for a few moments. To Norton, letting Jeff have the last word felt like a kind of defeat.

‘Well, what about this Istanbul clue then? I mean, seriously, it doesn’t come close to any of our current investigations, it’s right out of left-field. Some other thirteen the Europeans have got interned in Turkey, who might have a connection to some Peruvian gangster who might have ties to the people who maybe had our renegade thirteen shipped back from Mars. I mean, am I supposed to trust that? It’s pretty thin.’

Jeff stared out of the window.

‘Maybe it is,’ he said absently. ‘Thirteens don’t think the same way as us, they have a whole different set of synaptic wiring. Some of that, the more extreme end, we just go ahead and label paranoia or sociopathic tendency. But often it just comes out as a different way of looking at things. That’s why UNGLA employs guys like this Marsalis in the first place. In some ways, that’s why I suggested you dig him out of Florida and hire him. Give you access to those other angles.’ A sudden, hard look. ‘You didn’t tell anyone that was my suggestion, did you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Yeah? Not even this ex-cop you’ve got under the skin so badly?’

‘I made you a promise, Jeff. I keep my promises.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ His brother pressed thumb and forefinger into tight closed eyes for a moment. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t get so harsh with you, just I’m stressed out of my fucking box right now. This job’s a political tightrope act at the best of times, and now isn’t the best of times. Someone gets to hear that the director of the Human Cost Foundation is giving informal advice to a COLIN officer on matters relating to the genetically enhanced, I’m going to be looking for another job. We’ll get the whole Rim-China-Mars super-conspiracy bullshit blowing up in our faces all over again, probably lose the bulk of our funding overnight. Bad enough that we’re taking in black-lab refugees and giving them Rim citizenship. Arranging for dangerous genetic variants to be released from jail, that’d be the final straw.’

‘Yeah, well like I said. Relax. No one knows.’ Norton felt an unaccustomed tightness in his throat as he looked at his brother. ‘I appreciate all this, Jeff. Maybe it doesn’t come across that way sometimes, but I do.’

‘I know.’ Jeff grinned at him. ‘Been looking out for you since you were knee-high anyway. That’s what big brothers are for, right? Whole stack of genetic predisposition right there.’

Norton shook his head. ‘You’ve been working this field too long, Jeff. Why not just say you care?’

‘I thought I just did. Base reasons for caring about your siblings are genetic. I didn’t have to join Human Cost to know that.’

An image of Megan bloomed brightly in his mind. Long tanned limbs and freckled smile, sun and hair in her eyes. The recollection forced its way aboard, seemed to dim his vision. It felt as if the v-format and his brother had suddenly been tuned down into a muted distance. His voice sounded vague in his own ears.

‘Yeah, so what about sibling rivalry? Where does that come in?’

His brother shrugged. ‘Genetic too. At base, all this stuff is. Xtrasomes aside, everything we are is built on some bedrock genetic tendency or other.’

‘And that’s how you justify Nuying.’

Jeff’s expression tightened. ‘I think we’ve had this conversation, and I didn’t enjoy it much last time. I don’t justify what I did with Nu. But I do understand where it comes from. Those are two very different things.’

Norton let the memory of Megan fade. ‘Yeah, okay. Forget it. Sorry I started on you again. I’m feeling pretty stressed myself right now. Got my own genetic tendencies to handle, you know?’

‘We all do,’ his brother said quietly. ‘Thirteen, or bonobo, or just base fucking human. Sooner or later, we all have to face what’s inside.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Morning came in laced with the sounds of traffic along Moda caddesi and children shouting. Bright, angled sunlight along the side wall of the room he’d chosen to sleep in and the reluctant conclusion that out here at the back of the apartment there was a school playground directly under the window. He levered himself out of the bed, shambled about looking for the bathroom, stumbled in on a lightly snoring Ertekin in the process; she slept sprawled on her back with her mouth half open, long-limbed and gloriously inelegant in the faded NYPD T-shirt and tangle of sheets, one crooked arm thrown back over her head. He drank in the sight, then slid quietly out again, found the bathroom and took a long much-needed piss. A faint hangover nagged rustily at his temples, not nearly as bad as he’d been expecting. He stuck his head under a tap.

He left Ertekin to sleep, padded to the kitchen and found a semi-smart grocery manager recessed in next to the heating system panel. He ordered fresh bread and cimits both, not knowing Ertekin’s preferences, milk and a few other bits and pieces. Found an unopened packet of coffee - Earth-grown, untwisted - in a cupboard and a Mediterranean-style espresso pot on the worktop. He fired up the hob, set up the pot and by the time it started burbling to itself, the breakfast delivery was buzzing for entry down at the main door. He let them in, found a screen phone and carried it through to the kitchen table. He unwrapped the cimits - gnarly rings of baked and twisted dough, dusted with sesame seeds, still warm - broke one up into segments, poured himself a coffee, and went looking for Stéphane Névant.

It took a while.

The duty officer at the Internment Tract HQ in Ankara wasn’t anyone he knew, and he couldn’t pull UNGLA rank, because his operating codes were six months out of date. Naming friends didn’t help much. He had to settle for a referral to one of the site offices, where, apparently, Battal Yavuz was putting in some overtime. When he tried the site, Battal was out in a prowler and not answering his radio. The best the woman on site could do was take a message. What should-

‘Just tell him he’s a reprobate motherfucker, and a big bad thirteen’s going to fly right out there and steal his woman if he doesn’t call me back.’

The face on screen coloured slightly. ‘I don’t think-’

‘No, really. That’s the message. Thanks.’

Noises from the corridor. He cut the call and broke another cimit. Found an unexpected grin in the corner of his mouth, frowned it away. Ertekin used the bathroom, went back to the bedroom by the sound of it, and for a moment he thought she was going to go back to sleep. Then he heard footfalls in the corridor again, approaching. He leaned back in his chair to watch her come into the kitchen. Wondering if she’d still be in the T-shirt. His hangover, he noticed vaguely, was receding.

She was dressed. Hair thickly untidy, face a freshly scrubbed scowl.

‘Morning. Sleep well?’

She grunted. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Working.’ He gestured at the phone. ‘Waiting for a call back on Névant. Why, what did you think? I’d skip out on you as soon as you passed out? Perfidious, self-regarding thirteen motherfucker that I am.’

‘I didn’t pass out.’

‘Well, you dropped your glass while you were resting your eyes then. I figured you’d finished drinking anyway, so I went to bed. How’s your head?’

The look she gave him was answer enough.

‘Coffee still in the pot, but it must be nearly cold. I can-’

The phone chimed. He raised an eyebrow and prodded it to life. Ertekin busied herself with the coffee, and he dropped his gaze to the screen. A picture fizzled into focus, grainy with patch-through. Wide angle on an arid backdrop through the dust-plastered windscreen and side window of an all-terrain prowl truck. Battal Yavuz in the driver’s seat, chubby features narrowed in peering disbelief.

‘Carl? No fucking way that’s you.’

‘The one and only.’

‘They had you in a Jesusland jail, man. Di Palma told us. Special powers invoked, indefinite retention without trial. How the fuck you get out of that?’

‘I got out of Mars, Battal. What did you think, Jesusland was going to hold me?’

‘Man, you never know. They’ve got a history of that indefinite retention shit. Fucking barbarians.’

Across the table from him, Sevgi Ertekin snorted. Carl flashed her a quizzical look. She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

‘So what are you doing in Istanbul, anyway? You coming out to visit?’

‘Don’t think I’ve got time for that, Battal. But listen, I was hoping you could do me a favour.’

When he’d hung up, Ertekin was still slumped opposite, staring a hole in the bottom of her coffee cup. He eyed her curiously.

‘So what was that about?’

‘What was what about?’

He mimicked her snort. ‘That.’

‘Oh. Yeah. Just kind of amusing to hear a Turk talking about someone else’s barbarism.’

‘Well, he was talking about Jesusland.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ She sat up suddenly. ‘See, Marsalis, my father left this country for a reason. His father and his uncle both died back on that fucking square in Taksim because the illustrious Turkish military suddenly decided freedom of speech was getting a little out of hand. You know, you fucking Europeans, you think you’re so fucking above it all with your secular societies and your soft power, and your softly softly security forces that no one likes to talk about. But in the end-’

‘In the end,’ he said, a little harshly because Battal was a friend, and he didn’t have many, ‘Turkey’s still in one piece. They had a psychotic religious element here too, you know, and a problem with rabid patriotic dogma. But they solved it. The ones who stayed, the ones who didn’t cave in to fundamentalist idiocy or just make a run for some comfortable haven elsewhere - in the end they made the difference, and they held it together.’

‘Yeah, with some judicious funding from interested European parties, is what I heard.’

‘None of which invalidates the fact that Jesusland is a fucking barbaric society, which you’re not from anyway, so what’s your point?’

She glared back at him. He sighed.

‘Look. My head hurts too, all right? Why don’t you talk to Battal when he gets here? He’s the one filled me in on local history; guy used to teach in a prison before he got this gig, he knows his stuff. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Turkey and the old US, how they were more similar than you’d think. Talk to him.’

‘You think he’ll come here?’

‘If Névant comes, he’ll have to have an escort. And I don’t see Battal passing up the chance to see his tea-house friends in Istanbul at someone else’s expense. Yeah, he’ll come.’

Ertekin sniffed. ‘If Névant comes.’

‘Don’t worry about Névant. Just the fact I’m asking for his help is going to be enough to get him here. He’s going to love that.’

‘Maybe he’s going to love turning you down.’

‘Maybe. But he’ll come here to do it. He’ll want to see my face. And besides,’ Carl spread his hands, gave her a crooked grin, ‘there’s a good chance this’ll be his only opportunity to get off the internment tract for the next decade.’

She nodded slowly, like someone assimilating a new concept. Gaze still on her coffee. He had the sudden, uneasy feeling that what she’d just grasped wasn’t much to do with what he’d just been saying.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘there’s really no need for either of them to come here at all. We could just as easily have gone out to them, couldn’t we?’ And her gaze flipped up, locked onto his face. ‘Out to the tract?’

It was only a beat, but she had him.

‘Yeah, we could have,’ he answered, smoothly enough. ‘But we’re both hungover, and I like the view from this place. So - why bother going there, if we can get him to come to us?’

She got up from the table and looked down at him.

‘Right.’

For a moment, he thought she was going to push the point, but she just smiled, nodded again and left him sitting there in the kitchen, memories of the tract and those he’d dragged back to it swirling through his mind in hungover free association.

He was still sitting there when Névant called.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

‘Knew I’d come, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

Névant drew on his cigarette, let the smoke gush back out of his mouth and sucked it in hard through his nose. ‘Fuck you did.’

Carl shrugged. ‘All right.’

‘Want to know why I did come?’

‘Sure.’

The Frenchman grinned and leaned across the table, mock confidential. ‘I came to kill your ass, Mars man.’

Out beyond the glass panel frontage of the restaurant, sunset bruised and bloodied the sky over the sea of Marmara. Torn cloud, clotted with red. Carl met Névant’s gaze and held it.

‘That’s original.’

‘Well.’ Névant sat back again, stared down at the table top. ‘Sometimes, the old gene-deep reasons are the best, you know.’

‘Is that why you tried to persuade Manco Bambaren to give you house room? Gene-deep reasons?’

‘If you like. It was a question of survival.’

‘Yeah, survival as a cudlip.’

Névant looked up. Carl saw the twitch of a suppressed fight instruction flowing down the nerves of one arm. Like most thirteens, the Frenchman was physically powerful, broad in chest and shoulders, long limbs carrying corded muscle, head craggy and large. But somehow, in Névant, the bulk seemed to have whittled down to a pale, lycanthropic coil of potential. He’d lost weight since Carl saw him last, and his nose and cheekbones made sharp angles out of his flesh. The narrowed grey-green eyes were muddy dark with anger, and the smile when it came was a slow-peeling, silent snarl. He’d been fast, back in Arequipa three years ago - it had taken the mesh for Carl to beat him. If he came across the table now, it would be like a whip, like snake-strike.

‘Don’t like your jacket much. What is that, fucking incarceration chic?’

Carl shrugged. ‘Souvenir.’

‘That’s no excuse. What’d it cost you?’

‘About four months.’

Brief pause. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, well. What happened, your licence expire?’

‘No, that’s still good.’

‘Still doing the same shit, huh?’ Névant plumed a lungful of smoke across the table. ‘Still hunting your brothers down for the man?’

‘Oh, please.’

‘You know, it wouldn’t just be for me, Mars man.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Killing you. It wouldn’t just be for me. You have a large fan club back there in the tract. Can hardly blame them, right? And if I killed you, and they knew about it.’ Névant yawned and stretched, loosening the combat tension from his frame. ‘Well, I’d probably never have to buy my own cigarettes again.’

‘I’d have thought they’d want to kill me themselves.’

The Frenchman gestured. ‘The limits of revenge. They can’t all kill you, and stuck where they are right now, none of them can. You learn a kind of wisdom in the tract - settle for what you can get, it’s better than nothing.’

‘Am I supposed to feel bad about that?’

The wolfish grin came back. ‘Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.’

‘They had their chance, Stéphane. You all did. You could have gone to Mars.’

‘Yeah, it’s not all red rocks and airlocks, apparently. Saw the ads on my way in.’ Névant touched the raki glass on the table in front of him with one fingernail. He hadn’t yet picked it up, or touched the tray of mezes laid out between the two men. ‘Sounds great. Hard to see why you came back.’

‘I won the lottery.’

‘Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so much fun on Mars that the grunts buy a ticket every month to see if they can’t get the fuck out of there and home again.’

Carl shrugged. ‘I didn’t say it was paradise. It was an option.’

‘Look, man. You came back, and the reason you came back is that life on Mars is a pile of shit.’ Névant blew more smoke at him. ‘Some of us just didn’t need to make the trip to work that one out.’

‘You were busy making plans to spend the rest of your life up on the altiplano when I caught up with you. That’s just Mars with higher gravity.’

Névant smiled thinly. ‘So you say.’

‘Why should I lie?’

Outside, street lights were glimmering to life along the sea wall walkway. Sevgi Ertekin sat with Battal Yavuz on tall stools at a sahlep stall a dozen metres down the promenade. They sipped their drinks in cupped hands and were apparently getting on okay. Névant tipped his head in their direction.

‘Who is she, then?’

‘No, I’m not his partner,’ Sevgi struggled to keep the edge out of her voice. ‘This is strictly a temporary thing.’

‘Okay, sorry. My mistake. Just the two of you seem, you know . . .’

‘Seem what?’

Yavuz shrugged. ‘Connected, I guess. That’s unusual with Marsalis. Even for a thirteen, he’s pretty locked up. And it’s not like it’s easy getting close to these guys in the first place.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Yeah. I don’t want to sound like those Human Purity fuckwits, but I’ve been working the tract for nearly a decade now, and I’ve got to say variant thirteen are the closest thing to an alien race you’re ever going to see.’

‘I’ve heard the same thing said about women.’

‘By men, yeah.’ Yavuz slurped at his sahlep and came up grinning. He cut a cheery figure in the evening gloom and the yellowish lights from the stall. His jacket collar framed a tanned, well-fed face and there was a small but unapologetic paunch under his sweater. Life at UNGLA Eurozone seemed to be treating him well. His hair was academic untidy and his eyes were merry with reflected light. ‘Naturally. The way you people are wired, compared to the way we are.’

‘You people?’

‘I’m joking, of course. But the same way male and female genetic wiring is substantially different.’ Yavuz jerked a casual thumb back towards the lit interior of the restaurant, and the two men who sat facing each other in the window. ‘That’s the way those two are substantially different from you and me both.’

‘Bit closer to you people though,’ said Sevgi sourly. ‘Right?’

Yavuz chuckled. ‘Fair point. In testosterone chemistry, in readiness for violent acts and suspension of basic empathy, yes, I suppose so. They are more male than female, of course. But then, no one ever tried to build a female thirteen.’

‘That we know of.’

‘That we know of,’ he echoed, and sighed. ‘From what I understand, readiness for violent acts and suspension of empathy were exactly the traits the researchers hoped to amplify. Small surprise they opted for the male model, then.’

For just a moment, his gaze drifted out past her shoulder to the sea.

‘At times,’ he said quietly. ‘It shames me to be male.’

Sevgi shifted uncomfortably on her stool. She turned her sahlep mug in both hands. They were speaking Turkish, hers a little creaky with lack of use, and for some reason, some association maybe with childhood misbehaviour and scolding, the Turkish phrasing of that sentiment - it shames me - lent an obscure force to Yavuz’s words. She felt her cheeks warm against the cold air in sympathy.

‘I mean,’ he continued, still not looking at her, ‘we index how civilised a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male social dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem.’

Sevgi’s eyes flickered away to the restaurant window. Stéphane Névant was leaned across the table, gesturing, talking intently. Marsalis looked back at him, impassive, arms draped on the back of his chair, head tilted slightly to one side. The same intensity seemed to crackle off both men, for all the difference in their demeanour. The same raw sense of force. It was hard to imagine either of them ever talking about a sense of shame. For anything.

Deep in the pit of her stomach, despite herself, something warmed and slid. She felt her cheeks flush again, harder. She cleared her throat.

‘I think there’s another way to look at it,’ she said quickly. ‘Back in New York, I’ve got a friend, Meltem, who’s an imam. She says it’s a question of stages in social evolution. You’re Muslim, right?’

Yavuz put tongue in cheek, grinned. ‘Nominally.’

‘Well, Meltem says - she’s Turkish too, Turkish-American, I mean, and she’s a believer, of course, but-’

‘Yeah,’ Yavuz drawled. ‘Comes with the job, I imagine.’

She laughed. ‘Right. But she’s a feminist Sufi. She studied with Nazli Valipour in Ahvaz before the crackdown. You’ve heard of the Rabiah school?’

The man in front of her nodded. ‘Read about them. That’s the Ibn Idris thing, right? Questions all authorities subsequent to the Prophet.’

‘Well, Valipour cites Idris, yeah, but really she’s tracing a line right back to Rabiah Basri herself, and she’s arguing that Rabiah’s interpretation of religious duty purely as religious love is uh, is you know, the proto-typical feminist understanding of Islam.’

And then she dried up, suddenly self-conscious. Back in New York, she wasn’t used to talking about this stuff. She was rarely at the mosque these days, never found the time for it. Her conversations with Meltem had stopped soon after Ethan died. She was too angry, with a God she wasn’t at all sure she believed in any more, and in his echoing absence with anybody who made the mistake of taking his side.

But Battal Yavuz just smiled and sipped at his sahlep.

‘All right, that sounds like an interesting angle,’ he said. ‘So how does your imam square her Islamic feminism with all that inconvenient textual shit in the hadiths and the Book?’

Sevgi frowned, mustering her rusty Turkish. ‘Well, it’s cycles, you know. The way it looks from the historical context, the male cycle of civilisation had to come first, because there was no other way outside of male force to create a civilisation in the first place. To have law and art and science, you have to have settled agrarian societies and a non-labouring class that can develop that stuff. But that kind of society would have to be enforced, and pretty brutally in the terms we look at things today.’

‘That’s right.’ Yavuz nodded at the two thirteens in the restaurant window. ‘You’d have to wipe out all those guys, for a start.’

‘She’s the client.’ Carl picked up a fork and helped himself to a slice of aubergine from the meze tray. ‘Are we going to eat some of this?’

Deep, final draw on the cigarette, raised brow. Névant stubbed out the butt. ‘You freelancing now?’

‘I always was, Stéphane. UNGLA hold the licence, but they only call me when they need me. Rest of the time, I’ve got to make a living like everybody else’

‘So what does the client want with me?’

‘We’re chasing up some familia andina connections. Trying to bust a Marstech ring in the induction camps.’

‘There’s some reason that I’d help you do that?’

‘Apart from the fact that Manco Bambaren sold you out to me three years back? No, no reason I can think of. I always did have you down as the forgiving sort.’

Névant skinned a brief grin. ‘Yeah, tayta Manco sold me out. But it was you that came to collect.’

‘Blame the messenger, huh?’

‘Oh, I do.’

Carl helped himself to more meze. ‘You really think a cut-rate godfather with delusions of ethnicity was ever going to go up against UNGLA for you? Were you really that desperate to believe you’d found a bolthole, Stéphane? There’s a reason Manco made it to tayta level, and it’s not his charitable nature.’

‘What the fuck do you know about it, Mars man? As I recall, you were on urban fucking pacification detail most of your time in the Middle East.’

‘I know tha-’

‘Do you know that they’ve got warlord alliances operating in central Asia still, that I fucking built from nothing back in ’87? Do you know how many of those puppet presidents you see mouthing the words on Al Jazeera I helped launch?’

Carl shrugged. ‘Works in central Asia doesn’t mean it’ll fly in South America. That’s a whole different continent, Stéphane.’

‘Yeah, and a whole different goal.’ Névant shook a new cigarette out of the packet. He fitted it in the corner of his mouth, drew it to life and raised his eyebrows. ‘You want one of these?’

‘I’m eating.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He leaned forward, blew smoke across the table and grinned. ‘See, the familias aren’t like those warlord motherfucks, they never were. Warlord wants the same thing any cudlip politician wants - legitimacy, recognition and respect from the rest of the herd. The whole nine-car motorcade.’

Carl nodded, chewing. He’d had pretty much the same lecture from Névant three years ago, waiting for the paperwork to clear so he could take the Frenchman out of Lima in restraints. But let Névant lecture. It was Carl’s best chance of gleaning something he could use.

‘So, habitually, you’ve got a lawless vacuum and a bunch of these assholes fighting to put their stamp on a new order that lets them ride up front in the lead limo. Now, with the familias, that’s never going to be the case. There’s already a structure in place and it’s already full of legitimised scumbags, criollo whites and trained token indigenas, who’ve got the parliament, the military, the banks, the landowners, all that good shit right there in their pockets. The familias are locked out; all they’ve got is crime and this faint echo of an ethnic grievance.’ Névant cupped a hand at his ear. ‘And the echo’s fading, man. COLIN’s shipped so many altiplano natives out to Mars over the past fifty years, poured so much money into the region, the familias just can’t recruit like they used to. Only places they’re strong any more is ghetto populations in the Republic. No one else can be bothered. Nobody’s scared of them any more.’

‘So you were going to provide the fear.’

More smoke, billowing. Névant gestured through it. ‘Play to your strengths. Everybody’s scared of the thirteens.’

‘Yeah, would be, if they weren’t all locked up.’

The Frenchman grinned. ‘You wish.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Carl waved the fork. ‘We’ve got a couple of dozen out there at any one time, at most.’

‘Not the point, Mars man. Not the point, at all.’

‘No? Then what is the point?’

Névant toyed with the cutlery on his side of the table, just touching it with the fingertips of his right hand. ‘The point is that we exist. We’re a perfect fit for all those atavistic fears they have. They’ve been desperately looking for witches and monsters ever since they wiped us out the first time around. Now, they’ve got us back.’

‘Okay, so male force and hierarchy nail the human race into a coherent social order, weed out the worst of the loose cannons and provide a stable base, all so that thousands of years later female principles can emerge to govern with a modicum of civilised decency. That’s your imam’s stance?’

Sevgi nodded. ‘It’s Valipour’s stance as well, give or take. And a valid Sufi stance too, in as far as it represents a continuing revelation.’

‘Sort of explains the backlash, though, doesn’t it?’ Yavuz grinned. ‘Thanks, guys, you’ve done a bang up job, given your gender limitations, but we’ll take it from here. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the shahuda sitting still for that.’

‘Well,’ she shrugged. ‘They didn’t, no.’

‘Yeah, I remember the mobs here, chanting in the streets when I was a kid.’ Yavuz put a raised, droning note into his voice. ‘Men have authority over women because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other. So forth.’

Sevgi snorted. ‘That tired old shit.’

‘That tired old shit’s the Qu’ran, as I recall. Is the Qu’ran not a part of Islam in New York?’

‘Very funny. Is historical context not a part of intelligent human thought around here?’

The impish grin again. Yavuz seemed to be shrugging off his sudden bout of male guilt. ‘Around here, sure. But you don’t have to go too far southeast of here before intelligent human thought is pretty severely frowned on. Come to that, from what I hear you don’t have to go too far southwest of New York before the same thing applies.’

She laughed. ‘Fair comment. Marsalis told me you wrote a thesis on that stuff. Similarities in the US before secession and Turkey, something like that?’

‘Psychosocial Parallels in Turkish and American Nationalisms,’ Yavuz quoted with mock-bombast. He gestured modestly, undercut the effect. ‘Nothing’s ever that simple, of course, but there were a lot of similarities. Both big, stroppy nationalisms founded in very shallow cultural soil. Both constitutionally secular societies with a resentful fundamentalism snapping at their heels. Both running a massive cultural gap between urban and rural society. Both very uneasy with the New Math, both trying to beat back the virilicide with draconian drug laws and wishful thinking. You know this place might have fractured apart too, the way the US did, if we hadn’t had the Europeans sneaking about pulling levers from the outside.’

‘You don’t sound that pleased about it.’

The Turk sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. And I should be, I guess. Certainly don’t want the fucking shahuda prowling the streets here, stoning my daughters if they go out unchaperoned or showing more flesh than a wrapped corpse. But it’s no fun either, knowing your whole country’s just the new backyard for a bunch of over-the-hill ex-imperial cynics.’

‘Now you sound almost patriotic.’

‘Not me.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Did Carl tell you I used to teach in the prison system before I got this gig?’

‘He mentioned it.’

‘Yeah, well, you get to see some unpleasant things in the Turkish penal system. I’ve met a few too many torture-scarred political prisoners to be much of a Turkish patriot any more. The way I see it, anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet.’

‘I like that.’ Sevgi smiled into her sahlep. ‘So you think the US might have held together the way Turkey did. I mean, if there’d been an outside force to apply the right pressure?’

‘Not necessarily, no.’ Yavuz looked unaccountably sad as he said it. ‘I mean, you’ve got the whole states’ rights issue, which we never had. Two centuries of southern resentment and cultural abrasion, religious fury, racial tension. Those are pretty deep fissures. Plus the anti-drug laws meant less chance for the virilicide to do its weeding out the way it was elsewhere.’

He put his sahlep mug down on the counter, sat back and held his open palms towards it, as if in obscure invocation.

‘But anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it? Because there never was an outside force big enough to make you people behave. COLIN didn’t exist as such back then, the UN was still a toothless tiger trying to find its dentures, the Chinese just didn’t give a shit. Homegrown corporate interests were all behaving like thugs, they just wanted the cheap resources and labour for as long as it lasted. You’ve got the environmental lobby screaming, Zhang fever scaring the shit out of the Asian populace. Pacific Rim commercial interests don’t want a fight, they just step in and make their offer, and pretty much everyone on the West Coast breathes a big sigh of relief when they do. Los Angeles goes first, toe in the pool, and then the whole coast takes the plunge when it works.’

Sevgi nodded. Somewhere in a box on top of a wardrobe, she still had a replica scroll of the Angeline Freeport charter. Murat had brought it back from a West Coast medical conference for her when she was still in junior school. Like most successful first-generation immigrants, he’d been passionate about his adoptive homeland, even after it fractured apart under his feet almost as he stepped off the plane.

‘Yeah,’ she said greyly. ‘And anything the fucking West Coast can do...’

Yavuz nodded, teacher-like. ‘Just so. The northeastern states seize the precedent and walk away as well. And on all sides, the rhetoric has been stoked so high that there can be no climb-down for anyone. It’s the classic male impasse. Honour satisfied, and everybody loses. A textbook case. Have you ever read Mariela Groombridge? Evolving States?’

She shook her head.

‘You should. She’s brilliant. Taught at the University of Texas until they threw her out for signing an anti-creationist petition. She’s in Vienna these days. Basically, she argues that the secession was an example of a nation state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn’t cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died off.’

‘Which is what?’

Yavuz shrugged. ‘Fear.’

‘It’s a power beyond numbers.’ Névant still hadn’t touched the mezes, but he was a couple of fingers down the raki glass now. He sneered. ‘You think the cudlips give a shit about facts? Statistics and formal studies? It’s the knee-jerk, man. That’s what these people live and breathe. There are monsters, there is evil, and it’s somewhere out there in the dark. Whoo-oo-oo. You know, a couple of years before I got out to Peru, Manco was putting out a rumour that he had pistacos working for him. Settling scores for that turf squabble they had back in ’03.’

Carl nodded. On Mars, he’d seen the familias run a similar dynamic among the less educated end of the Uplands Initiative workforce. He’d been offered pistaco work himself a couple of times, lack of pale skin notwithstanding.

‘Whatever works, I guess.’

‘Yeah, well. Worked for a while.’ Névant snorted disgustedly and knocked back another chunk of his raki. ‘Manco was so fucking pleased with himself, he couldn’t see it’d crash and burn soon as one of his fake pistacos got called and couldn’t cut it. I told him - the way I had it mapped out, he could have that monster threat for real. Real, honest-to-DNA monsters doing his enforcing for him. Something to scare everybody, not just the illiterates. Just think what would have happened if the word went round, cross the familias and they’ll send a fucking thirteen to visit you?’

‘Always assuming you and your future army of thirteens could cut it any better than tayta Manco’s fakes.’

Névant looked at him. ‘You lost many fights to a normal human recently?’

‘No. But like you just got through telling me, it isn’t the facts that do it for humans. Maybe Manco didn’t need a real threat. Or at least, he didn’t need it badly enough to cuddle up with a bunch of fucking twists.’

‘Didn’t have any problem cuddling up to that hib cunt Jurgens,’ said Névant sourly. ‘Amazing how your prejudices can go out the window when there’s a decent rack in the equation.’

‘Greta Jurgens?’ Carl summoned vague recollection of a languid, grey-eyed blonde from his inquiries after Névant three years back. She’d been running front-office operations for Manco in Arequipa. ‘She was a hibernoid?’

‘Yeah, she was. Why?’

Carl shrugged. ‘No reason. Just the way Manco was about the whole twist thing, it’s strange he’d tolerate one that far up the ladder on the inside.’

‘Like I said, check out the rack. The ass. And hey, for all I know, hibs do some dickshift tricks you can’t get out of a human woman.’

Carl sipped his drink, shook his head. ‘That’s bonobos, and even then it’s bullshit hype. And anyway, Manco wants that kind of thrill, he can go down to Lima and have his pick of twist brothels. Come on. It doesn’t add up.’

‘Well then, maybe it’s just that there are twists and twists.’ Névant’s lip curled. ‘Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only people like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding.’

Carl gazed at the cutlery on the table. He nodded, a little sadly. ‘People like you. They lock people like you up. Me, I’m licensed.’

‘Domesticated, you mean.’

‘Call it what you like. You can’t turn the clock back twenty thousand years, Stéphane.’

Névant unsheathed the wolf-snarl grin again.

‘Can’t you?’

‘See, once upon a time,’ Yavuz was saying, ‘Fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalised interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait. She cites-’

Down the promenade, the splintering crack of glass. Sevgi whipped about, in time to see the restaurant window shattered outwards around two grappling bodies. Someone shrieked.

‘Ah, fuck.’

She grabbed after the gun she wasn’t permitted to carry here, blind fingers registering the lack ahead of conscious thought. Flung herself off the stool - it teetered and toppled behind her, she heard it go down clattering - and towards the fight. Yavuz was at her side, brandishing an authorised pistol . . .

On the floor, the pale thirteen had Marsalis pinned. His arm hauled up, something in it, slashed down. Somehow, Marsalis twisted aside, did something with his legs that shifted the balance of the fight. Névant reeled, shaking a hand that must have hit the concrete floor with killing force, must have broken bones. He was trying to keep the black man down with his other arm, but the lock wasn’t working. Marsalis skated sideways by fractions, his shoulder slipped loose. His hand flapped, grabbed, pulled the Frenchman down towards him. He hinged upward from the stomach, hard, met Névant’s face with the crown of his skull. Sevgi heard the noise it made, and her teeth went on edge.

They arrived.

‘That’s it, motherfucker.’ Yavuz, in English. Voice shocked hoarse, pistol jammed in Névant’s ear. ‘Game over.’

Névant swaying, one hand clutched to his face, blood dripping between fingers from a nose that had to be broken. Coughing, bubbling, but through it came laughter. Marsalis grunted and tugged himself out from beneath, folded a leg and shoved the Frenchman sideways with his knee. Névant went halfway to collapsing, still clutching his face. Still chuckling. The hand he was using was the same one he’d just broken on the concrete.

‘Going to have to.’ He sucked a breath, wetly. ‘Buy my own cigarettes after all.’

‘Looks like it, yeah.’ Marsalis rolled to his feet, one smooth coiling motion. He was checking himself for cuts from the glass.

‘I did warn you.’

‘Yeah, and you made a real pig’s ear of palming that cutlery knife as well.’ The black man’s tone was absent. He turned his right hand, frowning, and Sevgi saw tear-track ribbons of blood in the cup of it. Marsalis lifted the hand to eye level, twisted it palm outward and pulled back his sleeve. He grimaced. There was a long cut, narrow sliver of glass still embedded, in the flesh on the outer edge of his palm.

‘You stay there, you fuck,’ Yavuz was telling Névant shakily. The pistol muzzle floated about close to the pale Thirteen’s forehead ‘You sit there, and you don’t fucking move.’

He fished in his jacket with his spare hand, brought out a phone and punched a speed dial number. Beyond, in the cave made by the hole through the window, people stood about and gaped at the tumbled chairs and table. Waiters hovered, uncertain. A big downward-jagged triangular chunk of glass dropped suddenly from among its fellows in the top of the frame and broke undramatically in three pieces on the ground.

At the apex of the narrowest fragment, as if indicated by an arrowhead of glass, Sevgi saw the glint of the cutlery knife where Névant had dropped it. The words the two thirteens had just traded caught up with her. She stared at Marsalis.

‘You. Knew he was going to do this?’

The black man pinched the glass sliver between finger and thumb and tugged slowly until it emerged whole from the wound. He turned it curiously this way and that in the dim light for a moment, then dropped it.

‘Well.’ He flexed the injured hand and grimaced again. ‘There was always a risk he’d get genetic about it, yeah.’

‘You told us the two of you were friends.’

Choked chortle from Névant where he now sat with his back to the undamaged neighbouring window panel. Marsalis looked at Sevgi levelly over his wound.

‘I think I said we got on okay.’

Sevgi grew aware of the thuttering in her chest and temples. She took a long breath, took stock. Gestured around her.

‘And you call this okay?’

Marsalis shrugged. ‘Hey, what can I say? Blame the wiring.’

On the floor, Névant chuckled again, through blood and broken bone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

His hand needed glue, and there were still minute fragments of glass in the wound. He sat in a UN medical unit in Fenerbahce and waited patiently while a nurse cleaned him up. Glare of overhead lighting and - something he could have lived without - a screen in one corner with a microscopic blow-up of the wound as it was treated. He looked fixedly elsewhere.

Ertekin had wanted the COLIN facilities on the European side instead, but couldn’t argue with the immediacy of the UN hospital’s location. It took them less than five minutes in a taxi - the bloodied promenade and gathering, gawping crowds dumped for the quiet residential streets of Fenerbahce and the welcome beacon lamps out front at the medical centre’s modestly appointed nanobuild facade. Now, Ertekin was gone, along with Battal Yavuz and Névant, down the corridor to wherever they were treating the Frenchman’s injuries. He guessed she wanted a shot at hearing the other thirteen’s side of the story. He also judged she was still a little numb from the action, and couldn’t blame her much. The strain of the encounter with Névant still twanged in his own blood, more than he showed.

The door opened and a Turk in a suit slipped in, yawning. Grizzled hair and matching, close-clipped moustache, not quite clean-shaven slate grey chin. The suit was expensive and came with a carefully knotted silk tie. Only the sleep-swollen eyes and the yawn suggested the bed he’d been called out of. The sleepy gaze calibrated Carl for a moment, then the newcomer murmured something to the nurse, who immediately laid down his microcam-enhanced tools and excused himself. The door shut quietly behind him. Carl raised an eyebrow.

‘Am I going to have to pay for this?’

The Turk smiled dutifully. ‘Very droll, Mr Marsalis. Of course, as a licensed UNGLA accountant, you have a health plan with us. That’s not why I’m here.’ He came forward and offered his hand. ‘I am Mehmet Tuzcu, UNGLA special liaison.’

Carl took the hand, careful of his wound. He stayed seated. ‘And what can I do for you, Mehmet bey?’

‘Your Colony Initiative escort is on the next floor.’ Tuzcu’s gaze flicked towards the ceiling. ‘There is transport waiting for you in the street at the back of this building. We will leave by the bulk elevator, unseen. In half an hour we can have you on a suborbital to London, but’ - a glance at a heavy steel watch - ‘we will have to hurry.’

‘You’re. Rescuing me?’

‘If you like.’ The patient smile again. ‘They expected you in New York, but events seem to have overtaken us. Now we really must-’

‘I, uhm.’ Carl gestured with his nearly repaired hand. ‘I don’t really need rescuing. COLIN aren’t holding me under any kind of duress.’

The smile paled out. ‘Nevertheless, you are part of an unauthorised retrieval operation. COLIN are in breach of the Munich Accords by employing you in this capacity.’

‘I’ll mention it to them.’

Tuzcu frowned. ‘You are refusing to come with me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘May I ask why?’

Ask away, he was tempted to say. Been asking myself the same thing, don’t have an intelligent answer yet.

‘Do you know Gianfranco di Palma?’

Tuzcu’s eyes were careful. ‘Yes. I have met Signor di Palma a number of times.’

‘Slimy piece of shit, isn’t he.’

‘What is your point, please?’

‘You were asking me for a reason. Tell di Palma this is what happens when you run your licensed operatives on a no win/no fee bounty and a three-month delay on expense reimbursement. They start to have loyalty issues.’

The UNGLA man hesitated. He glanced back at the door. Carl stood up.

‘Don’t let’s force this, Mehmet,’ he said easily.

Sevgi found him later, seated in the ground floor waiting area watching some low-grade global music show on an overhead screen. A miked-up and dyed blonde pranced back and forth on stage in clothing that wasn’t much more than slashed ribbons, stances and motion designed to maximise the display of the tanned flesh beneath. A dance troupe of young men and women, similarly unclad, followed her in mindless body echo. The song wittered on, backed by instruments you couldn’t see being played.

‘See anything you like?’ she asked.

‘It’s better than what I was watching earlier.’ He glanced past her. ‘What did you do with Névant?’

‘He’s coming down.’

‘Right.’ Marsalis’s eyes drifted back to the screen. ‘Got to hand it to you people, this is something you do really well.’

‘You people?’

‘Humans. Look at that.’ He waved his bandaged hand up at the gaily coloured images. ‘Perfect lockstep. Group mind. No wonder you guys make such good soldiers.’

‘Kind of ironic, coming from you,’ she said waspishly. ‘Compliments from the state-of-the-art gene warrior.’

He smiled. ‘Ertekin, you don’t want to believe everything they tell you on the feeds.’

The elevator chimed, and Battal Yavuz exited, shepherding Névant. The pale thirteen wore a mask of bandaging across the middle of his face and a similar wrapping on his broken hand. He seemed in good spirits.

‘See you again,’ he said to Marsalis. He lifted the damaged hand. ‘When this is back to functional, maybe.’

‘Sure. You know where I live. Look me up soon as you get out.’

Yavuz looked sheepish. ‘Sorry about this, Carl. If I’d known he was going to-’

‘Skip it. No harm done.’ Carl got up and clapped the Turk on the shoulder. ‘Thanks for coming out. Been good to see you.’

Sevgi hovered, watching Névant peripherally.

‘You want me to come with you to the heliport?’ she asked Yavuz

He shook his head. ‘No need.’

‘But if-’

Marsalis grinned. ‘Show her your ankle, Stéphane.’

As if they were all sharing a joke, the Frenchman pulled up the left leg of his trousers. Tight at the bottom of his shin, a slim band of shiny, pored black fibre wrapped around. It wasn’t much larger than a man’s watch, but a tiny green light winked tirelessly on and off at one edge. She shouldn’t really have been surprised, but her breath still hitched to a halt for a moment as she saw.

‘Excursion restraint,’ said Yavuz. ‘No one comes off the tract without one. Stéphane here’s not going to give me any trouble.’

‘And if he slips it? Finds a way to cut it loose ‘

‘It’s anti-tamper,’ said Névant, curiously gentle. ‘Wolf-trap formatted. Any interference, it triggers. Want to know what happens then?’

She already knew. The wolf-trap cuffs had a long and unpleasant history, made worse in her case by close personal connection. News stories of mutilated Muslim prisoners of war in American custody had dogged her father in his choice of émigré destination - his mail in the last weeks before he left Istanbul for good had been sprinkled with badly spelled death threats. Controversy raged in the feeds, cheap and violent vitriol overshadowing Murat’s personal struggle with culture and conscience - western pundits retorted angrily to the war crime accusations with detail on modified cuff use for shari’ah punishments in numerous of the self-declared Islamic republics, a rebuttal that stood for a while, then rang increasingly hollow as it became apparent who was selling the Islamic purists their mutilative technology. Murat, tasting a sour expedient hypocrisy whichever fruit he bit into, stormed out of Turkey anyway, and never looked back.

But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.

‘She’s a cop, Stéphane.’ Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. ‘I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.’

She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her familiarity with the hardware. Internal Affairs landed on the hundred eighth like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hardcore suspects, apparently - but who the fuck could really fathom the logic of it? - in an attempt to scare up a useable confession. During the interrogation the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape/crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.

Welcome to NYPD.

Small consolation - look at it this way, Sev, an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time - that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the hundred eighth via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement - of course - still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.

Look at it this way Sev.

IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into midtown homicide.

Look at it this way, Sev.

The dead men in the field would not be much missed - all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labour among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.

She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it that way, but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early morning mist. Something changed in her that day - she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterwards. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.

Névant dropped his trouser leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.

‘I thought those were illegal in Europe,’ she said, to break the silence.

‘On humans,’ agreed Névant, darting a glance at Marsalis. ‘With thirteens though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?’

The black man shrugged. ‘Depends how bright they are, I’d say.’

He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could either.

So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it was not really cold outside nor very late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the streetfinder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down towards the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.

At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question.

‘When did you know he was going to try for you?’

He shrugged. ‘When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.’

‘And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?’

‘If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.’

They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahce loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Ataturk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene - What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.

‘What’s that say?’ he asked her.

She groped after a translation. ‘Uhm, male pattern baldness - it’s a bigger problem than you think.’

He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.

‘Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.’

She shook her head. ‘Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humour. They would have just defaced it.’

‘And you?’

‘It’s not my country,’ she said flatly.

At a second-storey balcony ahead, an old man leaned amidst pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts, where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.

‘So did you get anything useful out of Névant?’ He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said carefully. ‘I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambaren.’

‘In Peru?’

‘Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.’

‘It’s your ground too, isn’t it?’ He thought she smiled. ‘Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?’

‘If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it a while ago.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was joking.’

‘Oh.’

They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred metres further on the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word Moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.

‘That cuff,’ she said as they’d spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. ‘You knew Névant was wearing it.’

‘Never really thought about it.’ He thought about it. ‘Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.’

‘It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.’

‘Well, those things are slow-acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have got my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stéphane would have buried that knife in my spine.’ He paused, reviewing the fight. ‘Or my eye.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’ There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.

‘Well, what do you mean then?’

‘I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the paving along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.

‘Look,’ he said experimentally. ‘First of all, Stéphane Névant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.’

‘But that’s fucking stupid,’ she flared.

‘Is it?’ This time he stopped on the pavement, turned towards her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-sole boots she wore them with. ‘I put Névant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or a UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometres, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot - which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment - you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.’

‘Worth dying for?’

‘You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.’

‘I meant you might have killed him.’

Carl shrugged. ‘I might. You’re also forgetting that Névant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.’

She locked her gaze on his.

‘Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t got there first?’

He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long-fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand moulded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment block entryway.

It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and inner thighs, his fingers worked the moistness apart. She shuddered, groped vaguely at the swollen lump in his trousers, finally got both hands on his belt and opened it. He flopped out, tightened to fully erect in the cool air. She laughed, short and throaty as she felt the length of his prick, ghosted an open palm up and down the underside of it.

Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose. No luck, the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.

‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry.’ She stopped, bent towards him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. ‘Look, stop, wait.’

She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place. She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.

She felt the change, made a muffled, querying noise and went to work in earnest, mouth and fingers, he felt himself climbing the curve again, but knew again he would not make it. His hands uncurled, came loose from the wall, hung there. He stared at the shadows.

‘Hey,’ she said softly.

‘Look, I’m-’

‘No, you look.’ Sudden instruction in her voice, it hooked his gaze downward and she grinned up at him. With her left hand, she gathered her exposed breasts up and together. She gripped his shaft hard in the other hand, pushed the glans back and forth in the press of her cleavage. He felt something leap violently in his chest. She grinned again, bent her head and spat gently, drooled spit onto the head of his prick and then, still gripping hard, pushed the wet-gleaming flesh back between her breasts, rubbed it there, in and out, in and out, for the ten or twenty more seconds it took before he felt the furious heat come raging up through him, no hitch now, no stopping . . .

And out.

He made a noise like a drowning man hauled back aboard, like the sound he’d made the day the rescue ship hailed Felipe Souza for the first time, and he sagged back against the wall, then slid down it, as if shot. He felt her fingers let go, stickily, felt her gathering her disordered clothing together, and put out his hand.

‘Wait.’

‘We should go, it’s-’

‘You’re going. Nowhere,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Stand up.’

He pushed her upright again, where she’d been, against the wall, and this time he crouched, slid hands up the insides of the long thighs to part them, pulled the scrap of lace cotton firmly to one side and sank his tongue in her as deep as it would go.

Back at the apartment, he did it again, this time on the bed where he’d seen her asleep that morning. Pulled up close to breathe her scent, one hand raising the cushion of her buttocks up so the lips of her cunt met his mouth like a mismatched kiss, the fingers of his other hand deep inside her and the breadth of his tongue lapping up against the rubbery switch of her clit. He felt a carnivore itch rising in him, a deep thirst that was only partly slaked when she bucked and flexed across the bed and clamped hands and thighs around his head as if she could push him by sheer force inside her.

She flopped, panting, face rolled sideways, eyes closed, gone, and he gathered her under him and slid into her to the hilt of his newly swollen-tight erection. Her eyes flew open, and she said oh, just that single sound, lightly, delightedly, fresh hunger rolling on the edge of the syllable.

And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they’d taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘He did what?’

Norton glowered out of the screen at her, disbelief and anger struggling for the upper hand on his face.

‘Ended up in a fight with Névant,’ said Sevgi patiently. ‘Relax, Tom, it’s already happened. There’s nothing anybody could have done.’

‘Yes there is. You could have refused to let him have his way.’

‘Let him have his way?’ She felt the faint stain of a blush start in her neck. All the places Marsalis had bitten softly into her flesh were suddenly warm again. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means Marsalis suddenly decides he needs to fly out to the other side of the globe, and you just lie down for it. Our cannibal friend is killing people in America, not Europe. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Marsalis is looking for a way to get home without fulfilling his contract.’

‘Yes, that occurred to me, Tom. Quite a while ago in fact, back when you were happy to stick him in an unguarded New York hotel for the night.’

Pause. ‘As I recall, I was going to put him up at my place.’

‘Whatever, Tom. The point is, we hired Marsalis to do a job. If we aren’t going to trust him to do it, then why did we bother springing him in the first place?’

Norton opened his mouth, then evidently thought better of what he was going to say. He nodded.

‘All right. So having beaten up Névant, what does our resident expert want to do now?’

‘He’s talking about Peru.’

‘Peru?’

‘Yes, Peru. Familias andinas, remember. He got leads from Névant that point back to the altiplano, so that’s where we need to go.’

‘Right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘So, Sevgi, you think we’re actually going to do any investigating at all in the places the crimes are being committed? You know, I was never a cop, but-’

‘Fuck it, Tom.’ She leaned into the screen. ‘What’s wrong with you? This is the twenty-second century. You know, global interconnection? The integrated human domain? We can be in Lima in forty-five minutes. Cuzco a couple of hours later at worst. And back in New York before the end of the day.’

‘It is the end of the day,’ said Norton dryly. ‘It’s past midnight here.’

‘Hey, you rang me.’

‘Yeah, because I was getting kind of alarmed at the silent running, Sev. You’ve been gone two days without a word.’

‘Day and a half.’ The retort was automatic, but in fact she wasn’t sure who was closest. Her sense of time was shot. Crossing the Bosphorus seemed weeks in the past, New York and Florida months before that.

Norton didn’t seem disposed to argue the toss either. He glanced at his watch, shrugged.

‘Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.’

She grinned. ‘So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.’

‘Meredith and Hanitty are a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.’ Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. ‘Where is wonderboy, anyway?’

‘Asleep’ - she caught herself - ‘I’d guess. It’s a pretty anti-social hour here as well, you know.’

In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimetres, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing. COLIN apartment, he said, I figure that’s for you. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.

‘On COLIN’s endeavour, the sun never sets,’ quoted Norton, deadpan. ‘Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.’

‘Have you talked to Ortiz?’

He grew sombre. ‘Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes. Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nano-repair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogenic, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.’

‘Is he going to die?’

‘We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilised. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.’

‘So what did he say, in the virtual?’

A grimace. ‘He told me to trust your instincts.’

They got a late morning suborb to La Paz - like most nations aligned with the western nations colony initiative, Turkey ran connection to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door - no leisure to ride the ferries this time around.

‘We could have waited for the Lima hook,’ Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. ‘Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.’

‘I’m under instructions to rush,’ she told him.

‘Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambaren might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.’

‘In that case, we’ll go there.’

‘That’ll take some time.’

She gave him a superior grin. ‘No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.’

To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armoured Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the No Parking zone. Beyond, was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun - Beretta Marstech, two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang and Olufsen data/comms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

They stood at opposite ends of the floor to ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning - they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now, the pre-dawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

‘Want to eat?’ she asked.

He shot her a glance she recognised. ‘Don’t tempt me.’

‘Food,’ she said primly. ‘All I’ve eaten so far today is that cimit.’

‘Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb traveller lifestyle.’

‘Do you want to eat or not?’

‘Sure. Whatever they’ve got.’ He went to the Bang and Olufsen, checked the welcome screen protocol and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view and went to order from the next room.

Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the sub-heading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realised with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.

Hadn’t wanted any.

The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambaren’s attention, three years back, he’d got it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the central Asian theatre, and it transferred without too much trouble.

Bambaren’s particular limb of the familias was moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this - pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambaren was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambaren stayed out of their hair on the more vexed issue of local labour relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambaren’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-running system, and since it kept everyone happy, it showed potential to run that way for a long time to come.

Carl entered the equation with no local axe to grind, and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stéphane Névant. For two quiet weeks, he did his research, and then one night he held up one of tayta Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road, or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade - Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt - taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved co-operative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cart-wheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burnt with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind them a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile. Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambaren, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage, asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stéphane Névant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organised crime was concerned.

He dialled accordingly.

‘This had better be life or fucking death,’ Greta Jurgens said coldly, when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a grey silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

‘Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bed-time. How’s things, Greta?’

The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. ‘Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.’

‘The very same.’

‘What do you want?’

‘That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small-talk.’ Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. ‘It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.’

‘Manco’s not in town right now.’

‘But you know how to get hold of him.’

Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual too - silence was the safe option.

Carl grinned. ‘Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sit-down, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?’

‘You might find that a little harder to do these days.’

‘Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?’ He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face. ‘Do yourself and Manco both a favour, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on. Then decide whether you want to piss me off.’

He killed the line and Greta Jurgens inked out in mid-retort.

Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned. Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The familia datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech. In any case Jurgens probably wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambaren wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached and that wouldn’t take long either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.

Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.

‘Food’s here,’ she said.

In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. ‘Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.’

‘Yeah, Marsalis,’ She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. ‘I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?’

‘That’s not what it says on your chest,’ he told her, looking there pointedly.

‘This?’ She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the NYPD logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth. ‘You got a problem with me wearing this?’

He grinned back. ‘Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.’

‘We’ll see,’ she said, unconvincingly.

But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of mate de coca cupped in both hands. Outside call, the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang and Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.

‘Yeah?’

Manco Bambaren’s weatherblasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.

‘So, black man. You return to plague us.’

‘Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.’ Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. ‘Better than being plagued by the white man, right?’

‘Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?’

Carl slipped into Quechua. ‘I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there. Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression, all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face to face. Take a couple of hours at most.’

Bambaren leaned into the screen. ‘I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their boltholes. I have nothing to tell you.’

‘Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.’ Carl let his voice harden. ‘Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.’

There was a long pause while Bambaren tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odour of it, and waited.

‘You still speak my language like a drunken peasant labourer,’ said the familia chief sourly. ‘And act as if it were an accomplishment.’

Carl shrugged. ‘Well I learnt it among peasant labourers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.’

More silence. Bambaren glowered. ‘I am in Cuzco,’ he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. ‘I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuaman at one this afternoon.’

‘Make it three,’ Carl told him lazily. ‘I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambaren. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet-lag and the showdown with Névant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s service net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard-wearing - like me, he thought sourly - and top of the line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amidst a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.

Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.

‘He’s late,’ she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.

‘Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.’

Through the windscreen, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuaman rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of colour against the sombre stone.

It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuaman, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which - he glanced at his watch - they had been.

‘You think he’s making a point with this as well?’ Ertekin nodded forward, at the walls. ‘Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

He shot her a side glance. ‘Did I say that?’

‘You might as well have.’

He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Névant grinned at him out of a blood-stained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting. Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.

He made an effort.

‘You could be right,’ he admitted. ‘The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.’

Ertekin nodded. ‘Thought so.’

Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armoured black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet-lag folded away.

‘Here we go.’

The new arrival braked to a halt and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambaren stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-coloured suit and flanked by minders in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America. Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogota. The mirror patches Bambaren and his minders had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bomb-proof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.

Carl climbed out of the jeep.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Ertekin quickly.

‘Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.’

He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambaren, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two minders and-

Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.

‘Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.’

‘Black man.’ Manco jerked his chin. ‘Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?’

Carl nodded. ‘South Florida State.’

‘Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.’

Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. ‘Yeah, going to be a major fashion any time now.’

‘It was my understanding,’ said the familia chief urbanely, ‘that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?’

Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had got out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

He held down a grin. ‘That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.’

‘A thirteen with friends.’ Bambaren’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. ‘Must go against the grain for you.’

‘We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?’

Manco Bambaren nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sunlenses, towards the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

‘So you work for COLIN now?’

‘With.’ Carl let his grin out. ‘I work with COLIN. It’s a co-operative venture. You should understand that.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of co-existing with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.’

Bambaren shook his head. ‘I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.’

‘No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.’

‘And this is what you wanted to talk about?’

‘No. I want to talk about Stéphane Névant.’

‘Névant?’ A frown wrinkled the tayta’s forehead. ‘What about him?’

‘Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.’

Bambaren stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the familia chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

‘How far it went? Black man, I gave Névant to you. How far do you think it went?’

‘You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.’

The tayta took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed. ‘Stéphane Névant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.’

‘But he might have done, given time.’

‘I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Névant himself?’

Carl grinned. ‘I did. He tried to kill me.’

Bambaren’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

‘That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,’ he said tonelessly. ‘In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.’

‘Quite.’

They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks each the size of a small car. It was instinctive, the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

Manco Bambaren’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood and stone itself.

‘I’m not suggesting you personally bought into Névant’s plans,’ Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? ‘But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.’

Bambaren paced in silence for a while.

‘My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.’

‘Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterwards. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.’

‘Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,’ said the other man coldly. ‘More of a species gap.’

Carl coughed a laugh. ‘Oh, you wound me, Manco. To the core.’

‘And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.’

‘We make very convenient monsters.’

Bambaren shrugged. ‘The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.’

‘Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.’

A sharp glance. ‘Heard from who?’

‘Névant.’

‘You told me Névant tried to kill you.’

‘Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?’

‘No.’ The familia chief appeared to consider. ‘Névant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.’

Carl nodded. ‘But you still kept him around.’

Bambaren spread his hands. ‘He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow, he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways; he had a skill in this.’

Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Névant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist manoeuvred them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him. A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobsen had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints which embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown-construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking football, for Christ’s sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic? It’s the rest of you people that don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.

Later, hungover, he’d apologised. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.

Beside him, Bambaren was still talking.

‘. . . cannot tell, but if his schemes did include this genetic pistaco fantasy, then he was a fool. You do not need real monsters to frighten people. Far from it. Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power.’

Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.

‘Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.’

The tayta must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two minders twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambaren’s throat, while he grabbed right-handed at the tayta’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the minders drew whatever probable hi-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men down in time . . .

He saw her falling, outgunned, or just not fast enough . . .

‘Easy, Manco,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?’

The tayta’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. ‘You think you can kill me, twist?’

‘I know I can.’ Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown. ‘I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem any more, that’s a promise.’

The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of grey cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.

Oh, fuck . . .

The familia chief drew a hard breath.

His fists uncurled.

His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twinned there instead.

The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.

Bambaren laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.

‘You’re a fool, black man,’ he said harshly. ‘Just as Névant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumours about the pistacos? You think I need an army of monsters, real or imagined, to maintain order? Men will do that for me, ordinary men.’

He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away towards the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thinned to something more general and weary.

‘Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honour the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains. The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We - my people - invented the pistacos to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they cannot obtain what they want by other means. I pass no rumours of the pistaco, black man, because the lie of the pistaco is already in us all, and it comes to life time and time again on the altiplano without any encouragement from me.’

Carl glanced back towards the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.

‘So,’ he said breezily. ‘Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?’

Bambaren drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.

‘Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?’

‘It’s my intention, tayta, to get some straight answers out of you. And speech-making on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.’

‘You dismiss-’

‘I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.’

‘I have to have the respect of my men.’

‘Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.’

Beneath the sunlenses, Bambaren’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. ‘What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every-’

‘British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman’

‘It makes no difference. You.’ The familia chief’s face twitched. ‘Névant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonised women too poverty stricken to afford children of their own-’

‘Go fuck yourself, Manco.’

But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.

‘Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day-’

‘Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.’ Now he had the tone, the drawl. ‘We’re not here to discuss my family history.’

But tayta Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive.

‘Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be harvested of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel, twist?’

And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambaren’s death at the edge of his striking hand. There was no art in this, this was thumbs hooked into the familia chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite-

If we are ruled by what they have trained into us, said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage, then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear.

Carl flexed a smile, and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.

‘Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,’ he said. ‘Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?’

He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambaren blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long-lost treasure of the Incas was kept.

‘What are you talking about?’

Carl shrugged. ‘I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?’

Bambaren spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. ‘No one talks to Mars. You know that.’

‘You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.’

‘They walked away from that possibility back in ’74. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.’

Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-djinn on a ship home, climb inside a spare crycocap - you can always eat the previous occupant if you’re hungry - and dive-bomb the Pacific ocean with the survivable modules. Piece of cake.

‘You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’

Carl grinned. ‘Hate will find a way, huh? That old deuda de sangre magic.’

The familia chief studied the ground. ‘Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the afrenta marciana with me?’

‘Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.’

Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. ‘A resurgence of what, black man? We are at war. That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.’

‘Or until you curry enough favour with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.’

Manco looked pointedly back towards the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.

‘COLIN is a fact of life,’ he said sombrely. ‘We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.’

‘Yeah, very fucking poetic.’

Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care. Marsalis held onto the rough-ride strap above his door.

‘Well, he has a point.’

‘I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him - apart from cheap poetics - that was worth coming all this way for.’

Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back towards the centre of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenalin and sweat through her pores. But slow - she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambaren’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a kerb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing.

‘Well?’

‘Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.’

She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.

‘Please state your destination.’ Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.

‘City centre,’ she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. ‘Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.’

‘I know that.’

‘Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.’

He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.

‘Bambaren’s clean.’ He said it reluctantly. ‘I reckon.’

‘But that’s not all?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.’

She heard the raised tone at the end. ‘But?’

‘But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambaren, I’d just blown up a truck full of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again, if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there. This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.’

She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unravelled or snapped.

‘So what do you want to do about it?’ she asked.

He stared out of the side window. ‘I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.’

‘That’s Arequipa, right?’

‘Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.’

‘And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.’

Marsalis shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.’

‘You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?’

‘I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirrorshade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?’

Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near-collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia minders moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgement, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.

She sighed.

‘Yeah, okay.’ She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times. ‘Inshallah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.’

Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.

‘Course correct. Long haul, Arequipa.’

Scribbles awoke on the displays.

‘This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,’ Asia Badawi told her coolly.

‘Yeah, fucking tell me about it.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

The centre of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No co-operation, no overview - the late afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amidst it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noise-making process.

The jeep was a car-pool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

‘You want to drive?’

Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose to tail metal they were trying to break into.

‘Not really.’

‘You mind if I do?’

The lights changed and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a metre, jerked to a halt again, as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

‘Right.’

It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realised what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, towards the car behind them.

‘Marsalis, don’t-’

But he was already gone, striding back towards the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood - she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time - and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.

‘Ah, shit.’

Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window. She scrabbled it open.

‘What the fuck are you-’

‘Scoot over.’

‘What did you just do?’

‘Nothing. Scoot over, I’m going to take it on manual.’

She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn’t see anything through the darkened glass windscreen. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their priority again and shook her head in weary resignation.

‘Whatever.’

He took down the automation, engaged the drive and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he’d cut up and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of metres and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

‘Did you enjoy that?’

He shrugged. ‘Had a certain operational satisfaction.’

‘I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How’s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?’

‘Ertekin, there was no fight.’ He looked across and met her eye. ‘Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best.’

‘And if he hadn’t backed down?’

‘Well.’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘You people usually do.’

It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening towards dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within. Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaning intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus moustache worked on the innards. A mother seated on a front step, smoking and watching the traffic go by, three tiny children clinging about her. A young man in a suit, leaned into a shop doorway and flirting with the girl behind the counter. Each scene slipped by and left her with the frustrated sense of life escaping through her fingers like sand.

On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly coloured lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco’s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure, colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she’d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn’t make sense of any of it - just the general ache.

Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

Right.

Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. ‘You okay?’

‘Fine,’ she lied.

At the jeep, he got into the driver’s seat, then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

‘You don’t want to drive any more?’

‘No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don’t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic.’

He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialise out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowing boat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their running lights, then pulling ahead and away into the night. The jeep’s systems chirruped softly in the dashboard-lit cabin space, talking to each rig, interrogating, adjusting. Maybe bidding farewell.

‘You get used to that on Mars?’ she asked him. ‘The machine thing?’

He frowned. ‘Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?’

‘I thought on Mars-’

‘Yeah, everybody does. It’s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it’s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day, even the scientists thought the terraforming would take centuries. Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our timescales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch up.’ He gestured. ‘So now we’re still stuck with the red rocks and airlocks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don’t like to let it go.’

‘Ain’t that the fucking truth.’

He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. ‘Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the illusion. It’s a lot of empty black to cross just for that.’

The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

‘It was bad, huh?’ she said quietly. ‘Out there?’

He shot her a glance. ‘Bad enough.’

Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

‘There was this woman,’ he said at last. ‘In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like . . . someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day’d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I’d tell her what I’d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth control and the rescue ship crew.’

He cleared his throat.

‘See, after a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren’t there. The fact that you’re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You’re asking yourself, why you? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on your watch? You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit.’ He grimaced. ‘That’s religion, right?’

‘No, that’s not religion.’ Sudden asperity in her voice.

‘It’s not?’ He shrugged. ‘Well, it’s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something out there trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there’d be something else as well, a kind of opposed force, something in there with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn’t take me long to make one - see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre’s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the Felipe Souza to watch over me.’

‘But she was.’ Sevgi gestured. ‘A person. Just a human being.’

‘I didn’t say it made any sense, Ertekin. I said it was religion.’

‘I thought,’ she said severely, ‘thirteens were supposed to be incapable of religious faith.’

Ethan certainly had been. She remembered his incurious, stifled-yawn incomprehension whenever she tried to talk about it, as if she were some Jesusland fence-hopper stood on his doorstep trying to sell him something plastic and pointless.

Marsalis stared into the blue glow of the dashboard displays. ‘Yeah, they say we’re not wired for it. Something in the frontal cortex, same reason we don’t take direction well. But like I said, it got pretty bad out there. You’re stuck in the empty dark, looking for intent where there’s only incidence. Feeling powerless, knowing you’ll live or die dependent on factors you can’t control. Talking to sleeping faces or the stars because it beats talking to yourself. I don’t know about the cortical wiring argument, all I can tell you is that for a couple of weeks aboard Felipe Souza, it felt like I had religion.’

‘So what changed?’

He shrugged again. ‘I looked out the window.’

More silence. Another autohauler droned by, buffeting them with the wind of its passage. The jeep rocked in its wake, adrift on the night.

‘Souza had vision ports let into the lower cargo deck,’ Marsalis said slowly. ‘I went there sometimes, got the n-djinn to crank back the shields. You have to kill the interior lights before you can see anything, and even then . . .’

He looked at her, opened his hands.

‘There’s nothing out there,’ he said simply. ‘No meaning, no mindful eye. Nothing watching you. Just empty space and, if you travel far enough, a bunch of matter in motion that’ll kill you if it can. Once you get your head round that, you’re fine. You stop expecting anything better or worse.’

‘So that’s your general philosophy, is it?’

‘No, it’s what Elena Aguirre told me.’

For a moment, she blanked. It was like those moments when someone talked to her in Turkish out of the blue and she was still working in English, a failure to process the words she’d heard.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What I said. Elena Aguirre told me to stop believing all that shit and face up to what you can see out the window.’

‘Are you laughing at me?’ she asked him tautly.

‘No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m telling you what happened to me. I stood at that window with the lights off, looking out, and I heard Elena Aguirre come up behind me. She’d followed me down to the cargo deck and she stood there behind me in the dark. Breathing. Talking into my ear.’

‘That’s impossible!’

‘Yeah, I know that.’ Now he did smile, but not at her. He was looking into the light from the dashboard again, eyes blind, washed empty with the electric blue glow. ‘She’d have left tank gel all over the deck, wouldn’t she? Not to mention, she would have rung every alarm on the ship climbing out of the tank in the first place. I mean, I don’t know how long I stood frozen to the window after she’d gone, you tend to lose track of time out there, and I was pretty scared, but-’

‘Stop it.’ She heard the jagged edge on her tone. Felt the urge to shudder creep up her neck like a cold, cupped hand. ‘Just stop it. Be serious.’

He frowned into the blue light. ‘You know, Ertekin, for someone who believes in a supreme architect of the universe and a spiritual afterlife, you’re taking this remarkably hard.’

‘Look - ’ Thrown down like a challenge. ‘How could you know it was her? This Elena Aguirre. You’d never even heard her voice.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

There was a quiet simplicity in the question that tilted her, suddenly, weightlessly, like sex the first time she got to do it properly and came, like her first dead body crime scene by the tracks off Barnett Avenue. Like watching Nalan’s breathing stop for the final time in the hospital bed. She shook her head helplessly.

‘I-’

‘See, you asked if it got bad,’ he said softly. ‘So I’m telling you how bad it got. I went down deep, Sevgi. Deep enough for some very strange shit to happen, genetic wiring to the contrary or not.’

‘But you can’t believe-’

‘That Elena Aguirre was the incarnation of a presence watching over me? Of course not.’

‘Then-’

‘She was a metaphor.’ He breathed out, as if letting something go. ‘But she got out of hand, like metaphors sometimes can. You go that deep, you can lose your grip on these things, let them get free. I guess I’m lucky whatever was waiting for me down there spat me out again. Maybe my genetic wiring gave it indigestion after all.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Flat anger. She couldn’t keep it out of her voice. ‘Indigestion? Metaphors? I don’t understand anything you’re telling me.’

He glanced across at her, maybe surprised by her tone.

‘That’s okay. I’m probably not explaining it all that well. Sutherland would have done better, but he’s had years to nail it all down. Let’s just say that out there in transit I talked myself into something at a subconscious level and it took an invented subconscious helper to talk me back out. Does that make more sense?’

‘Not really. Who’s Sutherland?’

‘He’s a thirteen, guy I met on Mars, what the Japanese would call a sensei, I guess. He teaches tanindo around the Upland camps. He used to say humans live their whole lives by metaphor, and the problem for the thirteens is that we fit too fucking neatly into the metaphorical box for all those bad things out beyond the campfire in the dark, the box labelled monster.’

She couldn’t argue with that. Memory backed it to the hilt, faces turned to her full of mute accusation when they knew what Ethan had been. Friends, colleagues, even Murat. Once they knew, they didn’t see the Ethan they’d known any more, just an Ethan-shaped piece of darkness, like the perp sketch that served in virtual for the man who murdered Toni Montes.

‘Monsters, scapegoats.’ The words dropped off his tongue like cards he was dealing. His voice was suddenly jeering. ‘Angels and demons, heaven and hell, god, morality, law and language. Sutherland’s right, it’s all metaphor. Scaffolding to handle the areas where base reality won’t cut it for you guys, where it’s too cold for humans to live without something made up. We codify our hopes and fears and wants, and then build whole societies on the code. And then forget it ever was code and treat it like fact. Act like the universe gives a shit about it. Go to war over it, string men and women up by the neck for it. Firebomb trains and skyscrapers in the name of it.’

‘If you’re talking about Dubai again-’

‘Dubai, Kabul, Tashkent and the whole of fucking Jesusland for that matter. It doesn’t matter where you look, it’s the same fucking game, it’s humans. It’s-’

He stopped abruptly, still staring into the blue-lit displays, but this time with a narrowed focus.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. We’re slowing down.’

She twisted in her seat to look through the rear windows. No sign of an autohauler they might be blocking. And no jarring red flashes anywhere on the display to signify a hardware problem. Still the jeep bled speed.

‘We’ve been hacked,’ Marsalis said grimly.

Sevgi peered out of the side windows. No road lighting anywhere, but a miserly crescent moon showed her a bleached, sloping landscape of rock and scrub, mountain wall to the right, and across on the far side of the highway what looked like a steep drop into a ravine. The road curved round the flank of the mountain and they were down to a single lane each way. The central reservation had shrunk to a metre-wide luminous guidance marker painted on the evercrete for the autohaulers. No lights or sign of human habitation anywhere. No traffic.

‘You’re sure?’

‘How sure do you need me to be?’ He took the wheel and tried to engage the manual option. The system locked him out with a smug triple chime and pulsing orange nodes in amongst the blue. The jeep trundled sluggishly on down the gradient. He threw up his hands and kicked the pedals under his feet. ‘See? Motherfucker.’

It wasn’t clear if he was talking to the machine or whoever was reeling them in. Sevgi reached for her pistol, freed it from the shoulder holster and cleared the safety. Marsalis heard the click, fixed on the gun in her hands for a moment. Then he leaned across the dashboard and hit the emergency shutdown stud. The display lit red across and the brakes bit. They still had solid coasting velocity. The jeep’s tyres yelped at the abuse and locked. They slewed, but not far. Jerked to a tooth-snapping halt.

Silence - and the blink, click of the hazard lights on automatic. Cherry-red glow pooled at each corner of the jeep, vanished. Pooled, vanished. Pooled, vanished.

‘Right.’

He fumbled the mechanism of his seat so it sank and allowed him access to the back of the jeep. Dived over and hung from the seat back by his hips, groping around. His voice tightened up with the pressure on his stomach muscles. ‘Seen this before in the Zagros. Mostly from the other side of the scam. We used to flag down the Iranian troop carriers like this for ambush. Hook them well before they could see you.’ A blanket rose and fell in his hand, tossed away. ‘Once you’ve cracked the pilot protocols, you can do pretty much what you like with them.’ Rattle of something plastic spilling. He reached harder. ‘Crash them into each other, drive them off the edge of a cliff, if there is one. Or over a carefully placed mine fuck.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for a weapon. I figure you’re not going to share that Beretta with me, right? Contractual obligations and all that.’ He bounced back into the seat, teeth tight in frustration, glared around him and then threw open the door. He ran round to the back of the jeep. Road dust from the emergency stop caught on a soft breeze and blew forward over and around them in a cloud. It floated away, ghostly quiet and intermittently lit up red by the hazard lights. Sevgi looked back and saw Marsalis working to loosen something from the rear hatch. The jeep rocked on its suspension with every tug. The flashing lights lit him amidst the dust, turned his face demonic with tension and focused effort. She thought she heard him grunt. Something clanked loose.

He came back to the door, hefting a collapsible shovel.

‘All right, listen,’ he said, suddenly calm. ‘If we’re lucky, these are local thugs, used to flagging down easy-mark trucks and the odd tour bus. If they are, I’m guessing we’ve got a couple more minutes before they realise what we’ve done. Maybe another three or four minutes after that for them to mount up and come find us. Not long, however you look at it. So, textbook response, we need to get out of the vehicle and find some cover, fast.’

Sevgi nodded mutely, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth was. She snapped the slide on the Beretta, textbook style, tilting it to the horizontal so she could read the load display on the side. Thirty-three, and one in the pipe. The Marstech guns took state-of-the-art expansion slugs, pencil slim, accurate at long range and explosive on impact. She cleared her throat and lifted the Beretta.

‘You think we’ll be able to chase them off?’

He stared at her. The hazards painted him red, dark, red, dark, red, dark. He looked down at the folded shovel in his hands. Snapped the blade out into the functional position. Then he looked up at her again, hands tightening the locking mechanism in place, and his voice was almost gentle.

‘Sevgi, we’re going to have to kill these guys.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

There were seven of them.

From his limited vantage point, Carl made them for Peruvian regulars and relaxed a little. Familia hitmen would have been worse. He let the mesh come on, felt it seep into his muscles like rage. His vision sharpened on the vanguard. They were walking three abreast on the opposite carriageway, ten paces ahead of a slow-crawling open army jeep that carried the other four and a mounted machine gun. The vehicle moved with the main lights doused - that much, at least, they were doing right - and the vanguard party held their assault rifles ready for use. A gawky tension in the way they moved screamed conscript nerves. These guys could have been the same easy-grin, football-talking uniforms he’d blagged a ride from five months back, on his way to kill Gray. With luck, they’d be as young and unprepared.

They came to a halt twenty metres from the red hazard flash pooling and fading at each corner of the stranded COLIN jeep. Muttered Spanish, too far off to catch. The curve on the road was gentle, they’d have been able to see the lights for the last hundred metres at least, but they’d chosen now to stop and discuss tactics. Carl smiled to himself and gripped the shaft of the shovel. The eroded metal edge of the blade touched his face, cold and notched with use against his cheek.

The jeep backed up a little. The vanguard soldiers crossed the luminous central reservation, looking both ways like well-trained children. Carl thought he could hear the distant drone of an autohauler somewhere in the night, impossible to tell how far off or which direction it was headed. Otherwise, there was nothing but thin moonlight on porous rock and jagged mountain backdrop. Stars shingled across the sky, almost as clear as on Mars. It was quiet enough to hear the scuff of booted feet across the evercrete now they were close, the follow-up grumble of the jeep’s antique engine.

Fucking seven of them. Christ, I hope you’re up for this Ertekin.

He’d asked her if she knew how to kill someone with the matt-grey Beretta, if she’d ever shot anyone dead. Half hoping she’d crumble and give him the weapon. The look he got in return was enough. But she hadn’t answered his question and he still didn’t know.

The vanguard arrived at the COLIN vehicle. They crept up crabwise and peered inside the cabin. Tugged at the door handles and barked surprise when the doors pulled open on smooth hydraulic servos. Poked their weapons nervously inside. Now he could hear them talking. Forced bravado rinsing through the soft coastal Spanish accents like grit through a silk screen. Young-boy talk.

‘You check the back, Ernesto?’

‘Already done it, man. They’re fucking gone. Run off. Told the sarge we should have pulled them over old-style. Flashing lights, road block, it never fails.’

‘That’s all you fucking know.’ A third voice, from round the other side of the jeep. It sounded a little older. ‘This isn’t some Bolivian strike leader, this is a fucking thirteen. He would have driven right through us, fucked us in pieces.’

‘That gringa cunt, that’s what I’ll fuck in pieces when we catch up with them.’

Laughter.

‘She’s not a gringa, Ernesto. Didn’t you see the photo? I got a sister-in-law in Barranca got lighter skin than that.’

‘Hey, she’s from Nueva York. That’s good enough fucking for me.’

‘You know something, you guys disgust me. What if your mothers could hear you now?’

‘Ah, come on Ramon. Don’t be an altar boy your whole fucking life. You seen the photos of this bitch or not? Tits on her like Cami Chachapoyas. Don’t tell me you don’t want a piece of that.’

Ramon said nothing. The slightly older one filled in for him.

‘Tell you what, you do fuck her, either of you, you’d better spray on first. Those gringas got a dose of everything going. I got a cousin in Nueva York, says those bitches are out fucking everything that moves.’

‘Man, you got fucking family all over, don’t you? How come-’

An NCO bellow from the jeep: ‘Report, corporal!’

‘Nothing here, sir,’ the older voice called back. ‘They’re gone. Have to quarter the area.’

In the jeep, something indistinct was said about fucking infrareds. Probably, Carl guessed, that they didn’t have any.

‘Ground search. Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m telling you, when we catch up with this twist and his bitch-’

And time.

He let the rage drive him, rolled and braced himself off the edge of the moulded roof storage pan, came down a metre clear, on the opposite side to the other jeep. The heat-resistant elasticated tarpaulin that had hidden him stretched taut as he rolled, let him free and then snapped back with a flat, slapping sound.

It was all the warning they ever had.

He hit the evercrete amidst uniformed bodies. Sent them staggering and sprawling - no time to count. The one in front had his back turned, did not quite go down-

‘Fuck, Ramon, what are you doing?’

He hadn’t understood what was happening. Was turning, unguarded, no worse than irritated, when Carl swung the shovel blade into his face. Blood splattered, warm and unseen in the dark, but he felt it on his cheek. The man dropped his assault rifle and clutched at his shattered cheekbone, made a wet sound, fell down screaming. Carl was already spinning away. A second uniform, struggling on his hands and knees. Ramon the altar boy? Carl hacked down with the shovel, into the soft top of the skull. The man made a noise like a panicked cow and collapsed prone. More blood spritzed, painted his face with its warmth.

The third soldier was still on the far side of the COLIN jeep. He came round the back of the vehicle at speed and Carl met him head on, grinning, black and splattered with the other men’s blood. The soldier panicked, yelled. Forgot to raise his rifle.

‘He’s here-’

Carl lunged. Jabbed hard with the shovel, blade end into the soldier’s throat. The warning shout died to a choked gurgle. Carl zipped up the gap between them, blocked off the late-rising barrel of the assault rifle with one splayed hand, smashed the butt end of the shovel into the man’s nose. The fight died, the soldier went down choking. Carl reversed the shovel and hacked down with point of the blade, into the throat until the other man stopped making a noise.

The night flared apart with headlight beams from the other jeep. Shouts of alarm from the other side. Four more, he knew. No way to be sure how many were still sitting in their vehicle, how many deployed by now . . .

Come on, Ertekin. Pick it up.

Gunfire - the flat, high crack of the Marstech gun, six rapid shots in succession. The lights doused. Panicked yells from the jeep.

Fuck. Nice shooting, girl.

‘Open fire!’

Carl hit the asphalt. Kicked the screaming, rolling victim with the shattered face out of his way, snagged the man’s assault rifle. Dimly he registered it as a use-worn Brasilian Imbel, not exactly state of the art but-

From somewhere, the mounted machine gun on the army jeep cut loose. The noise ripped the night apart. Stammering thunder from the gun, and the shattering clangour as the .50 cal rounds smashed themselves apart on the COLIN vehicle’s armoured flank. Marstech, Marstech, we got the Marstech. The idiot rhyme marched through his head, flash image of the kids that used to chant it out back of the bubblefabs at Wells. Carl grinned a tight combat rictus, crabbed about in the cover the jeep gave him and poked the Imbel under the vehicle. He sprayed a liberal burst of return fire through the gap, then cut it off. Confused yelling, the machine gun coughed, suddenly silent. Carl pressed his face flat to the road surface and peered. Nothing - his vision was still blasted from the headlamps. He squeezed both eyes shut, tried again.

‘Motherfucking twist piece of-’

The injured soldier was on him, flailing with fists, face hanging off in flaps where the shovel had sliced it apart. His voice was a high weeping torrent of abuse, a boy’s fury. Carl smacked him under the chin with the butt of the Imbel, then again in the region of the wound. The soldier screamed and cringed back. Carl brought the barrel of the assault rifle to bear. Short, stuttering burst. The muzzle flash lit the boy’s ruined face, reached out and touched him on the chest like fizzling magic - kicked him away across the road like rags.

The machine gun cut loose again, died just as abruptly at yelled orders from the jeep. Still grinning, Carl got to his feet and crept to the wing of the COLIN vehicle. He crouched and squinted, squeezed detail from his flash-burnt vision. Saw the silhouette of the soldier manning the mounted gun. About forty metres, he reckoned. It hurt to hold onto the detail through aching pupils, but-

Better get this done.

As if she’d heard him, Ertekin’s Marstech pistol cracked again across the night, three times in rapid succession. The soldier on the mounted gun pivoted his weapon about, chasing the sound. Carl put the Imbel to his shoulder, popped up over the jeep hood, cuddled the weapon in and squeezed the trigger. Clattering roar at his ear and the muzzle flash stabbed out again in the cool air. Long burst, drop back into cover, don’t stop to see . . .

But he already knew.

The mounted machine gun stayed silent.

He gave it another minute, just to be safe - just to beat that bullshit thirteen arrogance, right, Sutherland ? - then poked the weapon up over the hood again, butt first. No returning fire. He moved to the rear of the COLIN jeep and eased his head out far enough to see the other vehicle.

Silent, tumbled figures in and alongside the open-top jeep. The mounted gun, stark and skeletal amidst the carnage, unmanned and tilting butt first at the sky. Carl stepped out of cover. Paused. Moved slowly forward, mesh-hammer ebbing along his nerves now the fight was done. He covered the distance to the other jeep in a cautious, curving arc. Peripherally, he was aware of Ertekin climbing up onto the road from the ravine side where she’d hidden. He got to the jeep well ahead of her, circled it once, warily, and then stood looking at his handiwork.

‘Well, that seemed to work,’ he said, to no one in particular.

It looked as if the sergeant had got clear of the jeep, was on the way to support his men when he ran into the hail of fire from the Imbel. Now he lay flung back against the forward wheel arch like a drunk who’d just tripped on a kerb. Above his slumped form, the jeep’s driver was still behind the wheel, hands folded neatly in his lap, face ripped away, brains dripping down his shirt-front like spilled gravy. The soldier manning the mounted gun hung twisted over the back of the jeep, one foot tangled in something that had prevented the impact of the Imbel’s rounds from knocking him bodily out of the vehicle. His head was almost touching the evercrete surface of the road, boy’s face slack with shock, staring from frozen, upside down eyes as Carl moved past him.

The remaining man lay huddled in the back of the jeep like a child playing hide and seek. In the low light, blood shone wet and dark on his battledress, but his chest still rose and fell. Carl reached in and gripped his shoulder. The soldier’s eyes flickered open drowsily. He blinked at Carl for a moment, bemused. Blood-irised spit bubbles moved at the corner of his mouth as his lips parted.

‘Uncle Gregorio,’ he muttered weakly. ‘What are you doing here?’

Carl just looked at him, and presently the soldier’s eyes slid closed again. His head tipped a little to one side, came to rest against the inside trim of the jeep. Carl reached in again and felt for a pulse. He sighed.

Ertekin reached his side.

‘You okay?’ he asked her absently.

‘Yeah. Marsalis, you’ve got blood-’

‘Not mine. Can I see that Marstech piece of yours for a second?’

‘Uh. Sure.’

She handed the weapon to him, took the Imbel as he offered it over in return. He weighed the Beretta for a moment, checked the safety and the load display. Then he raised it and shot the young soldier through the face. The boy’s head jerked back. Lolled. He knocked the safety back on, palmed the warmth of the barrel and handed the pistol back to Ertekin.

She didn’t take it. Her voice, when it came, was leashed tight with anger.

‘What the fuck did you do that for?’

He shrugged. ‘Because he wasn’t dead.’

‘So you had to make him that way?’ Now the anger started to bleed through. Suddenly she was shouting. ‘Look at him, Marsalis. He was no threat, he was injured-’

‘Yeah.’ Carl gestured around at the deserted road and the empty landscape beyond. ‘You see a hospital out there anywhere?’

‘In Arequipa-’

‘In Arequipa, he’d have been a fucking liability.’ Running a little anger of his own now. ‘Ertekin, we need to hit Greta Jurgens fast, before she finds out what went down here tonight. We don’t have time for hospital visits. This isn’t a ... what?’

Ertekin was frowning, anger shelved momentarily as she reached into her jacket pocket. She fished out her phone, which was vibrating quietly on and off, pulsing along its edges with pale crystalline light.

‘Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’ Carl looked away down the perspectives of the road in exasperated disbelief. ‘At this time of night?’

‘Rang before,’ she said, putting the device to her ear. ‘Just before the fireworks kicked off. Didn’t have time to pick up. Ertekin.’

Then she listened quietly. Made monosyllabic agreement a couple of times. Hung up, and put the phone away again, face gone calm and thoughtful.

‘Norton,’ he guessed.

‘Yeah. Time to go home.’

He gaped at her. ‘What?’

‘That’s right.’ She met his eye, something harder edging the calm. ‘RimSec called. They’ve got a body. We’ve got to go back.’

Carl shook his head. Twinges of the firefight backed up in his nerves, fake-fired the mesh. ‘So they’ve got a body. Another body. Big fucking deal. You going to pull out now, just when we’re getting somewhere?’

Ertekin gazed around at the carnage. ‘You call this getting somewhere?’

‘They tried to stop us, Sevgi. They tried to kill us.’

‘They tried to kill us in New York as well. You want to go back there? Come to that, Névant tried to kill you in Istanbul. Violence follows you around, Marsalis. Just like Merrin, just like-’

She clamped her lips.

Carl looked at her and felt the old weariness seeping in. He cranked up the rind of a smile for cover.

‘Go ahead, Sevgi, say it. Just like Ethan.’ He gestured. ‘Go on, get it off that gorgeous chest of yours. It’s what you’re thinking anyway.’

‘You have no fucking right to assume-’

‘No?’ He paused for effect. ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot. You get some kind of perverse thrill out of fucking unlucks, and that makes you think you don’t see us the same way the rest of the whole fucking human race does. Well it takes more than a Cuban wank and a few sheet stains to-’

Abruptly, he was on the ground.

He lay there on his back in the road dust, staring up while she stood over him, clutching her right fist in her left hand.

‘Motherfucker,’ she said wonderingly.

She’d stepped in before she threw the punch, he realised. Right hook, or an uppercut, he couldn’t work out which. He never saw it coming.

‘You think I haven’t been where you are now, Marsalis?’

He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What, flat on the your back in the road?’

‘Shut up.’ She was trembling visibly. Maybe with comedown from the firefight. Maybe not. ‘You think I don’t know what it’s like? Think again, fuckwit. Try growing up Muslim in the West, while the Middle East catches fire again. Trying growing up a woman in a western Muslim culture fighting off siege mentality fundamentalism again. Try being one of only three Turkish-American patrolwomen in a New York precinct dominated by male Greek-American detectives. Hey, try sleeping with a thirteen, you’ll get almost as much shit as being one, not least from members of your own fucking family. Yeah. People are stupid, Marsalis. You think I need lessons in that?’

‘I don’t know what you need, Ertekin.’

‘No, that’s right, you don’t. And listen - you got some fucking problem with what we did back in Istanbul, then deal with it however you need to. But don’t you ever, ever call into question my relationship with Ethan Conrad again. Because the next time I swear I will put a fucking bullet in you.’

Carl rubbed at his jaw. Flexed it experimentally left and right.

‘Mind if I get up now?’

‘Do what you fucking like.’

She stood away from him, staring off somewhere beyond the corpses and the arid landscape. He climbed carefully to his feet.

‘Ertekin, just listen to me for a moment. Look around you. Look at this mess.’

‘I am looking at it.’

‘Right. So it’s got to mean something, right?’

Still she didn’t look at his face. ‘Yeah, what it probably means is that Manco Bambaren’s tired of you pushing him around in his own backyard.’

‘Oh, come on Ertekin. You’re a cop, for fuck’s sake.’

‘That’s right, I’m a cop.’ Suddenly, she whipped round on him. Fast enough to halfway trip a block reflex. ‘And right now, while I get dragged around the globe watching you fulfil your genetic potential for wholesale slaughter, other cops elsewhere are doing real police work and getting somewhere with it. Norton was right about this, we’re wasting our time. We are going back.’

‘You’re making a mistake.’

‘No.’ She shook her head, decision taken. ‘I made a mistake in Istanbul. Now I’m going to put it right.’

PART IV

OUT TO SEA

‘We must at all times guard against any illusory sense of final achievement. To recommend change, as this report does, is not to suggest that the problems we address will disappear or no longer require attention. At most they will disappear from view, and this may very well be a counterproductive outcome, since it cannot fail to encourage a complacency we can ill-afford. ’

Jacobsen Report August 2091

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Greta Jurgens came to work early, shuffling across the deserted white stone courtyards just off the Plaza de Armas before the sun got high enough to make them blaze. Still, she wore heavy-framed sunglasses against the light, and her pace was sluggish enough for summer heat or a woman twice her age. She wasn’t small-boned, or even especially pale given her Germanic ancestry, but the tanned, muscle-freighted bulk of the two Samoan bodyguards detailed to escort her from the limousine each day made her seem delicate and ill by comparison. And as she reached the cloistered edge of the courtyard where her office was, stepped under the cloister’s stone roof and up to the office door, she shivered, harder than most humans would. October was a knowledge, a cold creeping tide in her blood. Darker, colder days, coming in.

Back in Europe, the seasonal cycle her metabolism had originally been calibrated for was already well into autumn and winding slowly down to winter. And you never could quite get it together to get recalibrated, could you, Greta. Too little faith in the local service providers - it was a complicated procedure, went very deep - and too little disposable income or time to go back and pay someone she’d trust. Yeah, and if you’re honest, just never the right time either; too fucking busy, then too fucking depressed, then just too fucking asleep. It was a pretty standard hib complaint - along with the more obvious physiological factors, the hibernoid hormonal suite lent itself to mental fluctuations that were almost bipolar in their intensity. All through the waking segment of the cycle, she whirred like an overloaded magdrive dynamo, working, dealing, broking, living but always too busy, too busy, too busy to rest or relax or sleep or worry about minor considerations like changing her life for the better. Then, as the hormonal tide began to ebb and such considerations finally managed to creep to the front of her conscious concerns, they came in freighted with such a surging sense of weariness in the face of insurmountable odds that it was all she could do not to weep at the pointlessness of trying to do anything about a thing like that now. Better just to sleep on it, better just let it go this time around, pick up again in spring and . . .

And round she went again.

An unfortunate psychological side effect, went the arid, tut-tutting text of the Jacobsen protocol, and somewhat debilitating for those implicated, but not a failing this committee need concern itself with unduly, nor a social threat as such.

Somewhat debilitating. Right. Her fingers mashed at the door code panel, slow and clumsy, as if they weren’t really hers. The Samoans stood by. Isaac and Salesi, both of them familia enforcers since their youth, long schooled in a sort of hard-faced butler’s diplomacy where escort duties were concerned - they knew better than to offer her help. She’d been in a foul mood for days now, snappish and strung out at the wrong end of her waking tether. Judgement fraying, social skills barely operational. Under normal circumstances, she’d already have handed over operations here to one of Manco’s brighter minions, given in to the inevitable changes in her blood chemistry and let the cold tide turn opiate-warm along her veins. She’d already be housebound, down at the Colca retreat, pottering about, prepping for the long sleep ahead. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have to-

He came out of nowhere.

She still had her sunglasses on, blurry early morning vision, and not much peripheral sense at all this late in the cycle - no surprise she didn’t see it happen. Her first warning was the sound of a solid, untidy impact behind her. The door, coded open, was already swinging inward off the latch. She felt the huge hand of one of the bodyguards hit her in the small of her back, shoving her bodily inside. She stumbled, caught the corner of a desk in the cramped office space, struggled foggily to comprehend.

We’re being hit.

Impossible. Her mind rejected it out of hand, objections in a blurry rush. Manco had put his stamp on the Arequipa gangs a decade ago, made his allegiances, wiped out the rest. No one - no one - was stupid enough to buck the trend. And the courtyard, the white stone courtyard, was pristine when they crossed, empty this early.

The sound behind her, played back in her head. Shock jumped in her blood as she put it together.

Someone had come off the paved walkway above the cloister, jumped better than five metres directly down and onto one of her escorts. Was outside now, finishing the job . . .

Isaac cannoned into the doorjamb and sagged there, clinging. Blood matted his hair and poured down his face between the eyes. He made a convulsive effort to gain his feet again, failed, went down in a heap.

Behind him in the doorway, a black figure silhouetted against the gathering glare of the early morning sun. Something flopped in her sluggish blood, deep jolt of instinctive fear just ahead of recognition.

‘Morning, Greta. Surprised to see me?’

‘Marsalis.’ She spat it out, temper snapping across. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

He stepped carefully into the office, skirting Isaac’s toppled bulk with catlike care and a wary sideways glance. Behind him, through the open door, she saw Salesi stretched out unmoving on the chessboard white and grey paving of the courtyard like a beached whale. Marsalis didn’t have a mark on him, didn’t even appear to be breathing heavily. He stood just inside reaching distance and looked impassively at her.

‘I haven’t had much sleep, Greta. I’d bear that in mind if I were you.’

‘I’m not afraid of you.’

He saw it was true. Smiled a little. ‘I guess not. Welcome to the twist brotherhood, right? All just monsters together.’

‘I repeat.’ She stepped away from the desk corner, straightened up to him. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘I might ask Manco the same question. See, I’ve been pretty polite so far. Couple of quick conversations and I’m out of your hair for good. No damage, no disruption, everybody’s happy. That’s the way I wanted it, anyw-’

‘We don’t always get what we want, Marsalis. Didn’t your mummy ever tell you that?’

‘Yeah. She also told me it was rude to interrupt.’ He reached in, whiplash swift, and her sunglasses were gone, plucked into his hand. Her vision watered and swam. ‘Like I said, Greta, I could have been out of everyone’s hair in nothing flat. Instead, last night, while I was on my way here to talk to you, someone paid a bucketful of your illustrious local military to have me disappeared.’

She blinked hard to clear her vision. Silent curse at the tears it squeezed visibly out at the corners of her eyes.

‘What a shame they didn’t manage it.’

‘Yeah, well you just can’t get the help these days. Point is, Greta, who do you think I should blame?’

She tipped her head to look past him at the crumpled form by the door. ‘Looks to me like you’ve already decided that one.’

‘You’re confusing purpose with necessity. I don’t think your islander friends would have been over-keen on us all having a sit-down chat.’

She met his gaze. ‘I don’t seem to be sitting down.’

For a moment, they stared at each other. Then he shrugged, and tossed her sunglasses onto the desktop. He nodded at the chair behind the desk.

‘Be my guest.’

She made her way round the edge of the desk and seated herself. At the door to the little office, Isaac stirred, shook his head muzzily. Marsalis glanced his way, looked back at Greta and pointed a warning finger, then crossed to where the Samoan lay. Isaac snarled and spat blood, glared up at the black man in disbelieving rage. He braced his arms at his sides, pressed huge hands flat to the floor.

‘You stand up,’ Marsalis said without passion. ‘I will kill you.’

The Samoan didn’t appear to hear. His arms flexed, his mouth formed a grin.

‘Isaac, he means it.’ Greta leaned over the desk, put urgency into her tone. ‘He’s thirteen. Unluck. You stay where you are. I’ll square this.’

Marsalis shot her a glance. ‘Generous of you.’

‘Fuck you, Marsalis. Some of us got loyalties past getting paid.’ Sudden, unstoppable, cavernous yawn. ‘Wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’

‘Am I keeping you up?’

‘Fuck off. You want to ask me questions, ask me. Then get the fuck out.’

‘You talk to Manco today?’

‘No.’

He seated himself on the edge of the desk. ‘Yesterday?’

‘Before he went to meet you. Not since.’

‘Why would he use the army and not familia talent?’

‘You’re assuming it was him.’

‘He came close to greasing me himself, up at Sacsayhuaman. Yeah, I’m assuming this was him.’

‘You got no other enemies?’

‘I think we agreed I was asking the questions.’

She shrugged. Waited.

‘Manco got any interests up in Jesusland?’

‘That I know of? No.’

‘The Rim?’

‘No.’

‘He had a cousin did jail-time in Florida. Wore a jacket just like this one, apparently. Know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘You guys move medical tech at all ?’

She held down another yawn. ‘If it pays.’

‘Heard of a guy called Eddie Tanaka?’

‘No.’

‘Texan. Strictly small-time.’

‘I said no.’

‘What about Jasper Whitlock?’

‘No.’

‘Toni Montes?’

‘No.’

‘Allen Merrin?’

She threw up her hands. ‘Marsalis, what the fuck is this? Gone Walkabout? Do I look like Shannon Doukoure to you? We’re not a fucking missing persons agency.’

‘So you don’t know Merrin?’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘What about Ulysses Ward?’

She sat back in the chair. Sighed. ‘No.’

‘Manco treat you okay, Greta?’

She flared again, for real this time. ‘That’s none of your motherfucking business.’

‘Hey, I’m just wondering here.’ He gestured. ‘I mean, you’re good-looking and all, but in the end you’re a twist, just like me, and-’

‘I am nothing like you, unluck,’ she said coldly.

‘-we all know how the familias feel about twists. I don’t imagine Manco’s any different to the other taytas. Must be tough for you.’

Greta said nothing.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t hear you ask me a question.’

‘Didn’t you?’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘My question, Greta, was how does a gringa hib twist like yourself end up working front office for the familias?’

‘I don’t know, Marsalis. Maybe it’s because some of us twists can transcend what it says in our genes and just get on and do the work. Ever think of that?’

‘Greta, you’re asleep four months out of every twelve. That’s going to put a serious dent in anyone’s productivity. Add to that you’re white, you’re a woman and you’re not from here. The familias aren’t known for their progressive attitudes. So I don’t see any way this works, unless my sources are right and you’re fucking the boss.’

Across the room, Isaac’s eyes widened with disbelieving fury. She caught his gaze and shook her head, then fixed Marsalis with a stare.

‘Is that what you’d like to believe?’

‘No, it’s what Stéphane Névant tells me.’

‘Névant?’ Greta sneered. ‘That shithead ? Fucking wannabe pistaco, too stupid to realise-’

She stopped, sat silent.

Fucking end of cycle slippage, she knew dismally. Fucking traitorous genetic bullshit modifi-

Marsalis nodded. ‘Too stupid to realise what?’

‘To realise. That he needed us, and we didn’t need him at all.’

‘That’s not what you were going to say.’

‘Oh, so now you’re a fucking telepath?’

He got off the edge of the desk. ‘Let’s not make this more unpleasant than it’s got to be, Greta.’

‘I agree. In fact, let’s stop this shit right now.’

The new voice held them both frozen for a pair of seconds. Greta locked onto the figure in the doorway, then looked back just in time to see Marsalis’s face slacken into resignation. His lips formed a word, a name, she realised, and realised at the same moment, confusedly but surely, that it was all over.

Sevgi Ertekin stepped into the room, Marstech Beretta in hand.

In the taxi, they sat with a frigid thirty centimetres of plastic seat between them and stared out of opposite side windows at the passing frontages. Outside, the sun was on its way up into a sky of flawless blue, striking the early morning chill out of the air and lighting the white volcanic stonework of the old town almost incandescent. Traffic already clogged the main streets, slowed passage to a jerky crawl.

‘We’re going to miss our fucking flight,’ she said grimly.

‘Ertekin, this place has a dozen flights a day to Lima. We’ve got no problem getting out of here.’

‘No, but we’ve got a big fucking problem making the Oakland suborbital out of Lima if we miss this flight.’

He shrugged. ‘So we wait in Lima, catch a later bounce to Oakland. This guy they’ve found is dead, right? He’s not in a hurry.’

She swung on him. ‘What the fuck were you doing back there?’

‘Working a source, what did it look like?’

‘To me? Looked like you were winding up to beat a confession out of her.’

‘I wasn’t looking for a confession. I don’t think she knows about our little reception committee last night.’

‘Shame you didn’t think to find that out before you cut loose on the hired help.’

Carl shrugged. ‘They’ll live.’

‘The one out in the courtyard may not. I checked him on my way in. At a guess I’d say you fractured his skull.’

‘That’s hardly the point.’

‘No, the point is that I told you we were done here. I told you we were going stay put in the hotel until we were ready to fly out. The point is that you told me you would.’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

She said something in Turkish, under her breath. He wondered whether to tell her the truth, that he had slept, but not for very long. Had stung himself awake with dreams of Elena Aguirre muttering behind him in the gloom of Felipe Souza’s cargo section, had thought for one icy moment that she stood there beside the bed in the darkened hotel suite, staring down at him glitter-eyed. He’d dressed and gone out, itching to do violence, to do anything that would chase out the remembered powerlessness.

Instead he told her:

‘She knows Merrin.’

Momentary stillness, a barely perceptible stiffening, then the scant shift of her profile from the window, a single, sidelong glance.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I ran a long list of names on her, mostly victims from your list. Merrin’s was the only one that got a reaction. And when I moved on to the next name, she relaxed right back down again. Either she knew him before he went to Mars, or she knows him now.’

‘Or she knows someone else with that name, or did once.’ She’d gone back to looking out of the window. ‘Or it sounded like something or someone she knew, or you’re mistaken about the way she reacted. You’re chasing shadows, and you know it.’

‘Someone tried to kill us last night.’

‘Yeah, and on your own admission Jurgens knows nothing about it.’

‘I said she didn’t seem to.’

‘Like she seemed to know Merrin, you mean?’ She looked at him again, but this time there was no hostility. She just looked tired. ‘Look, Marsalis, you can’t have it both ways. Either we trust your instincts or we don’t.’

‘And you don’t?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t trust this.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean, this?’

‘It means this fucking dive back to the visceral level all the time. This throwing your weight around and pissing people off and pushing until something breaks loose and gives us someone new to fight. Confrontation, escalation, fucking death or glory.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘I mean, maybe that worked for Project Lawman back in the day, but it isn’t going to cut it here. This is an investigation, not a brawl.’

‘Osprey.’

‘What?’

‘Osprey. I’m not American, I was never part of Project Lawman.’ He frowned, flicker of something recalled, too faint now to get back. ‘And another thing I’m not, Ertekin, just so you keep it in mind. I’m not Ethan.’

For a moment, he thought she’d explode on him, the way she had the night before on the highway, with the corpses draped across the stalled and blinded jeep. But she only hooded her gaze and turned away.

‘I know who you are,’ she said quietly.

They didn’t speak again until they reached the airport.

They made the Lima flight with a couple of minutes to spare, got into the capital on time and confirmed their places on the Oakland suborb an hour before it lifted.

Time to kill.

Quiet amidst the bustle and vaulted space of the Lima terminal, Sevgi faced herself in a washroom mirror. She stared for what seemed like a long time, then shrugged and fed herself the syn capsules one at a time.

Dry-swallowed and grimaced as they went down.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Alcatraz station. Special Cases division.

By the time she got there, the superfunction capsules had kicked in with a vengeance. Her feelings were her own again, vacuum-packed back into the steel canister she’d made for them. An icy detachment propped up focus and attention to the detail beyond the mirror.

Another fucking mirror, she noted.

But this time she sat behind the glass and watched the scene in the interview room on the other side. Coyle and Rovayo and a woman who sprawled leggily in the chair provided, wore form-fitting black under a heavy leather jacket she hadn’t bothered to take off, and watched her interrogators with energetic, gum-chewing dislike. She was young, not far into her twenties, and her harsh-boned, Slavic face carried the sneer well. The rest was pure Rim mix - short blonde hair hacked about in a classic Djakarta shreddie cut that didn’t really suit her, crimson Chinese characters embroidered down the leg of her one-piece from hip to ankle, the baroque blue ink of a Maori-look skin-sting curled across her left temple. Her voice, as it strained through the speaker to the observer’s gallery, was heavily accented.

‘Look, what you fucking want from me? Everything you ask me, I give you answers. Now I got places I got to be.’ She leaned across the table. ‘You know, I don’t show up for shift tonight, they don’t pay me. Not like you public-sector guys.’

‘Zdena Tovbina,’ said Norton. ‘Filigree Steel co-worker. They got her off video archive from the block where this guy used to live. Seems she came looking for him when he didn’t show up for work two shifts running.’

‘Nice of her. Shame Filigree Steel didn’t think to do the same thing.’

Norton shrugged. ‘Fluid labour market, you know how it is. Apparently they did call him a couple of times, but when he didn’t call back, they just assumed he’d moved on. Hired someone else to fill his shifts. These security grunts make shit, staff turnover’s through the roof. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Unionise, maybe?’

‘Ssssh.’

In the interview room, Alicia Rovayo was pacing about. ‘We’ll inform your shift manager if we need to keep you much longer. Meantime, let’s go over it one more time. You say you didn’t actually know anything was wrong with Driscoll.’

‘No, I knew was something wrong. Something wrong was he saw inside of that ship.’ For just a moment, Zdena Tovbina looked haunted. ‘When we saw, we all got sick. Joey was first, but we all saw what was there.’

‘You actually saw Driscoll vomiting?’ Coyle asked from his seat.

‘No, we heard.’ Tovbina tapped her ear twice, graphically. ‘Squad net. Radio.’

‘And later, when you saw him?’

‘He was quiet. Would not talk.’ A phlegmatic, open-handed gesture. ‘I tried, he turned away from me. Very male, you know.’

‘These guys went in masked,’ Norton murmured. ‘Minimal stuff, upper face goggle wrap, but they were smearing anti-contaminants as well. You beginning to see where this is going?’

Sevgi nodded glumly. She glanced across the gallery at Marsalis, but he was focused wholly on the woman beyond the glass.

‘When was the last time you actually saw Joseph Driscoll?’ Coyle asked patiently.

Tovbina all but ground her teeth in frustration. ‘I have told you. He went back on Red Two shuttle. Climbed in by mistake. We were all shaken. Not thinking right. When we’re back at base, I looked for him in squad room. He was already gone.’

‘Oh yeah,’ breathed Marsalis. ‘He was gone all right.’

‘Where’d they find the body?’ Sevgi asked.

‘Caught up in deep-water cabling a hundred and something metres down, on the edge of one of these bioculture platforms they’ve got out there. It’s pretty much the area where Horkan’s Pride came down, allowing for drift. Whoever threw Driscoll over the side weighted him around the legs with a couple of bags of junk from the Horkan’s Pride galley. Probably made them up in advance. Took him down fast and clean, heading for the seabed until he hit something that snagged him. Pure chance a repair crew was out that way yesterday.’

‘Did he drown?’

‘No, looks like he was dead before he went into the water. Crushed larynx, snapped neck.’

‘Fuck. Weren’t these guys wearing vital-signs vests?’

‘Yeah, but no one checks them apparently. Staffing cuts. Filigree Steel eliminated the deck medics on their shuttles some time last year when they went up for retender.’

‘Great.’

‘Yeah, market forces, don’t you just love them? Oh yeah, and there are a lot of smaller contusions on Driscoll as well, some abrasions too. Forensics reckon he was stuffed inside one of the disposal chutes up near the kitchen section, then dumped straight out into the ocean. A couple of those hatches at least would have been on the submerged side of the hull. No one would have noticed.’

Sevgi shook her head. ‘Blowing an outer hatch should have shown up on a scanner somewhere. Takes power. Either that, or you have to use the explosive bolts like he did with the access hatches, and that would have made a noise, even submerged.’

‘There’d be plenty of power in the onboard batteries,’ said Marsalis distantly. ‘You wouldn’t need the bolts. And by the look of it, these people were too busy puking their guts up to be watching their screens for low-level electrical activity.’

He sat back and puffed out his cheeks.

‘Our boy Merrin really played this one.’ He shook his head. ‘A thing of beauty, really.’

Norton shot him an unfriendly look.

‘So.’ Sevgi wanted to hear someone say it, even if it was her. ‘Merrin walks out of there as Driscoll. Steals his gear, masks up, and slips aboard the wrong transport in the general confusion. Think that was deliberate, or did he just luck out?’

Marsalis shook his head again. ‘Deliberate, absolutely. He’d be paying attention for that stuff.’

‘He makes it back to the base, gets off the base somehow. I’d guess that’s not hard. Got to be a hundred different outs for someone with Merrin’s training. Security’s going to be focused on incoming personnel anyway, not the graveyard shift going home. And with all this breaking loose, everyone’s running around like a Jesusland snake handling meet.’ She stopped. ‘Wait a minute, what about the quarantine?’

Norton sighed. ‘Fudged. They applied it, made the announcement on the way back. Everyone through the nanoscan. Apparently.’ Irony lay heavy on the word. ‘No one at Filigree Steel realised Driscoll didn’t take the scan.’

Marsalis grunted. ‘Or by the time they realised, it was too late and they just covered their arses.’

‘Yeah, well, in any case, quarantine cleared inside the first couple of hours. Some biohazard outfit down from Seattle, they checked the hull for contaminants before it was towed. If someone at Filigree Steel was covering their asses, they knew they were safe bylunchtime.’

Sevgi nodded gloomily. ‘And by the time we’d get to digging any deeper with Filigree Steel, Ward shows up dead so we assume that’s how Merrin got ashore, and we don’t bother. What a fucking mess.’

‘It’s classic insurgency technique,’ Marsalis said. ‘Misdirect, cover your tracks.’

‘Can you sound a little less fucking impressed, please?’

In the interview room, they were done. Zdena Tovbina was escorted out, ostentatiously checking her watch. Rovayo stayed behind, played a long, weary glance through the one-way glass to the gallery as if she could see the three of them sitting there.

‘That’s all, folks,’ she said.

‘He planned this.’ Sevgi was still talking to make herself believe it. ‘He opened up the cryocaps and ripped the bodies apart to create a fucking diversion.’

‘Yeah.’ Marsalis got up to leave. ‘And you guys thought he’d just gone crazy.’

Coyle and Rovayo had been busy. There was a full CSI virtual up and running for Joey Driscoll’s death, including a gruesomely modelled corpse recovery site. They stood, briefly, in fathomless, lamp-lit blue and Driscoll peered down at them out of the tangled cabling, one puffy hand waving gently in the current. A CSI ’face reached up helpfully and pulled in magnified detail that Sevgi, syn or no syn, could really have done without. Driscoll’s eyes were gone, and the ear lobes, the mouth eaten back to a lopsided harelip snarl, and the whole swollen face gone waxy with adipocere seepage through the skin from the subcutaneous fat layers beneath. Sevgi’d seen worse, much worse, fished out of the Hudson or the East River every so often, but it was all a long time ago, and now the illusion of floating beneath the waterlogged corpse in the depths of the ocean kept triggering an impulse to hold her breath.

‘You said forensics have been over the apartment,’ she said. ‘Any chance of seeing that?’

Coyle nodded. ‘Sure. We all done here?’

‘I think so,’ said Norton uncomfortably.

Marsalis nodded impassively.

‘Full shift, datahome six,’ Coyle told the ’face, and the drowned blue murk amped up to a blinding flash of white, then soaked back out into the sombre colours of cheap rental accommodation. Driscoll had either been saving for something better, or maybe didn’t rate home environment as much of a budget priority. The furniture was functional and worn, the walls carried generic corporate promo artwork from what looked like a string of different employers. A window gave them a view of what must be an identical apartment building twenty metres away across an alley.

Sevgi breathed in relief.

‘You got matching genetic trace?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’ Rovayo pointed, and all around the room tiny scuffs of transparent red lit up on the furniture and fittings. ‘He was definitely here. Used the place for a couple of days at least.’

Marsalis went to the window and peered out. ‘Any sightings? Eye-witnesses? ’

The female Rim detective frowned. ‘Not much from witnesses, no. These blocks are purpose built for immigrant labor. Tenant turnover’s high, and people keep pretty much to themselves. There’s some security video from the corridors, but not much of that either. It looks like he took out most of the surveillance equipment in the block right after he got here. They didn’t get around to fixing it for a couple of weeks.’

‘Pretty standard,’ Marsalis muttered.

‘Yeah, right,’ Coyle growled. ‘And I suppose you don’t got immigrant labour slums in the Euro-fucking-Union.’

The black man flickered a glance at him.

‘I was talking about the surveillance take-down. Pretty standard urban penetration procedure.’

‘Oh.’

‘You want to see some of what we did get?’ Rovayo asked. She was already gesturing a viewpatch screen into existence on the empty air. Marsalis shrugged and shifted from the window.

‘Sure. Can’t hurt.’

So they all watched at a foreshortening camera angle as Merrin walked gaunt and hollow-eyed through the block lobby, stared thoughtfully up at the lens for a moment, and then walked on again. Sevgi, watching Marsalis as well, thought she saw the black man stiffen slightly as Merrin seemed to look up at them all from the screen. She wasn’t sure what he saw there to tighten him like that, maybe just a worthy opponent. For her, the moment flip-flopped abruptly in her head, Merrin looking up, the corpse of Joey Driscoll looking down, corpse and killer, little windows opening out of time to let the dead and destructive peer in. Fucking virtual formats. Copied worlds, no place for anything but ghosts and the machine perfection of the ’faces drifting between, administering it all with the inhuman competence of angels.

She wondered suddenly if that was what the paradise the imams talked about would be like. Ghosts and angels, and no place for anything human or warm.

‘We’ve got a problem here,’ she said, to dispel the sudden, creeping sense of doom. ‘If this is how Merrin got off Horkan’s Pride, then-’

‘Yeah.’ Coyle finished it for her. ‘How does he end up at Ward Biosupply the same afternoon, painting the dock with Ulysses Ward’s blood?’

‘More important than how,’ said Marsalis quietly. ‘You might want to wonder why?’

Coyle and Rovayo shared a look. Sevgi wrote the subtitles. Who knows why the fuck an unluck twist does anything? She wasn’t sure if Marsalis caught it too.

Norton cleared his throat. ‘Ward was out there. The satellite footage and the filed sub plans prove it. We’ve assumed that was coincidence, his bad luck he happened to be in the region. He rescued Merrin from the wreck and got murdered for his kindness.’

‘Big assumption,’ said Marsalis, less quietly.

‘We didn’t assume anything.’ Irritable tiredness in Rovayo’s voice. Now Sevgi thought about it, neither of the Rim cops looked as if they’d had a lot of sleep recently. ‘We ran background checks on Ward at the time. COLIN-approved security n-djinn. There’s no evidence of a link to Merrin, or Mars generally.’

‘There is now. Maybe you just didn’t dig deep enough.’

Coyle bristled. ‘What the fuck do you know about it? You some kind of cop all of a sudden?’

‘Some kind of, yeah.’

‘Marsalis, you’re full of shit. You’re a licensed hit-man at best, and from what I hear, you weren’t even very good at that. They bailed your ass out of a Florida jail for this job, right?’

Marsalis smiled faintly.

‘We’ll go back to Ward,’ Rovayo said quickly. She’d stepped subtly into the space between the two men, body language a blend of backing Coyle up and defusing the situation. Sevgi made it as instinctive - you couldn’t brawl in a virtuality, but Rovayo seemed to have forgotten where they were. ‘We’ll change the protocols, maybe run it through a different n-djinn. We’ll go deeper until we find the link. Now, it’s a given that they knew each other. So it’s probably a safe bet that Ward went out there with the specific intention of bringing Merrin back.’

Coyle nodded. ‘Only Merrin won’t play ball. He doesn’t show; after what’s happened to him in transit from Mars, he doesn’t trust Ward, or anybody else who’s in on this thing. And Ward has got a limited window before Filigree Steel show up, he hasn’t got the time to search the hull for the guy he’s supposed to be collecting.’

‘Or,’ offered Rovayo, ‘Ward climbs down into the hull and when he sees the mess, he freaks and runs.’

‘Yeah, could work that way too.’ Coyle grimaced. ‘Either way, Merrin finds his own way out, then goes looking for Ward anyway. You know what that sounds like to me? Revenge.’

Sevgi turned to look at Marsalis. ‘That make sense to you?’

‘Well, you know us thirteens.’ Marsalis glanced across at Coyle. He burlesqued a caricature Jesusland drawl. ‘We’re all real irrational when someone pisses us off.’

Coyle shrugged it off. ‘Yeah. What I heard.’

‘Merrin’s just endured seven months in transit,’ Norton pointed out. ‘He’s had to resort to cannibalism to survive. All because someone messed up his cryocap thaw. If he blamed Ward for that-’

‘Or if Alicia here is right, and Ward did freak and run.’ Coyle gestured. ‘Come on, however you look at it, this twi . . . this guy isn’t going to be in the most forgiving of moods. This is payback, pure and simple.’

‘Marsalis.’ Sevgi tried again. ‘I asked you what you think. You want to answer my question?’

He met her eyes. Face unreadable. ‘What do I think? I think we’re wasting our time here.’

Coyle snorted. Rovayo laid a hand on his arm. The black man barely looked in their direction. He took a step across the virtual apartment, faced the screen where Merrin was locked in freeze frame walking away, slipping out of the security camera’s angle of capture.

‘He was clear,’ he said slowly. ‘He’d beaten your half-arsed private-sector security effort, he’d left them puking their guts up exactly as planned. He’d run rings round them, misdirected everyone’s attention and then disappeared into local population, just the way he was trained. Going back for Ward meant exposing himself, coming out into the open again.’ A long, speculative stare across at Coyle. ‘When you’re operational in enemy territory, you don’t take risks like that for some kind of revenge kick.’

‘Sure,’ said Coyle. ‘Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.’

‘Who said anything about getting away with it?’ Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. ‘My kind know how to wait, cudlip. My kind would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing-’

‘What did you call me?’ It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.

‘You heard me.’

‘Will you two knock it off?’ snapped Sevgi. ‘Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ the black man said irritably. ‘I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.’

Norton stepped into the breach. ‘No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something. You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?’

‘Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up.’ Rovayo said ‘Cover his retreat. If Ward talked-’

Sevgi shook her head. ‘Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.’

‘Right,’ said Coyle slowly. ‘But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way round. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.’

Norton looked suddenly hopeful. ‘You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?’

‘Unlikely.’ Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. ‘The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.’

‘Or maybe just not the whole list,’ said Norton hopefully. ‘Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.’

‘There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,’ Rovayo pointed out.

‘Or Montes,’ said Coyle.

Norton sighed. ‘Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.’

‘Yeah, well for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.’ Marsalis gestured around the apartment. ‘And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.’

Coyle’s lip curled. ‘Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.’

‘Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambaren?’ A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. ‘Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the familias. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site-’

‘Who the fuck is Bambaren?’ Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily. Don’t ask.

Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full blown grin. ‘The reason it’s taken five months to find this corpse - fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside - is that the outfit who run routine maintenance on Ward Biosupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a bi-annual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called Bulgakov’s Cat, and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.’

‘You think I’m paranoid?’ asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.

The big Rim cop snorted. ‘Are you shitting me? You people were fucking designed paranoid, Marsalis.’

Norton cleared his throat. ‘I think-’

‘Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.’ Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. ‘In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Norton. ‘So why don’t we-’

‘I’m not done yet.’

Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realised. He was measuring the other man.

‘This is a Rim States police investigation,’ Coyle said. ‘Not some black ops slaughter-ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them-’

‘Yes. You don’t seem to have caught Merrin yet though, do you?’

Coyle bared his teeth. ‘Cute. No, we haven’t caught this one yet. But we will. And when we do-’

‘Roy - ’ It was the first time Sevgi could remember hearing Rovayo use her partner’s first name. ‘Crank it down, huh.’

‘No, Al, I’m sick of the assumptions here. This has got to be said.’ Coyle looked pointedly at Sevgi and Norton on his way back to staring down the thirteen. ‘If your COLIN masters here decide they want Merrin summarily executed when we’ve done our job and brought him in, well then I guess we’ll come to you for your professional expertise. Meantime, why don’t you just curb your fucking twi . . . gene-enhanced tendencies and let us work?’

Wall of silence. The last of the words seemed to hit it like pebbles off evercrete. It was a space, Sevgi realised with syn-sharpened surety, that outside virtual would have filled with violence the way blood rises to fill a wound. Marsalis and the Rim cop were wired eye to eye, like nothing else existed around them. She caught something in Rovayo’s face she couldn’t define. The other woman seemed locked up, an impossible step away from doing something. Norton wavered, helpless exasperation in the way he twitched. And she, Sevgi, watching the situation decay like-

‘Okay,’ said Marsalis, very softly.

Sevgi thought he’d finished. She opened her mouth, but the black man went on speaking.

‘A couple of things.’ Still soft, like the touch of cotton wool wadding on fingertips. ‘First, if you think you’ll bring Allen Merrin down in any condition other than dead, then you’re not living in the real world. None of you are. And second, Roy, if you ever speak to me like that again, in the real world, I’ll put you in intensive care.’

The Rim cop flared up. ‘Hey, you want to fucking step outside with me?’

‘Very much, yes.’ But Sevgi had the curious sensation that Marsalis was imperceptibly shaking his head as he said it. ‘But it isn’t going to happen. I want you to remember a name, Roy. Sutherland. Isaac Sutherland. He saved your life today.’

Then he was gone.

Scribbled out in a flicker of virtual light as he left them to the empty virtual apartment, Merrin’s viewpatch freeze-frame portrait walking away, and the hundred red-glow traces of his forensic passing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Oddly enough, it was Rovayo who came looking for him. By the time she tracked him down, he’d stopped prowling angrily about the Alcatraz station and drifted instead to an irritable halt on an outside gallery at the western end of the complex. She found him leaning on the rail, staring across the silver-glinting chop of the sea towards the mouth of the bay and the rust-coloured suspension span that bridged it. There was a towering bank of fog rolling in against the blue of the sky, like a pale cotton candy wave about to break.

‘Enough water for you?’ she asked.

Carl shot her a curious glance. ‘I’ve been back a long time.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Rovayo joined him at the rail. ‘I got this cousin down in the Freeport, he did six years on Mars when he was younger. Soil engineer. Two three-year qualpro stints back to back. He told me you never get used to the size of the water again, doesn’t matter how long ago you went.’

‘Well, that’s him. Everyone handles it differently.’

‘You ever miss it?’

He looked at her again. ‘What do you want, Rovayo?’

‘Says he misses the sky,’ she went on neutrally, as if Carl hadn’t spoken. ‘Sky at night, you know. All that landscape on that tiny horizon, says it looks like furniture crammed into a storeroom that’s too small for everything to fit. And all the stars. He says it was like you were all camping out together, like you were all part of the same army or something. You and every other human being you knew was on the planet with you, all with the same reason for being there, like you were all doing something that mattered.’

Carl grunted.

‘You ever feel like that?’ she asked.

‘No.’

It came out more abrupt than he’d meant. He sighed and opened his hands where they rested on the rail. ‘I’m a thirteen, remember. We don’t suffer from this need to feel useful that you people have. We’re not wired for group harmony.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t always let your wiring tell you what to do, right?’

‘Maybe not, but I’d say it pays to listen to it from time to time. If you plan on ever being happy, that is.’

Rovayo rolled over on the railing, put her arched spine to it and hooked her elbows back for support. ‘I seem to remember reading somewhere we’re none of us wired for that one. Being happy. Just a chemical by-product of function, a trick to get you where your genes want you to go.’

His gaze slipped sideways, drawn by the lithe twist she’d used to reverse her position on the rail. He caught her profile, lean, high-breasted body and long thighs, the dark, flaring facets of her face. The wind off the bay fingered through the curls in her hair, flattened it forward around her head.

‘You don’t want to worry too much about Coyle,’ she said, not looking at him.

‘I’m not.’

She smiled. ‘Okay. It’s just. See, we don’t get a whole lot of thirteens out here on the Rim. They crop up occasionally, we just bust ’em and ship ’em out. Dump them in Cimarron or Tanana. Jesusland’s always a good place to export the stuff you don’t want in your own backyard. Nuclear nondegradables, nanotech test-runs, cutting-edge crop research. The Republic takes it all at a fraction what it’d cost us to do the processing ourselves.’

‘I know.’

‘Yeah, you worked a couple of Cimarron breaks, right?’

‘Six.’ He considered. ‘Seven if you count Eric Sundersen last year. He escaped en route, never actually got to Cimarron itself.’

‘Oh yeah, I remember that one. The guy who shorted out the autocopter, right?’

‘Right.’

‘You the one who brought him in?’

‘No,’ he said shortly. Eric Sundersen died in a hail of assault-rifle fire on the streets of Minneapolis. Standard police ordnance and tactics; apparently he’d been mistaken for a local drug dealer. Carl was chasing false leads down in Juarez at the time. He went home with day-rate expenses and minor lacerations from a razor fight triggered by one too many questions in the wrong bar. ‘I missed out on that one.’

‘Yeah?’ Rovayo hitched herself up on the rail. ‘Well, anyway, like I said. Having guys like you around isn’t something any of us are used to. Coyle’s got a pretty standard Rim mentality about what a good thing that is. And with the mess Merrin made on that ship . . . well, Coyle’s a cop, he just doesn’t want to see any more blood in the streets.’

‘You trying to apologise for him? That what this is about?’

She grimaced. ‘I’m just trying to make sure you two don’t kill each other before we get the job done.’

He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘I can guarantee you Coyle won’t kill me.’

‘Yeah.’ She nodded and her mouth tightened. ‘Well just so you know, he’s my partner. It’s not a fight I’ll stay out of it cuts loose.’

He let it sit for a while, waiting to see if she was finished, if she’d leave him alone with the threat. When she didn’t, he sighed again.

‘Okay, Rovayo, you win. Go back and tell your good, honest, compassionate cop partner that if he can keep the word twist hedged a little tighter behind his teeth next time, I’ll cut him some slack.’

‘I know. I’m sorry about that.’

‘Don’t be. You’re not the one who said it.’

She hesitated. ‘I don’t like that word any more than you do. It’s just, like I said, we don’t get-’

‘Yeah, I know. You don’t get many like me in the Rim, so Coyle gets to throw the words around without repercussions. Don’t worry, it’s not much different anywhere else I’ve been.’

‘Apart from Mars?’

He hunched round to look at her properly.

‘Mars, huh? This cousin of yours really planted some seeds, didn’t he? What’s the deal, you thinking about going yourself?’

She didn’t meet his gaze. ‘Nothing like that. Just Enrique, my cousin, he talked a lot about how no one had a problem with the thirteens there. Like they had this kind of minor celebrity status.’

Carls snorted. ‘Pretty fucking minor, I’d say. Sounds to me like your cousin Enrique’s having a bad attack of qualpro nostalgia. That’s pretty common once you get safely back, but you notice most of these guys don’t sign up for another tour. I mean, he didn’t, right?’

She shook her head. ‘I think part of him wanted to, part of him would have stayed out there longer, maybe not come back at all. But he got scared. He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you could pick it up from what he said, you know.’

‘Well, it’s an easy place to get scared,’ Carl admitted grudgingly.

‘Even for a thirteen?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re not that good at fear, it’s true. But this is something deeper, it’s not an actual fear of anything. It’s something that comes up from inside. No warning, no trigger you can work out. Just a feeling.’

‘Feeling of what?’

Carl grimaced, remembering. ‘A feeling that you don’t belong. That you shouldn’t be there. Like being in someone else’s home without them knowing, and you know they might be coming home any minute.’

‘Big bad Martian monsters, huh?’

‘I didn’t say it made any sense.’ He stared out at the bridge. The southern tower was almost lost in the encroaching fog bank now, wrapped and shrouded to the top. Tendrils crept through under the main span. ‘They say it’s the gravity and the perceived horizon that does it. Triggers a survival anxiety. Maybe they’re right.’

‘You think you handled it better?’ She made an embarrassed gesture. ‘Because. You know, because of what you are?’

He frowned. ‘What do you want to hear from me, Rovayo? What’s this really about?’

‘Hey, just making conversation. You want to be alone, say the word. I can take a hint if you hit me upside the head with it.’

Carl felt a faint smile touch the corners of his mouth.

‘You work at it, you can reach a balance,’ he said. ‘The fear tips over into exhilaration. The weakness turns into strength, fuels you up to face whatever it is your survival anxiety thinks it’s warning you about. Starts to feel good instead of bad.’ He looked down at the backs of his hands where they rested on the rail. ‘Kind of addictive after a while.’

‘You think that’s why they’re happy to have you on Mars?’

‘Rovayo, they’re happy to have anyone on Mars. The qualpro guys mostly go home as soon as their stint’s up - to be fair to your cousin, he’s a tough motherfucker if he stayed even for a second tour - and you’ve got a high rate of mental health problems in the permanent settlers, that’s the grunts and the ex-grunts who’ve upskilled, doesn’t seem to make much difference either way. End result - there’s never enough labour to go round, never enough skilled personnel or reliable raw human material to learn the skills. So yeah, they can put up with the fact you’re a born and bred twist sociopath if they think you’ll be able to punch above your weight.’ A thin smile. ‘Which we mostly can.’

The Rim cop nodded, as if convincing herself of something.

‘They say the Chinese are breeding a new variant for Mars. Against the charter. You believe that?’

‘I’d believe pretty much anything of those shitheads in Beijing. You don’t keep a grip on the world’s largest economy the way they have without stamping on a few human rights.’

‘You see any evidence? When you were there, I mean?’

Carl shook his head. ‘You don’t see much of the Chinese at all on Mars. They’re mostly based down in Hellas or around the Utopia spread. Long way from Bradbury or Wells, unless you’ve got some specific reason to go there.’

They both watched the silvered chop of the water for a while.

‘I did think about going,’ Rovayo said finally. ‘I was younger when Enrique came back with all his stories, still in my teens. I was going to get some studies, sign up for a three stint.’

‘So what happened?’

She laughed. ‘Life happened, man. Just one of those dreams the logistics stacked up against, you know.’

‘You probably didn’t miss much.’

‘Hey, you went.’

‘Yeah. I went because the alternative was internment.’ A brief memory of Névant’s jeering slipped across his mind. ‘And I came back as soon as I got the chance. You don’t want to believe all your cousin’s war stories. That stuff always looks better in the rear-view mirror. A lot of the time, Mars is just this cold, hard-scrabble place you won’t ever belong to no matter how hard you scrabble at trying.’

Rovayo shrugged.

‘Yeah, well.’ A hard little smile came and went across her mouth, but her voice was quiet and cop-wisdom calm. ‘You think it’s any different here on Earth, Marsalis? You think down here they’re ever going to let you belong?’

And for that, he had no answer. He just stood and watched the disappearing bridge, until Rovayo propped herself upright off the rail and touched his arm.

‘C’mon,’ she said companionably. ‘Let’s get back to work.’

They were working the Horkan’s Pride case out of a closed suite in the lower levels of the Alcatraz station. Shielding in the superstructure above them ensured a leaktight data environment, the transmission systems in and out ran Marstech-standard encryption and all the equipment in the suite was jacked together with python-thick coils of black, actual cable. It gave the offices a period feel that sat well with the raw, sandblasted stone walls and the subterranean cool that soaked off them. Sevgi sat in a commandeered desk chair and stared at a rough-hewn corner, keeping her eyes off Marsalis and furious with herself for the feeling that snaked across her belly when Rovayo came back with the black man in tow.

‘Coyle and Norton went to talk to Tsai,’ she told them. ‘Going to book some n-djinn time, run a fresh linkage model on Ward and the victims, soon as we can get on the machine.’

Rovayo nodded and went to her desk, where she stood, prodding through a pile of hardcopy with limited enthusiasm. Sevgi turned to Marsalis.

‘There’s a Mars datafile you might want to take a look at here. Seems Norton got onto Colony while we were in Istanbul, had them pull Gutierrez in. You want to screen it?’

She thought she saw a subtle tightening go through him. But he only shrugged. ‘Think it’s worth looking at?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said acidly. ‘I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘The chances Colony got anything useful out of an old familia hand like Gutierrez are pretty thin.’

‘Not really the main point,’ said Rovayo absently from across the room, not looking up from her paperwork. ‘Cop’ll tell you it’s what the guy doesn’t say as often as not gives you the angle.’

‘Uh, exactly,’ said Sevgi, startled.

Marsalis shuttled a sour look between the two women.

‘All right,’ he said ungraciously. ‘So let’s all watch the fucking thing, shall we?’

But in the screening chamber, she saw how the quick-flaring irritation damped down to an intent stare that might have passed for boredom if she hadn’t seen him looking the same way after the third skater in New York, the man he’d failed to kill. She had no way of knowing where exactly Marsalis’s attention fell - the file was a standard split-screen interrogation tape, six or seven facets slotted together on the LCLS display, frontal on Gutierrez, face and body from the tabletop up, vital signs in longitudinal display below, minimised footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in drop down to the left, cop custom had her skimming detail from the whole thing in random snatches. But if she’d had to guess, she’d say the thirteen at her side was riveted on the slightly gaunt, sunblasted features of the familia datahawk as he sat unimpressed and smoking his way through the interrogation.

‘They let him take fucking cigarettes in there?’ asked Rovayo, outraged.

‘It’s not a cigarette as such,’ Sevgi told her patiently. She’d been a little shocked the first time she saw it too. ‘That’s a gill. You know, like in the settler flicks. Chemical ember, gives off oxygen instead of burning it. Like a lung supercharger.’

Rovayo snapped her fingers. ‘O-kay. Like, Kwame Oviedo’s always got one stuck in the corner of his mouth, practically every scene in that Upland Heroes trilogy.’

Sevgi nodded. ‘Yeah, same with Marisa Mansour. Even in Marineris Queen, which when you think about it, is pretty-’

‘Weren’t we supposed to be watching this?’ said Marsalis loudly.

Sevgi cocked an expressive eyebrow at the Rim cop and they turned back towards the screen. Gutierrez was settling comfortably into his role of career criminal cool. Upland dialect Quechua drawled out of him - the language monitor tagged it in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, provided a machine-speed simultaneous subtitle in Amanglic, but for the original interrogators it would have been hard work. They’d have some street Quechua, Sevgi supposed - you’d have to, to be a decent cop out there - but you could see they were uncomfortable with it. Instead, they fell back repeatedly on Amanglic or Spanish - both of which the file said Gutierrez spoke well - and listened constantly to their sleek black earplug whisperers. The datahawk smirked through it.

‘Look, let’s cut the bouncing about, Nicki,’ he said, apparently. ‘There is no motherfucking way you have anything on me. You’ll have to give me my phone call sooner or later. So why not save us all a lot of fucking about and do it now?’

The ranking officer on the other side of the table sat back in her chair and fixed the ex-datahawk with a sombre stare.

‘I think you’ve forgotten which planet you’re on, Franklin. You’ll get to make a phone call when I say you can.’

Her companion got up out of his chair and began to pace a slow circle around the table. Gutierrez tipped his head back a little to watch the move, drew on his gill and puffed a long feather of fumes up into the air, then went back to looking at the woman. He shook his head.

‘They’ll come and dig me out of here before breakfast, Nicki. You know that.’

The other cop hit him, dropped body weight into the swing, one cupped striking hand to the datahawk’s ear and side of the head. The gill went flying. In the slack grip of Mars gravity, so did Gutierrez and the chair. Clatter of plastic on evercrete, soft human yelp. Rovayo flinched - Sevgi caught it peripherally from two seats over. On screen, Gutierrez rolled to a halt and the cop was on him. The datahawk was shaking his head muzzily, trying to pick himself up - his assailant locked a thick-muscled arm around his throat, hauled him upright by it. The ranking officer watched impassively.

‘Wrong guess, fuckwit,’ hissed the strongarm cop, into the ear he hadn’t deafened. ‘See, we got a lot of leeway on this one. You really fucked up with Horkan’s Pride, and I mean big time. There’s a lot more juice coming down from COLIN right now than your buddies over in Wells know how to soak up. I’d say we’ve got you down here for a fortnight at least.’

The datahawk choked out a reply. ‘Reyes,’ said the subtitles. ‘You’re confusing your wet dreams with reality again.’

The cop bared his teeth in a grin. He reached down and grabbed Gutierrez by the crotch. Twisted. A suffocated screech made it up the datahawk’s throat.

‘Can he-’ Rovayo began numbly.

Marsalis rolled his head slightly in her direction. Met her eye. ‘Colony police. Oh, yeah. He can.’

The ranking officer made a tiny motion with her head. Her companion let go of Gutierrez’s testicles and dumped the datahawk forward onto the table top like a load of laundry. He lay there, face to one side, breath whistling hoarsely in and out of his teeth. The cop called Reyes pressed a flat palm down hard against their suspect’s cheek, leaned on it, and then closer, over him.

‘You’d better fucking learn to behave, Franklin,’ he said conversationally. ‘What they tell me, we can blow this whole year’s compensation budget on you if we have to.’ He looked at the woman. ‘What’s the rate for testicular damage these days, Nick?’

The ranking officer shrugged. ‘Thirty-seven grand.’

Reyes grinned again. ‘Right. Now that’s for each one, right?’

‘No, that’s for both.’ The woman leaned forward a little. ‘I hear the restorative surgery’s a bitch, Franklin. Not something you’d want to go through at all.’

‘Yeah, so how about you speak English to us for a change.’ Reyes marked the emphasis, skidding his palm hard off the datahawk’s face, as if wiping it clean. His face wrinkled up with disgust. ‘Because we all know you can, sort of. Just wrap the fucking upland chatter for a while. Do us that small favour, huh? Maybe then I leave your cojones intact.’

He stepped back. A thin sound trickled out of Gutierrez. Sevgi, disbelieving, made it as laughter. The datahawk was chuckling.

Reyes hooked back round to stare. ‘Something amusing you, pendejo?’

Gutierrez got up off the table. He straightened his clothes. Nodded, as if he’d just had something entirely reasonable explained to him. His ear, Sevgi knew, must still have been singing like a fire alarm.

‘Only the dialogue.’ His English was lightly accented, otherwise flawless. ‘You say you got me down here indef. Okay, I’ll bite. Nicki, you want to put a leash on your dog?’

Reyes tensed, but the woman made another barely perceptible motion with her head, and he slackened off again. Gutierrez lowered himself gingerly back into his chair, wincing. He padded his pockets for the pack of gills, found them and fitted a new one into his mouth. He twisted the end ’til it tore open, puffed it to life. Breathed the fumes out of his mouth and up his nose. Sevgi made it for buying time. The datahawk shrugged.

‘So what do you want to know?’

‘Horkan’s Pride,’ said Reyes evenly.

‘Yeah, you mentioned it. Big spaceship, went home last year. Crashed into the sea, they say.’ He plumed pale smoke ‘So what?’

‘So why’d you do it?’

‘Why’d I do what?’

The two Colony cops swapped a glance of theatrical exasperation. Reyes took a couple of steps forward, hands lifting.

‘Hold it,’ said the woman. It rang staged, patently false after the imperceptible signals the two cops had exchanged before.

‘Yeah, hold it,’ agreed Gutierrez. ‘You’re going to tie me to some systems crash on another fucking planet ? I mean, back in the day I was good. But not that good.’

‘That’s not what we hear,’ growled Reyes.

‘So what do you hear, exactly?’

‘Why don’t you tell us, pendejo?’

Gutierrez cocked his head on one side. ‘Why don’t I tell you what you’ve just heard? What am I, telepathic now?’

‘Listen, fuckwit . . .’

Marsalis groaned, a little theatrical exasperation of his own. It was hard for Sevgi not to sympathise. Colony were fucking it up beyond belief.

They sat it out, nonetheless. The interrogation cycled a couple more times, reasonable to third degree and back again, but spiralling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’ brutality when it came round. He didn’t give a millimetre. They took him out limping, broken-mouthed and bruised around one eye, nursing a sprained wrist. He gave one of the cameras a bloodied smile as he was led away. The vital signs monitors collapsed as he left the room, the ranking officer signed off formally. Fade to black.

Marsalis sighed. ‘Happy now?’

‘I will be when you tell me what you think.’

‘What do I think? I think short of professional torture with electrodes and psychotropics, Gutierrez isn’t going to tell Colony anything worth knowing. How long ago did this happen?’

‘Couple of days. Norton put in the arrest order the night we flew out to Istanbul.’

‘They worked on him since?’

‘I don’t think so. This is all we have. I don’t think they’ll go to the next level with him until they’ve got something solid from us.’

‘Yeah, and they’ll probably still be wasting their time. Earth or Mars, the familias have too much invested in guys like this. They get in early on with the good ones, give them the same synaptic conditioning you see in covert ops biotech. Stuff where the brain’ll turn to warm porridge sooner than give up proscribed information.’

‘You think he’d really be wearing something like that?’ Rovayo asked, slightly wide-eyed.

‘If I were running him, I’d have had it built in years ago.’ Marsalis yawned and stretched in his seat. ‘Plus, you want to remember Gutierrez is a datahawk. Those guys live for the virtual, they spend their whole lives switching off exactly the kind of physical realities torture involves. If they’re good at one thing, it’s distancing themselves from their own bodies. Back in the early days, back when the technology was fresh and the hook-ups were a lot more jack-and-pray than they are now, lot of ’hawks died from stupid shit like dehydration or burning to death because they missed a fire alarm. I remember Gutierrez telling me once hey, pain, that’s just your body letting you know what the thing you’re doing is going to cost - just got to get in there and pay the bill, soak. At that level, he’s as tough a motherfucker as you’ll ever see walk into an interrogation chamber. And with the familias behind him, he’s not much scared of physical damage either, because he knows it can be repaired.’

‘Scared of dying though, I guess,’ Sevgi said snappishly.

‘Yeah, and that’s part of your problem. See, Colony are a real bunch of thugs, but they can’t actually kill you, except maybe by accident. But the people Gutierrez works for, the familias - now that’s a whole other skyline. If they think he’s talked, or even that he might talk, then they got no problem putting him away. None at all, and he knows that. So yeah, Gutierrez is scared of dying, just like anybody else. But you’ve got to be able to deliver the threat.’

They sat for a couple of moments, facing the dead LCLS screen. Sevgi looked across at Rovayo.

‘You mind giving us a couple of minutes?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, as soon as they were alone.

‘I’m not saying-’

‘I know exactly what you’re saying, and you can just fucking forget it. They’re on Mars, Ertekin. You saw the footage. You think I can scare Gutierrez any worse than that from two hundred and fifty million kilometres out?’

‘Yes,’ she said steadily. ‘I think you can.’

He shook his head. Voice creased with irritation. ‘Oh, based on what?’

‘Based on the fact you and Gutierrez have history. I’m a cop, Marsalis. Eleven years in, so give me some fucking credit, why don’t you. I saw the way you were when his name popped out of the n-djinn scan. I saw the way you watched him up on that screen just now.’ She drew a deep breath, let it go. ‘Gutierrez wired you to wake up midway home on Felipe Souza, didn’t he?’

‘Did he?’ Now there was nothing in his voice at all.

‘Yeah, he did.’ Gathering certainty, the way he sat like stone. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, you and Merrin. The way I figure it, you did some kind of deal with Gutierrez for the lottery win, but Gutierrez didn’t like his end when it paid off. He sent you home with a little farewell kick. Fuck with your head, wake you up out there and hope you maybe go insane before recovery can get to you. That how it was?’

He rolled his head towards her on the back of the seat, looked at her and suddenly, for the first time in days, she was afraid of him again.

‘Well you’re the cop,’ he said tonelessly. ‘You got it all worked out, what do you need me for?’

She threw herself to her feet, paced towards the screen and turned to look back at him. Told herself it was not a retreat.

‘What I need you for is to look at Gutierrez like you just looked at me. Look him in the eye and tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t tell us what we need to know.’

‘That standard operating procedure for the NYPD these days, is it?’

She was back in the field, upstate New York at dawn and the gagging stench of disinterred flesh. The speculative stare of the IA detectives.

‘Fuck you.’

‘See. I can’t even scare you. And you’re right here in the room with me. How am I going to scare Gutierrez on Mars?’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’

He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Talking about the mythos, right? You think that because Gutierrez was a thirteen aficionado he bought into this whole implacable gene-warrior bullshit that goes with it. But it’s Mars, Sevgi. It’s hundreds of millions of kilometres of empty fucking space and no way to cross it without a licence. Don’t you understand what that does to all those fucking human imperatives Jacobsen goes on about? What it does to love and loyalty, and trust, and revenge? Mars isn’t just another world, it’s another fucking life. What happens there, stays there. You come back, you leave it behind. It’s like a dream you wake up from. Gutierrez helped send me home. He isn’t going to believe in a million years that I’d go back there just to kill him for what he did, let alone just to shake him down for you people.’

‘He might believe you’d order it done. Pay for someone else to do it at the other end.’

‘Someone who isn’t scared of the familias?’

She hesitated a beat. ‘There are options that-’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t doubt COLIN could rustle up a hit squad for me if your pal Norton makes the right calls. But I do my own killing, and Gutierrez knows that. I can’t fake him out on that one. And Sevgi, you know what? Even if I thought I could do it, I won’t.’

The last word grated in his mouth, like braking on gravel. Sevgi felt her expression congeal. ‘Why not?’

‘Because this is bullshit. We are being led around by the dick here, and it’s got nothing to do with what may or may not have happened back on Mars. We are looking in the wrong places.’

‘I am not going back to Arequipa.’

‘Well then, let’s start closer to home. Like maybe looking a little harder at your pal Norton.’

Quiet dripped into the room. Sevgi folded her arms and leaned against the back of a chair.

‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Work it out for yourself. Who else knew where I was sleeping in New York the morning the skaters jumped us? Who called you the same time we were getting hijacked on the way to Arequipa? Who dragged us all the way back here to look at a fucking four-month-drowned lead when we were just about to start getting somewhere?’

‘Oh.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘Fuck off Marsalis. Coyle was right, this is pure thirteen paranoia.’

‘Is it?’ Marsalis came to his feet with a jolt. He stalked towards her. ‘Think about it, Ertekin. Your n-djinn searches have failed. They didn’t find the link between Ward and Merrin, they didn’t find Gutierrez. Everything we’ve found since I started shaking the tree points to a cover-up, and Norton is ideally placed to pull it off. He’s fucking perfect for it.’

‘You shut the fuck up, Marsalis.’ Sudden rage. ‘You know nothing about Tom Norton. Nothing!’

‘I know men like him.’ He was in her face, body so close she seemed to feel the warmth coming off it. ‘They were all over the Osprey project from as young as I can remember. They dress well and they talk soft and they smile like they’re doing it for the society pages. And when the time comes, they’ll order the torture and slaughter of women and children without blinking because at core they do not give a shit about anything but their own agenda. And you, you people hand control over to them every fucking time, because in the end you’re just a bunch of fucking sheep looking for an owner.’

‘Yeah, well.’ The anger shifted, sluggish in her guts. Intuitive reflex, maybe the years with Ethan, told her how to use it, kept her voice nailed-down, detached. ‘If they ran Osprey, then I’d say you people handed over control to them pretty smartly too.’

It was like pulling a plug.

You can feel a good shot, an NYPD firearms instructor told her once, early on in training. Like you and the target and the gun and the slug are all part of this one mechanism. Shoot like that, you’ll know you’ve hit the guy before you even see him go down.

Like that. The anger drained almost visibly out of Marsalis. Though he didn’t move at all, somehow he seemed to step away.

‘I was eleven,’ he said quietly.

And then he did walk away, without looking back, and closed the door and left her alone with the dead LCLS screen.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

‘She’s not your mother,’ the pale-eyed uncle in the suit tells him.

‘Yes,’ he says, pointing through the chainlink at Marisol. ‘That one.’

‘No.’ The uncle places himself in Carl’s line of sight, leans back against the fence so that it sags, makes a springy, shivery sound as it takes his weight. There’s a careless, hard-buffet wind coming in off the sea, and the uncle pitches his voice to beat it. ‘None of them are mothers, Carl. They just work here, looking after you. They’re just aunts.’

Carl looks up at him angrily. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I know you don’t,’ the uncle says, and there seems to be something in his face, as if he’s not feeling very well. ‘But you will. This is a big day for you, Carl. Climbing that mountain was just the start of it.’

‘Have we got to go up there again?’ He tries to ask the question casually, but there’s a tremor in his voice. The mountain was scary in a way none of the uncles’ games so far have been. It wasn’t just that there were parts where you could easily fall and kill yourself, and that this time they had no ropes; it was the feeling he had that the uncles were watching him closely when it came to those parts, and that they weren’t watching to see if he was okay, that they didn’t really care if he was okay, they only wanted to know if he was scared or not. And that was even more scary because he didn’t know whether he should be scared or not, didn’t know if they’d want him to be scared or not (though he didn’t think that was likely). And besides, now it’s getting late and while Carl’s pretty confident he can do the climb again, he doesn’t think he could do it in the dark.

The uncle forces a smile. ‘No. Not today. But there are some other things we have to do. So you’ve got to come back inside with the others now.’

On the other side of the chainlink and the multiple razorwire coils beyond, Marisol has moved across the helicopter landing apron so he can see her past the uncle’s obstructing bulk. She’s staring at him, but she doesn’t raise her hand or call out. She stood and kissed him that morning, he recalls, before the uncles came to collect him, held his head between her hands and looked into his face intently, the way she sometimes did when he’d got cuts and scrapes from fighting. Then, hurriedly, she let him go and turned away. She made a soft sound in her throat, reached up and fiddled with the way she’d fixed her hair, as if was coming loose, and then of course it was coming loose because she’d fiddled with it and now she really did have to fix it again the way she always ...

He recognised the signals. But he just couldn’t see how he’d made her cry this time. He hadn’t been in a fight with any of the other kids for at least a week. He hadn’t mouthed off to an uncle for even longer. His room was tidy, his schoolwork was gold-starred in everything except maths and blade weapons, and both Uncle David and Mr Sessions said he was improving even in those. He’d helped in the kitchen most evenings that week, and when he burnt himself on the edge of a pan the day before, he’d shrugged it off with one of the control techniques they were working through in Aunt Chitra’s pain management class, and he could see in Marisol’s eyes how proud she was of that.

So why?

He racked his brains on the way out to the mountain, but couldn’t find an answer. Marisol didn’t cry often, and she didn’t cry without reason at all, except that once, he would have been about five or six, when he came home from school with a raft of questions about money, how did some people end up with more than others, did uncles get more than aunts, did you have to have it, and would you ever do something you really, really didn’t like to get some. That time she cried out of nowhere, suddenly, still talking to him at first as the tears rushed up out of her, before she could turn away and hide them.

He knows, knew then as well, that the other mothers cried like this sometimes, for reasons no one could work out, and of course Rod Gordon’s mother had to go away in the end because she kept doing it. But he’d always been vaguely sure that Marisol wasn’t like that, that she was different, the same way he was absently proud of how dark her skin was, how her teeth glowed white in her face when she smiled, the way she sang in Spanish about the house. Marisol is something special, he knows. Discovers it, in fact, for the first time now, wisps of knowledge, taken for granted, taken on trust, coalescing suddenly into a solid chunk of understanding that sits in his chest like damage. She jumps into sudden focus in his mind. He sees her across the chainlink and razor wire, as if for the first time.

She raises her hand, slowly, as if she’s in a class and not sure whether she really knows the answer or not. Waves to him.

‘I want to talk to her,’ he says to the uncle.

‘I’m afraid you can’t, Carl.’

‘I want to.’

The uncle straightens up off the fence, frowning. The chainlink rebounds with another metallic shiver. ‘You already know not to talk like that. Your wishes are very small things in this world, Carl. You are valuable because of what you can do, not because of what you want.’

‘Where are you taking her ?’

‘She’s going away.’ The uncle stands over him. ‘They all are. She’s done her job now, so she’s going home.’

It’s what he already knew, somehow, but still the words are like the slap of the wind in his face, buffeting, robbing him of breath. He feels the strength in his legs drain out, his stance shift fractionally on the worn concrete beneath his feet. He wants to fall down, or at least sit down somewhere, but knows better than to show it. He stares out across the huddled structures of the Osprey Eighteen settlement, the cottages in tidy rows, the school house and refectory, lights just starting to come on here and there as the afternoon tips towards evening. The bleak undulations of coastal moorland under a darkening pewter sky, the distant rise of mountains worn smooth and low with age. The cold Atlantic behind it all to the north.

‘This is her home,’ he tries to convince himself.

‘Not any more.’

Carl looks suddenly up into the man’s face. At eleven, he’s already tall for his age, the uncle barely tops him by a half a head.

‘If you take her, I’m going to kill you,’ he says, this time with conviction as deep as all his sudden knowledge about Marisol.

The uncle punches him flat.

It’s a short, swift blow, into the face - later he’ll find it’s split the skin across his cheekbone - and the surprise alone puts him on the ground. But when he bounces to his feet, the way he’s been taught, comes back with his rage fully unleashed, the uncle blocks him and hits him again, right fist deep in under the base of his ribs so he can’t breathe. He staggers back and the uncle follows, chops left-handed into the side of his neck with a callused palm edge and puts him down a second time.

He hits the ground, whooping for air he can’t find. He’s fallen facing away from the helicopter apron and Marisol. His body hinges convulsively on the asphalt, trying to turn over, trying to breathe. But the uncle knows his pressure points and has found them with effortless accuracy. Carl can barely twitch, let alone move. Behind him, he thinks Marisol must be rushing towards him, but there’s the razorwire, the chainlink, the other aunts and uncles . . .

The uncle crouches down in his field of vision and scrutinises the damage he’s done. He seems satisfied.

‘You don’t talk to any of us like that, ever again,’ he says calmly. ‘First of all because everything you have ever had, including the woman you think is your mother, was provided by us. You just remember that, Carl, and you show a little gratitude, a little respect. Everything you are, everything you’ve become and everything you will become, you owe to us. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if you ever do speak to one of us like that again, I personally will see to it that you get a punishment beating that’ll make what we had to do to Rod Gordon look like a game of knuckles. Do you understand that?’

Carl just glares back at him through brimming eyes. The uncle sees it, sighs and gets back to his feet.

‘In time,’ he says from what seems like a great height, ‘you will understand. ’

And in the distance, the waxing, hurrying chunter of the helicopter transport, coming in across the autumn sky like a harvester scything down summer’s crop.

He drifted awake in a bed he didn’t know, among sheets that emanated the scent of a woman. A faint grin touched his mouth, something to offset the bitter aftertaste of the Osprey memories.

‘Bad dream?’ Rovayo asked him, from across the room.

She sat a couple of metres off in a deep sofa under the window, curled up and naked apart from a pair of white briefs, reading from a projected display headset. Streetlight from outside lifting a soft sheen from the ebony curves of her body, the line of one raised thigh, the dome of a knee. Recollection slammed into him like a truck - the same body twined around him as he knelt upright on the bed and held her buttocks in his hands like fruit and she lifted herself up and down on his erection and made, again and again, a long, deep noise in her throat, like someone tasting food cooked to perfection.

He sat up. Blinked and stared at the darkness outside the window. Sense of dislocation - it felt wrong.

‘How long was I out?’

‘Not long. An hour, maybe.’ She tipped off the headset, laid it aside on the back of the sofa, still powered up. Tiny panels of blue light glowed in the eye frames, like the sober gaze of a robot chaperone. She shook back her hair and grinned at him. ‘I figured you earned the downtime.’

‘Fucking jet-lag.’ He remembered vaguely, the last thing, long after her hands and mouth could no longer get him to rise to the occasion, lying with his head pillowed on her thigh, breathing in the odour of her cunt as if it were the sea. ‘My time sense is shot to pieces. So, looked like I was having a bad dream, huh?’

‘Looked like you were wrestling Haystack Harrison for the California title, if you really want to know. You were thrashing about all over the place.’ She yawned, stretched and stood up. ‘Would have woken you up myself, but they say it’s better to let something like that play out, let the trigger images discharge fully or something. You don’t remember what you were dreaming?’

He shook his head and lied. ‘Not this time.’

‘Well then maybe you were dreaming about me.’ She put her hands on her hips. Another grin. ‘Going a fifth round, you know.’

He matched the grin. ‘Don’t know, I think I’m pretty fully beaten into submission right now.’

‘Yeah, I guess you are,’ she said reflectively. ‘You certainly seemed like a guy knew what he wanted.’

He couldn’t argue with that - self-ejected from the screening room, tight with anger at Ertekin, he’d stood in the centre of the operations space and when he spotted Rovayo propped on the edge of her desk and watching him, he drifted towards her like a needle tugging north.

‘Problems?’ she asked neutrally.

‘You could say that.’

She nodded. Leaned back across her desk space to the data-system and punched in a quit code. Looked back at him, dark eyes querying.

‘Want to get a drink?’

‘That’s exactly what I want,’ he said grimly.

They left, rode an elevator stack up through the levels of the Alcatraz station until they could see sky and water through the windows. It felt like pressure easing. On the upper balconies, Rovayo led him to a franchise outfit called Lima Alpha that had chairs and tables with views across the bay. She got heavily loaded Pisco sours for them both, handed him his and sank into the chair opposite with a fixed, speculative gaze. He sipped the cocktail, had to admit it was pretty good. His anger started to ebb. They talked about nothing much, drank, soaked in the late afternoon sunlight. Slipped at some point from Amanglic into Spanish. Their postures eased, sank lower in their chairs. Neither of them made an obvious move.

Finally, Rovayo’s phone wittered for attention. She grimaced, hauled it out and held it to her ear, audio only.

‘Yeah, what?’ She listened, grimaced again. ‘On my way home, why?’

A male voice rinsed tinnily out of the phone, distant and indistinct.

‘Roy, I haven’t been home in thirty, no wait,’ she checked her watch, ‘thirty-five hours. I haven’t slept in twelve, and that was ninety minutes on the couch in operations . . .’

Crackled dispute. Rovayo glowered.

‘ ... No, it fucking wasn’t . . .’

Coyle crackled some more. She cut him off.

‘Look, don’t try to tell me how much sleep I’ve had, Roy. You don’t . . .’

Spit, spit, crack.

‘Yeah, you’re right, we are all tired, and when you’re this fucking tired, Roy, you know what you do? You get some sleep. I’m not going to pull another macho all-nighter just so you can play at old-school cop with Tsai. Outside of all those pre-mil period flicks you love so much, nobody cracks a case like that. You guys want to act like the New Math never fucking happened, be my guest. I’m going home.’

A more muted crackling. Rovayo glanced across at Carl and raised an eyebrow.

‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Haven’t seen him. Doesn’t he have a phone? No? Well, try his hotel, maybe. See you in the morning.’

She killed the call.

‘People are looking for you,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. You want to be found?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘What I thought.’ She drained what was left in her glass, and gave him the speculative look again. ‘Well, I’d say your hotel is a bust right now. Want another drink at my place?’

He gave her back the look. ‘Is that a trick question?’

Alcatraz station ran smart chopper shuttles for its staff, twenty-four-seven to both sides of the bay. The Oakland service dropped off at a couple of points within easy walk of Rovayo’s apartment. They walked, easily, Pisco sours and the shared sense of truancy, laughing in the early evening air. She asked him how come he spoke Spanish, he told her a little about Marisol, a little more about Mars and the Upland projects. As before, she seemed hungry for the detail. They touched, far more than her Hispanic background could write off as a cultural norm. Signals coming through clear and tight. They got up the stairs and in the door of her second-floor apartment a couple of grins short of the clinch.

The door swung shut behind them with a solid snap and the burble of electronic security engaging.

Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.

‘So what do you want to do now?’

Still standing in front of him, hip shot, wide grin. Despite everything, he felt his sore and shrunken prick twitch at the sight.

‘I thought you were tired.’

She shrugged. ‘So did I. Cyclical, I guess. Give me another couple of hours, I probably will be again.’

‘You’re not Xtrasomeing on me, are you?’

‘No, I’m not fucking Xtrasomeing on you.’ Suddenly there was a real edge in her voice. ‘Do I look like I come from that kind of money? You think if my parents had the finance for built-in, I’d be working for RimSec?’

He blinked. Held up his hands, palms out. ‘Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Rim States have got a reputation for that stuff, you know.’

She wasn’t listening. She gestured at herself with one splayed hand, motion robbed of any sensuality by the look on her face. ‘What I’ve got, I was either born with or I fucking worked to build. I came up through the ranks, it’s taken me eight years to make detective, and I didn’t take any fucking genetic shortcuts along the way. I didn’t have-’

‘I said okay, detective.’

It stopped her. She sank back onto the sofa, sat hunched at the edge with her arms resting on her thighs, hands dangling into the space between. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was something hunted in her expression.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘We’re all just a little fucking tired of the Asia Badawis and the Meredith Changs around here.’

‘Badawi’s New York Sudanese,’ he pointed out.

‘Yeah? You want to see the house she’s got down the coast. Lot of fucking acreage for a foreigner. Anyway, that’s not what I meant.’

‘No?’ Suddenly, the post-coital intimacy was too tight, like binding on his limbs and a masking film across his face. Rovayo was abruptly the stranger she’d always been, but naked and in too close. He felt an unlooked-for visceral surge of nostalgia for sex with Sevgi Ertekin. ‘So you’re not a big fan of Enhancement generally, then?’

She snorted. ‘You think anyone’s a big fan of Xtrasomes that doesn’t have them?’

‘I am.’ But he knew at base he was trying to provoke her. ‘You think I’d be in this fucking mess if they’d had working artificial chromosome technology for humans forty years back? You think we’d be running around looking for some superannuated supersoldier turned cannibal fucking survivalist, if thirteen tendency could be platform-loaded and switched on and off at need? Take a good look at me, Rovayo. I’m the walking fucking embodiment of last century’s pre-Xtrasome jump-the-gun genetics.’

‘I know.’

‘I seriously doubt that.’ Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. ‘You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.’

The Rim cop shrugged. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong colour for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were? A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?’

‘I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.’

She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.

‘You did four months in there? I thought-’

‘Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on/off switch to fall back on.’

‘You don’t think?’ Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face, the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. ‘What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean, really know?’

He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.

‘Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think that means anything.’

He gestured. ‘Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.’

It got him a thin, unamused smile. ‘Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.’ She sat back in the sofa. ‘I’m a bonobo.’

He stared. ‘No, you’re fucking not.’

‘No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?’

‘No, but-’

‘I’m not full. My mother’s the hundred per cent deal, she used to work escort for a Panama agency, met my father when he was on a fishing trip down there. He smuggled her out.’

‘Then you’re not a bonobo.’

‘Half of me is.’ Said defiantly, jaw tight, eyes locked with his. ‘Read your Jacobsen. Inherited traits will be an unknown factor for generations to come. Quote, unquote.’

Something happened to the room. A dense, deafening quiet sat behind her voice, washed in like a tide when she stopped talking.

‘Does Coyle know?’ he asked, for something to break the stillness.

‘What do you think?’

And quiet again.

Finally, her mouth crimped at one corner. ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘I look at what I am, the way I react to things, and then I look at her, and I just don’t know. My old man tells me she never fitted in down there, never was submissive the way bonobos are supposed to be. He says that she was different than all the others, that’s why he picked her out. I don’t know whether to believe that shit, or write it off to rose-tinted romantic fucking nostalgia.’

Carl thought back to the bonobos he’d seen in the transit camps in Kuwait and Iraq, the ones you couldn’t get away from on R&R in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some that he’d talked to, one or two he’d fucked. And back in London, Zooly’s friend from the club, Krystalayna, who always claimed she was but never showed him any proof that wasn’t fan-site fantasy bullshit.

‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘you don’t want to confuse submissive with maternal or non-violent. Most of the bonobos I ever ran into knew how to get what they wanted about as well as anyone else.’

‘Yeah.’ Violence rose simmering in her voice. ‘I know how to give a pretty good blowjob myself. Don’t you think?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.’ A sour smile in Carl’s direction. ‘Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck with, even the way you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that, all the time?’

He nodded. ‘Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.’

‘I’m a good cop,’ she said urgently. ‘You don’t last in RimSec if you’re not. I’ve shot and killed three men in the line of duty, I don’t lose sleep over any of them. I mean, I got sick at the time, went through the counselling like everyone else, but after that I was fine. I’ve got commendations, early promotion to Special Cases, clearance rates that-’

‘Rovayo, stop it.’ He held up a hand, surprised at how weary the sudden mirroring of his younger self in her was making him feel. ‘I told you, I know. But you’re going about this the wrong way. You don’t have to justify yourself to anyone except you. In the end, that’s all that matters.’

She smiled the hard, humourless smile again. ‘Spoken like a true variant thirteen. Pretty obvious you’ve never had to face a genetic suitability assessor.’

‘I thought in the Rim-’

‘Yeah, Rim State citizens have a lot of rights that way. But citizen or not, I’ve still got my Jacobsen licence to live with. And before you say it, yes that is confidential data, charter-protected up the ass. But you waive your right to that protection when you sign up for RimSec.’

‘And Coyle still doesn’t know about you?’

‘No. Assessment comes as part of the standard officer vetting procedure. There’s no way for anyone to know I went through anything different than all the other grunts. Tsai knows, he’s my commanding officer, he’ll have the file. And there are a few others at divisional level, the ones who were on the vetting committee. But it’s more than any of their jobs are worth to let something like that leak.’

‘You think if Coyle knew, he’d care?’

‘I don’t know. You tell all your friends what you are?’

‘I’m a thirteen,’ he said with a straight face. ‘We don’t have any friends.’

She made the effort, laughed. There was some genuine amusement in it this time. ‘That why you’re here?’

‘I’d have thought my reasons for being here were transparently obvious.’

‘Well.’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘I guess you did explain yourself pretty thoroughly earlier, yeah.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Question remains, though.’ Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. ‘What do you want to do now?’

He smiled.

‘Got an idea,’ he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Seen from the descending autocopter, Bulgakov’s Cat had the blunt, blocky look of a night-time skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthways on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a football pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at it made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.

In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned up jacket collar. ‘I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.’

‘You asked what I wanted to do.’

‘Yeah.’ She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. ‘Not quite what I had in mind at the time.’

The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms ploughing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.

‘Think of it as an intuitive leap,’ he said absently.

‘I’m thinking of it as a paranoid fantasy outing. Which is exactly the way it’s going to look when I have to write up the chopper time. I told you, Donaldson and Kodo came down here yesterday and talked to these people. Got the interviews and the report on file. We’re wasting our time. Long flight for nothing.’

‘Yeah, that’s something else you might want to think about. Cat there is still a couple of hundred klicks off optimum range for maintenance on Ward’s spread. How come they rushed up here to do it now instead of waiting until next week?’

‘How the fuck would I know?’ she grumbled. ‘Maybe if you’d accessed the file instead of insisting on coming down here personally, you’d already have an answer.’

‘Yeah, I’d have an answer. I’d have whatever lie Daskeen Azul have decided to tell you to cover themselves. That’s not what I want.’

Rovayo rolled her eyes. ‘Like I said. Fucking paranoid.’

The autocopter found its designated landing pad, exchanged brief electronic chatter with the traffic management systems, and floated down to land with characteristic, inhuman perfection. The cabin hatch hinged open and Carl jumped down. Rovayo followed him, still mutinous.

‘Just don’t break anything,’ she said.

Daskeen Azul had an unremarkable mall frontage somewhere amidships for direct client contact and a couple of elevator-served work-shops down in the hull where they kept the submarine hardware. They sub-contracted landing-pad time and aircraft support through a secondary provider, but had their own surface and sub vessels moored in dry-dock, aft and starboard. This much Rovayo could tell him off the top of her head, detail skimmed from what she remembered of Donaldson and Kodo’s briefing. There was more in the file, and in theory they could have requested it via the autocopter’s datahead, but the Rim cop seemed disinclined to use the machine systems more than they already were - was already, it seemed, regretting the way they’d requisitioned the transport with her Special Cases badge - and Carl didn’t much care one way or the other. He had more than enough to work with.

So they flagged their business aboard Bulgakov’s Cat as simple follow-up investigation, which the autocopter told the factory raft’s datahead, and the Rim security protocols did the rest. Technically, vessels like the Cat were autonomous nation states, but any nation state that lived so solidly from niche entry into the Rim States’ hyperdynamic economy had to live with the political realities the relationship entailed. Bulgakov’s Cat cruised freely in and out of the Rim’s coastal jurisdiction, its citizens had right of access to Rim State soil, its contracts were legally enforceable in Rim courts - but it all came at a stiff colonial price. Rovayo led Carl along the promenades and corridors of the factory raft with a proprietorial lack of self-consciousness and an authorised, loaded gun beneath her jacket. They might have been taking a stroll inside Alcatraz station for all the tension she showed. They’d spoken to no one when they came aboard, notified no one, taken no courtesy measures whatsoever at a human level. Somewhere in the walls, the machines whispered to each other about them in incomprehensible electronic tones, but beyond that, they came on Daskeen Azul unannounced.

‘And at this time of night,’ the Daskeen Azul front desk agent complained, with barely disguised irritation. ‘I mean, our usual hours of business-’

‘Are not my problem,’ Rovayo told him crisply. ‘We’re here for follow-up on a RimSec murder investigation, and the last I heard Bulgakov’s Cat was a twenty-four-hour service community. You’ve seen my ID, so how about you roll out some of that twenty-four-hour service and answer my questions.’

The agent switched his eyes to Carl. ‘And he is?’

‘Getting impatient,’ Carl said impassively.

‘I’ve seen no ID,’ the agent insisted. Below the smooth upper shelf of the reception desk, his hands were busy pressing buttons. ‘I have to see ID for both of you.’

Rovayo leaned on the shelf.

‘Did your mother get you this job?’ she asked curiously.

The agent gaped at her, belated anger dropping his jaw for a retort he wasn’t fast enough to make.

‘Because it appears to be a job you don’t feel any pressing need to do properly. This man is a private consultant for Rim Security and his liaison is with me, not you. I’ve shown you my fucking ID, sonny, and in about another ten seconds I’m going to be showing you the front end of a RimSec probable cause shutdown order. Now either you’re going to answer my questions, or you’re going to get someone better paid out of bed to do it for you. I don’t much care either way, so which is it going to be?’

The man behind the desk flinched as if slapped.

‘I’ll just see,’ he muttered, prodding more buttons on the screens beneath his hands. ‘Just, please, just, uhm, have a seat.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rovayo with heavy irony.

They folded themselves into the utilitarian bank of chairs opposite the desk. The reception agent fitted a phone hook to his ear, muttered into it. Outside, on the broad sweep of the mall, a thin but unending night-time herd of shoppers browsed past the open frontages, clothing bright, gait unhurried and undirected, like sleep walkers or the victims of some multiple hypnotic trick. Carl sat and tried, the way Sutherland had taught him, not to feel the usual seeping contempt. It wasn’t easy.

On Mars . . .

Yeah, like fuck.

On Mars, things are different because they have to be, soak. Lopsided grin, like he was giving away some secret he shouldn’t. But that’s strictly temporary. No more long-term truth in it than all that bullshit they sell in the qualpro ads. Day’s going to come, this place’ll be just like Home only less gravity. It’s them, Carl. It’s the humans. Take ’em wherever and give ’em time, they’ll build you the same fairy fucking playground as ever was. And that’s the construct you got to live inside, soak, like it or like it not.

A slim, elegantly dressed woman emerged from an inner door behind the front desk. Tailored jacket and slacks in olive green and black, just a chic hint of work coveralls about the ensemble. Striking looks, strong on Chinese genes but salted with something else. She leaned down beside the reception agent, spoke briefly in low tones, then looked up again. Carl met her eyes from across the room and saw a depth of calm there that told him they’d just gone up an entire level. He saw something that might have been an acknowledgement in the return gaze, then the woman straightened up and came round the side of the desk towards them. She walked like a dancer, like a combat pro.

Carl came to his feet, on automatic, the way he would have done if someone in the room had pulled a gun.

The new arrival saw it and smiled a little. It hit him secondarily, riding in past the wave of caution, that she was very beautiful in that Rim-blended, Asia Pacific fashion you saw in Freeport movie stars and major female political figures up and down the West Coast. She put out her hand, offered to Carl first. The grip and the look that backed it up were both coolly evaluative. Shaking hands with Rovayo was strictly a side issue, a formality dealt with and then set aside.

‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘I’m Carmen Ren, assistant duty manager. I must apologise for the way you’ve been received. We’re all still a little shaken from our discovery up at Ward Biosupply. But of course, we want to co-operate fully with the investigation. Please come with me.’

She led them back through the door she’d used, through cramped storage space racked with shelves of underwater equipment and other less identifiable hardware. On the far side of one sparsely loaded freestanding unit, Carl glimpsed two commercial-sized elevator hatches set into a side wall. A faint sea salt dampness hung about in the air. At the back, the storeroom had another door that opened into an office cubicle where Carmen Ren gestured them to the two visible chairs and pulled down a third, folding seat from the wall. They sat with knees almost touching and the Chinese woman looked back and forth between them.

‘So then,’ she said brightly. ‘I’d been given to understand that your colleagues had all the information they needed, but clearly that’s not the case. So what is it I can do for you?’

Rovayo looked over at Carl and nodded with ironic largesse. She was still visibly fuming from their reception at the front desk and the subtle relegation Ren had dealt her. Carl shrugged, and stepped up.

‘Ward Biosupply’s fields are a good two hundred kilometres northwest of here,’ he said. ‘Nearer three hundred, when you went up there two days ago. You mind telling us why you didn’t hold off until the Cat got a little closer?’

‘Well,’ Carmen Ren gestured apologetically. ‘I wasn’t the duty manager for that shift, so it’s not a question I can answer fully. But we quite often do attend to a contract ahead of time that way. It depends more on staffing rotas, hardware overhaul, that kind of thing, than actual proximity. As you’ll probably know from our promotional literature, Daskeen Azul has an operational deployment radius of up to five hundred kilometres should the need arise for it.’

‘And the need arose here.’

‘So it appears, yes. Though, as I said-’

Rovayo joined the play. ‘Yeah, you weren’t on duty. We heard you. So who was?’

‘I would really need to check the duty logs to be certain.’ A hint of reproach tinged Ren’s voice. ‘But I’m reasonably sure that the officers who visited us the day before yesterday will already have that information. ’

Carl ignored the significant look he was getting from Rovayo.

‘I’m not concerned with what you told Donaldson and Kodo,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m looking for Allen Merrin.’

Ren frowned, genuine puzzlement or immaculate control. ‘Alan . . .’

‘Merrin,’ said Rovayo.

‘Alan Merrin.’ Ren nodded seriously, kept to the slightly vowel-heavy mispronunciation of the first name. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have an employee of that name. Or a client, as far as I’m aware. I could-’

Carl smiled. ‘I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice but, one way or another, it’s going to get done. He can skulk about America, hiding in the crowd like a cudlip if he wants, but it isn’t going to save him. This game is over. Next time you hear from him, you can tell him that from me.’

Ren let go a small, sliding breath, the sound of politeness embarrassed. ‘And you are, exactly?’

‘Who I am isn’t very important. You can call me Marsalis, if it matters. What I am, well.’ He watched her face closely. ‘I’m a variant thirteen, just like your pal Merrin. You can tell him that too, if you like.’

A defensive smile hesitated at the corners of the woman’s mouth. Her eyes slipped sideways to Rovayo, as if in appeal.

‘I’m afraid I really don’t know who you’re referring to with this Merrin. And, Detective Rovayo, I have to say that your colleague here is being considerably less well mannered than the two officers who preceded you.’

‘He’s not my colleague,’ said Rovayo indifferently. ‘And I don’t think he’s that bothered about manners either. I’d start co-operating if I were you.’

‘We are already co-operating fully with-’

‘You put into Lima on your way up here,’ Carl asked her. ‘Right?’

This time, he thought the frown was genuine. ‘Bulgakov’s Cat very rarely puts in, as you express it, anywhere. We are dry-docked in the Angeline Freeport on average every five years, but otherwise-’

‘I’m not talking about the Cat. I’m talking about Daskeen Azul. You got friends on the Peruvian coast, right?’

‘I, personally, do not. No. But it may be that some of our employees do. Bulgakov’s Cat is, as I’m sure you’re aware, licensed for the whole of the Pacific Americas rim. And Daskeen Azul certainly has contracts along the Peruvian segment. As do many of our fellow companies aboard. But this, all of this, is common knowledge - you could have ascertained it using any corporate commerce register for the region.’

‘Seen Manco Bambaren recently? Or Greta Jurgens?’

Another elegant furrowing of the clean white brow. Lips pursed, regretful shaking of the head. Her long glossy hair shifted in sheaves. ‘I’m sorry, these names. None of them are familiar to me. And I’m still not clear exactly what - if anything - you are accusing us of.’

‘What are they paying you, Ren?’

Pause. The brief smile again. ‘I really don’t think, Mr Marsalis, that my salary is any of your-’

‘No, really. Give it some thought. I think the people I represent would make it worth your while to turn. And this is coming down around you anyway. We don’t have enough yet, but we will. And when Merrin breaks cover, I’ll be there. You don’t want to get caught in that particular crossfire, believe me.’

‘Are you trying to scare me, Mr Marsalis?’

‘No, I’m appealing to your sense of reality. I don’t think you scare easily, Ren. But in the end, I think you’re smart enough to recognise when it’s time to cut cable and bounce.’ He held her gaze. ‘That time is now.’

The polite, sliding breath sound again. ‘I don’t really know how to respond to that. You’re attempting to . . . bribe me?’ Another shuttled glance at Rovayo. ‘Into what, exactly? Is this standard RimSec procedure these days?’

‘I already told you I’m not a cop, Ren. I’m just like you. For hire and-’

Ren shot to her feet, clean and rapid motion, no leverage with either arm on the furniture around her. In the confined office space, it was a remarkable piece of physical precision. She brought loosely cupped fists together at her chest, a formal stance that echoed dojo training.

‘That’s it,’ she flared. ‘This conversation is over. I have been as co-operative as possible, Detective Rovayo, and all I have received in return are innuendo and insult. I will not be compared to some . . . variant in this way. Take your offensive, genetically enhanced friend, and get out. If you wish to speak to me again, you will contact our legal representatives.’

‘Think that was for real?’ Rovayo asked him, as they walked back to the landing pad. She was still fingering the tiny lawyer’s card Ren had handed her.

Carl shook his head. ‘She wanted us out of there, and she hooked the best opportunity there was to shut us down fast.’

‘Yeah. What I thought.’

‘If she’s a Daskeen Azul duty manager, then I’m a fucking bonobo. You see the moves on her?’

Rovayo nodded reluctantly.

‘Still think I’m paranoid?’

‘I think you-’

And out of nowhere, a corner in the mall, shoppers still around them, out of the fractured crowd, out of the sweet piped muzak and murmur, suddenly, a panicked bystander scream, and then the leaping figure, tall and lean, distorted face around the gut-deep yell, eyes blown wide with hate, and the gunmetal glint of the machete, hacking down.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Scott Osborne had seen and heard enough.

Nearly five months of sitting on his hands, waiting because Carmen told him that was how it had to be. Months while Bulgakov’s Cat churned up and down the coast of the Americas, coastline always out of sight, just below the horizon, like the harrowing that Carmen had promised was to come, but hadn’t still. Months adrift. Scott had never seen the ocean for real before he came to the Rim, and living afloat in the middle of it, week after landless week, didn’t seem natural, never would. He bore it because he must, and because when Carmen came to him, it all seemed worth it. Lying with her afterwards, he seemed to feel the approaching storm, and to accept it with the same comfortable ache he’d felt that last summer before he left for Bozeman and the fence run. It was the sense of your time running out, and the sudden value in everything you’d ordinarily take for granted, everything that would soon be swept away.

But the storm never came.

Instead, they waited and life aboard the factory raft took on the same dismal proportions as life anywhere else you tried to survive that wasn’t home. He hung around Daskeen Azul, looking for things to do and taking on whatever work they’d give him. He kept out of the stranger’s way - even now that he’d learnt to call him Merrin, now that his knees no longer trembled when he looked into the hollow eyes - and he didn’t ask when Merrin and Carmen disappeared together for long periods of time. But something was happening to the exhilaration he’d felt on the deserted airfield all those months ago, and it was something bad.

He didn’t want to believe it was lack of faith, not again. He prayed, more now than he ever had even back home, and what he prayed for mostly was guidance, because what had seemed so clear back at the airfield with his head still bandaged and the fear fresh in his heart was slowly but surely giving way to a mess of conflicting voices in that self same head and heart. He knew the judgement was at hand, had at first derived an almost smug superiority among the other workers and shoppers aboard the Cat as he watched them living out what were probably the last months of their lives in ignorance. But that was fading fast. Now that same blissful ignorance rubbed at him like a badly fitted boot, irritated something deep inside that made him want to grab them by the throat as they browsed sheep-like through the glittery-lit glass frontages of the mall, or sat on a break in the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat guffawing and barking like subnormals about what they’d give that slinky bitch Asia Badawi if they ever got in an elevator with her. He wanted to choke them, slap them, smash down their idiot complacency, scream into their faces don’t you understand, it’s time! He is coming, don’t you see! You will be weighed in the balance and found wanting!

He forced it down, deeper inside him. Prayed for patience, talked to Carmen.

But these days, even Carmen was not the refuge she had once been. When they slept together now, he sometimes felt an impatience smoking off her in the act, as if he were some awkward tangle of weed around a marker buoy on the Ward estates. She’d snapped at him a couple of times post-coital, apologised immediately of course, told him she was sorry, she was tired, yes, she was tired of waiting too, but that was the way it had to be, it was a hard path for the, uh, the righteous.

And there was Merrin.

Now the terror of precarious faith came sweeping in for real, up along his arms, lifting the hair with a ghost caress. It pricked out sweat on his palms and swathed him in a cool dread, like standing over a precipice. What if he was wrong? What if Carmen was wrong, what if they all were? Merrin was out of sight so much, Scott had no way of knowing what he did with his time. But when he was there, it didn’t feel like the presence of a saviour, of the King of Heaven come again in triumph. It was more like sharing v-time with a stripped-protocol ’face, one of the bare-bones chassis models you could buy off the rack and customise the way those kids he once shared a flop with in the Freeport were always doing. Merrin spoke little, answered questions even less, sat mostly wrapped in his own silence and staring out at the sea from whatever vantage point there was. It was like he’d never seen the ocean before either, and for a while that gave Scott a warm feeling of kinship with the other man. He thought it might mean he could be a more worthy disciple.

Of course, he knew to leave Merrin alone, Carmen had been clear on that if on nothing else. But every now and then, in the tight corridors and storage spaces of Daskeen Azul, he caught the stranger’s eye and the returned gaze did nothing but chill him. And he never told Carmen, didn’t dare tell her, about the time he’d come up behind Merrin at one of his ocean vigils and said, in as steady and respectful voice as he could manage yeah, it got me that way when I first saw it too. Just didn’t seem possible, that much water in one place. And Merrin whipped around on him like some bar tough whose drink he’d just spilled, only faster, so much inhumanly faster. And said nothing, nothing at all, just glared at him with the same blank unkindness in those eyes that Nocera had sometimes had, the same but not, because this time there was something in the eyes so deep, so cold, so distant that whatever else Scott believed about this man, he knew for certain that what Carmen Ren had told him was true, that Merrin really had come here across a gulf that nothing human could cross unprotected. He looked back into those eyes for the scant seconds he could bear to, and he felt the cold of it blowing over him as if Merrin’s gaze was an open door into the void he’d travelled to get here.

Scott winced, he turned away, mumbling half-formed apologies.

He moved like a snake.

Walking away, he heard Merrin say something that sounded like cunt lips, knew it couldn’t be those words, tried to put the encounter out of his mind. But the way the stranger had turned on him, the whiplash speed and venom of it would not go away. He moves like a snake ran in his thoughts like dripping poison. He could not reconcile it with what he wanted to believe.

Judgement means what it says, Pastor William had always warned them. You think the Lord is gonna come like some bleeding-heart UN liberal and make us all love one another ? No, sir, he will come in judgement and vengeance for those who defile his gifts. Like it says in the good book itself - the big, black, limp-cover Bible brandished aloft - Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I come not to send peace but a sword. Yes, sir, when the Lord comes, he will be wrathful and those who have not walked in righteousness will know the terror of his justice.

Terror, Scott could accept, could understand, but should the saviour of mankind really move like a snake?

Questions and doubts, coiling back and forth in his head, and Carmen withdrawing, cooler now with every time they lay together, drifting away from him. There’d been times recently when she simply didn’t want him, shrugged him off, made excuses that convinced him less and less. He could see the time coming when-

And then, instead, the black man came.

‘You stay out of it,’ Carmen snapped at him as she threw on clothes. ‘You don’t make a move unless I call it, right?’

At the door of the tiny lower deck apartment, she turned back, softened her voice with an effort he saw on her face.

‘Sorry, Scott. It’s just, you know how hard this is for all of us. Just let me handle it. It’ll be fine.’

So he watched on the monitors instead, and he saw the black man for himself. No doubt in his mind any more, he felt the thud of certainty in his blood. The black man, betraying himself in his arrogance. I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice, but one way or another, it’s going to get done. Scott felt his previous confusion shrivel away. Regained conviction was a solid joy in his throat, a pulsing in his limbs.

And Carmen, showing no fear - his heart swelled with love and pride for her - but he knew the terror she must feel, there alone, facing the darkness. Carmen, brave enough to keep silent in the face of the black man’s threats, to stand his presence, but not strong enough to do what needed to be done.

We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part.

And now he knew what it was.

The machete was cling-padded to a panel under the bed. He hadn’t told Carmen, but he’d seen how it might come down, the enemy smashing in the door like the faceless helmeted UN police in End Times Volume I, Issue 56, dragging them naked and defenceless from the bed.

He wouldn’t go that way.

He dressed, pulled on a mid-length deck-coat with Daskeen Azul logos across back and sleeves. He freed the machete from its cling-pads, tucked it under the coat, under one arm. Checked himself in the mirror and saw it worked, not enough to get past any kind of door with security on it, but in the incessant crowds of the shopping decks, more than enough to let him get close.

The rest was in God’s hands.

He looked into the mirror, saw the taut determination his face threw back, and for just a moment it was as if it was Him, Merrin, looking out from behind Scott’s eyes, lending him the force of will he’d need.

Scott murmured a swift prayer of thanks, and walked out to face the black man.

It was like the fucking Saudi opsdog all over again. Like Dudeck and the Aryans. Carl saw the eyes, locked with them on instinct, and it was the same blank, driven hatred that filled them. Who the fuck-

No time - the machete swung down. His attacker was a big guy, tall and reachy, the response wrote itself. Carl hurled himself forward, inside the chopping arc, blocked and stamped, took the fight to the ground. Against all expectation, the other man flailed like an upturned beetle. Carl got in with an elbow, stunning blow to the face, tanindo grasp on the machete arm, twist and the weapon clattered free. A knee came up and caught him in the groin, not full force but enough to half-kill his strength. The other man was screaming at him, weird invective and what sounded like religious invocation. Hands came clawing for his throat. It was no kind of fighting Carl knew. He fended, expecting a trick. Got feeble repetition instead. He did the obvious thing, grabbed a finger and snapped it sideways. The invocation broke on a scream. Another long leg lashed at him, but he smothered it, kept hold of the snapped finger, twisted some more. His attacker screamed again, quivered like a gaffed fish. Carl had time to look down into the eyes again, saw no surrender there. He chopped down, into the side of the throat, pulled it a little at the last moment, he’d need to talk to this guy.

The fight died.

Rovayo circled in, gun drawn, levelled on the unmoving figure on the floor. Carl grunted around the ache in his balls, shot the pistol an ironic glance.

‘Thanks. Little late for that.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘Not yet.’ Carl levered himself to his feet, groaned again, glanced around. The gathered crowd gaped back. ‘Just him, huh?’

‘Looks that way.’ Rovayo hauled an arm aloft, showed the holo in her palm to the spectators.

‘RimSec.’ She stated it like a challenge. ‘Anyone work security around here?’

Hesitation, then a thickset uniform with blunt Samoan features shouldered his way through the others.

‘I do.’

‘Good, you’re deputised.’ She read the name off his chest ID. ‘Suaniu. Call this in, get some back up. The rest of you, give me some space.’

On the floor, Carl’s attacker coughed and flopped. They all looked. Carl saw suddenly that he was young, younger even than Dudeck had been. Barely out of his teens. He cast about and saw a cluster of carbon fibre chairs and tables around a sushi counter that had closed for the night. He hauled the boy up by the lapels and dragged him towards the nearest chair. The crowd skittered back out of his path. The boy’s eyes fluttered. Carl dumped him into the chair, settled him there and slapped him hard across the face.

‘Name?’

The boy gagged, tried to rub at his neck where Carl’s stunning chop had gone home. The black man slapped him again.

‘Name,’ he said again.

‘You can’t do that,’ said a woman’s voice from the crowd. Australian twang to it. Carl turned his head, found her with a narrow look. Elegant olive-skinned shopper, early fifties, stick thin. A couple of bags, ochre and green parcels, black cord handles, flicker ad for some franchise or other across the ochre in black Thai script. His lip curled.

‘Haven’t you got some shoes to go buy?’

‘Fuck you, buddy.’ She wasn’t backing down. ‘This isn’t the Rim. You can’t walk all over us like this.’

‘Thanks, I‘ll bear that in mind.’ Carl went back to the boy in the chair, backhanded him and got blood. ‘Name.’

‘Marsalis,’ Rovayo was at his side. ‘That’s enough.’

‘You think?’

Her voice dropped to a mutter. ‘She’s right, this isn’t the Rim. There’s only so far we can push this.’

Carl looked around. The Samoan security guard was talking into a phone, but his eyes were fixed on the boy and the black man standing over him. And the crowd had shuffled back when Rovayo ordered them to, but beyond that they were staying put. Carl guessed maybe one in ten had actually seen the fight, even less the machete attack that preceded it. The scenario was wide open for interpretation.

He shrugged. ‘You’ve got the gun.’

‘Yeah, I do. And I’m not about to start shooting these people with it.’

‘I don’t think it’d come to that.’

‘Marsalis, forget it. I’m not-’

Spluttering cough. The boy in the chair floundered there, grasping the carbon weave arms. His gaze was locked on Carl’s face.

‘Black man,’ he spat.

Carl glanced sideways at Rovayo. ‘Observant little fucker, isn’t he.’

The Rim cop grimaced and put herself between Carl and the chair. She showed the RimSec holo to the boy.

‘See that? Do you know how much trouble you’re in, son?’

The boy glared back at her. ‘I know you lie for him. Authority out of Babylon, and black lies that shield the servants of Satan. I know who your master is.’

‘Oh, great.’

‘Marsalis, shut up a minute.’ Rovayo closed her hand, stowed her gun and scrutinised their prisoner with hands on hips. ‘You’re from Jesusland, right? You’re a fence-hopper? You got any idea how quickly I can have you sent back there?’

‘I do not answer to your laws. I do not bow down before Mammon and Belial. I have been chosen.’ In the crystalline lighting of the mall, the boy’s face was pale and slick with sweat. ‘I have gone beyond.’

‘You certainly have,’ said Carl wearily.

‘Marsalis!’

‘Hey, he didn’t come at you with the fucking machete.’

The boy tried to stand. Rovayo stiff-armed him impatiently in the chest, sent the chair skidding back a little as he collapsed back into it.

‘Sit down,’ she advised him.

Rage detonated in his eyes. His voice scaled upward.

‘You are false judges. False lawgivers, money changers, sunk in stinking sins of flesh and corruption.’ It was as if he was vomiting up something long suppressed. ‘You will not lead me astray, you will not pre-’

‘You want me to shut him up?’

‘-vail, I am beyond your traps. Judgemen-’

‘No, I fucking don’t. I want-’

‘-is coming. He is here! He lives, in the flesh, among us! You know him as Merrin but you know nothing, he is-’

The tirade ebbed a little, lost some of its shrill rage, as Carl and Rovayo both stared down at the boy with fresh interest.

‘-the Commander of the legions of Heaven,’ he finished uncertainly.

‘Merrin’s here?’ jerked out of Carl. ‘Aboard the Cat? Now?’

The boy’s lips tightened. Carl switched gazes to Rovayo. She reached for her phone.

‘Can you lock this place down?’

‘On it.’ She was already dialling. She put the phone to her ear, looked at him as she listened. ‘Alcatraz can authorise a block on traffic in and out. Might have to get a couple of people out of bed to do it, but-’

The phone crickled audibly with scrambler protocols and then a voice. Rovayo cut across it.

‘Alicia Rovayo, Special Cases. Print me, and then get me the Alcatraz duty officer.’

Pause. Very deliberately, Carl turned his back on the boy in the chair. Casually, he asked: ‘Is that going to be satellite-enforceable?’

Rovayo nodded. ‘There’s bound to be something overhead. One of ours, or something we can rent the time on. Special Cases can usually. Hello? Yeah, this is Rovayo, listen-’

‘Hey! No!’

Carl didn’t really need the anonymous yell. Tanindo, as taught by Sutherland, worked up a high level of proximity sense, and the mesh tuned it tighter still. He felt the boy come out of the chair without needing to turn and see it. He turned anyway, at a leisurely rate, and caught the escape bid with peripheral glimpse, the same peeled awareness that had saved him from the machete attack in the first place. The boy was already out of tackle range, heading for the refuge of a side access walkway. Pumping limbs, head thrown back, a spurt of desperate speed. Not bad, all things considered.

He saw Rovayo stiffen, stop speaking to Alcatraz. Reach for her stowed gun. He put out an arm to forestall her, shook his head.

‘Let him go. I’m on it.’

‘But you-’

‘Relax. Running after idiots is what I do for a living.’

He turned away. Would have liked the gun, but it wasn’t like there was the time to talk it through-

‘He’s getting away,’ shouted the Australian woman.

Carl spared her a murderous look, then he was in motion. Slow run building to a sprint, gathering speed and purpose, the fine focal intensity of the hunt.

Time to find Merrin, and shut him down.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Wide awake, jet-lagged to pieces even the syn didn’t seem able to fix, she sat in the window of the hotel room and stared out over the bay. COLIN privileges - top floor suite, unobstructed views. The marching lights of the Bay Bridge led her gaze inexorably across to where Oakland’s own night-time display glowed from the waterline and twinkled up into the hills.

Cheap fucking piece of shit.

Norton wanted to put out a citywide search and detain, but neither she nor Coyle were interested. They both knew damn well where Marsalis was, and the fact he was technically absent without authorisation was the least of it. Rovayo wasn’t answering her phone, and what that meant was punched onto the other Rim cop’s face like bruising from a street-fight. Sevgi couldn’t be sure if Coyle and Rovayo had ever been an item as such, but they were partners and most of the time that ran deeper. Higher loyalty stakes - the people you accepted into your bed weren’t likely to have to save your life on any given day. Back with NYPD, Sevgi’d had her share of ill-advised co-worker liaisons, but she never, never crossed that particular line with anybody she partnered, not because she hadn’t occasionally been tempted, but because it would have been stupid. Like taking one of harbour patrol’s big powerboats into the shallow waters off some white-sand tourist beach. You just knew that you were going stick and tip.

Not like now, huh Sev, the syn sneered at her. This one, you’ve got well under control, don’t you? Deep water and an even keel all the way.

Oh shut up.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, disconnected into the sprinkle lit night, when someone started hammering on the door.

‘Sevgi?’

She blinked. It was Norton’s voice, muffled through the soundproofing on the door, and slightly slurred. They’d sat up in the hotel bar for a while earlier, barely touched drinks and not much to say. At least she’d thought the drinks were barely touched until, out of nowhere, he said to her quietly just like cocaine, right. No evolved defences, too much strain on your heart. She stared back at him, aware that he’d nailed her somehow but unable to make exact rational sense of the words. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, Tom, she answered stiffly. But I’m sitting here thinking about Helena Larsen and how we still haven’t caught the motherfucker who murdered her. It was only halfway to a lie. The promises she’d made to herself and the mutilated corpse back in June weighed heavily whenever she gave them headroom.

So she’d fled the bar, left Norton sitting there with a brief good-night. Now it seemed he’d stayed for the long haul.

‘Sev. You in there?’

She sighed and levered herself off the window shelf to the floor. Padded across to the door and opened it. Norton leaned on the doorframe with one raised arm, not as drunk as she’d feared.

‘Yeah, I’m in here,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

He grinned. ‘This you are going to love. Coyle just called.’

‘Yeah?’ She turned away, left the door open. ‘Come on in. So what happened? He storm over to Rovayo’s place and drag Marsalis out of her bed?’

‘No, not quite.’ Norton followed her in, waited until she turned back to face him. He was still grinning. She folded her arms.

‘So?’

‘So Rovayo and Marsalis stormed Bulgakov’s Cat this evening, bullied their way into Daskeen Azul’s offices and made a mess. Someone took exception and came at Marsalis with a machete.’

‘What?’

‘That’s right. Now Rovayo’s called a RimSec lockdown on the whole raft, and Marsalis is somewhere down in the belly of the beast, chasing the machete artist because he thinks it’s all part of some grand conspiracy that’ll lead him to Merrin.’

‘Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’

‘I wish I were.’

‘Well - where’s Coyle?’

‘On his way here, now. He’s heading out to the party with a detachment of RimSec’s public-order thugs in tow. I sort of insisted he stop by and pick us up.’

Sevgi grabbed her jacket off the bed and shouldered her way into it.

‘Would have settled for him just fucking her,’ she muttered, then suddenly remembered she was no longer alone.

Norton pretended not to hear.

In the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat, Carl found a curious relief. There were at least no fucking shops down here.

His short-term memory spilled recall of endless smooth-floored covered thoroughfares and changing frontages in such volume that their individuality finally blurred into perceptible patterns of appeal. Clothing under glass, museum exhibit sober or in shout-out garish display, depending on the prey it was designed to hook. Little chunks and slices of hardware under soft gleaming lights. Food and drink laid out in holo-real impressionistic tumbles of plenty designed to imitate some ghost memory of a street market. Psychochemicals blown up in holodisplay to sizes where pills and the molecules they were made of each started to resemble the fetishised pieces in the hardware shops. Services and intangibles sold with broad cinematic images that offered almost no intelligible connection with the product. Level after level after level of it, walkway after walkway, maze of corridors, of elevators and staircases, all bright and endless.

He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse night-time crowds would allow.

He’d long ago learnt that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency - if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.

Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin colour. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate - the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible - but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.

He hung back, he used the mirrored surfaces, the camera playback-and-display narcissism of the mall space, and he watched as his quarry’s frantic, spinning, backward-staring run damped down to a slower, purposeful threading through the crowd. The full body turns became frequent over-the-shoulder glances, and then not so frequent. Carl eased forward, keeping behind knots of shoppers and going bent-kneed where there was no one tall enough to give him cover.

Then the shops ran out.

They’d been dropping levels slowly but steadily, taking gleaming marbled stairways and the odd gleaming jewel-box elevator, all consistently downward. At first Carl thought they might be heading back to Daskeen Azul, but they’d already gone too low for that, and he didn’t think the boy had the skills or presence of mind to lay a double-back track. In the frontages, prices came down. Empty rental space began to interpose itself between the taken units. The holodisplays got ragged, the merchandise and the way it was sold took on an imitative quality, a not-quite-good copy of what the upper decks carried. The services on offer became less wholesome, or at least less smoothly packaged. Killbitch available, he saw in cheap neon, wasn’t sure what it referred to, wasn’t sure he wanted to. Elsewhere, someone had spraycanned a huge empty rectangle on the glass front of an untenanted unit and filled it with the words: BUY CONSUME DIE - ARTWORK TO FOLLOW. No one had cleaned it off.

The boy flickered left out of the flow of shoppers and took another staircase. This time it was a utilitarian unpolished metal affair, and no one else was using it. When Carl got to it, he could hear his quarry’s steps clattering down in the well.

Fuck.

He waited until the metallic footfalls stopped, then went down after them, trying to make as little noise as possible. At the bottom of the well, he found himself in a low-rent residential section, simple green security doors set in bleak grey corridor walls whose ragged graffiti scars were almost a relief. A steady thrum in the structure suggested heavy duty engines somewhere close. The floor was dirty, stains and patches of dust that crunched underfoot, neat lines of detritus swept to the sides either by mechanical cleaning carts or possibly the residents themselves. Clear evidence, if he’d been in need of it, that the nano-hygiene systems didn’t make it down here much. Nor, he supposed, did anyone else who didn’t either live here or know someone who did.

Which, of course, made it perfect for Merrin.

The corridor was deserted. Receding rows of closed doors and no sign of machete boy anywhere. Branch corridors up ahead to left and right, the same story again when he reached them and peered down the dingy perspectives they offered. Meshed-up tension sagging slowly into the realisation that his quarry had gone to ground. He held off the settling feeling as best he could, prowled down the left hand branch passage, ears tuned past the engine thrum for the sound of voices or footsteps. Well aware - I know, I fucking know - that the doors would have security cameras and that each one he passed upped the risk of being spotted if his quarry was in one of the apartments behind, watching the screen.

He did it anyway. Maybe machete boy had got hold of another weapon and was up for another shot at killing the black man.

He found a zone plan screwed to a wall at the next intersection, studied it and got a sense of how the area was laid out. The wall next to the map offered the deadpan grafitto’d legend: You are Here I’m afraid - Deal with It. He grinned despite himself and prowled back the way he’d come, aiming to start a proper search pattern. Something to do until RimSec got there in force. He’d have to hope the lockdown worked.

Behind him, the clank-punt of a door disengaging its locks. He spun about, combat crouch in the making when he saw the woman backing out of the open doorway. She wore nondescript coveralls, some logo he didn’t recognise, and had her corkscrew-unruly hair gathered up in a tight band. Mestiza complexion, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth. By the time she’d fully turned, he was casual again.

‘Hey there.’

She appraised him with a head to foot look. ‘What’s the matter, you lost?’

‘Next best thing.’ He built her a smile. ‘I’m supposed to meet some guy down here works for Daskeen Azul, think either I’ve taken a wrong turn or he has.’

‘That right?’

She was looking at the S(t)igma jacket, he realised. Maybe the corporation and what it did wasn’t standard knowledge out this far west, but unless you were immune to continental American news digests, it was hard to misunderstand the style of the jacket and the bright chevrons down the sleeve. He sighed.

‘Chasing a job, you know,’ he said, faking weariness. ‘Guy says he can maybe get me some hours.’

Another flickered assessment. She nodded and took the spliff out of her mouth, turned and gestured with it, back to the corner with the map. ‘See that right turn there. Take that, two blocks straight then one left. Takes you through the bulkhead to starboard loading. Think Daskeen got a couple of berths there. You’re not far out - probably just got the wrong stairwell down off Margarita thoroughfare. ’

‘Right.’ He let the renewed pulsing of the mesh leak through as eagerness. ‘Hey, thanks a lot.’

‘No problem. Here.’ She handed him the spliff. ‘You get the work, celebrate on me.’

‘Oh, hey, you don’t have to do-’

‘Take it, man.’ She held it out until he did. ‘Think I’ve never been where you are now?’

‘Thanks. Thank you. Look, I’d better-’

‘Sure. Don’t want to be late for your job interview.’

He grinned and nodded, wheeled about and stalked rapidly back to the corner. As soon as he rounded it, he broke into a flat run.

‘Who is this?’

‘This is Guava Diamond. We are blown, Claw Control. Repeat, we are blown. Heaven-sent is endangered at best, fully exposed at worst. I don’t know what the fuck you’re playing at over there, but this is out of nowhere. We have no cover and no exit strategy I can guarantee. Request immediate extraction.’

The bulkhead was a lustrous nanofibre black, raw and shiny and as distinct from the grey walls of the residential section as his Hilton-bought shirt was from the inmate jacket he wore over it. Bright yellow markings delineated the access hatches. By the look of it, they could be simply coded shut at a molecular level, hinges and locks turning to an unbroken whole with the surface of the hatch. He passed through, stabbed suddenly with memories of Mars. It hit him that ever since he’d got down from the shopping levels, that was what this place brought to mind. Life on Mars. Right down to the camaraderie of the helpful mestiza, the freely offered spliff.

Don’t think you’re going to miss all this, Sutherland grinned at him. But you will, soak. You wait and see.

Beyond lay starboard loading.

He’d been on factory rafts a few times before this, but it was always easy to forget the scale of the things. Looking over the rail of the gantry he’d stepped onto was like viewing some immense factory testing rank for cable cars. The loading space was a fifty-metre slope up from the ocean and a vast roof of the same nanofibre construction as the bulkhead, vaulted so high overhead it could almost have been the night sky. Cut into this base, a dozen or more cable-crank slipways led up out of the water to the undersides of the perched docking sheds they served. The nanofibre cables shone in their channels like roped liqurorice, new and wet looking in the overhead blast of LCLS arcs. Poised at various points between the underbelly entrances of the sheds and the sea, heavy duty cradles held a variety of sea-going vessels secure on their respective slipways. Latticed steel gantries and stairs ran up and down the sides of the slips for maintenance and clung to the outer edges of the dock facilities above. Cranes and pylons bristled off the sloping surface. Dotted figures scrambled about and faint yells lofted back and forth across the cavern-cold air. Carl scanned the roofing of the sheds for the Daskeen Azul logo, found it on the sixth unit in line and started to run.

‘Guava Diamond?’

‘Still holding.’

‘We are unable to assist, Guava Diamond. Repeat, we are unable to assist. Suggest-’

‘You what? You bonobo-sucking piece of shit, you’d better tell me I misheard that.’

‘There are control complications at this end. We cannot act. I’m sorry, Guava Diamond. You’re on your own.’

‘You will be fucking sorry if we make it out of this in one piece.’

‘I repeat, Guava Diamond, we cannot act. Suggest you implement Lizard immediately, and get off Bulgakov’s Cat while you can. You may still have time.’

Pause.

‘You’re a fucking dead man, Claw Control.’

Static hiss.

Carl was almost to the Daskeen Azul unit when the crank cables leading up to it whined into sudden life. Shifting highlights on the nanofibre black in its recessed channel, it looked more like something melting and running than actual motion. He heard the change in engine note as the cables engaged a load. Somewhere down the line, a cradled mini-sub jerked and started to climb.

Here we go.

He was still at the initial access level he’d come in on, behind and three metres above the roofing of the line of docking sheds. Long, shallow sets of steps ran out from the walkway he stood on, sank between the units and joined with a lower level gantry that fringed each shed. He made it for the access level to the doors and hatches leading inside the facilities. Below again, further sets of steps snaked down on themselves and connected to the slope the slipways were built into.

There were hatches set into the roof of the Daskeen Azul unit, but they were very likely sealed from the inside, and even if they weren’t, going in that way was a good recipe for getting shot in the arse. Carl slowed to a crouched jog, made the corner of the shed and started down the flight of stairs at its side. The murmur of the winch engine came through the wall at his ear. A couple of small windows broke the corrugated alloy surface and there was a closed door at the bottom of the stairs. No easy way in. He paused and weighed the options. He had no weapon, and no sense of the layout within the unit. No idea how many Daskeen Azul employees he might be up against, or what they’d be armed with.

Yeah, so this is where you back off and wait for Rovayo’s cavalry.

But he already knew he wasn’t going to do that.

He crept under one of the windows and eased his head up beside it, grabbed a narrow angled view into the space on the other side of the wall. Cleanly kept flooring, stacked dinghy hulls and other less identifiable hardware, LCLS panels shedding light from the walls and ceiling. The squat bulk of the winch machinery at the head of the slipway and four gathered figures. He narrowed his eyes - the glass was filthy and the winch system blocked a lot of the room’s light. The four were all wearing Daskeen Azul jackets and the face he could see clearly was a stranger, a man. But the profile of the figure next to him was machete boy, gesticulating frantically at a woman who Carl identified as Carmen Ren by poise and stance before he made out her face. She had a phone in her hand, held low, not in use.

The fourth figure had his back turned to the window, had long hair gathered into a loose tail that hung below the collar of his jacket. Carl stared at him and a solid slab of something dropped into his chest. He didn’t need to see the face. He’d watched the same figure walk away from him in the mind’s eye of the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, along the deadened quiet of the spacecraft’s corridors. Had seen him stop and turn and look up at the camera, look through it as if he knew that Carl was there.

He looked round now, as if called.

Carl jerked his head back, but not before he’d seen the gaunt features, a little more flesh on the bones now maybe, but still the same slash-cheek, hollow-eyed stare. He was checking the door, twitched around on some whisper of intuition from the weight of Carl’s gaze.

Allen Merrin. Home from Mars.

Carl sank back to the step, fuming. With the Haag gun, Rovayo’s gun, any fucking gun, he would have just stormed through the door and got it over with. Merrin’s mesh and thirteen instincts, Carmen Ren’s combat poise, the unknown quantity that the other Daskeen Azul employee represented, any weapons the four of them might have - it wouldn’t matter. He’d fill the air with slugs going in, looking for multiple body hits, clean up the mess after.

Unarmed, he was going to end up dead.

Where the fuck are you, RimSec?

Rovayo’s words rinsed back through his mind. Alcatraz can authorise a block on traffic in and out. Might have to get a couple of people out of bed to do it, but-

But nothing. Merrin and his pals here are going to bail out before RimSec’s dozy fucking authorities get the sleep out of their eyes . . .

The cradled sub came on up the slipway.

And stopped.

Carl peered down through the steel lattice of the gantry he stood on. The haul cradle was still a good twenty metres down the slope, frozen there. Inside the docking shed, the winding engine ran on but its sound had shifted. The liquorice black of the cable was frozen in its channel. The winch had disconnected.

He peered across the sweep of the loading slope and saw the same story all the way along. No motion, none of the cables were working.

Lockdown. He’d done RimSec an injustice.

He saw it coming, just ahead of time. Moved off the wall, shifted stance for the combat crouch, and then the door ahead clanked open, three steps down. The mesh pounded inside him. Ren came out, the others crowding behind.

‘. . . yank the cradle releases and ride it down. There’s no other-’

She saw him. He jumped.

Their numbers made it work for him. He cannoned into Ren, knocked her flying back along the walkway and to the floor. Machete boy roared and swung at him, hopelessly wide. Carl blocked, locked up an elbow and shoved the boy back into the two other men behind him. All three staggered back through the confines of the doorway. The nameless Daskeen Azul employee yelped and brandished a weapon awkwardly, one-handed. Yelling get out of the way, get out of the fucking way. Carl made it as a sharkpunch and his flesh quailed. He rode the attack momentum through the door, sent them all stumbling. He got his hands on the gunman’s arm and wrenched, forced him to the floor, followed him down, knee into the stomach. Find the pressure point in the wrist, wrench again. The sharkpunch went off once, symphony of dull metallic plinks and clanks as the murderous load punched ragged holes in the roof. Then he had possession and the former owner was flailing under him disarmed. Carl twisted, pointed down point blank and pulled the trigger. The other man turned abruptly to shredded bone and flesh from the waist up. Blood and gore splattered, drenched him from head to foot.

Proximity sense signalled left, Carl rose and twisted at mesh speed, still blinking the blood from his eyes. Machete boy ran onto the sharkpunch, screaming abomination and hellfire. This time, Carl pulled the trigger in sheer reflex. The impact kicked the boy back towards the open door and tore him apart in mid-air. The screaming died in mid syllable, the wall and doorway were suddenly painted with gore. Carl gaped at the damage the weapon had done-

-and Merrin hit him from the side. Locked out the gun in exactly the same way Carl had taken it from its original owner. Carl grunted and let the other thirteen’s attack carry the two of them round in a stumbling dance. Kept the gaping muzzle of the sharkpunch angled hard away as best he could. He tried for a tanindo throw, but Merrin knew the move. They lurched again, feet on the edge of the opening in the shed floor where the slipway ran in.

‘Been looking for you,’ Carl gritted.

Merrin’s fingers dug into his wrist. Carl heaved and let the sharkpunch go, through the hole in the floor. It hit the slope below and clattered heavily away downward. Better than leaving it lying around for Ren to pick up and use. He tried another technique to get loose, worked his feet back from the hole, hitched an elbow strike atMerrin’s belly. The other thirteen smothered the blow, hooked out Carl’s ankle with a heel and brought both of them down. He got in an elbow of his own, blunt force into the side of Carl’s face. Vision flew apart. Merrin got on top. Grinned down at the black man like a wolf.

‘I did not cross the void to be killed like a cudlip,’ he hissed. ‘To die like meat on the slab. You have not understood who I am.’

He drove a forearm up into Carl’s throat, bore down and began to crush his larynx. Carl, vision still starry, took the only option left, levered with one leg, rolled and tipped them both over the edge.

It wasn’t a long drop, the height of the haulage cradle when it slotted into place at the top of the ramp, three metres at most. But the impact broke their holds on each other and they rolled down the slope apart. Twenty metres further down, the solid steel bulk of the locked-up cradle waited to greet them. Impact was going to hurt.

Carl got himself feet first in the tumble and tried to jam a foot into the crank-cable channel. The sole of his boot skidded off the nanofibre, braked him, but not a lot. Merrin came ploughing past at his shoulder, grabbed at him and tugged him loose again. He kicked out, missed, slithered after the other thirteen. The cradle loomed, smooth curve of the sub’s hull held in its massive forked iron grasp. Merrin hit, shrugged it off at mesh speed, braced himself upright against one of the forks. He turned to face Carl with a snarling grin. Carl panicked, jammed his foot hard into the cable space again, tried to sit as his knee bent. He must have hit a bracket or a support brace. His fall locked to a halt a couple of metres off impact with the cradle. The momentum flipped him almost upright, hurled him down to meet Merrin like a bad skater fighting to stay upright. The other thirteen gaped, Carl was coming in impossibly high. Carl snapped out a fist, some reflex he didn’t know he owned, and drove into the side of Merrin’s neck with all the force of his arrival.

It nearly broke his wrist.

He felt the abused joint creak with the impact, but it was lost in the surge of savage joy as Merrin choked and sagged. He pivoted off the punch and cannoned into the side of the sub. Merrin made some kind of blocking move, but it was weak. Carl beat it down, seized the other thirteen’s head in both hands and smashed it sideways, as hard as he could against the edge of the cradle fork. Merrin made a strangled, raging noise and lashed out. Carl shrugged off the blow, smashed the thirteen’s head into the metal again - and again - and again -

Felt the fight go finally out of the other man. Didn’t stop.

Didn’t stop until blood made a sudden blotched spray across the grey hull of the sub, and sprinkled warm on his face again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Sevgi came down the gantry stairs through a flood of CSI lighting and experts setting up their gear. RimSec had cordoned off the whole of starboard loading, shepherded everyone out for questioning and then locked the place down. There were uniforms along the upper walkways at every entry point and a sharkish black patrol boat prowled the ocean alongside the open bay. Smaller inflatables fringed the water’s edge at the bottom of the slipway like orange seaweed, wagging back and forth with the slop of the waves against the slope. There was a sense of hollowness under the vaulted roof, of something emptied out and done.

Sevgi fished her COLIN identification from a pocket and showed it to a supervising officer at the Daskeen Azul docking shed. Surprised herself with the faint stab of nostalgia for the days of her palm-wired NYPD holobadge. Being a cop, back in the day. The officer looked back at her blankly.

‘Yeah, what do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Carl Marsalis. I was told he’s still down here.’

‘Marsalis?’ The woman stayed mystified for a moment, then the light dawned. ‘Oh, you’re talking about the twist? The guy that did all this damage?’

Sevgi was too churned to up to call the Rim cop on her terminology. She nodded. The officer pointed down the slope.

‘He’s sitting down there on that empty cradle, one across from this slip. Was going to have him forcibly removed for questioning, but then some Special Cases badge calls down and says to leave him be, the guy can sit there all night if he wants.’ She made a weary gesture. ‘Who am I to argue with Special Cases, right?’

Sevgi murmured something sympathetic and headed on down the stairs beside the Daskeen Azul slipway. When she got level with the empty cradle on the other slip, she had to pick her way awkwardly across the sloping surface, once or twice teetering and dropping to a crouch to stop herself falling. She reached the cradle and hung onto one of the forks with relief.

‘Hey there,’ she said awkwardly.

Marsalis glanced down, apparently surprised to see her. It was the first time she’d seen him so unaware of his surroundings, and it jolted her more than the surprise had shaken him. She wondered, briefly, if he was in shock. His clothes were covered with drying blood in big uneven patches, and there were smeared specks and streaks still on his face where he’d washed but apparently hadn’t scrubbed hard enough.

‘You okay?’ she asked

He shrugged. ‘Few bruises. Nothing serious. When did you get here?’

‘A while ago. Been upstairs, shouting at Daskeen Azul’s management. ’ Sevgi hauled herself up onto the cradle, propped herself against the fork next to him and slid her legs out in front of her. ‘So. Turns out you called it right, after all.’

‘Yeah. Thirteen paranoia.’

‘Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.’

‘Well, I’m not looking to get laid.’

She shot him a sideways glance. ‘No, I guess you’ve probably had enough of that for one night.’

He shrugged again, didn’t look at her.

‘Daskeen Azul are denying any knowledge,’ she said. ‘As far as they’re concerned, Merrin, Ren and Osborne were all casual employees, automatically renewed contracts every month unless there’s a problem, and there never was. They’re lying in their teeth, but I don’t know if RimSec are going to be able to prove that.’

‘Osborne?’

‘The guy who jumped you with the machete. Scott Osborne, Jesusland fence-hopper. RimSec forensic reckon he was one of the Ward Biosupply employees who ran when Merrin showed up there. DNA match with genetic trace leavings from here and Ward’s place.’

He nodded. ‘And Ren?’

‘That’s a tougher one. There was no genetic trace for her at Ward’s place, so looks like she or someone else went over there and cleaned up after they left. But we’re working off witness description composites and yeah, looks like she was there too.’

‘What about gene trace here. Have they run that?’

‘Not yet.’ She looked at him again, curiously. ‘You don’t seem very happy about any of this.’

‘I’m not.’

She frowned. ‘Marsalis, it’s over. You get to go home now. You know, back to London and your smug European social comfort zone.’

He raised an eyebrow, stared out at the water. ‘Lucky me.’

Abruptly, there was a light tripping pulse in her throat. She tried for irony. ‘What, you going to miss me?’

He turned to look at her now.

‘This isn’t over, Sevgi.’

‘It isn’t?’ She felt a little crime scene macabre creep into her tone. ‘Well, you could have fooled me. I mean, you did just kill them all. Osborne and the other guy are all over the walls and floor up there. Merrin, you just brained. I’d say we’re pretty much done, wouldn’t you?’

‘And Ren?’

Sevgi gestured, throwaway. ‘Pick up her up, sooner or later.’

‘Yeah? Like you did after she split from Ward Biosupply?’

‘Marsalis, you’re fucking up the victory parade here. Ren’s aftermath, she’s a detail at most. Merrin’s dead, that’s what counts.’

‘Yeah. Suppose we should be celebrating, right?’

‘That’s right, we should.’

He nodded and reached into his inmate jacket. Produced a well-made blunt and held it up for her approval.

‘Want some?’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t know. Someone gave it to me. In case I needed to celebrate.’ He put the blunt in his mouth and crunched the ember end to life. Drew in smoke, coughed a little. ‘Here, try. Not bad.’

She took it and drew her own toke. The smoke went down sweet and silty, enhanced dope and an edge of something else on it. She held it in, let it go. Felt the cool languor of the hit come stealing along her limbs. All sorts of knots seemed to loosen in her head. She drew again, let it up quicker this time, and handed the blunt back to him.

‘So tell me why you’re not happy,’ she said.

‘Because I don’t like being played, and this whole fucking thing was a set-up from the start.’ He smoked in gloomy quiet for a while, then held the blunt up and examined the burning end. ‘Fucking monster myths.’

‘Eh?’

‘Monsters,’ he said bitterly. ‘Super-terrorists, serial killers, criminal masterminds. It’s always the same fucking lie. Might as well be talking about werewolves and vampires, for all the difference it makes. We are the good, the civilised people. Huddled here in our cosy ring of firelight, our cities and our homes, and out there’ - a wide gesture, warming to his theme now - ‘out in the dark, the monster prowls. The Big Evil, the Threat to the Tribe. Kill the beast and all will be well. Never mind the-’

‘You going to smoke that, or not?’

He blinked. ‘Yeah, sorry. Here.’

‘So you don’t think we’ve killed the beast?’

‘Sure. We’ve killed it. So what? That doesn’t give us any answers. We still don’t know why Merrin came back from Mars, or what the point of all these deaths was.’

‘Should have asked him.’

‘Yeah, well. Slipped my mind at the time, you know.’

She stared at the toes of her boots. Frowned. ‘Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe we don’t have the answers yet. But the fact we don’t know what this was about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be happy we’ve stopped it.’

‘We didn’t stop it. I already told you, this whole thing was set up.’

‘Oh, come on. Set up how? Rovayo says you took Daskeen Azul totally by surprise. They weren’t expecting this to happen.’

‘We were early.’

‘What?’

He took the blunt from her. ‘We were early. They didn’t expect me to push so hard, they were maybe going to let this play out some time next week.’

‘Let what play out next week?’ Exasperation slightly blurred by whatever they were smoking. ‘You think Merrin planned to let you kill him?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He certainly didn’t fight as hard as I expected him to. I mean, I got lucky in the end, but the whole thing felt, I don’t know. Slack. Anyway, that’s not the main point. Ren could have come in at any point and tipped the balance. She wasn’t injured, all I did was knock her on her back.’

‘So? She just cut her losses, got out while she could.’

‘After partnering this guy for the last four months? I don’t think so. Ren was a pro, it was stamped right through her. The way she moved, the way she stood. The way she looked at you. Someone like that doesn’t panic. Doesn’t mistake one unarmed man for a RimSec invasion.’

‘Did you tell her you were a thirteen?’

He gave her a tired look.

‘Well? Did you?’

‘Yeah, I did but-’

‘There you are then.’ She bent one knee, eased round to face him more. ‘That’s what panicked her. Look, Marsalis, I’ve been around you when the fighting starts, and it scares me. And I know what a thirteen really is.’

‘So did she. She’d been caretaking one for the last four months, remember.’

‘That’s not the same as facing one in combat. She’d have a standard human response to that, a standard-’

‘Not this woman.’

‘Oh, you think you’re an expert on women, do you?’

‘I’m an expert on soldiers, Sevgi. And that’s what Ren was. She was someone’s soldier, the same someone who hired Merrin out of Mars. And whoever that someone was, for whatever reasons, they were getting ready to sell him out. Maybe because he’d served his purpose, maybe because we were getting too close to the truth down in Cuzco. Either way, this’ - he nodded back towards the CSI buzz on the slope above them - ‘All this was a planned outcome. COLIN with its boot on the corpse of the beast, big smiles for the camera, congratulations all round. Fade out to a happy ending.’

‘Doesn’t sound so bad to me,’ she muttered.

‘Really?’ He plumed smoke up at the nanofibre vault. ‘And there I was thinking you were a cop.’

‘Ex-cop. You’re confusing me with Rovayo. You really ought to try and keep the women you fuck separate in your head.’

She took the blunt from him, brusquely. He watched her smoke for a couple of moments in silence. She pretended not to notice.

‘Sevgi,’ he said finally. ‘You can’t tell me you’re happy to walk away, knowing we’ve been played.’

‘Can’t I?’ She met his eyes. Exploded a lungful of smoke at him. ‘You’re wrong, Marsalis. I can walk away from this happy, because the fucked-up psycho who cut Helena Larsen into pieces and ate her is dead. I guess for that, at least, I should thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Yeah. And maybe we don’t know why Merrin came back, and maybe we’ll never know. But I can live with that, just like I lived with more unsolved cases than you’ll ever know when I worked homicide. You don’t always get a clean wrap. Life is messy, and so is crime. Sometimes, you just got to be happy you got the bad guy, and call time on the rest.’

He turned away to look at the sea. ‘Well, that must be a human thing.’

‘Yeah. Must be.’

‘Norton’ll be pleased.’

She rolled her head sideways, blew smoke and nailed him through it with another look. ‘We’re not going to talk about Tom Norton.’

‘Fine. We’re not going to talk about Norton, we’re not going to talk about Ren. We’re not going to talk about anything inconvenient, because you’ve got your monster and that’s all that matters. Christ, no wonder you people are in such a mess.’

Anger ignited behind her eyes.

‘Us people? Fuck you, Marsalis. You know what? Us people are running a more peaceful planet now than the human race has ever fucking seen. There’s prosperity, tolerance, justice-’

‘Not in Florida, that I noticed.’

‘Oh, what do you want? That’s Jesusland. Globally, things are getting better. There’s no fighting in the Middle East-’

‘For the time being.’

‘-no starving in Africa, no war with China-’

‘Only because no one has the guts to take them on.’

‘No. Because we have learnt that taking them on is a losing game. No one wins a war any more. Change is slow, it has to come from within.’

‘Tell that to the black-lab refugees.’

‘Oh, spare me the fucking pseudo-empathy. You could give a shit about some Chinese escapee you never met. I know you, Marsalis. Injustice is personal for guys like you - if it didn’t happen to you or someone you think belongs to you, then it doesn’t touch you at all. You don’t-’

‘It did fucking happen to me!’

The shout ripped loose, floated away in the immensity of the vaulted space. She wondered if the RimSec CSI crew heard it. His hands were on her shoulders, fingers hooked into her flesh, head jutting close, eyes locked into hers. They hadn’t been this close since they fucked, and something deeply buried, some ancestor subroutine in her genes picked up on the proximity and sent the old, confused signals pulsing out.

It was the part of herself she most hated.

She kept the locked stare. Reached up and jabbed the lit ember of the blunt into the back of his hand.

Something detonated in his eyes, inked out just as fast. He unhinged his fingers with a snap. Backed off a fraction at a time. She drove him back with her eyes.

‘Keep your fucking hands off me,’ she hissed.

‘You think-’

His voice was hoarse. He stopped, swallowed and started again.

‘You think I can’t empathise with someone out of the black labs, some gene experiment made flesh? I am them, Sevgi. I mean, what do you think Osprey was? I am a fucking experiment. I grew up in a controlled environment, managed and box-checked by men in fucking suits. I lost-’

He stopped again. This time, his eyes slid away from hers. A faint frown furrowed his brow. For a split second she thought he was going to weep, and something prickled at the base of her own throat in sympathy.

‘Motherfucker,’ he said softly.

She waited, finally had to prompt him. ‘What?’

Marsalis looked at her and his eyes were washed clean of the rage. His voice stayed low.

‘Bambaren,’ he said. ‘Manco fucking Bambaren.’

‘What about him?’

‘He was fucking with me, back at Sacsayhuaman. He thought they took Marisol - my surrogate - away from me when I was fourteen. But that’s Lawman, in Osprey they did it at eleven. Different psych theory.’

‘So?’

‘So he was too close to the detail. It wasn’t just the age, it was the other stuff. He was talking about men in uniforms, debriefing in a steel trailerfab. Osprey’s handlers all wore suits. And we never had any trailers, the whole place was purpose-built and permanent.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s read about it. Seen footage.’

‘That’s not how it sounded, Sevgi. It sounded personal. As if he’d been involved.’ He sighed. ‘I know. Thirteen paranoia, right?’

She hesitated. ‘It’s pretty thin.’

‘Yeah.’ He looked away from her. Seemed to make an effort, she saw his mouth clamp. He met her eyes again. ‘I’m sorry I grabbed you like that. Thought I had that shit locked down.’

‘’Sokay. Just don’t do it again. Ever.’

He took the blunt from her, very gently. It was down to the stub and smouldering unequally from where she’d stabbed his hand with it. He coaxed a little more from it, drew deep.

‘So what’s going to happen now?’ he asked, voice tight with holding down the smoke.

She grimaced. ‘Aftermath, like I said. We’re going to be chasing the detail for months, but they’ll start to fold the case priority away. Someone somewhere’s going to figure out how to knock off some major unlicensed Marstech again, and we’ll get switched to that. File Merrin for a rainy day.’

‘Yeah. What I thought.’

‘Look, let it go, Carl.’ Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand, the same hand she’d scorched. ‘Just let go and walk away. You’re home free. We’ll look at the familia thing, who knows, maybe we’ll get somewhere with it.’

‘You go down there without me, all you’ll get is killed.’ But he was smiling as he said it. ‘You saw what happened last time.’

She flickered the smile back at him. ‘Well, maybe we’ll be a bit less full frontal in our approach.’

He grunted. Held up the dying blunt, querying. She shook her head, and he just held it there between them for a moment or two. Then he shrugged, took one last toke and pitched it out through the cradle forks, down the long slope to the water.

‘You chase that aftermath,’ he said.

‘We will.’

But out beyond the vault of starboard loading, the waves were starting to pale, black to gunmetal, as the early light of a whole new day crept in.

CHAPTER FORTY

Back at the hotel, he opaqued the windows against the unwelcome dawn. Jet-lag and fight ache stalked him through the darkened suite to the bed. He shed his clothes on the floor and stood staring down at them. S(t)igma, the back of the inmate jacket reminded him in cheery orange. Sevgi Ertekin stood in his thoughts and waved - she’d walked him up to the helipad on Bulgakov’s Cat and seen him off. Was still standing there with one arm raised as the Cat dropped away below and behind the autocopter, visible detail blurring out.

He grimaced, tried to shake the memory off.

He ripped the bed open irritably, crawled in and tugged a sheet across his shoulder.

Sleep came and buried him.

The phone.

He rolled awake in the still-darkened room, convinced he’d only just closed his eyes. Steady blue-glow digits at the bedside disputed the impression. 17:09. He’d slept through the day. He held up his wrist, peering stupidly at the watch he’d forgotten to take off, as if a hotel clock could somehow be wrong. The wrist ached from the fumbled blow he’d hit Merrin with. He turned it a little, flexing. Might even be-

Phone. Answer the fucking-

He groped for it, dragged the audio receiver up to his ear.

‘Yeah, what?’

‘Marsalis?’ A voice he should know but, sleep scrambled, didn’t. ‘Is that you?’

‘Who the fuck is this?’

‘Ah, so it is you.’ The name came just ahead of his own belated recognition of the measured tones. ‘Gianfranco di Palma here. Brussels office.’

Carl sat up in bed, frowning.

‘What do you want?’

‘I have just been speaking to an agent Nicholson in New York.’ Di Palma’s perfect, barely accented UN English floated urbanely down the line. ‘I understand that COLIN have no further use for your services, and that they have arranged that all charges against you in the Republic will be dropped forthwith. It seems you will be returning to Europe very shortly.’

‘Yeah? News to me.’

‘Well, I don’t think we need to wait around on formalities. I’ll have a UNGLA shuttle despatched to SFO tonight. If you would care to be at the suborbital terminal around midnight-’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

‘I am sorry?’

South Florida State swirled up into his mind, like dirty water backing up from a blocked drain. A sudden decision gripped him, cheery as the lettering on his S(t)igma jacket.

‘I said you can fuck off, di Palma. Write it down. Fuck. Right. Off. You let me sit in a Jesusland jail for four months and I’d still be there for all the fucking efforts you made to get me out. And you still owe me expenses from fucking January.’ And just like that, out of nowhere he was furious, trembling with the sudden rage. ‘So don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to jump into line just because you finally got your dick out of your own arse. I am not done here. I am very far from done here, and I’ll come home when I’m fucking good and ready.’

There was a stiff pause at the other end of the line.

‘You understand, I assume,’ said di Palma silkily, ‘that you are not authorised to operate outwith UNGLA jurisdiction. Of course, your time is your own to dispose of, but we cannot agree to you having any further professional contact with COLIN or the Rim States Security Corps. In the interests of-’

‘What’s the matter with you, di Palma. Don’t you have a pen there? I told you to fuck off. Want me to spell it?’

‘I strongly advise you not to take this attitude.’

‘Yeah? Well, I strongly advise you to go and get a caustic soda enema. Let’s see which of us takes direction best, shall we.’

He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.

So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?

It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.

They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.

The phone sat in his hand.

Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a pay-rise when you get back.

The phone.

Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favours, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.

Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.

Oh, how very alpha male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.

He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realised suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.

Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.

There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.

You don’t know that.

He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.

You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.

He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.

Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.

He grimaced. Dialled from memory.

Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holo signs that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.

It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.

‘Yeah, Ertekin.’

‘Alcatraz control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?’

‘Patched?’ She frowned. ‘Patched from where?’

‘New York, apparently. A detective Williamson?’

She grappled with memory - saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amidst uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.

‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’

Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. ‘Ms Ertekin?’

‘Speaking.’ A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.

‘Is this a bad time?’

‘No worse than any other. What can I do for you, detective?’

‘It’s more what I can do for you, Ms Ertekin. We have some information you might like.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.’

She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now - they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorised to listen electronically who knew where.

‘That’s very kind of Larry.’ She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amidst menswear, hopped half to a halt and dodged round them. ‘And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?’

‘What I’ve got, Ms Ertekin, is your third shooter for Joaquin Ortiz.’

She nearly stopped again, in clear space. ‘Is he alive?’

‘Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.’ Williamson chuckled. ‘You believe that luck?’

‘Not a local boy then?’

‘No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.’

‘How’d you manage that?’

‘We’re sweating him pretty hard,’ Williamson said casually. ‘Got one of the homicide psych teams on it. Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.’

Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly non-street syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. ‘Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?’

‘Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a back-up man.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray and run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumour and implied Yarashanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano. Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well, he’s a known associate of Atkins.’

‘Okay.’ Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. ‘Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?’

‘Marsalis? The thirteen guy?’ Pause, while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. ‘No. Nothing here outside of we would have brought the whole thing off too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offence.’

‘No offence?’

‘Yeah.’ Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. ‘One of the psych team’s the same colour as me. This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.’

Sevgi grunted. ‘Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?’

‘Yeah, he was pissed about that too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves. Seems he always went by this coffee house he liked on West 97th, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston sicario standby, apparently. Good for city-centre hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic. Anyway, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads up town suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to hundred and eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.’

‘Very pro.’ She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming round a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.

‘Right,’ Williamson agreed. ‘Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.’

‘No.’

‘Yeah.’ The New York detective hesitated again. ‘So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang onto this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that newsflash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.’

The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of co-ordinated effort from RimSec and the Cat’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide - it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.

‘Well, listen, detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favour some day.’

‘No need. Like I said, saw the newsflash. Lot of talk about agency co-operation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to be some too.’

‘I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.’

‘Will do. Hope it helps.’

The New York patch clicked out, took Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.

‘Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.’

Carl shook his head irritably. ‘Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?’

‘I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.’

‘You certain about that?’

‘Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.’

Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to-

‘And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?’

‘Is coincidence,’ said Matthew crisply.

He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. ‘Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.’

‘Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition towards paranoia to contend with as well.’

Carl grimaced. ‘Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that-’

‘Matthew.’

‘Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?’

‘Yes, and evolutionarily selective too.’ The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. ‘But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect that underlying mathematics.’

‘But not when they clash.’ Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. ‘Right?’

‘Not when they clash,’ Matthew agreed. ‘When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.’

‘So Norton’s clean?’

‘Norton is clean.’

Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognised the reflex - seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.

So use it, fuckwit.

‘Does it ever bother you?’ he asked into the phone.

‘Does what bother me, Carl?’

‘This whole thing.’ He gestured as if Matthew could see him. ‘Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.’

‘To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?’

Carl sighed. ‘Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, no offence, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.’

‘My emotional range has been psycho-chemically rebalanced and extended.’

‘Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.’

‘Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?’

Carl thought about that.

‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ he admitted gloomily. ‘No.’

‘So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.’

‘Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.’ Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in catching the datahawk and his hyper-balanced mindset out, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. ‘This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilisation crew.’ For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. ‘I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in eighty-nine, ninety? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?’

‘Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.’

Carl shrugged. ‘Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.’

‘And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.’

‘Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.’

Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stéphane Névant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.

‘Look, Matt, thanks-’

‘Matthew.’

‘Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.’

He hung up. Tossed the phone on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride, and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.

The interior was low-lit and cosy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armoured screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealised female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asia-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.

‘Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?’

He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.

Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.

‘Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,’ he said.

Switched off and careless from jet-lag, long sleep and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique - if you want to call it that, he fumed - mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.

Wundawari’s shipment never made it through MTC in Jakarta, Wundawari herself was now banged up in an Indonesian jail on trumped-up holding charges until some scummy Seattle-based rights lawyer she used could wire across and get her out. The money was gone. Write it off, the Seattle guy advised dryly down the line, what you maybe claw back from the Maritime Transit guys in compensation, you’re going to be paying me in fees. Dougie might have called him on that one, but Wundawari wouldn’t do the time, and both he and Seattle knew it. She was too soft, came from Kuala Lumpur money and a whole creche of spoilt-brat connections down in the Freeport. She’d pay whatever Seattle wanted.

On the street, things were no better. Alcatraz station were coming down hard and heavy all over the fucking place, big-ass RimSec interventions at levels those guys mostly didn’t bother with. He still couldn’t find out why. Some shit about a factory raft bust last night and the fallout, but none of his few bought-and-paid-for touches inside the RimSec machine ranked high enough to know any more than that. More importantly, they were too fucking scared of Alcatraz to risk sniffing around any closer. End result was, he couldn’t move shit anywhere north of Selby or west of the Boulevard, and even in the yards at Hunter Point, he was getting heat he didn’t need. And the border had been sticky for fucking months now. None of the gangs he knew could get more than the odd fence-bunny across, mostly strait-laced white girls out of the Dakotas that took fucking for ever to break in and even then didn’t play too well to popular demand.

Mama was still coughing. Still wouldn’t take her fucking pills.

Now Valdez was lining up in the wake of another too-hard-too-fast fuck-up, two spots floating nice and loose over open pockets, clean back-up angles everywhere, and then the eight ball doubled into the side, one of Valdez’s favourite cheap trick shots, he’d do it with his fucking eyes closed if he wanted. Another fifty bucks. He’d-

But Valdez frowned instead and lifted his chin off the cue. Got up and came round the table to Dougie, eyes narrowed.

‘Hey, pengo mio. You say Elvira wasn’t working tonight?’ He nodded across the gloom to the bar. ‘Because if that ain’t work, then you got a problem.’

So Dougie slanted a glance across the gloom to where Valdez was looking, and like the rest of it wasn’t fucking enough, here’s Elvie on her stool with her back to the bar, elbows down and tits cranked out in that red top he bought her back in May, legs making all kinds of slit-skirt angles on the frame of the stool, and all for this big black guy draped over the next stool and just looking her over like she’s fruit on some Meade Avenue street stall.

Too fucking much.

He hefted the cue up one-handed through his own grip, a half metre down from the tip where it thickened, reversed his hold and carried it low at his side across to the bar. Elvira saw him coming, made that dumb fucking face of hers and stopped gabbing. Dougie let the silence work for him, came on a couple more steps and locked to a halt a metre and half off the black guy’s shoulder.

‘That’s a mistake you’re making, pal,’ he said, breathing hard. Anger slurred through his tone like smeared paint on a cheap logo. ‘See, Elvira here isn’t working tonight. You want some cheap fucking pussy, you’d better come around and see her another fucking day. Got that?’

‘We’re just talking.’ The black guy’s tone was low and reasonable, almost bored. Weird fucking accent as well. He didn’t even look at Dougie. ‘If Elvira’s not working, I guess she’s free to do that, right?’

Dougie felt the weight of the day come down on him like demolition.

‘I don’t think you’re paying attention,’ he told the guy tightly.

And then the black guy did look at him, a sudden switch so his eyes collected Dougie’s stare like third base snapping up a low ball out at Monster Park.

‘No, I am,’ he said.

It stopped Dougie dead in his tracks, knocked him back and kept the cue at his side, because at some level he couldn’t quite nail he knew this guy was actively looking for what came next. It felt like a skid, like ice under his wheels when he least expected it. He knew he had to keep going. No one much in the place tonight but Valdez was watching, so was the barkeep and a couple of others. Whatever went down, street-feed would have it out to everyone by morning, he had to fuck this guy up. But the ground under his feet had shifted, was no longer safe, he couldn’t fucking read this guy or what he’d do.

He tightened his grip on the cue.

‘Try to hit me with that thing,’ said the black man softly, ‘I will kill you.’

Dougie’s heart kicked in his chest. He felt the rage flicker, over-stoked, held too long, suddenly unreliable. Tiny, rain-drip voice of caution in the gap. He drew breath, forced the knowledge down.

‘Door’s over there,’ he said. ‘Just walk the fuck away.’

‘My feet are tired.’

So Dougie just swung that fucking cue like he’d always known deep down he’d have to. Lips peeled back off a snarl and the shaky lift of the held-too-long adrenal surge.

Situation like that, what else was he going fucking do?

Even as the fight bloomed, Carl could feel the small seep of disappointment at the back of it all. This swaggering low-grade gangster in front of him, a little more spine than most pimps maybe, but in the end no competition, no real threat.

Yeah, like you expected anything else out here, black-walled bunker bar in a derelict neighbourhood on the edge of an all but fully automated navy yard. Not like he hadn’t discussed it carefully enough with the autocab, walked the deserted streets for long enough looking. Face it, soak, this is exactly what you’ve been prowling for. This is what you wanted. Enjoy.

The fight was so mapped out in his head, it was almost preordained. He already had his weight braced off the stool he’d been using, some in the forearm where he leant on the bar, more in his legs than he showed. He saw the intention tremor down the other guy’s arm, grabbed a leg of the stool and yanked the whole thing savagely upward. The leg ends hit and gouged, face and chest. Swing momentum on the seat end hooked the thing round and blocked out the cue completely - the strike never made it above waist height. He let go, stepped in as the pimp reeled back, hand up to the rip in his face. The stool tumbled away. Carl threw a long chop, hard as he could make it, into the unguarded side of the throat. The pimp hit the floor, dead as far as he could tell. Elvira shrieked.

At the pool table, the pimp’s shaven-headed friend stood shocked and motionless, cue held defensively across his body in both hands. Carl stalked forward a couple of steps, proximity sense peeled for the rest of the room.

‘Well?’ he rasped.

It was half a dozen metres at most, if the skinhead had a gun he wasn’t going to have time to clear it before Carl was on him. Carl saw in his face that he knew it.

Peripheral vision, left. The barkeep, fumbling for something, phone or weapon. Carl threw out an arm, finger raised.

‘Don’t.’

On the floor, the pimp moaned and shifted. Carl checked every face in the room, calibrated probable responses, then kicked the downed man in the head. The moaning stopped.

‘What’s his name?’ he asked of the room.

‘Uh, it’s Dougie.’ The barkeep. ‘Dougie Kwang.’

‘Right. Well anyone here who’s a big friend of Dougie Kwang’s, maybe wants to stay and discuss this with me, you can. Anyone else had better leave.’

Hasty shuffle of feet, graunch of chair legs jammed back in a hurry. The thin crowd, scrabbling to leave. The door swung open for them, he felt the cold it let in touch the back of his neck. The barkeep snatched the opportunity, went too. Left him with Elvira who’d started grubbing about on the floor next to Dougie in tears, and the skinhead, who Carl guessed just didn’t trust getting safe passage to the door. He gave him a cold smile.

‘You really want to make something of this?’

‘No, he doesn’t. Look at his face. Stop being an asshole and let him go.’

Control and the mesh stopped him whipping round at the voice, the cool amusement and the iron certainty beneath. He already knew from the tone that there was a gun pointing at him. That he wasn’t on the floor next to Dougie, shot dead or dying, was the only part that didn’t make sense.

He shelved the wonder, stepped aside with ironic courtesy and gestured the skinhead to pass him. Momentary flashback to the chapel in South Florida State, the sneering white supremacist walking past him up the aisle. Suddenly, he was sick of it all, the cheap postures and moves, the use of stares, the whole fucking mechanistic predictability of the man-dance.

‘Go on,’ he said flatly. ‘Looks like you get a free pass. Better take Elvira there with you.’

He watched Dougie Kwang’s friend drop the pool cue he was clutching and come forward a hesitant step at a time. He couldn’t work out what was going on either. His eyes flickered from Carl to whoever the new arrival was and back. A numb failure to catch up was stamped across his face like a bootprint. He knelt beside the off-duty whore and tried to manhandle her to her feet. She wriggled and wept, refused to get up, hands still plastered on Dougie’s motionless form, long dark-curling hair shrouding his eyes-wide, frozen face. She keened and sobbed, half comprehensible fragments, some Sino-Spanish street mix Carl couldn’t follow well.

Enjoying our handiwork here, are we?

He wondered momentarily if, when the time came, there’d be a woman, any woman, to weep like this for him.

‘We don’t have all night,’ said the voice behind him.

Carl turned slowly, fear of the bullet prickling at the base of his neck. Time to see what the fuck had gone wrong.

Right. Like you don’t already know.

There was a tall man at the door.

A couple of others too, neither of them small, but it was this one who drew attention, the way you vectored in on colour in a drab landscape. Carl’s mesh-sharpened senses fixed on the heavy silver revolver in the raised and black-gloved hand, the bizarre, consciously antiquated statement it made, but it wasn’t that. Wasn’t the oily, slicked-back dark hair or the slight sheen on the tanned and creased white features, tell-tale marks of cell-fix facial and hair gel for an assassin who had no intention of leaving genetic trace material at the scene of his crime. Carl saw all this and set it aside for what really mattered.

It was the way the man stood, the way he looked into the room as if it was a stage set purely for his benefit. It was the way his dark clothes were wrapped on his body as if blown there by a storm, as if he didn’t much care whether he wore them or not. The way his tanned face had some vague familiarity to it, some sense that you must have met this person before somewhere, and that he had meant something to you back then.

Thirteen.

Had to be. Paranoia confirmed. Merrin’s back office crew, come for payback. It wasn’t over.

Beside Carl, the pool player spoke urgently to Elvira, finally succeeded in getting her to her feet, and shepherded her past Carl with an arm round her shaking shoulders. The same dazed mix of shock and incomprehension on his face as before. Carl nodded him past, then turned slowly to watch him half carry Elvira to the door. The new arrivals stood aside to let the couple out, and one of them closed the door firmly afterwards. All the time, the silver gun never shifted from its focus.

Carl gave its owner a sardonic smile and moved a few casual steps forward. The other man watched him come closer, but he didn’t move or make any objection. Carl breathed. He wasn’t going to get shot just yet, it appeared.

But it’s coming.

He took the bright flicker of fear, broke it and folded it away. The mesh, and a sustained will to do damage pulsed brighter.

Push it, see how far it goes.

It went almost to touching distance.

The tall man let him come on that far, even gave him a gentle, encouraging smile, like an indulgent adult watching a child in his charge do something daring. Close enough that Carl’s assessment of the situation began to flake apart, to leave him abruptly uncertain of how to play this. But then, a couple of metres off the muzzle of the revolver, the tall man’s smile shifted on his face, never quite left it, settled into something hard and careful.

‘That’ll do,’ he said softly. ‘I’m not that careless.’

Carl nodded. ‘You don’t look it. Do I know you from somewhere?’ ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘You can call me Onbekend.’

‘Marsalis.’

‘Yes, I know.’ The tall man nodded towards a nearby table. ‘Sit down. We’ve got a little time.’

So. Cool gust of confirmation down the back of his neck, down the muscles of his forearms.

‘You sit down. I’m fine right here.’

The revolver’s hammer clicked back. ‘Sit down or I’ll kill you.’

Carl looked in the eyes and saw no space there, not even for the snappy one-liner - looks like you’re going to do that anyway. This man would put him down right here and now. He shrugged and stepped across to the table, lowered himself into one of the abandoned chairs. It was still warm from its previous occupant. He leaned back and set his feet apart, as far off the table edge as he thought he could get away with. Onbekend glanced at one of his shadows, nodded at the door. The man slipped quietly outside.

The remaining back-up stood immobile, fixed Carl with a cold stare and folded his arms. Onbekend checked him with another glance and then moved across and seated himself opposite Carl at the table.

‘You’re the lottery guy, aren’t you?’ he said.

Carl sighed. It wasn’t entirely faked. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

‘The one who woke up halfway home?’

‘Yeah. You looking for an autograph?’

He got a thin smile. ‘I’m curious. What was it like, being stuck out there all that time, waiting?’

‘It was a riot. You should try it some time.’

Onbekend didn’t react any more than a stone. The sense of familiarity grew - Carl was certain it was specific. He knew this face, or one very like it, from somewhere.

‘Did you feel abandoned? Like when you were fourteen all over again?’

Fourteen?

Carl grinned. The tiny piece of advantage felt adrenal in his veins. He cocked his head, elaborately casual.

‘So you were a Lawman, huh? Fortress America’s final set of southern fried chickens coming home to roost.’

Just there, just as tiny, but there nonetheless, there in the corners of Onbekend’s eyes. Loss of poise, siphoned sip of anger. For just that moment, Carl had him backed up.

‘You think you know me? You don’t fucking know me, my friend.’

‘I’m not your fucking friend either,’ Carl told him mildly. ‘So, there you go. We all make these mistakes. What do you want from me, exactly?’

For a moment so brief it was gone before he even registered it, Carl thought he was dead. The barrel of the revolver didn’t shift, but it seemed to glimmer with intent in the lower field of his vision. Onbekend’s mouth smeared a little tighter, his eyes hated a little more.

‘You could start by telling me how it feels to hunt down other variant thirteens for the cudlips at the UN.’

‘Remunerative.’ Carl stared blandly back into the other thirteen’s narrowed eyes. One of them was going to die in this bar. ‘It feels remunerative. What are you doing for a living these days?’

‘Surviving.’

‘Oh.’ He nodded, mock-understanding. ‘Playing the outlaw, are we?’

‘I’m not working for the cudlips, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Sure, you are.’ Carl yawned - sudden, tension-driven demand for oxygen, out of nowhere, but it played so fucking well he could have crowed. ‘We’re all working for the cudlips, one way or another.’

Onbekend set his jaw. Tipped his head a little, like a wolf or a dog listening for something faint.

‘You talk very easily about other men’s compromises. Like I said, you don’t fucking know me at all.’

‘I know you bought food today. I know you travelled here in some kind of manufactured vehicle, on city streets built and paid for in some shape or form by the local citizenry. I know you’re holding a gun you didn’t build from the raw metal up in your spare time.’

‘This?’ Onbekend raised the gun slightly, took the muzzle fractionally out of line. He seemed amused. Carl forced himself not to tense, not to watch the wavering weapon. ‘I took this gun from a man I killed.’

‘Oh, well there’s a sustainable model of exchange. Did you kill the guy who served you breakfast this morning as well, so you wouldn’t have to pay for that either? Going to murder the guy who sold or rented you your transport option, and the guy who runs the place you sleep tonight? Got plans for the people who employ them too, the ones who run the means of production, the managers and the owners, and the people who sell for them and the people who buy from them?’ Carl leaned forward, grinning hard against the cool proximity of death. It felt like biting down. ‘Don’t you fucking get it? They’re all around us, the cudlips. You can’t escape them. You can’t cut loose of them. Every time you consume, you’re working for them. Every time you travel. On Mars, every time you fucking breathe you’re part of it.’

‘Well.’ Onbekend put together another small smile of his own. ‘You’ve learnt your lesson well. But I guess if you whip a dog often enough, it always will.’

‘Oh, please. You know what? You want to pretend there’s some other way? You want to escape into some mythical pre-virilicide golden age - go live in Jesusland, where they still believe in that shit. I was there last week, they love guys like us. They’d burn us both at the stake as soon as look at us. Don’t you understand? There is no place for what we are any more.’ Sutherland’s words seemed to rise in him, Sutherland’s quiet, amused, bass timbre voice like thunder, like strength. ‘They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. They won, Onbekend, and you want to know why? They won because it worked. Group co-operation and bowing down to some thug with a beard worked better than standing alone as a thirteen was ever going to. They ran us ragged, Onbekend, with their mobs and leaders and their fucking strength in numbers. They hunted us down, they exterminated us, and they got the future as a prize. And now here we are, standing in the roof garden of the cudlip success story, and you’re telling me no, no, you didn’t take the elevator or the stairs, you just fucking flew up here all on your own, all with your own two fucking wings. You are full of shit.’

Onbekend leaned forward, mirroring, eyes flaring. It was instinctive, anger driven. The revolver shifted fractionally in his hand, to allow the shift in posture. Angled minutely to one side. Carl saw, and held down the surge of the mesh. Not yet, not yet. He met the other man’s eyes, saw his own death there and didn’t much care. There was a rage rising in him he barely understood. The words kept him alive, warmed him as long as he could spit them out.

‘They built us, Onbekend, they fucking built us. They brought us back from the fucking dead for the one thing we’re good at. Violence. Slaughter. You, me.’ He gestured, slashing, open-handed disgust. ‘All of us, every fucking one. We’re dinosaurs. Monsters summoned up from the deep dark violent past to safeguard the bright lights and shopping privileges of western civilisation. And we did it for them, just like they wanted. You want to talk about cudlips, how they bow and fold to authority, how they let the group dictate? Tell me how we were different. Project fucking Lawman? What does that sound like to you?’

‘Yeah, because they fucking trained us.’ For the first time, Onbekend’s voice rose almost to a shout, was almost pain. He flattened it again, instantly, got it down to a cold, even-tempered anger. ‘They locked us up from fucking childhood, Marsalis. Beat us down with the conditioning. You know that, Osprey must have been the same. How were we supposed to-’

‘We did, as we, were told!’ Carl spaced his words, leaned on them like crowbars going into brickwork. ‘Just like them, just like the cudlips. We failed, just like we failed twenty thousand years ago.’

‘That was then,’ Onbekend snapped. ‘And this is now. And some of us aren’t on that path any more.’

‘Oh, don’t make me fucking laugh. I already told you, everything about you is part of the cudlip world. If you can’t come to some kind of accommodation with that, you might as well fucking shoot yourself-’

A ghost grin came up across Onbekend’s face. ‘It was your suicide I was sent to arrange, Marsalis. Not mine.’

‘Sent?’ Carl jeered it, leered across the scant space between them. ‘Sent? Oh, I rest my fucking case.’

‘Thirteens have had an unfortunate propensity for death by their own hand.’ The other man’s voice came out raised, words rushed, trampling at Carl’s scorn, trying to drive home a winning point he hadn’t embedded quite as well as he’d hoped. ‘Violent suicide, in the tracts and reservations. And a thirteen carrying as much guilt as you-’

‘Guilt? Give me a fucking break. Now you’re talking just like them. Variant thirteen doesn’t do guilt, that’s a cudlip thing.’

‘Yes, all the ones you’ve hunted down, murdered or taken back to a living death in the tracts.’ But Onbekend was calmer now, voice dropping back to even. ‘It stands to reason you couldn’t live with it for ever.’

‘Try me.’

A bleak smile. ‘Happily, I don’t have to. And as for the suicide, you’ve made it easy for me.’

‘Really?’ Carl looked elaborately around him. ‘This doesn’t look much like a suicide scene to me.’

But under the drawl, he already saw the angle and something very like panic started to ice through him. He’d played all his cards, and Onbekend just hadn’t loosened enough. The other thirteen was watching him minutely again, back to the cold control he’d walked in with. Awareness of the place they were in congealed around him - ancient grimy fittings, the long arm of the bartop, scars and spill stains gleaming in the low light and the piled-up glassware and bottles behind. The worn pool tables in their puddles of light from the overheads. Dougie Kwang face up on the floor, head rolled to one side, eyes staring open across the room at him. Waiting for company, for someone to join him down there in the dust and sticky stains.

‘Suicide would be hard to fake here,’ Onbekend agreed. ‘Would have been harder to fake wherever we did it. But you’ve been kind enough to let your drives get the better of you and so here we are, a mindless bar brawl in a low-grade neighbourhood with low-grade criminals to match, and it seems Carl Marsalis just miscalled the odds. Pretty fucking stupid way to die, but hey.’ A shrug. Onbekend’s voice tinged suddenly with contempt. ‘They’ll believe it of you. You’ve given them no reason not to.’

The oblique accusation stung. In the back of his head, Sutherland concurred. If we are ruled by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth.

Ertekin might not buy it.

Yeah, but she might. You don’t always get a clean wrap, Marsalis. Remember that? Life is messy, and so is crime.

Kwang seemed to wink at him from the floor.

Could be this’ll be just messy enough for her, soak.

As if he didn’t have enough with his own thoughts beating him up, Onbekend was still going strong.

‘They’ll believe you were too stupid to beat your own programming, ’ he said matter-of-factly, as if he’d been there for Sutherland’s musings too. ‘Because you are. They’ll believe you went looking for trouble, because you did exactly that, and they’ll believe you found a little too much of it down here to handle alone. So they’ll do a little light investigating, they’ll talk to some people, and in the end they’ll decide you got shot at close range with a nondescript gun that’ll never be found, in the hand of some nameless street thug who’ll also never be found, and they’ll walk away, Marsalis, they’ll walk away because it’ll fit right in with this idiocy you’ve spontaneously generated for us. I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.’

Carl gestured. ‘That’s hardly a nondescript gun.’

‘This?’ Onbekend lifted the revolver again, weighed it in his hand. ‘This is-’

Now.

It wasn’t much - the fractionally lowered reflexive response in the other man, neurochemical sparks lulled and damped down by Carl’s previous open-handed gestures and the descending calm after all the shouting. Then the fractional shift of the revolver’s muzzle, the few degrees off and the brief lack of tension on the trigger. Then Onbekend’s standard issue thirteen sense of superiority, the curious need he seemed to have to lecture. It wasn’t much.

Not much at all.

Carl exploded out of the chair, hands to the table edge, flipping it up and over. Onbekend got one shot off, wide, and then he was staggering back, trying to get out of the chair and on his feet. The shadow by the door yelled and moved. Carl was across the empty space where the table had been, into Onbekend, palm heel and hooking elbow, turning, try for the gun, lock in close, too close to shoot at. He had the other thirteen’s arm in both hands now, twisted the revolver up and round, looking for the man by the door. Tried for the trigger. Onbekend got his finger out, blocked the attempt, but it didn’t matter. The other man yelled again, dodged away from the slug he thought was coming. The door flew inward on its hinges, the other half of Onbekend’s human back-up burst into the room. Carl yanked at the revolver, couldn’t get it free. The new arrival didn’t make the same mistake as his companion. He stepped in, grinning.

‘Just hold him there, Onbee.’

Desperate, Carl hacked sideways with one foot, tried to get the fight on the ground and jar the revolver out of Onbekend’s stubborn grip. The other thirteen locked ankles with him, stood firm, and Carl tumbled instead, pulled off balance by his own weight and a tanindo move that hadn’t worked. Onbekend timed it just right, stepped wide and shrugged him off like a heavy backpack. He went down, clutching for the revolver, didn’t get it. Onbekend kicked him in the groin. He convulsed around the blow, tried frantically to roll, to get up-

Onbekend levelled the revolver.

The world seemed to stop, to lean in and watch.

In the small unreal stillness, he knew the impact before it came, and the knowledge was terrifying because it felt like freedom. He felt himself open to it, like spreading wings, like snarling. His eyes locked with Onbekend’s. He grinned and spat out a final defiance.

‘You sad, deluded little fuck.’

And then the gunblasts, the final violence through the quiet, again - again - again, like the repeated slamming of a door in a storm.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The Marstech Beretta had a burst function that allowed three shots for every trigger pull. Sevgi Ertekin came through the door with it enabled, gun raised and cupped in both hands, and she squeezed the trigger twice for each figure in her sights. No time for niceties, she’d seen through the window what was about to go down. The expansion slugs made a flat, undramatic crackling sound as they launched, but they tore down her targets like cardboard.

Bodies jerked and hurled aside. Two down.

The third one was turning, tiger swift, the first burst missed him altogether. A big, heavy silver revolver tracking round in his hand. She squeezed again and he flipped over backwards like a circus trick.

Marsalis flopped about on the ground, struggled to sit up. She couldn’t see if he was hit. She advanced into the room, gun swinging to cover angles in approved fashion. Peering down at the men she’d just hit, no, wait-

-she took in staring eyes and crumpled, awkward postures, one of them slumped almost comically in the arms of a chair, legs slid out from under him, one on the floor in a sprawl of limbs like some tantrum-prone child’s doll-

-the men she’d just killed. The Marstech gun and its load, unequivocal in its sentencing as a Jesusland judge.

The third one hit her from the side. Flash glimpse of a bloodied face, distorted with rage. She hit the floor, arms splayed back to break the fall, lost the fucking Beretta with the impact. For a moment, the third man lurched above her, growling through lips skinned back off his teeth, empty hands crooked like talons. The look in the eyes was savage, stripped of anything human. She felt the terror thrust up like wings in her stomach and chest.

He saw the fallen gun. Stepped past her to get it.

‘Onbekend!’

Her attacker twisted around, bent halfway over to the Beretta, saw the same as her - Carl Marsalis, propped up off the floor with the big revolver in his hand.

He wheeled about and the shot went wide. Deep bellow of the heavy calibre across the room. Marsalis snarled something, swung and fired again. The door swung shut on the other man.

Sevgi grabbed up her gun.

‘You okay?’

Grim nod. He was getting unsteadily to his feet. She gave him a tight grin and went to the door. Pushed it open a crack and peered out. The teardrop she’d taxi-trailed from the hotel was still there on the other side of the deserted, dilapidated street. The injured third man fumbled at its door, got it open. No time. She ran through and took up her firing stance again on the sidewalk. A thousand memories from the streets and back alleys of Queens and Manhattan, eleven years of pursuits and arrests - it pulsed through her, anchored her, steadied her hands.

‘Police officer! Put your hands on your head, get down on the ground!’

He seemed to kneel at the opened door of the car. She trod closer.

‘I said, get your hands-’

He spun, yanked a weapon clear from somewhere. Came up firing. She shot back. Clutch of three - saw him punched back on the teardrop’s high sheen flank, but knew at the same time she’d gone too high. Felt something kick her in the left shoulder, staggered with it and fell back against the wall of the bar. One leg shot out from under her, she flailed not to go all the way down. She braced herself on the wall, saw him reel off the car, leave smears of blood on the shiny bodywork of the teardrop, stagger and collapse inside the vehicle. She fought to get upright again, watched him lean out to haul the door closed after him, knew she was going to be too late. She threw up the Beretta one handed and snapped off a shot. The three-slug burst was too powerful to hold down, the bullets pinged off the teardrop, nowhere near. The door hinged and snapped shut with a clunk she heard right across the street. The engine whined into instant life. She stumbled forward, tried to straighten up, tried against the numbness in her shoulder to get a clean bead on the teardrop as it took off.

Three times, she came down on the trigger. Nine shots, solid pulsing kick each time into the wounded shoulder from the two-handed firing stance she held. The teardrop slewed side to side, then straightened up, reached a corner and took it at speed, disappeared from view on a screech of abused tyres. She let her arms drop, blew out a disgusted breath, and just stood there for a moment.

‘Fuck it,’ she said finally. Her voice sounded loud in the suddenly silent street. ‘Two out of three, anyone got a problem with that?’

Apparently no one did.

She walked back to the bar, pushed open the door and leaned there in the doorway, surveying the mess. Marsalis had got himself upright in the midst of it, had the revolver in his hand. He jolted as she came in, then just stood there, looking at her. A faint smile twitched at her lips.

‘I take it there’s no one back there in the restroom.’

‘You take it right.’

‘Good. I’m tired.’ She put the Beretta away in its shoulder holster, wincing a little at the pain the movement caused her.

‘You okay?’

She looked down at her left shoulder, where the slug had torn through. Blood leaked slowly down the arm of her ruined jacket. The numbness was fading out now to a solid, thumping ache. She flexed her left hand, lifted it and grimaced a little at the pain.

‘Yeah, he tagged me. Flesh wound, I’ll live.’

‘You want me to take a look at it?’

‘No, I don’t fucking want you to take a look at it.’ She hesitated, gestured what might have been apology. Her voice softened. ‘RimSec are on their way. It’ll wait.’

‘I heard the car. Did he get away?’

She grimaced. ‘Yeah. Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.’

‘Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers you know.’

And then the breath seemed to come out of Marsalis as if he’d been punctured. He went to the bar, got behind it and laid the revolver carefully down on the scarred wood.

‘Thank Christ that’s over,’ he said feelingly. ‘You want a drink.’

‘No, I don’t want a fucking drink. He got away.’

Marsalis turned to survey the piled assortment of bottles behind him. His eyes found her in the mirror.

‘Yeah, but look on the bright side. We’re neither of us dead, which is a big fucking improvement on what I was expecting ten minutes ago.’

She shivered a little. Shook it off. Marsalis picked out a bottle from the multitude, and a couple of shot glasses from below the bar. He set the glasses up on the bartop and drizzled amber-coloured liquor into them.

‘Look, humour me. Least I owe you for saving my life back there is a couple of stolen whiskies. And you look like you could use them.’

‘Oh, hey, thanks a lot. I save your fucking life, you tell me I look like shit?’

He made a wobbling plane of his hand, tilted it back and forth. ‘Bit pale, let’s say.’

‘Fuck you.’ She picked up the glass.

He matched her, clinked the glasses together very gently. Said very quietly, ‘I owe you, Sevgi.’

She sipped and swallowed. ‘Call it quits for the skaters. You don’t owe me a thing.’

‘Oh, but I do. Those guys in New York were trying to kill me as well as you, that was self-defence. This is different. Cheers.’

They both drained their glasses. Sevgi leaned on the bar opposite him and felt the warmth work its way down into her belly. He lifted the bottle, querying. She shook her head.

‘Like I said, RimSec should be here any minute,’ she said. ‘I called them back around the time your friends made their entrance. Would have stormed in a little earlier but I was hoping for some back-up.’

‘Well.’ He looked at his hands and she saw they were trembling a little. It did something to the pit of her stomach to see that. He looked up again, grinned. ‘Pretty good timing anyway. How the hell did you wind up here?’

‘I saw you walk out the hotel. I was just arriving.’ She nodded at the corpses on the floor between them. ‘Saw the teardrop with these guys pull out and go after your taxi. Took me a few seconds to flag one down myself. Then when I got down here, I saw them sit outside the bar and wait. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, what you’d be doing all the way out of town like this, if these guys were with you or not. Only called it in when I heard shots and they headed on over. Which reminds me, what the fuck were you doing down here?’

He looked away from her, into a corner. ‘Just looking for a fight.’

‘Yeah? Looks like you found a good one.’

He said nothing.

‘So who were they?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You called him something.’ A sudden, cop sharpness spiked in her mind, ruined the moment with its objections. ‘Back when he went for the gun. I heard you. On-something.’

‘Onbekend, yeah. It’s his name. He introduced himself, while he was getting ready to kill me.’ Marsalis frowned to himself. ‘He was a thirteen.’

‘He told you that?’

‘It came up in the conversation, yeah.’

She shivered again. ‘Bit of a coincidence.’

‘Isn’t it. Speaking of which, what were you doing back at the hotel watching me?’

‘Oh, yeah. That.’ She nodded, let the satisfaction of being right warm her into a faint smile of her own. ‘Came to tell you. NYPD tracked down the third skater and brought him in. He says their target was Ortiz all along. Not you.’

Marsalis blinked. ‘Ortiz?’

‘Yeah. Seems you and me just got caught in the crossfire. Sort of puts Norton in the clear, doesn’t it. Paranoia aside, I mean.’

‘Are you sure about this? I mean, did NYPD check if-’

‘Marsalis, just fucking drop it.’ Her weariness seemed to be building. Or maybe the whisky had been a bad idea. Either way, her eyes were starting to ache. ‘Better yet, just think about apologising, if you know how that’s done. You were fucking wrong. End of fucking story.’

‘Don’t gloat, Ertekin. It’s not attractive, remember.’

And she had to laugh then, even through the crushing weight of the tiredness. In the distance, she heard a RimSec siren approaching.

‘And I’m not looking to get laid,’ she said.

‘Yeah, you are.’

She chuckled. ‘No, I’m fucking not.’

‘You are.’

‘Am fucking not, you-’

She coughed hard, caught off guard by the abrupt violence of it. Shook her head and found her eyes flooded with sudden tears. She heard Marsalis produce a chuckle of his own.

‘Well, maybe not then. I wouldn’t want to-’

Another shiver ripped through her, stronger. In the wake of the coughing, her head was suddenly aching. She frowned and put a hand to the side of her brow.

‘Sevgi?’

She looked up, gave him a puzzled smile. The shivering was still there, she hadn’t shaken it at all. The siren was louder now, but it seemed to get stuck inside her head and the noise it made there scraped. ‘I don’t feel too good.’

His face went mask-like with shock.

‘What did he shoot you with, Sevgi?’

‘I don’t-’

‘Did you see the gun he shot you with?’ He was round the bar, at her side as she shook her head sleepily.

‘No. He got away. Like I said.’

He turned her, put his hands on either side of her face. His voice was tight and urgent. ‘Listen to me, Sevgi. You have to stay awake. You’re going to start feeling very tired in the next-’

‘Going to?’ She giggled. ‘Fuck, Marsalis, I could sleep for a month right here on this fucking floor.’

‘No, you stay awake.’ He shook her head. ‘Listen, they’re coming, they’ll be here. We’ll get you to the hospital. Just don’t fucking flake on me.’

‘What are you talking about? I’m not going to-’

She stopped because she saw, noticed groggily, that his eyes were tear-sheened like her own. She frowned, and the skin on her face felt hot and thick and stiff, she had to force expression into it like pushing a hand into a tight, new glove. She made a small, amused sound.

‘Hey, Marsalis,’ she slurred, trying not to. ‘What’s the matter? You feeling bad as well?’

The RimSec medical team took her out in a stretcher, got her in the helicopter. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. One minute Marsalis was cradling her in the corpse-strewn shithole bar, the next they were out in the chilly air and she was looking straight up at the shrouded stars. Awareness was a flapping cloth behind her eyes, there then gone, gone then back again. She tried to crane her neck and see what was going on around her, but it was all a blur of shouts and lights and hurrying busy figures. The clatter of the helicopter rotors just added to what was now a splitting headache.

‘Sevgi?’

Oh, Marsalis. There he was.

‘It’s okay, sir. We’ll take it from here.’

‘You tell them it’s a Haag slug.’ She couldn’t work out why he was shouting, unless it was the racket of the rotor blades. Nothing seemed to connect up the way it should. She thought maybe she’d lost a lot of blood, after all. ‘You tell them they’ve got to get the smartest anti-virals they have into her, right now.’

‘We know that, sir. We’ve called ahead.’

She squinted in the glare from the helicopter’s landing lights. It hurt to do. She just about made out Marsalis’s bulk. He had one of the paramedics by the shoulders, was shaking him.

‘Don’t you fucking let her die,’ he was yelling. ‘I will kill you and everyone you care for, if you let her die.’

Scuffling. The helicopter shifted about, lifted and wheeled away. Studded lights all over the hills of the city, the rise and fall of it, the tilting horizon. As if she wasn’t fucking dizzy enough already.

And she seemed to have been hanging on for ever. Not just this shit, whatever it was, the whole Horkan’s Pride case. The whole fucking thing with Marsalis, the wrecked attempt to make something of it. The repeated calls to her father, the stilted, carefully polite conversations and the barrier she could no longer break through. The memories of Ethan, the battle for custody and re-implantation of Murat-to-be, the serried ranks of lawyers and their fucking waiting rooms. The struggle to hold onto faith, to go back to the mosque and find whatever it was that welled up out of Rabiah’s poetry and Nazli Vapour’s writing, and Meltem’s kindly smiling patience. The search for reasons to go on that didn’t come in bottles or foil wafers.

It marched through her mind in tawdry procession, and she was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the effort. Better to just watch the sway and twinkle of the city lights below, go where the ride was taking her, listen to the motors hammering out their white noise refrain, like lying next to a waterfall that smelled ever so slightly of oil and hot metal. The tilting night sky, sense of the sea, flat and black beyond. Not so bad, when you thought about it, not really. Not so hard.

She gave up holding on not long after that, just let go and slid away down the gradient of her own immense tiredness.

PART V

HOME TO ROOST

‘The problems we address here are general to humanity. No amount of privileged withdrawal, segregation or hierarchical exclusion will serve to insulate any of us from a process of fallout that has already begun. If we are arrogant, if we fail to acknowledge this generality and to act on it while there is still time - then the price that we pay for our failure will be horrific, and it will be levied on us all.’

Jacobsen Report August 2091

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing colour into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of grey towards a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the black man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse to human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical centre knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anaesthetic - the slow, saw-toothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.

Out on Highway 101, the occasional brushing sound of night-time traffic was building to a steady background murmur. Birdsong made self-important, twittering aural counterpoint, like handfuls of brightly coloured pebbles tossed continually onto a broad grey conveyor belt. Human voices splashed between with increasing strength and frequency, feet crunched in gravel like a grave being dug. Day stormed the walls Carl had built around himself in the cold hours, smashed and battered down the simplicity of his vigil with human detail. He looked up out of the wreckage with a quiet and implacable hatred for everything he could see and hear.

‘Happy now?’

Norton stood in front of him, not in reach. He’d slept in his clothes somewhere, even the Marstech jeans were creased.

He seemed to be genuinely waiting for an answer.

‘No. You?’

There was a stone bench on the other side of the path, twin to the one Carl was using. Norton lowered himself onto it.

‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ he said woodenly. ‘I’m going to have you sent back to South Florida State. I’m going to have you sent to Cimarron or Tanana for the rest of your fucking life.’

By the look of him, he’d been crying. Carl felt a brief stab of envy.

‘How is she?’ he asked.

‘You’re joking, of course. You fuck.’

The mesh pounded up out of his desolation. He lifted a shaky, loose fingered hand, pointed it. ‘Don’t push me, Norton. I could do with killing something right now, and it might as well be you.’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’ Norton stared down at his own hands, as if assessing their suitability for the task. ‘But that isn’t going to help Sevgi.’

‘Nothing’s going to help Sevgi, you fucking prick!’ There was a brutal pleasure somewhere in the snapped words, like biting down on a mouth ulcer until it split and bled. ‘Didn’t they tell you? It’s a Haag slug.’

‘Yes, they told me. They also tell me Stanford has the best immune systems repair clinic on the West Coast. Cutting-edge techniques.’

‘It won’t matter. It’s Falwell. Nothing short of death stops that motherfucker.’

‘That’s right, give up why don’t you? Very fucking British.’

Carl stared at him for a couple of seconds, made a disgusted spitting noise and looked away. A young woman went by pushing a bike. The small black backpack she wore had a smiley face pinned to it, winking a merciless yellow in the fresh morning light. Whatever you are, a tinselly patch above the badge suggested brightly, be a good one.

‘Norton,’ he said quietly. ‘How is she?’

The COLIN executive shook his head. ‘They’ve stabilised her. That’s all I know. They’ve got an n-djinn mapping the viral shift.’

Carl nodded. Sat in silence.

Finally, Norton asked him, ‘How long has she got?’

‘I don’t know.’ Carl drew breath. Let it out by shuddering increments. ‘Not long.’

More quiet. More people went past, talking intimate irrelevancies. Living their lives.

‘Marsalis, how the fuck did this guy get hold of a Haag gun in the first place?’ There was a high, desperate note in Norton’s voice now, like a child protesting an unfair punishment. ‘They’re illegal everywhere I know, incredibly expensive to get hold of on the black market. Lethally dangerous in the wrong hands. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred people on the planet with a Haag carry permit.’

‘Yeah. For anyone with major male tendency, you just described the perfect object of desire.’ Carl drew on the collateral detail like dying embers in a fire, huddling to the warmth and distraction it offered. ‘Haag gun’s infinitely attractive to anyone even remotely enamoured of weaponry. Guy I knew in Texas once offered me half a million dollars for mine. Cash in a suitcase.’

‘Okay, look.’ The COLIN exec rubbed hands over his face. Dragged his head up through his fingers. ‘Say this guy, this Onbekend, he somehow gets hold of a Haag gun because it makes his dick hard. He carries it into a situation where he runs the risk of arrest or a shoot-out with RimSec, and just before the action starts, he leaves the damn thing in the car? There’s no sense in that.’

‘Yes, there is.’ He’d had the whole night to think it through, sitting in a chair outside the intensive care unit and fitting together the irreversible march of events that put Sevgi Ertekin in a support cocoon on the other side of the bio-sealed doors. He had his solution before dawn, and it stared him in the face like a skull, drove him out of the cleanly kept corridors and away, down into the gardens and their greying light. ‘Onbekend brought the Haag gun for me, because he thought he was going to have to walk me out of the hotel and get me somewhere they could fake my suicide. They couldn’t afford a murder, they’re trying to run silent right now. And Onbekend couldn’t afford to sedate me, because it might show up in an autopsy. He was looking to back me up and push me around fully conscious, and that’s a tricky thing to do with a thirteen. We don’t scare easily, and we’re generally not that afraid of dying. But there are ways and ways to die. I might have tried to jump almost any ordinary weapon, even against the odds. Not the Haag gun.’

‘He told you that. That he was planning to fake your suicide?’

‘Yeah, he told me.’ Carl stared back into the memories. ‘Above and beyond anything he was hired to do, Onbekend hated me. I’m used to that from other thirteens, it’s standard. But this was a little more. He wanted me stripped down before I died. Wanted me to know how stupid I’d been, how far ahead and above me he was. How pitiful I was going to look with my brains blown out by my own hand somewhere.’

‘But they shelved the suicide.’

‘Yeah.’ Carl drew another hard breath. Onbekend’s remembered scorn cut through him. ‘They didn’t need it. I went walkabout and the plan changed, it was going to be enough to fake a street death instead. No need for the Haag as a threat, and it would have been entirely the wrong weapon to actually kill me with. Onbekend left it in the teardrop, only used it on Sevgi because he didn’t have anything else to hand.’

Norton stared at him. ‘I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to her.’

Carl looked tiredly back at him. ‘You want to blame me for this, Norton? Need a target for your impotent male rage. Go right ahead, hate me. I’m used to it, I’m not going to notice the extra weight. Just don’t push your luck, because I’m tired and I will break you in half if you cross the line.’

‘If you hadn’t-’

‘If I hadn’t gone out, it would have been different. I know. They would have taken me in the hotel, walked me out and Sevgi Ertekin would still have been there when it happened because, Norton, she was coming to see me anyway. Maybe that’s what’s really eating you, huh?’

‘Oh, fuck you.’ But it was said wearily, and he looked away.

‘You want to know the truth, Norton? Why she was coming to see me?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘She was coming to clear your name.’

The COLIN exec looked back at him, as if Carl had just slapped him.

‘What?’

‘I didn’t trust you, Norton, any more than a Jesusland Presidential address. Those skaters outside Sevgi’s place that morning, and you were the only one who knew where I was. I figured you had some agenda that involved wiping me off the landscape.’

‘What? I fucking got you out of jail in the first place, Marsalis. It was my call, my initiative. Why the hell would I-’

‘Hey, call it thirteen paranoia.’ Carl sighed. ‘Anyway, seems last night Sevgi got a call from NYPD, they’d picked up the third skater and he talked. I was never the target. Ortiz was. Sevgi was coming to tell me that, because she couldn’t bear the idea of your name being smeared.’

Norton said nothing.

‘Feel any better now?’

‘No.’ It was a whisper.

‘She never wore it as a theory anyway. Slapped me down when I tried to sell it to her. I don’t know if you guys were ever an item-’

‘We weren’t.’ Snapped out, brittle and harsh.

‘No, well whatever you had, it still went pretty deep, apparently.’

Long silence. Norton looked about the garden as if he might see some kind of explanation hanging up in a shrub, sparkling there in the fountain.

‘She was a cop,’ he muttered finally. ‘Two years in COLIN, but I don’t think she ever really changed.’

‘Yeah. She was a cop. That’s why she backed you, her partner, against anything I could sell her. And that’s why she went out into the street after Onbekend, and that’s why she got shot.’

More quiet. Direct sunlight reached the bottom of the buildings, gilded the gravel. There was some real warmth seeping into the day now. A group of students went past in a hurry, late for something. A woman in a blue doctor’s tunic came towards them from the acute unit block.

‘Which of you is Marsalis?’ she asked peremptorily. Under close-cropped black hair, her Chinese features were smudged with tiredness.

Carl raised his hand. The doctor nodded.

‘You’d better come in. She’s asking for you.’

Norton looked away.

The v-format was state of the art and took less time than he’d expected to cajole his thirteen nervous system into relaxing and accepting the illusion. He blinked in behind floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. On the other side there was a garden, less arid and stylised than the one he’d been sitting in back in the real world. Here, there was a border of lush growth around the well-kept lawn, nodding ferns and draped foliage, tall, straight trees beyond. A pair of wooden easy chairs were set out in the centre.

Sevgi Ertekin sat in one of them, loosely robed in a slate and blue kimono with Arab characters embroidered, waiting. There was a book in her lap, but she held it closed, fingers loosely inserted between the pages and her head was lifted, as if listening. She was staring at something else, as if someone already stood there on the other side of the garden, waiting as well.

The glass slid back soundlessly, and he stepped through. The motion caught her eye, or the system was wired to chime the arrival of visitors. She saw him, lifted an arm in greeting.

‘Nice, isn’t it,’ she called out. ‘No expense spared for dying COLIN executives, you know.’

‘So I see.’ He walked to her, stood looking down into her face. The system had allowed no trace of her illness into its imaging.

She gestured. ‘Come on, then. Sit down, soak it up.’

He sat.

‘I guess I’m looking a lot better in here than I do for real,’ she said brightly, treading on the heels of his own thoughts with an accuracy that made him blink. ‘Right?’

‘I don’t know. They haven’t let me in to see you yet.’

‘Well, they haven’t shown me a mirror yet either. Then again, I haven’t asked. I figure the idea is to make you feel as good about yourself as possible, hope that kicks your will to live into high gear, boosts your immune system, and gets you out of their expensive acute-care unit as soon as humanly possible.’ She stopped abruptly, as if unplugged, and he saw for the first time how scared she really was. She licked her lips. ‘Of course, that’s not a dynamic that applies to me.’

He said nothing, could think of nothing to say. A brook chuckled to itself somewhere beyond the foliage. A couple of small birds hopped about on the grass, closer to the humans than would have been likely in the real world. Sunlight struck through the surrounding trees at a high angle.

‘My father’s flying in from New York,’ she said, and sighed. ‘I’m not looking forward to that.’

‘I don’t suppose he is either.’

She ghosted a chuckle, barely louder than the brook. ‘No, I guess not. We haven’t been getting on all that well the last few years. Don’t see each other much, don’t really talk. Not the way we used to, anyway.’ Another faint laugh. ‘He’s probably going to think I did this just to get his attention. Death-bed reconciliation. What a fucking drama queen, huh?’

Carl felt his mouth tighten, back teeth locking down with involuntary force. It cost him more effort than he’d thought to keep looking at her.

‘Norton here?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’ He tried to smile. It was as if he’d forgotten which muscles to use. ‘I think he’s kind of hurt you asked to see me first.’

Ertekin pulled a face. ‘Yeah, well. Be time for everybody, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of friends.’

He took an interest in one of the brightly coloured birds around his feet.

‘Marsalis?’

He looked up reluctantly. ‘Yeah?’

‘How much time have I got?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said quickly.

‘But you know how the Haag system works.’ Urgency in her voice like pleading. You’ve used the fucking thing often enough, you must have some idea.’

‘Sevgi, it depends. They’re treating you with state of the art anti-virals here-’

‘Yeah, just like fucking Nalan.’

‘Sorry?’

She shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Look, you’re not going to scare me any more than I already am. Tell me the truth. They can’t stop it, can they?’

He hesitated.

‘Tell me the fucking truth, Carl.’

He met her eyes. ‘No. They can’t stop it.’

‘Good. Now tell me how long I’ve got.’

‘I don’t know, Sevgi. Honestly. They can probably back it up with what they have here, maybe model it enough to . . .’

He saw the look on her face and stopped.

‘Weeks,’ he said. ‘A couple of months at most.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Sevgi, I-’

She raised a hand, made a smile for him. She got out of the chair.

‘Going to walk down to the river. Want to come? They told me I’m not supposed to exert myself, even in here. Stimulus feedback, apparently it affects the nervous system almost like the real thing. But I think I’d like to walk a little while I still can.’ She held up the book. ‘And there’s only so much fifteenth-century poetry you can handle without a break, you know.’

He read the title off the antique russet and green binding. The Perfumed Garden - Ibn Muhammed al-Nafzawi.

‘Any good?’

‘The aphrodisiac recipes are shaky, but the rest is pretty solid, yeah. Always promised myself I was going to get round to reading it one day.’ Again, the brief flicker of fear in her eyes, rapidly quashed. ‘Better late than never, right?’

Again, he had no answer, not for what she said or for what he’d seen in her eyes. He followed her across the lawn towards the sound of the water and helped her hold back the hanging branches that blocked passage. They eased through, bent-backed and stood up in sun-dappled foliage on the bank of the shallow stream. Sevgi stared down at the flow for a while as it slipped past them.

‘I need to ask you a couple of favours,’ she said quietly.

‘Sure.’

‘I need you to stay on here. I know I said you were free to go, I know I more or less sent you away but-’

‘Don’t worry.’ His voice thickened. He had to damp down the surge of fury. ‘I’m not going to just walk away from this. Onbekend is a dead man walking. And so is whoever sent him.’

‘Good. But that’s not what I meant.’

‘No?’

‘No. With what’s happened now, there’s more than enough to keep the case wide open. It’d be good if you were there to help out after I’m . . .’ She made a limp gesture at the flow of the stream. ‘But that’s not what I’m asking you for. This is, well, it’s more selfish.’

‘I’m alive because of you, Sevgi,’ he said tonelessly. ‘That buys you a lot of indulgence.’

She turned. She touched his hand.

There was a brief, visceral shock to it, tactile contact was one of the wrinkles the technology still hadn’t really ironed out, and format etiquette tended against it as a result. Outside of the crude and curiously unsatisfying porn virtuals he’d used on base in the military, he doubted he’d touched anyone in format more than a half dozen times in his life, and most of those would have been accidental collisions. Now, he felt Sevgi Ertekin’s hand as if through gloves and a twitching sense of frustration rose to fan the embers of his fading anger.

‘I need you to stay with me,’ she said. She looked down at where their hands met, as if trying to make out some detail she wasn’t sure was there. ‘It’s going to be hard. Murat - that’s my father - he’s going to be hurting too much. Norton’s too conflicted. Everyone else is too far off, I’ve pushed them all away anyway, since Ethan. I wouldn’t know what to say to them. That leaves you, Carl. You’re clean. I need you to help me do this.’

Clean?

‘You said two favours,’ he reminded her.

‘Yeah.’ She dropped his hand, went back to staring at the flow of the water. ‘I think you know what the other one’s going to be.’

He stood beside her and watched the stream flow.

‘All right,’ he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

He waited for Norton in the corridor outside the visiting station and the v-format cubicles. The COLIN exec came out puffy-eyed and blinking, as if the light in the corridor was too harsh to deal with.

‘I need to talk to you,’ Carl told him.

Norton’s face twitched. ‘And you think now’s the time?’

‘She isn’t going to improve, Norton. You’d better get used to operating under these conditions.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Have you read the statement I gave to RimSec?’

‘No, I.’ Norton closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Yes. I skimmed it. So what?’

‘Someone sent Onbekend to take me out. Probably the same someone who hired Carmen Ren to partner Merrin, the same someone who had Merrin brought back to Earth in the first place. We’re not done here, we’re not even half done.’

Norton sighed. ‘Yes, I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes with Sevgi telling me the same thing. I don’t need you to ram it home. COLIN will step up the inquiry, RimSec are already covering bases here. Right now though-’

‘I’m not going home until this is done.’

‘Yes, Sevgi made that quite clear to me as well.’ Norton tried to brush past him. Carl fought down a desire to snag his arm and snap him around. He backed up a couple of rapid paces instead, put his arm out across the corridor to the wall, so the COLIN exec had to stop. Norton’s teeth clenched, his fists balled at his sides.

‘What, do you want, from me, Marsalis?’

‘Two things. First, you need to get onto Ortiz and have him put a stopper on my release back to UNGLA jurisdiction. I had a call from the Brussels office last night and they’re very keen to have me back in the fold.’

‘Ortiz is barely out of intensive care. He’s in no condition-’

‘Then talk to whoever is. I don’t want to have fight UNGLA as well as whoever’s running Onbekend.’

Norton pulled in a compressed breath. ‘Very well. I’ll pass this on to Nicholson when I speak to him this afternoon. What else?’

‘I want you to lean on Colony. I want to talk to Gutierrez.’

COLIN ran a small administrative unit out of two blocks in downtown Oakland, with facilities for a Mars com-link. Norton got a RimSec autocopter detailed to fly them back up and across the bay, and a COLIN limo to meet them at touchdown. He did it all with the remote command of a preoccupied man driving a familiar route home. In the limo, he called ahead to the com-link duty technician and set up the call.

Sevgi burned in his head like a brand, dry eyed beside the small stream, all the things she didn’t say. All the things he didn’t either.

The red tape from the Colony Police administration at the Mars end was fierce and self-referential. Having Gutierrez arrested and interrogated had been easy by comparison - Colony knew, in their own cloddish way, how to do that. But authorised off-world communication, from custody, with non-COLIN personnel was apparently just too exotic to have precedent or established procedure. It took three levels of rank before he reached someone who’d do what he told them. And the distances didn’t help - Mars currently sat just less than two hundred and fifty million kilometres away and transmission time was around thirteen and a half minutes each way. Almost a full half hour between each act of communication. It seemed somehow emblematic.

Marsalis prowled outside the chamber, occasionally visible through the head-height windows on the door. There was a small, mean-spirited pleasure in excluding the thirteen from the early proceedings, an impulse that Norton knew only too drearily well was the human equivalent of a tomcat pissing to mark his territory.

He was too tired to combat the urge, too non-specifically furious to feel embarrassed by his behaviour. He battered down the red tape at Colony with a cold, controlled anger he hadn’t known he owned, appealed to reason where he could, bullied and threatened where he could not. He waited out the long delay silences that punctuated the whole process with the patience of an automaton. None of it seemed to matter, except as a way to stave off the knowledge that Sevgi would die, was dying right now by stages as her immune system staggered under the repeated blows from the Falwell viruses and their mutating swirl.

Finally, he let Marsalis in. Ceded the operational seat and folded himself into an off-scope chair at the side of the chamber. Stared emptily at the thirteen as he settled himself.

‘You really think this is going to work?’

His voice was slack and careless in his own ears, run flat with emotional overload.

‘That depends,’ said Marsalis, studying the countdown clock above the lens-and-screen array in front of him.

‘On what?’

‘On whether Franklin Gutierrez wants to go on living or not.’

The last digits blinked through, the receiving announcer chimed and the screen rezzed up to an image of a similar transmission chamber at the Mars end. Gutierrez sat there, cleaned up since Norton had last seen him dragged out of interrogation. There was a clean, white plaster wrap on his damaged hand and the bruising around his face and eye had been treated with inflammation suppressants. He frowned into the camera a little, glanced aside to someone off screen then cleared his throat and leaned forward.

‘’Til I see who the fuck’s on the other end of this, I don’t say anything. Got that? You get these morons to pull their claws out of me, we can maybe do some kind of deal. But that’s when I see your face, not before.’

He sat back. The transmission-locked seal blipped across the screen in green machine code and the image froze. The online light glowed orange. Marsalis sat looking at the screen, moved no more than a corpse.

‘Hullo Franklin,’ he said flatly. ‘Remember me? I’m pretty sure you do. So now you know who’s on the other end, listen carefully to me. You will give me everything you know about Allen Merrin and why you helped send him home. You get one chance to do this. Don’t disappoint me.’

He snapped the arm control and the transmission sealed, fired off. Above their heads, the counter started down again.

‘You’ll forgive me if I’m not impressed yet,’ Norton said.

Marsalis barely shifted in the seat, but his eyes tracked round and out of nowhere, through all the weariness and grief, Norton saw something there that sent a small chill chasing round the base of his skull like cold water rinsing round a basin.

They waited out the counter. It reached zero, started counting up again into time used before transmission at the other end.

‘Hey, the lottery man!’ Gutierrez came back sneering, but behind it Norton could see the chill, the same jolt he’d felt when Marsalis looked at him half an hour earlier. And the counter told its own tale in glowing frozen digits. They were up around two and a half minutes over base transmission-and-turnaround time - unless the datahawk had made a speech to camera, the time overspill was hesitation. Gutierrez had jammed up, had had to put a reply together on hold. The bravado rang false as a Tennessee Marstech label. ‘Yeah, how’s your luck holding back home, Marsalis? How you doing? Missing the girls from the Dozen Up club?’

After that, Gutierrez switched into Quechua. The screen fired up stilted subtitles to cover. You are three hundred million kilometres away from me. That is a long way off for making threats. What will you do, take the long sleep? Come all the way back here, just to kill me? You don’t scare me any more, Marsalis. You make me laugh. It went on, derisory, building the bravado up. It boiled down to fuck off and die.

It still rang false.

Marsalis watched it all with a thin, cold smile.

When the transmission ended, he leaned forward and started speaking, also in Quechua. Norton had no knowledge of the altiplano tongue beyond counting one to twenty and a handful of food items, but even through the blanket incomprehension, he felt a dry ice cold coming off the black man and what he was saying. The words husked out of him, rustling and intent, like something reptilian breaking out of an egg. In the fog of sleeplessness that was gradually shutting down his senses, Norton had one moment of clarity so supreme he knew it had to be a lie; but in that moment it was as if something else was speaking through Marsalis, something ancient and not really human using his mouth and face as a mask and a launch point to hurl itself across the gulf between worlds, to reach out and take Franklin Gutierrez by the throat and heart, as if he was sitting on the other side of a desk and not a quarter of a billion kilometres of empty space.

It took little more than a minute to say, whatever it was, but for Norton the whole thing seemed to happen outside real time. When Marsalis was finished speaking, the COLIN exec opened his mouth to say something - say anything, to break the creaking, something-has-left-the-building silence - and then he stopped because he saw that Marsalis had not thumbed for transmission. The message was still open, still waiting to be sealed, and for what seemed like a very long time the black man just looked into the facing lens and said nothing at all, just looked.

Then he touched the button and, in some way Norton could not define, he seemed to slump.

It was a solid minute before the COLIN exec found words of his own.

‘What did you say?’ he asked, through dry lips.

Marsalis twitched like someone waking from a doze. Shot him a normal, human look. Shrugged.

‘I told him I’d go back to Mars and find him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Told him COLIN would fund the ticket, there and back. Told him I’d kill him and everyone he cares about.’

‘You think he’ll buy it?’

The black man’s attention drifted back to the screen. He must also, Norton suddenly realised, be very tired. ‘Yes. He’ll buy it.’

‘And if he doesn’t? If he calls your bluff?’

Marsalis glanced at him again, and Norton knew what the answer was going to be before the quiet, matter-of-fact words fell into the quiet room.

‘This isn’t a bluff.’

They waited, down to zero on the glowing counter and then minutes clocking up beyond. Neither of them said anything, Norton at least could think of nothing to say. But the lack was almost companionable. Marsalis met his eye once or twice, and once he nodded as if the COLIN exec had said something, so securely that Norton wondered if he hadn’t in the extremities of his grief and weariness vocalised some random internal thought.

If he had, he couldn’t recall what it was.

The quiet in the room settled in around him like a blanket, warming and soothing, inviting escape, exit from the mess and the grief, the slide down into the soft oblivion of long deferred sleep . . .

He jerked awake.

The chime of the receiver, and his neck, cricked and aching.

The screen rezzed up again.

Gutierrez came through, panic-stricken and babbling.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

You’re clean.

He couldn’t work out what she meant, not really. He tried. He tugged at the tight-knotted intricacies of it while he sat in a pool of lamplight in the darkened offices at COLIN and played back the transcript of Gutierrez cracking wide open. He gave up exasperated, left it alone. Came back and tugged at it some more.

That leaves you. Carl. You’re clean.

He felt round the rough contours of it, but it was like searching for holds on one of the improbably towering cliff faces in the massif Verne. Your fingers told you what was there, gave you something to hold onto or lever off, but that was immediate applicability, not the shape of the whole. It wasn’t understanding. He knew the moves that were coming, what that leaves you, you’re clean meant in terms of what she wanted him to do, but that no more told him what she believed about him, what she thought they were to each other, than a successful series of moves back on that Verne rock gave you a topographical map of the face.

It was like being back in the Osprey compound, puzzling over one of Aunt Chitra’s more obscure training koans.

You’re clean.

The phrase ticked in his head like a bomb.

Norton left, presumably to get some sleep before he collapsed. He offered no comment other than see you in the morning. His tone was hesitant, if not friendly then a close analogue, buffered soft by exhaustion. Somewhere in the last few hours, the tension between them had shifted in some indefinable way, and something else was emerging to take its place.

Carl sat in the empty offices, listening to the transcript over and over, staring into space, until the floor he was on started to shut itself down for the night. Overhead lighting blinked out panel by panel and the darkness beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows washed quietly in to fill the workspaces like dark water. Unused systems dropped into standby mode, screens locked to the COLIN acronym, and small red lights gleamed to life in the gloom. No one came up to see what he was doing. Like most COLIN facilities, the Oakland offices were manned round the clock, but by night the manning went down to skeleton levels and an enabled smart system in the basement. Security was down there - Norton must just have told them to leave him alone.

Gutierrez confessed, hasty and disjointed, backing up, self-correcting, probably lying and embellishing along the way. A picture emerged anyway ... someone in the familias ... had to break ranks sooner or later ... the war’s just fucking stupid . . .

... I don’t know, Marsalis, they didn’t feed me that much fucking information . . . just had to fake the guy through, that’s what I do, you know ... At some point in the protracted, half-hour-gapped interrogation, something tipped over in Gutierrez. Fear, the dangled promise of COLIN protection, maybe some griping sense of betrayal for his time in custody, waiting for a familia rescue that hadn’t yet come - resentment built from smouldering, sparked and finally flared into open, angry revolt . . . Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire-hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them, why are they going to tell me a fucking thing they don’t have to ...

... well, obviously someone who stands to gain from a cessation of hostilities with Mars . . . you don’t need me to tell you that, right . . .

... yeah, yeah, jump the docking protocols, put the guy down off the California coast ...

... no, they didn’t say why . . . like I said . . .

... yeah, of course I showed him how to jump start the cryocap gel . . . how else was he going to survive a splashdown . . .

And with the resentment, a steadily leaking pool of self-pity and justification .... yeah, fucking right, that was an accident. You think I planned to send him home awake like that? Think that’s the kind of work I do from choice? Should have woken up two weeks from home, not from Mars . . . fucking would have done too, if I’d had my way. I told them it was risky, killing the n-djinn two weeks into the trajectory, told them it might knock on and trigger the other stuff, but hey, why the fuck listen to the expert, what does he fucking know . . .

... because, if you shut the n-djinn down two weeks from home, COLIN Earth sends a rescue ship up to find out what the fuck happened. Guaranteed. They don’t want to take the risk of a docking fuck-up, can’t afford the bad publicity. But if it shuts down two weeks into the trajectory, and then the ship runs silent but smooth all the way home, then they’re going to trust the auto systems and let it go. You know how those fuckers are about costs . . .

There were a couple of hours of it, even when you cut out the transmission delay. The datahawk’s resistance had gone like a dam wall failing. Carl went back through it, time after time, because the alternative was to start thinking about Sevgi Ertekin. He listened until what Gutierrez was saying started to rub smooth in his head, until it was just patterned noise, with no more meaning than the stamped geometric light and dark of windows, lit and not, in the other buildings outside the window.

He saw her walk back in through the door of the bar once more, wry grimace and the slow ooze of blood on her shoulder and sleeve. The kick in his throat when he saw it, the relief when she said she was okay, the-

... blood, said the transcript for the nth time.

... not like I’ve got blood with any of them . . .

He frowned. Hit pause, rewind. The transcript gibbered backward, rolled again.

Gutierrez sulked once more. Look, I’m a fucking cormorant, man, a wire-hire, it’s not like I’ve got blood with any of them . . .

He heard his own voice and Bambaren’s, worried at by the wind across Sacsayhuaman.

My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.

Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that-

He sat up suddenly straight from his slump. He played it back again, listened once more to the juxtaposition he’d not spotted before.

That’s got to be it.

He reeled back some more, backed up through the datahawk’s rambling.

... obviously someone who stands to gain from a cessation of hostilities with Mars . . . you don’t need me to tell you that, right . . .

Fucking got to be. He stared at the revelation as it unfolded in the LCLS blast of the desk lamp. Bambaren’s image-tight knowledge of Project Lawman’s weaning procedures. Greta Jurgens, boasting, Bambaren’s suave understated confirmation when called on it. The two items collided in his head.

You’ve made a niche career out of co-existing with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.

I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you. No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.

... someone who stands to gain ...

... a sentimental attachment to ties of blood . . .

Fucking had to be.

The realisation of how close to the mystery he’d been digging at the time came in across waves of tiredness and made him giddy with exhilaration.

All the time, all the fucking time we were that close. Just fucking wait ’til I tell-

Sevgi.

And then, abruptly, it was all worth nothing again, and all he had was rage.

He checked the files, rang Matthew with it.

‘Gayoso.’ The datahawk seemed to be tasting the name. ‘Okay, but it may take a while, especially if people have been hiding things the way you say they have.’

‘I’m not in a hurry.’

Slight pause at the other end of the line. ‘That’s not like you, Carl.’

‘No.’ He stared at his reflected self in the night-time glass of the office windows. Grimaced. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’

More silence. Matthew didn’t like change, at least not among his human colleagues. Carl could feel his discomfort crawling on the line.

‘Sorry, Matt. I’m kind of tired.’

‘Matthew.’

‘Yeah, Matthew. Sorry again. Like I said, tired. I’m waiting for some things to shake out at this end, so I’m in no rush for this stuff. That’s all I meant.’

‘Okay.’ Matthew’s voice went back to sunny as if he’d thrown a switch. ‘Listen, you want to know a secret?’

‘A secret?’

‘Yes. Confidential data. Would you like to know it?’

Carl frowned. He didn’t often use video when he talked to Matthew. The datahawk didn’t seem to like it much for one thing, and for another the calls were usually purely functional, so it seemed pointless. But now, for the first time, he wished he could see Matthew’s face.

‘Confidential data’s usually the reason I ring you,’ he said carefully. ‘So, yeah. Let’s hear it.’

‘Well, you’re in trouble with the Brussels office. Gianfranco di Palma is very angry with you.’

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes. He told me not to communicate with you any more, not until you come back from the Rim.’

A slow-leaking anger trickled in Carl’s belly. ‘Did he now?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘I notice you’re not doing what he told you.’

‘Of course not,’ Matthew said serenely. ‘I don’t work for UNGLA, I’m part of the interagency liaison. And you are my friend.’

Carl blinked.

‘That’s good to know,’ he said finally.

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Listen, Matthew.’ The anger was shifting, coloured with something altogether less certain. The flush of understanding he’d had earlier seemed to recede, drowned out by new factors. ‘If di Palma talks to you again-’

‘I know, I know. Don’t tell him I’m checking on Gayoso for you.’

‘Yeah, that.’ Creeping sense of unease now. ‘But you tell him also that we’re friends, okay. That you’re my friend.’

‘He’ll know that already, Carl. It’s obvious just looking at the data that-’

‘Yeah, well he may not have looked too closely at the data, you know. You tell him you’re my friend. You tell him I said that, and that I told you to tell him that too.’ Carl stared sombrely at the night outside. ‘Just so he’s clear.’

A little later, he let himself out of the building, looking for a cab to get him back to the hotel. He walked down through the cool of the evening on big successive rectangles of crystalline violet light from the street’s LCLS overheads. It felt like crossing a series of small theatre stages, each one lit for a performance he refused to stop and give. His head was fogged with lack of sleep. Weary speculative whirl in there that just wouldn’t quit, still jostling for position with an expansive, freewheeling anger.

Fucking di Palma.

He didn’t realise how much rage must show on his face until he knocked into a street entertainer coming the other way and loaded down with what seemed like random pieces of junk. They cannoned, shoulder to shoulder and his bulk sent her sprawling. The junk clattered and scattered, right across the pavement. A single steel wheel from a child’s bike rolled away glinting in the LCLS, hit the kerb and keeled over abruptly in the gutter beyond. The entertainer looked up at him from where she’d fallen, face-painted features sullen.

‘Why don’t you . . .’

And her voice dried up.

He stood looking down at the garish clown-masked face and rigid copper pageboy wig for a silent moment, then realised that his mouth was tight, jaw still set with undischarged anger at di Palma, at Onbekend, at a whole host of shadowy targets he still couldn’t clearly make out.

Yeah, none of whom is this girl. Get a grip, Carl.

He grunted and offered her his hand.

‘Sorry. Wasn’t paying attention. My fault.’

He hauled her to her feet. The fear stayed in her eyes, and she snatched her hand away as soon as she was upright. He moved to help her gather up the scattered bits and pieces of her act from the pavement, saw how she flinched, was still afraid of this big, black man on the violet-panelled, deserted street. Gritty irritation flared through him.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he told her curtly.

He got the feeling she was watching him out of sight as he walked away. Something nagged at him about the encounter, but he couldn’t be bothered to chase the thread. A cab cruised by on the cross street ahead and he yelled and signalled. The sensors registered him and the cab executed a natty, machine-perfect U-TURN across the oncoming traffic, pulled sedately in to collect him. The door hinged out.

He got in, low light and slit windows, leatherette fittings. The rush of memory from his cab ride the night before, the one that Sevgi Ertekin had spotted him getting into and followed, came and did him some tiny, inexplicable harm inside.

The generic female interface rezzed up. ‘Welcome to Merritt Cabs. What will-’

‘Red Sands International,’ he said roughly.

‘The Red Sands chain operates on both sides of the bay. Which do you require?’

‘San Francisco.’

‘In transit,’ the ’face said smoothly. The features composed, once again he thought of Carmen Ren and her generic Rim States beauty, the smooth-

The clown.

The fucking clown.

‘Stop the cab,’ he snapped.

They glided to a halt. He wrestled with the door.

‘You want to fucking let me out?’

‘The engagement fee is outstanding,’ said the cab diffidently. ‘Regardless of trajectory, Merritt Cabs reserves-’

‘I’m coming back, I’m fucking coming back. Just hold it here.’

The door clunked free and hinged. He spilled out, sprinted back up the cross street for the corner. Before he reached it, he already knew what he’d find. He cornered at speed anyway, ran on, back up the long line of crystalline violet stage panels, back towards the COLIN block.

The street was empty, just the way he’d known it would be. Bits and pieces of junk lay unrecovered exactly where they’d fallen. The bicycle wheel sat gaunt and canted in the gutter. The face-painted woman was gone.

He pivoted about, scanned the street in both directions.

Pale crystalline stages, lit for performance, marching away in both directions. He stood in the pale violet fall of the LCLS, utterly alone. Tilting sense of the unreal. For one fragmented moment, he expected to see Elena Aguirre come drifting towards him over the narrow bands of gloom that interspersed the panels of light.

Come to collect him after all.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

They went over it in the garden.

Sevgi Ertekin’s choice, she would not be left out of the briefings. Still my fucking case, she said tightly when Norton protested. Carl guessed it had to be better for her than contemplating what was coming, and she seemed to have either finished or got fed up with al-Nafzawi. So they sat in the wooden chairs in the soft sunlight, listened to the brook behind them, and they all acted like Sevgi wasn’t going to die.

‘Fucking face-painted,’ she exploded, when Carl told them about his encounter the night before. ‘That bitch did the exact same thing to me back on Bulgakov’s Cat. She slammed into me coming round a support pillar. Had to be her. Why the fuck would she do that?’

‘Listening in,’ said Carl. ‘I went over to Alcatraz last night, immediately after. Set off every alarm in the place when I tried to get down to the shielded suites. They took a pinhead mike off my jacket. Size of a breadcrumb, chameleochrome casing. Sticks on impact, practically everlasting battery.’

‘Then there’ll be one on my clothing too.’

‘Most likely, yeah.’

‘So this is Ren, still in the game?’ Norton frowned. ‘That doesn’t make much sense. You’d think she’d be running. Down to the Freeport to get a new ID and a face change.’

Carl shook his head. ‘She’s smarter than that. Why go for major surgery when you can just slap on a layer of paint and a wig?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sevgi sourly. ‘You know how many street entertainers there’s got to be in this city. You see them fucking everywhere.’

‘That doesn’t answer the question of what she’s doing hanging around,’ Norton pointed out. ‘If her original brief was to back Merrin up, then I’d say she’s out of a job.’

‘I told you this wasn’t finished,’ said Carl. ‘We took down Merrin a little early, but apart from that, whoever set this thing up is running exactly according to plan.’

Norton gave him a dubious look.

‘Yeah, but according to what plan?’ Sevgi said. ‘You say Gutierrez claims he was sending Merrin back as a Martian familia hit man - revenge killings for the enforcement violence back in the seventies. Manco Bambaren gets in on the act because he could use a change of leadership, get the chance to make the most of his relationships with the Initiative corporations. And then instead of taking down the Lima bosses, Merrin goes and hits a couple of dozen random citizens in Jesusland and the Rim. It doesn’t join up at all.’

‘Gutierrez thought he was sending back a familia hit man.’ Carl geared up for the revelation. ‘But there’s obviously another agenda here. For one thing, Bambaren’s tied into this with a lot more than business interests.’

Another cranked eyebrow from Norton. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that Merrin’s genetic donor mother, Isabela Gayoso, is also Manco Bambaren’s real mother. Bambaren and Merrin were brothers. Well, half-brothers.’

Sevgi sat upright in her chair, staring.

‘No. Fucking. Way.’

‘I’m afraid so. Isabela Rivera Gayoso, slum mother in Arequipa, gave genetic material to a visiting US army medical unit who were on the scrounge down there with Elleniss Hall Genentech. I think they paid her fifty dollars. She gave her second family name, her mother’s surname, probably because she was ashamed. She also seems to have given a false sin, because the one on record with Elleniss Hall is a dead end. Or maybe they scrambled it somehow. I think back then they weren’t all that fussed about keeping tight records. The whole project was off the books anyway. On paper, Project Lawman didn’t exist.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ Norton said evenly. ‘The n-djinn searches would have turned it up.’

‘Well, yeah, they might have, if there hadn’t been so much deliberate datafogging going on at the time. Like I told you when I came on board, Sevgi, we were all ghosts back then. Nothing concrete, nothing some overzealous journalist might be able to nail down. And they used early n-djinn technology to do the fogging, so it’s solid. When Jacobsen came along, some of the fog got lifted, but most of the Project Lawman records still belong to the Confederated Republic and they weren’t overly co-operative back when UNGLA was setting up. Our covert research guys are always turning up some fresh dirty little secret the US military buried somewhere and forgot about.’

‘If that’s true, then how did you find all this out?’

‘I asked one of our covert research guys. He did some digging for me last night, daytime back in Europe, came back to me this morning just before he went to bed. He says it looks like there was some covering at the other end of things as well, cheap datahawk stuff, probably Bambaren trying to bury the unpleasant family history once he got some influence. Having a mother who co-operated with the gringo military, opened her legs for them right up to the ovaries, so to speak - well, it isn’t exactly a good thing to have on your résumé if you’re planning to make it big in the familias down there.’

Norton sniffed. ‘I still fail to see how this research guy of yours could do something our n-djinns couldn’t.’

‘Well, there are a couple of reasons. The first is that I was going in from the far end. Something Bambaren said to me, something about blood, just a feeling I had. I started with the assumption and asked my researcher to chase down Gayoso. I already had my connection. Your n-djinns would have been working the other way, probably off a broad sweep trawl through the general dataflow with Merrin as their starting point, then a filter for relevance and more detailed follow up. N-djinns aren’t human, they don’t do cognitive leaps the way we do. Like I said last week, Yaroshanko intuition’s a wonderful thing, but you have to have something to triangulate off. Your n-djinn data trawl’s only as good as your chosen filters, and I’m guessing they were Mars or Rim States-related.’

‘Yeah, and Lawman-related.’

‘Sure, and Lawman-related. But think about what that means - do you really think an n-djinn search running into the Project Lawman protocols is going to pay any attention to genetic source material. You’re talking about people who never met their offspring, never had anything to do with them. In Gayoso’s case, you’re talking about someone who was never even in the same country, never came within a thousand kilometres of the thing they made with her donated ovum. Genetic material is cheap as fuck, even now with Jacobsen in force. Back then, it meant less than nothing. No machine is going to see that as a lead worth pursuing, it never would have made it through the filters for follow-up analysis. You have to already know that the genes Isabela Gayoso handed on to her son are important before you can get the n-djinn to make the link. And like I said, she was never anywhere near him.’

Norton frowned. ‘Hold it. There was a deployment in Bolivia, wasn’t there? Back in eighty-eight, eighty-nine?’

‘Eighty-eight,’ said Sevgi. ‘Argentina and Bolivia. But it’s disputed. A lot of the data says he might not have been there at all. It’s also got him down as leading a platoon in Kuwait City around the same time.’

‘Yeah, but if he was there,’ Norton argued, suddenly enthused. ‘That’d be a point of contact. That’s maybe when Bambaren finds out he’s got a brother he didn’t know about and . . .’

‘And what, Tom?’ Sevgi shook her head irritably. ‘They meet, they have a few beers and Merrin heads out for urban pacification duties in the Rim. Six years later he goes to Mars, and twelve years after that some Mars-end familia head cooks up some crackpot revenge assassination plan, chooses Merrin for the job and Merrin turns round and says oh, hey, I’ve got a half brother back on Earth who can help out with that. Come on, that’s not it. There has to be something else, something that ties it in tighter than that.’

‘There probably is,’ Carl told them. ‘I said there were a couple of reasons why your n-djinns failed and my researcher didn’t. Well, the second reason is that there’s been a whole lot more datafogging, and it dates from a lot more recently than all this ancient history. Someone out there is still very much concerned to keep this whole thing under wraps.’

‘Someone who’s using Carmen Ren,’ mused Sevgi. ‘Keeping her deployed.’

‘That’s an angle,’ Carl admitted.

‘Did they destroy your pinhead bug?’

‘No, still holding it. We could try to put it back in play, I guess. See if we can draw Ren in. But I don’t see it working, she’s too sharp for that. This much silence, she’ll know she’s been blown.’

‘So where does that leave us?’ Norton asked.

‘It leaves us with Bambaren,’ Carl said grimly. ‘We go down there and we stamp on him until he tells us what we want to know.’

‘And Onbekend?’ Sevgi asked, with a strange light in her eye.

Silence. Norton hurried in to fill it. ‘Checked that yesterday, I talked to Coyle. No record that fits with the descriptions you both gave. But Onbekend’s a name from the Netherlands. Apparently it was Dutch bureaucracy’s get-out for anyone who didn’t have a fixed family name to go on their identity documents.’ He grimaced. ‘It means Unknown.’

Sevgi coughed out a laugh. ‘Oh, very good.’

‘Yeah, seems quite a few Indonesians ended up with it in the last century, because they didn’t have family names in the sense the Dutch understand the concept. It’s pretty common all over the Pacific Rim these-’

He stopped, because Sevgi’s cough hadn’t died away. It picked up, intensified until it shook her, feedback from the stimulus in the format triggering the real thing back in her hospital bed. The force of it bent her almost double in the chair, and then she flickered in and out of existence as her mental focus slipped. Carl and Norton exchanged a silent glance.

Sevgi’s presence flickered once more, then settled. She wheezed and seemed to get control.

‘Are you okay, Sev?’

‘No, Tom, I’m not fucking okay.’ She drew a hard breath. ‘I’m fucking dying, all right. Sorry if it’s causing problems.’

Carl looked at Norton again, surprised himself with the sudden jolt of sympathy he felt for the other man.

‘Maybe we’d better take a break,’ he said quietly.

‘No, it’s . . .’ Sevgi closed her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Tom. That was unforgivable. I had no call to snap at you like that. I’m fine now. Let’s get back to Onbekend.’

They did, after a fashion, but the incident sat among them like another presence. The conversation ran slow, grew diffident, finally fell apart. Sevgi wouldn’t meet Norton’s eyes, just sat and twisted her fingers in her lap, until finally the COLIN exec cleared his throat and excused himself with the pretext of calling New York. He blinked out with obvious relief. Carl sat and waited.

The twisted fingers again. Finally, she looked up at him.

‘Thanks for staying,’ she said softly.

He nodded at the surroundings. ‘It beats the garden they’ve got outside. Too arid, too stylised. This is very British, makes me feel at home.’

It got a short laugh, but carefully deployed this time.

‘Has your father arrived?’

‘Yeah.’ Jerky nod. ‘He came in to see me this morning, before you and Tom got here. For real, in the hospital They’re giving him a suite over in the staff dorms. Professional courtesy.’

‘Or COLIN influence.’

‘Well, yeah. That too.’

‘So how’d you get on with him?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. He, you know, he cried a lot. We both did. He apologised for all the rows about Ethan, the distance. A lot of other stuff. But-’

‘Yeah?’

She looked at him. ‘I’m really scared, Carl.’

‘I think you’re entitled to be.’

‘I, I mean, I keep having these dreams where it’s all been a mistake. It’s not really a Haag slug. Or it’s not as bad as they thought, they’ve got an anti-viral that can keep up. Or the whole thing was just a dream and I’ve woken up back in New York, I can hear the market outside.’ Tears leaked out of her eyes. Her voice took on a desperate, grinding edge. ‘And then I wake up for real, and I’m here, in that fucking bed with the drips and the monitors and all the fucking equipment around me like relatives I don’t want to fucking see. And I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, Carl.’

‘I know,’ he said hollowly, voice stupid in his own ears. Numb for something to say, to meet her with.

She gulped. ‘I always thought it’d be like a doorway, like standing in front of a door you’ve got to go through. But it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s like a fucking wall coming at me and I’m strapped in my seat, can’t fucking move, can’t touch the controls or get out. I’m just going to fucking lie there and die.’

Her teeth clenched on the last word. She looked emptily out across the garden at the foliage on the fringes of the lawn. Her hands tightened to fists in her lap. Loosened, tightened again. He watched her and waited.

‘I don’t want you to go down there after Bambaren and Onbekend,’ she said quietly. She was still staring away into the sun-splashed foliage. ‘I don’t want you to end up like me, like this.’

‘Sevgi, we all end up like this sooner or later. I’d just be catching you up.’

‘Yeah, well there are ways and ways of catching up. I don’t recommend the Haag shell method.’

‘I can handle Onbekend.’

‘Sure, you can.’ Her gaze switched back to him. ‘Last time you went up against him, as I recall, I had to bust in and save your life for you.’

‘Well, I’ll be more careful this time.’

She made a compressed sound that might have been another laugh. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m not scared that Onbekend might kill you down there. This is selfish, Carl. I’m scared that you won’t come back. I’m scared you’ll leave me here, dying by fucking increments with no one to help.’

‘I already told you’d I’d stay.’

She wasn’t listening. Wasn’t looking at him any more. ‘Saw my cousin die that way, back when I was still a kid. Sex virus, one of the hyper-evolved ones, she caught it off a soldier in the east. Nothing they could do. I’m not going to go through that. Not the way she went.’

‘Okay, Sevgi. Okay. I won’t go anywhere. I’m right here. But I think it’s time you let me in to see you for real. In the ward.’

She shivered. Shook her head. ‘No, not yet. I’m not ready for that yet.’

‘Staying in v-format is going to put a lot of strain on your nervous system. A lot of stress.’

Sevgi snorted. ‘That’s all you fucking know. You want to know what the strain is? I’ll tell you. Strain is lying back there in that fucking bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the machines they’ve got me hooked up to, feeling my lungs clogging up and all the needles they’ve stuck in me, aching every fucking place I can feel and no way to move unless someone comes to do it for me. Compared to that,’ she gestured weakly at the garden, ‘this is fucking paradise.’

She looked at the hanging branches in silence for a while.

‘They say it is a garden,’ she muttered. ‘Paradise, you know. Garden full of fruits and the sound of water.’

‘And virgins. Right? Seventy virgins each, or something?’

‘Not if you’re a woman. Anyway, that’s for martyrs.’ She pulled a face. ‘Anyway, it’s a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-quranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit any more. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking shop mannequin with its motion circuits shot up.’

‘Sounds like you’re talking from experience there.’ He grabbed the change of subject, glad of the chance.

It drew a crooked smile from her. ‘I’ve broken in one or two in my time. You?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘That’s not very public-spirited of you. Somebody’s got to do it.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, you know, maybe I’ll still get out there and do my share, later on in life.’

Her smile faded, shaded out at the mention of the future, like the passing of cloud cover across the sunlit lawn. She shivered and hunched her body a little in the chair. He cursed himself for the slip.

‘I was reading somewhere,’ she said quietly. ‘They reckon in another thirty or forty years they’ll have v-formatting so powerful you’ll be able to live inside it. You know, the n-djinn just copies your whole mind-state into the construct and then runs you as part of the system. You just sedate the body and step through. They say you’ll even be able to go on living there after your body actually dies. Forty years away, they’re saying, maybe not even that long.’ She grinned desperately. ‘Bit late for me, though, huh?’

‘Hey, you’re not going to need that shit.’ Floundering for a response. ‘You’re going to heaven, right? Paradise, like you said.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don’t think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts, I think we all know it’s a crock of shit. That’s why we’re all so fucking determined to spread the good news, to shove it down other people’s throats. Because if we can’t make other people believe it, how are we going to stamp out the doubt in ourselves. And it’s cold, that doubt.’ She looked at him, shivered as she said it. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Like November in the park, you know. Like winter coming in.’

He got up and went to where she sat, and tried as best he could to hold her. Blunt, glove-skinned sensation, like fistfuls of crushed velvet, like nothing real. No feeling of warmth, but as she shivered again he pulled her close anyway, and he held her head against his chest so she wouldn’t see how his jaw was clenched tight and his mouth had become a savage down-drawn line.

Like winter coming in.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Sevgi lived four more days.

They were the longest days he could remember since the week he waited for Marisol to come back, believing somehow against everything the uncles told him that she would. He’d sat blankly then, as he did now at the hospital, detached for hours at a time, staring into space in classes he’d previously excelled in. He took the punishment beatings from the uncles with a stoic lack of response that bordered on catatonic - fighting back would do no good, he knew, would only ensure that he took more damage. Aunt Chitra’s pain management training had come just in time.

Many years later, he wondered if that particular course hadn’t been deliberately scheduled for the months leading up to the removal of the surrogate mothers. There wasn’t much that happened in Osprey Eighteen without carefully considered planning. And pain, after all, as Chitra began the series of classes by telling them, came in many forms. Pain is unavoidable, smiling gently at their group, shaking each of them formally by the hand. Something of an unknown quantity after their other teachers, this small, hawkish-featured woman with skin like some fire-scorched copper alloy, cropped black hair, a figure that sent vaguely understood signals out to their prepubescent hormones, and dry callus-edged hands that told those same hormones exactly how they’d better behave around her. Her grip was firm, her eyes direct and appraising. Pain is all around us, it takes many forms. My job will be to teach you how to recognise all those forms, to understand them and to not allow any of them to keep you from your purpose. Carl had learnt the lessons well. He dealt with the careful brutality the uncles were applying exactly as if it were one of Chitra’s worked examples. He knew they would not damage him beyond repair because all the Osprey Eighteen children had been told, time and time again, how valuable they were. He also knew the uncles would have preferred not to use physical violence to this extent. It was never a preferred method of discipline at Osprey, was only ever used to punish serious breaches of respect and obedience, and only then as a last resort. But every other punishment task they set Carl that week, he simply refused to carry out. Worse, he spat back his refusal in their faces, he savoured the tug of disobedience like the pain of pushing himself on a run or a cliff climb. And when the measured violence came, he embraced it, shrugged himself into Chitra’s training like a harness and faced the uncles with a blank fury they could not match.

In the end, it was Chitra who unlocked his efforts, just as she’d given him what he needed to shore them up. She came to him one grey afternoon as he sat, bruised and bleeding from the mouth, aching back propped against a storage shed near the helipad. She stood for a while without saying anything, then stepped into his direct field of vision, hands in her coverall pockets. He tried to look around her, shifted sideways, but it hurt too much to sustain the posture. She didn’t move.

In the end he had to look up into her face.

What’s your purpose, Carl? she asked him quietly. There was no judgement in either tone or expression, only genuine inquiry. I understand your pain, I see the ways in which you’ve tried to make it external. But what purpose do you have?

He didn’t answer. Looking back he didn’t think she ever expected him to. But after she’d gone, he realised - allowed himself to realise - that Marisol really wasn’t coming back, that the uncles were telling the truth, and that he was wasting his own time as well as theirs.

Waiting with Sevgi was different. He had her there with him. He had purpose.

He was still going to fucking lose her.

He met her father in the gardens, a big, grey-haired Turk with powerful shoulders and the same tigerish eyes as his daughter. He wore no moustache, but there was thick stubble rising high on his cheeks and bristling at his cleft chin, and he had lost none of his hair with age. He would have been a very handsome man in his youth and even now - Carl estimated he must be in his early sixties - even seated on the beige stone bench and staring fixedly at the fountain, he exuded a quiet, charismatic authority. He wore a plain dark suit that matched the thick woollen shirt beneath it and the purplish smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

‘You’re Carl Marsalis,’ he said, as Carl reached the bench. There was no question mark in his voice, it was a little hoarse but iron firm beneath. If he’d been crying, he hid it well.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’

‘I am Murat Ertekin. Sevgi’s father. Please, join me.’ He gestured at the empty space beside him on the bench, waited until Carl was seated. ‘My daughter has told me a lot about you.’

‘Care to give me specifics?’

Ertekin glanced sideways at him. ‘She told me that your loyalty cannot be easily bought.’

It brought him up short. The received wisdom about variant thirteen was that they had no loyalties at all beyond self-interest. He wondered if Ertekin was quoting Sevgi directly, or putting his own spin on what she’d said.

‘Did she tell you what I am?’

‘Yes.’ Another sidelong look. ‘Were you expecting disapproval from me? Hatred, perhaps, or fear? The standard-issue prejudices?’

‘I don’t know you,’ Carl told him evenly. ‘Aside from the fact that the two of you don’t get on and that you left Turkey for political reasons, Sevgi hasn’t told me anything about you at all. I wouldn’t know what your attitude is to my kind. Though my impression is that you weren’t too happy about Sevgi’s last variant thirteen indiscretion.’

Ertekin sat rigid. Then he slumped. He closed his eyes, hard, opened them again to face the world.

‘I am to blame,’ he said quietly. ‘I failed her. All our lives together, I encouraged Sevgi to push the boundaries. And then, when she finally pushed them too far for my liking, I reacted like some village mullah who’s never seen the Bosphorus Bridge in his life and doesn’t plan to. I reacted exactly like my fucking brother.’

‘Your brother’s a mullah?’

Murat Ertekin laughed bitterly. ‘A mullah, no. Though perhaps he did miss his vocation when he chose secular law for a career. I’m told he was never more than an indifferent lawyer. But a self-righteous, wilfully ignorant male supremacist? Oh, yes. Bulent always excelled at that.’

‘You talk about him in the past. Is he dead?’

‘He is to me.’

The conversation jerked violently to a halt on the assertion. They both sat for a while staring into the space where it had been. Murat Ertekin sighed. He talked as if picking up the pieces of something broken, as if each bending down to retrieve a fragment of the past was an effort that forced him to breath deeply.

‘You must understand, Mr Marsalis, my marriage was not a successful one. I married young, and in haste, to a woman who took her faith very seriously indeed. When we were still both medical students in Istanbul, I mistook that faith for a general strength, but I was wrong. When we moved to America, as it still was then, Hatun could not cope. She was homesick, and New York frightened her. She never adjusted. We had Sevgi because at such times you are told that having a child will bring you together again.’ A grimace. ‘It’s a strange article of faith - the belief that sleepless nights, no sex, less income and the constant stress of caring for a helpless new life should somehow alleviate the pressures on a relationship already under strain.’

Carl shrugged. ‘People believe some strange things.’

‘Well, in our case it didn’t work. My work suffered, we fought more, and Hatun’s fear of the city grew. She retreated into her faith. She already went headscarfed in the streets, now she began to wear the full chador. She would not receive guests in the house unless she was covered, and of course she had already quit her job to have Sevgi. She isolated herself from her former friends and colleagues at the hospital, frustrated their attempts to stay in touch, eventually changed mosques to one preaching some antiquated Wahabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defence. What was Sevgi to make of her mother? She was growing up a streetwise New York kid, bilingual and smart, and Hatun didn’t even want her to have swimming lessons with boys.’

Ertekin stared down at his hands.

‘I encouraged the rebellion,’ he said quietly. ‘I hated the way Hatun was changing, maybe by then I even hated Hatun herself. She’d begun to criticise the work I did, calling it unIslamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or non-believing friends, growing more rigid in her attitudes every year. I was determined Sevgi would not end up the same way. It delighted me when she started asking her mother those simple child’s questions about God that no one can answer. I rejoiced when she was strong and determined and smart in the face of Hatun’s hollow, rote-learnt dogma. I egged her on, pushed her to take chances and achieve, and I defended her to her mother whenever they clashed - even when she was wrong and Hatun was right. And when things finally grew unbearable and Hatun left us and went home - I think I was glad.’

‘Does her mother know what’s happened?’

Ertekin shook his head. ‘We’re not in contact any more, neither Sevgi nor I. Hatun only ever called to berate us both, or to try to persuade Sevgi to go back to Turkey. Sevgi stopped taking her calls when she was fifteen. Even now, she’s asked me not to tell her mother. It’s probably as well. Hatun wouldn’t come, or if she came she’d make a scene, wailing and calling down judgement on us all.’

The word judgement went through Carl like a strummed chord.

‘You are not a religious man, are you?’ Ertekin asked him.

It was almost worth a grin. ‘I’m a thirteen.’

‘And thus genetically incapable.’ Ertekin nodded. ‘The received wisdom. Do you believe that?’

‘Is there another explanation?’

‘When I was younger, we were less enamoured of genetic influence as a factor. My grandfather was a communist.’ A shrewd glance. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘Read about them, yeah.’

‘He believed that you can make of a human anything you choose to. That humans can become what they choose. That environment is all. It’s not a fashionable view any longer.’

‘That’s because it’s demonstrably untrue.’

‘And yet, you - variant thirteens everywhere - were thoroughly environmentally conditioned. They did not trust your genes to give them the soldiers they wanted. You were brought up from the cradle to face brutality as if it were a fact of life.’

Carl thought of Sevgi, tubes and needles and hope withering away. ‘Brutality is a fucking fact of life. Haven’t you noticed?’

Ertekin shifted on the bench, turned towards him. Carl sensed that the other man was close to reaching out, to taking his hands in his own.

Groping for something.

‘Do you really believe that you would have become this, that you were genetically destined to it, however you were raised as a child?’

Carl made an impatient gesture. ‘What I believe isn’t important. I did become this, how I got here is academic. So let the academics discuss it at great length, write their papers and publish, get paid to agonise. In the end, none of it affects me.’

‘No, but it might affect others like you in the future.’

Now he found he could smile - a thin, hard smile, the rind of amusement. ‘There aren’t going to be any others like me in the future. Not on this planet. In another generation, we’ll all be gone.’

‘Is that why you don’t believe? Do you feel forsaken?’

The smile became a laugh of sorts. ‘I think you’ll find, Doctor Ertekin, that the technical term for that is transference. You’re the one feeling forsaken. I haven’t ever expected to be anything other than alone, so I’m not upset when I find it to be true.’

Marisol sat in his head and called him a liar. Elena Aguirre ghosted past, whispering. He held down a shiver, talked to stave it off.

‘And you’re missing a rather important point about my lack of religious convictions as well. To be a believer, you have to not only believe, you also have to want someone big and patriarchal around to take care of business for you. You have to be apt for worship. And thirteens don’t do worship, of anyone or anything. Even if you could convince a variant thirteen, against all the evidence, that there really was a god? He’d just see him as a threat to be eliminated. If god were demonstrably real?’ He stared hard into Ertekin’s eyes. ‘Guys like me would just be looking for ways to find him and burn him down.’

Ertekin flinched, and looked away.

‘She’s chosen you well,’ he murmured.

‘Sevgi?’

‘Yes.’ Still looking away, fumbling in a jacket pocket. ‘You will need this.’

He handed Carl a small package, sealed in slippery antiseptic white with orange flash warning decals. Lettering in a language he couldn’t read, Germanic feel, multiple vowels. Carl weighed it in his palm.

‘Put it away, please,’ Ertekin told him. The garden was starting to fill as students and medical staff came out on lunch-break to enjoy the sun.

‘This is painless?’

‘Yes. It’s from a Dutch company that specialises in such things. It will take about two minutes from injection.’

Carl stowed the package.

‘If you brought this,’ he said quietly, ‘why do you need me?’

‘Because I cannot do it,’ Ertekin told him simply.

‘Because you’re a Muslim?’

‘Because I’m a doctor.’ He looked at his hands again. They hung limp in his lap. ‘And because even if I had not taken an oath, I do not think I would be capable of ending my own daughter’s life.’

‘It’s what she wants. It’s what she’s asked for.’

‘Yes.’ There were tears gathering on Ertekin’s eyelids. ‘And now, when it most matters, I find I cannot give her what she wants.’

He took Carl’s hand suddenly. His grip was dry and powerful. The tiger-irised gaze burned into Carl’s, blinked tears aside so they trickled on the leathery skin.

‘She’s chosen you. And deep in my hypocritical, doubting soul, I give thanks to God that you’ve come. Sevgi is getting ready once more to push the boundaries, to cross the lines drawn by others that she will not heed. And this time I will not fail her, as I did four years ago.’

He wiped away the tears with quick, impatient gestures of his hand.

‘I will stand with my daughter this time,’ he said. ‘But you must help me, thirteen, if I am not to fail her again.’

The Haag complex rips through Sevgi’s system like vacuum in a suddenly holed spacecraft. Cells rupture, leak vital fluids. Debris flies about, her immune system staggers, flushes itself desperately, clings to the anti-viral boosters Stanford fed her, and still it fails. Her lungs begin to fill. Her renal functions slow and must be artificially stimulated if her kidneys are not to explode. Tubes in, tubes out. The creep of waste products through her system begins to hurt.

She finds it harder to think with clarity for any length of time.

Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.

He sat by the bed in shock.

For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.

‘I look like shit,’ she murmured. ‘Right?’

‘You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?’

She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.

He sat by the bed.

He held her hand.

‘Tell me a secret.’

‘What?’ He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds under the sheet. Her face was in shadow.

‘Come on,’ she croaked. ‘You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?’

He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. ‘Thought you’d already worked that out.’

‘Well, you tell me. Did I?’

He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years. It’s another world, it’s another time, Sutherland had said once. Got to learn to let it go.

‘You were close,’ he admitted.

‘How close? Come on, Marsalis.’ A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. ‘Grant a dying woman a last wish.’

His mouth tightened.

‘Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,’ he said. ‘There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.’

‘Which was?’

‘Same as it always is. The human angle.’

‘Oh, humans.’ She laughed again, a little stronger now. ‘I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any further than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?’

He smiled. ‘Right.’

‘So which particular human did you finesse?’

‘Neil Delaney.’ Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. ‘He was Bradbury site administrator back then.’

‘He’s on the oversight council now.’

‘Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.’ Carl found himself loosening up. Words flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet. ‘Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.’

‘Motherfucker!’ But it was the whispered ghost of outrage, you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.

‘Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as out-sourcing - NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done - dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly up.’

‘Somehow, I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.’

‘No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.’ Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. ‘It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.’

‘He sent you home.’

‘Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.’

‘And what did Gutierrez get?’

Carl shrugged. ‘Cash. Favours. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.’

‘But only you got to go home.’

‘Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start. I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.’

‘So.’ She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. ‘Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?’

‘Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties? Spitz, or something?’

‘Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.’

‘He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?’

‘You don’t care?’

He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. ‘There’s no point in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet. Another world, another time. What was I going to do - go back there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.’

Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. ‘Yeah,’ she whispered. ‘I guess that’s the truth.’

They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her

‘Why’d you come back, Carl?’ she asked him softly.

He made a crooked grin in the gloom. ‘Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.’

‘But you were free there.’ She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. ‘You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.’

‘Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy/thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.’ He shrugged. ‘Pretty good odds.’

‘And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?’ She craned forward in the bed, half-way to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. ‘What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?’

Another shrug, another crooked grin. ‘Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.’

She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said when she’d got her breath back. ‘All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?’

He hesitated. ‘It’s not really that important, Sevgi.’

‘It is to me.’

Feet when down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.

‘Sutherland,’ he said.

‘Your sensei.’

‘Yeah.’ He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. ‘See, there’s a point you get to with tanindo. A level where it stops being about how to do it, becomes all about why. Why you’re practising, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.’

‘You didn’t know why?’ She puffed a breathless laugh. ‘Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?’

Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.

‘Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,’ he said distantly. ‘You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.’

‘Sutherland’s a thirteen too, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So how come he managed it?’

Carl nodded. ‘Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.’

‘And that was?’

‘He told me to make a list, keep it to myself and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.’

‘You didn’t go for the round dozen?’

‘The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.’ He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. ‘Nine of those, I realised I needed to be on Earth to do.’

The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out of the window.

‘Have you done them all yet?’ she asked quietly.

‘No. Not yet.’ He cleared his throat, frowned. ‘But I’m getting through them. And it does work. Sutherland was right.’

For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched round to face him again.

‘You want to hear a secret of mine?’

‘Sure.’

‘Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide eyed and innocent.’ She coughed a little. ‘Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could have set it in motion.’

She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilised again.

He leaned in closer. ‘So who’d you want to kill?’

‘Amy fucking Westhoff,’ she said bitterly. ‘Fucking bitch that killed Ethan.’

‘You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.’

‘Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at city hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in datacrime?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.’

‘You think she knew what he was?’

‘I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.’

‘Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.’

That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.

‘I don’t believe she knew back then,’ Sevgi said finally. ‘Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did too if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. The Truth About Thirteens, how to recognise one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, freephone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. Are you Sleeping with a Thirteen? - thirteen tell-tale signs that let you know. Fucking bullshit like that.’

She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated. Voice impatient.

‘Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.’

‘She knew about the pregnancy?’

‘Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.’ Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. ‘That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby-’

‘So, not his surrogate then?’

‘No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.’

Carl saw the link. ‘You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?’

‘I don’t know. But he went to datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.’ He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on he bed. ‘But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I told Ethan that, but,’ she rolled her head back and forth on the pillow, ‘like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.’

‘Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?’

‘Enough to make a case?’ He thought she smiled in the dimness. ‘No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?’

‘Yeah, you said a downtown number.’

‘Yeah.’ She was smiling, bleakly. ‘Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have got there easily enough.’

‘Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in datacrime.’

‘No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.’

‘Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in city hall, maybe?’

‘Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.’

‘And no one else picked up on this?’

Another weak smile. ‘No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities. You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.’

He nodded. He thought it might be starting to get light outside.

‘So you planned to kill her. Have her killed. What stopped you?’

‘I don’t know.’ She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. ‘In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.’

Beyond the window, the night was definitely beginning to bleach out. Carl saw Sevgi’s face more clearly now, saw the desolation in it. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.

‘Try to get some rest now,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t,’ she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’

Rovayo showed up, off-duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t funny and no one laughed. Rovayo toughed it out, spent the time there she’d announced she could, promised awkwardly to return. The look in Sevgi’s eyes suggested she didn’t much care or way or the other. Outside in the corridor afterwards, the Rim cop grimaced at Carl.

‘Bad idea, huh?’

‘It was a nice thought.’ He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. ‘You get anything from the crime scene?’

Rovayo shook her head. ‘Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys or a dozen irrelevant Bayview low-lifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.’

‘Yeah, he was.’ Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. ‘You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.’

‘Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.’

‘Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.’

Rovayo blinked. ‘I see you’re in a great mood.’

‘Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.’ He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. ‘You want to get a coffee downstairs?’

‘Sure.’

Across the scarred plastic table top in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the Bulgakov’s Cat bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends. Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.

‘And we’ll probably lose,’ was Rovayo’s sour assessment. ‘Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.’

‘Right.’ It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.

Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table and said: ‘I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?’

‘Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-djinn built that has the chaos-modelling capacity to beat this. Haag system’s designed to take down a thirteen, and my immune system’s about twice as efficient as yours, so they had to come up with something pretty unstoppable.’

Rovayo grunted. ‘Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?’

‘Black man?’

‘Yeah, black. Black-skinned, like you and me. First they tie cocaine use to the black community, make it a race-based issue. Then they reckon they need a bigger bang to put us down, because we’re all coked up.’ The Rim cop made an ironic gesture of presentation. ‘Welcome to the .357 magnum round.’

Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. ‘You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?’

‘Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.’

He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. ‘Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.’

‘Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.’ Rovayo sipped at her coffee. ‘Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action-mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.’

Carl sat back. ‘You’re winding me up.’

‘No. Thing was supposed to fire round bullets if you were fighting Christians, square if you were killing heathens.’

‘Come on! There’s no fucking way they could build something like that back then.’

‘No, of course they couldn’t. It didn’t work.’ The Rim cop’s voice tinged grim. ‘But the .357 magnum did. And so does Haag.’

‘Monsters, huh,’ said Carl quietly. ‘How come you know all this stuff, Rovayo?’

‘I read a lot of history,’ said the black woman. ‘Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.’

They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a mid-term pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage.

Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.

Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.

Her hands and feet feel swollen, and increasingly numb.

When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.

Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.

When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the night-time ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadikoy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.

Reaching out his hand.

Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.

He tried to work.

Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.

‘I remembered something this afternoon,’ he told the COLIN exec. ‘Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambaren, he recognised this jacket.’

Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashed along the sleeve.

‘Yeah? Standard Republican jail-wear, I guess any criminal in the western hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.’

‘It’s not quite standard.’ Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.

‘Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.’

‘Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.’

Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. ‘All right, we can look. God knows, I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?’

‘No. Bambaren, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.’

‘And we don’t know when he did time?’

‘No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.’

‘Or Bambaren misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambaren’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.’

‘All right, leave it with me.’ Norton glanced back down the corridor towards Sevgi’s room. ‘Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?’

‘Sure. That’s why I’m here.’

Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. ‘You call me if anything-’

‘Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.’

For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight and headed away down the corridor.

Carl watched him go with folded arms.

Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.

‘Wondered when you’d show up,’ he said quietly.

Sevgi washed awake, alone, left beached by the receding tide of the endorphins, and she knew with an odd clarity that it was time. The once vertiginous terror was gone, had collapsed in on itself for lack of energy to sustain it. She was, finally, more weary, more miserably angry and more in pain than she was scared.

It was what she’d been waiting for.

Time to go.

Outside the window of her room, morning was trying to get in. Soft slant of sunlight through the gap in the quaint hand-pull curtains. Waiting between endorphin surges for night to drag itself out the door had seemed like an aching, gritty forever. She lay there for a while longer, watching the hot patch of light creep onto the bed at her feet and thinking, because she wanted to be sure.

When the door opened and Carl Marsalis stepped into the room, the decision was as solid in her head as it had been when she woke.

‘Hi there,’ he said softly. ‘Just been up the hall for a shower.’

‘Lucky fucking bastard,’ she said throatily, and was dismayed at how deep, how bitter her envy of that simple pleasure really was. It made her feelings over Rovayo look trivial by comparison.

Time to go.

He smiled at her, maybe hadn’t caught the edge in her voice, maybe had and let it go.

‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked.

The same question he asked every time. She held his gaze and mustered a firm nod.

‘Yeah, you can. Call my father and Tom in here, will you?’

The smile flickered and blew out on his face. He stood absolutely still for a moment, looking down at her. Then he nodded and slipped out.

As soon as he was gone, her pulse began to pound, up through her throat and in her temples. It felt like the first couple of times she ever had to draw her weapon as a patrol officer, the sudden, tilting comprehension that came with a street situation about to go bad. The terror of the last decaying seconds, the taste of irrevocable commitment.

But by the time he came back with the other two, she had it locked down.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she told them, voice a dried-up whisper scarcely louder in the room than it was in her own head. ‘This is it.’

None of them spoke. It wasn’t like this was a surprise.

‘Baba, I know you’d do this for me if you could. Tom, I know you would too. I chose Carl because he can, that’s all.’

She swallowed painfully. Waited for the ache it made to subside. Hiss/click of the machines around her across the silence. Outside in the corridor, the hospital’s working day was just getting underway.

‘They’ve told me they can keep me going like this for at least another month. Baba, is that true?’

Murat bowed his head. He made a trapped sound, somewhere between throat and chest. He jerked a nod. Tears fell off his eyes onto the sheets. She found suddenly, oddly, that she felt worse for him than she did for herself. Abruptly, she realised that the fear in her was almost gone, squeezed out of the frame with pain and tiredness and straightforward irritation with it all.

Time to go.

‘I’m not going to go on like this for another month,’ she husked. ‘I’m bored, I’m sick and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?’

Carl nodded.

‘Well, it isn’t rushing any more. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I’ve got to go, and it looks like fucking kilometres of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game any more.’

‘Sev, are you-’ Norton stalled out.

She smiled for him. ‘Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realise I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.’

She turned to Carl again.

‘Have you got it?’

He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so fucking weary.

‘Baba.’ Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. ‘Is this going to hurt me?’

Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.

‘No, canim. It’ll be like . . .’ He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. ‘Like going to sleep.’

‘That’s good,’ she whispered breathlessly. ‘I could use some decent sleep.’

She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions - she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.

‘Tom,’ she said gently. ‘Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come round here. Don’t cry, Baba. Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt any more.’

She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.

‘You just tell me when,’ he said.

She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.

‘I’m ready,’ she whispered.

He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.

Waited for what came next

Sunlight outside.

She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets any more. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens, crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock and of course there’s Murat in pyjamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalised and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room, yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut.

‘Better get some sleep, Sevgi.’

Still aching as she stumbles into bed, still half-dressed. Curtains not properly drawn, sunlight slanting in, but no fucking way that’s going to stop her sleeping, the way she feels now. No fucking way . . .

Sunlight outside.

Aches and pains forgotten. The long, warming slide into not worrying about anything at all.

And the room and all that was in it went away gently, like Murat closing her bedroom door.

When it was done, when her eyes slid finally closed and her breathing stopped, when Murat Ertekin bent over her, sobbing uncontrollably, and checked the pulse in her neck and nodded, when it was over and there was, finally, no more left for him to do, Carl walked away.

He left Murat Ertekin sitting with his daughter. He left Norton standing trembling like a bodyguard running a high fever but still on duty. He left and headed down the corridor alone. It felt as if he was wading in thigh-deep water. Humans brushed past, moving aside for him, cued in by the blank face and the forced gait. There was no panic, no buzz of activity in his wake - Murat knew how to bypass the machines so they wouldn’t scream for help when Sevgi’s vital signs sank to the bottom.

They would know soon enough. Norton had promised to deal with it. That was his end - Carl had done what he did best.

He walked away.

The memories scurried after him, anxious not to be left behind.

‘Don’t know what’s next,’ she says, smiling as the drug takes hold. ‘But if it feels anything like this, it’ll do.’

And then, as her eyelids begin to sag, ‘I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.’

‘Yeah, with all that fruit and the stream running under the trees there,’ he tells her, through lips that seem to have gone numb. Voice suddenly hoarse. He’s the only one talking to her now. Norton is silent and rigid at his side, no use to anyone. Murat Ertekin has sunk to his knees beside the bed, face pressed into his daughter’s hand, holding back tears with an effort that shakes him visibly as he breathes. He summons strength to keep speaking. Squeezes her hand. ‘Remember that, Sevgi. All that sunlight through the trees.’

She squeezes back, barely. She sniggers, a gentle rupturing of air out through her lips, barely any actual sound. ‘And the virgins. Don’t forget them.’

He swallows hard.

‘Yeah, well, you save me one of those. I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up. We all will.’

‘Fucking virgins,’ she murmurs sleepily. ‘Who needs ’em? Gotta teach ’em every fucking thing . . .’

And then, finally, just before the breathing stops,

‘Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.’

He smashed back the doors out of the ward, along the corridors people got out of his way. He found the stairs, plunged downward, looking for a way out.

Knowing there wasn’t one.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Afterwards, the COLIN exec came to find him in the garden. Carl hadn’t said he was going there, but it wouldn’t have taken a detective to work it out. The benches around the fountain had become a standard haunt for all of them over the past week, familiar with habitual use. It was where they went when the weight of the hospital pressed down on them, when the antiseptic-scented, nano-cleansed air grew too hard and arid to breathe. Norton slumped onto the bench beside him like someone getting home to a shared house and hitting the sofa. He stared into the sunlit splash of the fountain and said nothing at all. He’d cleaned up, but his face still looked feverish from the crying.

‘Any trouble?’ Carl asked him.

Norton shook his head numbly. His voice came out mechanical. ‘They’re making some noise. The COLIN brief should cover it. Ertekin’s talking to them.’

‘So we’re free to go.’

‘Free to . . . ?’ The exec’s brow furrowed, uncomprehending. ‘You’ve always been free to go, Marsalis.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

Norton swallowed. ‘Listen, there’s the funeral. Arrangements. I don’t know if-’

‘I’m not interested in what they do with her corpse. I’m going to find Onbekend. Are you going to help me?’

‘Marsalis, listen-’

‘It’s a simple question, Norton. You watched her die in there. What are you going to do about it?’

The COLIN exec drew a shuddering breath. ‘You think killing Onbekend is going to make things better? You think that’ll bring her back?’

Carl stared at him. ‘I’m going to assume that’s rhetorical.’

‘Haven’t you had enough yet?’

‘Enough of what?’

‘Enough of killing whatever you can get your fucking hands on.’ Norton came off the bench, stood over him. The words hissed out like vented poison gas. ‘You just took Sevgi’s life in there, and all you can think of to do is go look for someone else to kill? Is that all you fucking know how to do?’

Across the gardens, heads turned.

‘Sit down,’ Carl said grimly. ‘Before I break your fucking neck for you.’

Norton grinned hard. He sank onto his haunches, brought his face level with Carl’s.

‘You want to break my fucking neck.’ He gestured up. ‘Here it is, my friend. Right fucking here.’

He meant it. Carl closed his eyes and sighed. Opened them and looked at Norton again, nodded slowly.

‘All right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There are two ways to look at this, my friend. See, we can do the civilised, feminised, constructive thing, and work a long by-the-book investigation that may or may not lead us eventually back to Manco Bambaren and the altiplano and Onbekend. Or, we can take your COLIN authorisation and a little hardware, and we can fly down there and set fire to Manco’s machine.’

Norton levered himself upright again. He shook his head. ‘And you think that’s going to make him cave in? Just like that?’

‘Onbekend is a thirteen.’ Carl wondered fleetingly if he shouldn’t try harder with Norton, lever his voice up out of the dead tone he could hear in it. ‘Manco Bambaren may have hired him, or he may just be doing business with the people who did, but whatever the connection is, it’s not blood the way it was with Merrin. Manco’s going to see Onbekend and me as two of a kind, monsters he can play off against each other for whatever best result there is. He gave me Névant three years ago to get me off his back, and he’ll give me Onbekend for the same reason. In the end, he’s a businessman, and he’ll do what’s good for business. If we make it bad enough for business to hold out, then he’ll cave in.’

‘We?’

‘Slip of the tongue. I’m going anyway. You can come with me or not, as your non-variant conscience sees fit. Be easier for me if you did, but if you don’t, well.’ Carl shrugged. ‘I promised Gutierrez I’d go back to Mars to kill him, and I meant it. The altiplano’s a lot easier gig than that.’

‘I could stop you.’

‘No, you couldn’t. First sign of trouble from you, I’m on a UNGLA bounce out of here. They practically tried to drag me onto the shuttle last week. They’ll jump at the chance if I call them. Then I’ll just double back to Peru on my own ticket.’

‘COLIN could still make your life very tough down there.’

‘Yeah, they usually do. Occupational hazard. It never stopped me before.’

‘Hard man, huh?’

‘Thirteen.’ Carl looked at him levelly. ‘Norton, this is what’s wired into me, it’s what my body chemistry’s good for. I am going to build a memorial to Sevgi Ertekin out of Onbekend’s blood, and I will cut down anyone who gets in my way. Including you, if you make me.’

Norton sank back onto the bench.

‘You think that’s just you?’ he muttered. ‘You think we don’t all feel that way right now?’

‘I wouldn’t know. But feeling and doing are two very different things. In fact, there’s a guy back on Mars called Sutherland who tells me humans have built their entire civilisation in the gap between the two. I wouldn’t know about that either. What I do know is that an hour ago in there,’ Carl gestured towards the hospital, ‘Murat Ertekin felt he wanted to put his daughter out of her misery. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I won’t judge him for that, just like I won’t judge you for not coming with me, if that’s the choice you make. Maybe this stuff just isn’t wired into you people as deep. That’s what they told us at Osprey, anyway. That we were special because we were able to do what the society that created us no longer had the stomach for.’

‘Right,’ Norton said bitterly. ‘Believe everything the recruiting poster says, why don’t you.’

‘I didn’t say I did, I said that’s what they told us. I don’t necessarily think they were right. This much is true - it certainly didn’t work out well, not for us or for you people.’ Carl sighed. ‘Look, I don’t know, Norton. Maybe the fact you don’t have the stomach for single-minded slaughter any more, the fact you’re forgetting how to do it - maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you a better human being than me, a better member of society, a better man even. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t care because for me it isn’t relevant. I am going to destroy Onbekend, I am going to destroy anyone who stands in my way. Now are you coming with me or not?’

In the hotel, he found mundane things to do. The last four days of Sevgi’s life had frozen his own existence in its tracks, he’d done nothing awake but sit by her and wait. He’d been in the same set of clothes since the night she was shot, and even the Marstech fabrics were starting to look shabby. He bundled them up and sent them for cleaning. Ordered something similar from the hotel catalogue and wore it out into the street when he went looking for a phone. He supposed that he could have got phones easily enough from the hotel along with the clothing, but a habitual caution stopped him. And besides, he needed to walk. Away from or towards what, he wasn’t quite sure, but the need sat in the pit of his empty stomach like tiny bubbles, like frustration rising.

‘Bambaren’s cousin’s a bust,’ Norton had told him on their way back into town. The COLIN exec slumped in the back of the autocab as if broken at the joints. ‘So if you’re looking for a way in, that isn’t it. We got a name, Suerte Ferrer, street hook Maldicion, string of small-time stuff on the fringes of the Jesusland familias. Did his three years in South Florida for gang-related, but he’s out right now and he’s dropped right off the scope.’

‘The n-djinns can’t find him?’

‘He’s gone to ground somewhere in the Republic, and I can’t get an n-djinn search in there without causing a major diplomatic incident. We’re not exactly flavour of the month since we sprung you from South Florida State.’

‘You don’t think you can get local PD to co-operate?’

‘Which local PD?’ Norton stared emptily out of the window. ‘As far as our information goes, Ferrer could be in any of about a dozen different states. And besides, Jesusland PD don’t have the budget to run their own n-djinns.’

‘So they hire one out of the Rim.’

‘Yeah, they do that. But you’re talking about major expenditure and half these departments are struggling just to make payroll and keep their tactical equipment up to date. You’re looking at decades of slash-and-burn tax cuts in public services across the board. There is no way, in that climate, I can start ringing up senior detectives across the Republic and asking them to buy n-djinn time to track down some minor league gangbanger they’ve never heard of with no warrant out and no suspicion of anything other than being related to someone we don’t like.’

Carl nodded. Since leaving the hospital, he’d found himself thinking with a faintly adrenalised clarity that was like a synadrive hit. Sevgi was gone now, shelved in some space he could access later when he’d need the rage, and in her absence he was serene with vectored purpose. He looked back down the chain of association to Ferrer and saw the angle he needed.

‘Norton.’

The COLIN exec grunted.

‘How easy would it be for you to get access to unreleased Marstech?’

On the northern fringes of Chinatown, more or less at random, he found an unassuming frontage with the simple words Clean Phone picked out on the glass in green LCLS lozenges. He went inside and bought a pack of one-shot audiophones, walked out again and found himself standing in the cold evening air, abruptly alone. In the time he’d been in the shop, everyone else seemed to have suddenly found pressing reasons to get off the street. He suffered an overpowering sense of unreality, and a sudden urge of his own, to go back into the shop and see if the woman who’d served him had also disappeared, or had maybe ceded her place behind the counter to a grinning Elena Aguirre.

He grimaced and glanced around, picked out Telegraph Hill and the blunt finger of the Coit Tower on the skyline. He started walking towards it. The smoky evening light darkened and lights began to glimmer on across the vistas of the city. He reached Columbus Avenue and it was as if the city had suddenly jerked back to life around him. Teardrops zipped past in both direction, the muted chunter of their motors filled his ears. He joined other human beings at the crossing point, waited with them for a space in the traffic flow, hurried with them when it came, across to Washington Square. More life here, more lives being lived. There was a softball match just packing up in the centre of the grass, people headed home from under the spread of the trees. A tall, gaunt man dressed in ragged black stopped him and held out a begging bowl in hands that spasmed and shook. There was a sign in Chinese characters pinned to his shirt. Carl shot him a standard issue get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, but it didn’t work.

‘Bearliunt,’ the man said in a hoarse voice, pushing the bowl at him. ‘Bearliunt.’

He met hollowed-out eyes in a stretched parchment face. He held down the easy-access fury with an effort.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he told the derelict evenly. He jabbed a finger at the Chinese script. ‘I can’t read this.’

‘Bearliunt. Rike you. Needy Nero.’

The eyes were dark and intelligent, but they darted about. It was like being watched by something avian. The bowl came back, prodding.

‘Bearliunt. Brack Rab from.’

And Carl felt understanding pour down the back of his neck like cold water, like Elena Aguirre’s touch. The man nodded. Saw the recognition.

‘Yes. Brack Rab from. Bairliunt. Rike you.’

Chilled out of nowhere, fucked up in some indefinable way, Carl reached into his pocket and fished out a wafer at random. He dumped it into the bowl without checking for denomination. Then he shouldered past the man and headed away fast, towards the rising slope of Telegraph Hill. When he got out of the park, he looked back and the man was staring after him, standing awkwardly with one arm raised stiffly like some kind of scarecrow brought barely to life. Carl shook his head, not knowing what he was denying, and fled for the tower.

He got to the top, out of breath from the speed he’d climbed.

The tower was closed up and he had the place to himself apart from a young couple propped against the seaward viewing wall in each other’s arms. He stood and watched them balefully for a while, wondering how much he might also look like a living scarecrow in their eyes. Finally, they grew uncomfortable and the girl tugged her boyfriend away towards the exit stair. He was a muscular boy, tall and handsome in a pale Nordic fashion, and at first he wasn’t going to go. He stared back at Carl, blue eyes marbled wet with tension. Carl concentrated on not killing him.

Then the girl leaned up and murmured in the blond boy’s ear, and he contented himself with a snort, and they left.

Somewhere inside Carl, something clicked and broke, like ice in a glass.

He went to the wall and looked out across the water. Watched the lights glimmer on the Alcatraz station, out along the bridge, over at the shoreline on the Marin side. Sevgi was there in all of it, a thousand memories he didn’t need or want. He blew hard breath through his nose, pulled one of the phones loose from the pack and dialled a number he’d never expected to need.

‘Sigma Frat House,’ said a jeering voice. ‘This ain’t the time to be calling neither, so you leave a message and it better be a fucking good one.’

‘Danny? Let me speak to the Guatemalan.’

The voice scaled upward, derisive. ‘Guatemalan’s sleeping, motherfucker. You call back in office hours, you hear?’

‘Danny, you listen to me very carefully. If you don’t go and wake the Guatemalan up right fucking now, I’m going to hang up. And when he hears that you took some fucked-up decision about what he did and didn’t need to hear, all on your own pointed little head, he’ll have you bunking with the Aryans for a reward, I fucking guarantee you.’

Incredulous silence.

‘Who the fuck is this?’

‘This is Marsalis. The thirteen. Couple of weeks back I carried one of your shanks into the chapel after Dudeck, remember? Then I walked out the front gate. I’ve got something out here for the Guatemalan he’s going to like. So you go wake him up and tell him that.’

The voice at the other end went away. Soft prison-wall static sang in the space it left. Carl stared across the hazed evening air in the bay, screwed up his eyes and rubbed a tear out of one corner with his thumb. Grumbling voices in the background, then the bang of someone grabbing the phone. The Guatemalan rumbled down the line, amused and maybe slightly stoned.

‘Eurotrash? That you?’

‘Like I told Danny, yeah.’ Carl picked his angle of entry with care. ‘Dudeck out of the infirmary yet?’

‘Yeah, he is. Moving a little slow right now, though. You do good work, Eurotrash, I gotta give you that much. Dudeck what this is about? You feelin’ nostalgic, calling to talk about old times?’

‘Not exactly. I thought we could do a little business, though. Trade a little data. They say you’re a good man to see for that. So, I’ve got something I need to know, you can maybe help me with it.’

‘Data?’ The other man chuckled. ‘Seems to me, you told me you’d hooked up with the Colony Initiative. You telling me I got data that COLIN don’t?’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, yeah.’

There was a long pause.

‘Want to tell me what my end of this is, Eurotrash?’

‘Let’s see what you’ve got first. You remember a low-grade familia gangbanger came through SFS on a three spot, got out a couple of years ago.’

Another rumbling chortle. ‘Niggah, I remember a whole graveyard of those andino boys. They bounce in and out of this place like they tied to it on a rubber line. Muscle up sooooo proud to the brothers and the Aryans and every other fucker that’ll look them in the eye, and mostly they get stretchered out again. So which particular skull you picking over?’

‘Name of Ferrer, Suerte Ferrer. Likes to call himself Maldicion. He went out walking, so he’s either tougher or smarter than average. That ought to ring some bells.’

‘Yeah, Maldicion. Smart, I’m not convinced on, but he certainly fit tough. Sure. Think I could be induced to remember that boy.’

‘Good. You think you could be induced to tell me where he is now?’

‘You talking about where he is outside population?’

‘Yeah, it looks that way.’

A thoughtful, spreading pool of quiet on the line again. Carl could smell the reek of mistrust it gave off. The Guatemalan’s voice came back slow and careful.

‘I been in here nine long years, Eurotrash. Terror and organised crime, they slammed me away for both. What makes you think I’m in any position to know anything about what goes on outside?’

Carl let his tone sharpen. ‘Don’t get stupid on me, I’m not in the mood. I cut a deal with COLIN, not drug enforcement or the morals committee. This isn’t some hick Jesusland entrapment number. I want Ferrer found, and if possible delivered over the fenceline to the Rim. I’m willing to pay COLIN prices for the service. Now can we do each other some good, or not?’

The Guatemalan missed a beat, but only just. ‘I heard . . . COLIN prices?’

‘Yes, you did.’

Another pause, but this time it thrummed with purpose. He could almost hear the whirr as the Guatemalan made calculations and guesses.

‘Moves on the outside come a lot higher priced than in population,’ the other man said finally, and softly.

‘I imagined they would.’

‘And cross-border delivery, well.’ The Guatemalan made a noise with indrawn breath that sounded like spit steaming off a hot griddle. ‘That’s topping out the favours list, Eurotrash. Big risks, very high stakes.’

‘Unreleased Marstech.’ Carl dropped the words into the pool of quiet expectation at the other end of the line. ‘You hear what I’m saying?’

‘Not a lot of use to me in here.’ But now you could hear the excitement cabled beneath the Guatemalan’s casual tone.

‘Then I guess you’ll have to spend it outside somehow. Maybe buy yourself some big favours at legislature level. Maybe just lay down a little future growth here and there. Man like you, I’m sure you’d know better than me how to find the best investment options for your capital. Now, you going to find Maldicion for me, or not?’

Silence again, tight with the promise of its own brevity. Carl twitched a sudden look over his shoulder, tingle of alarm. Gloom across the space behind him back to the steps up to the tower. Dark, bordering shrubs and foliage. Nothing there. He worked his shoulders and felt the unreleased tension of days locked up there. The Guatemalan came back.

‘Call me in two days,’ he said calmly. ‘And think of a very big number.’

He hung up.

Carl folded the phone and listened to the faint crackle as the internal circuitry fired and melted. He let out a long breath and leaned on the wall, shoulders hunched. The tension gripped his neck like muscled fingers. The soft mounds of the Marin coast rose on the other side of the bay. He stared at the final orange leavings of dayglow on their flanks, filled with an obscure desire he couldn’t pin down. The phone casing was warm in his hand from the meltdown, the air around him felt suddenly chilled in contrast.

‘You’re looking in all the wrong places, thirteen.’

The voice sent him spinning about, combat stance, gripping the phone in his hand as if it could possibly serve him as a weapon.

She stood at the borders of the trees, and he knew the shiver of alarm he’d picked up earlier was the sensation of her watching him. She came forward, arms spread, hands open, palms turned upward with nothing on them. He knew the poise, knew the voice. Looked for the face paint and saw that this time she hadn’t bothered.

‘Hello, Ren.’

‘Good evening, Mr Marsalis.’

Carmen Ren came to a halt about three metres away. Feet set apart on the evercrete in cleated boots that promised steel beneath the curve of the toes. Black pilot-style trousers with thigh pockets sealed shut, plain grey zipped jacket with a high collar that pointed up the elevated planes of her face, hair gathered simply back off the pale narrow face. He looked her up and down for weaponry, saw none she could access in a hurry.

He straightened out of the fighting crouch.

‘Very wise,’ she said. ‘I’m here to help.’

‘So help. Sit down cross-legged with your hands on your head and don’t move while I call RimSec.’

She peeled him a brief smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m not feeling that generous.’

‘I didn’t say you had a choice.’

Something moved in her eyes, the way she breathed. The smile floated back onto her face, but this time it was the adrenal veil, the prelude to fight-or-flight. She telegraphed it to him with an odd, careless abandon that was curiously like the offer of open arms. Abruptly he wasn’t very sure that he’d be able to take her.

He cleared his throat. ‘That’s very good. How’d you do that?’

‘Practice.’ The smile went away again, pocketed for later use. ‘Are we going to talk, or are you going get all genetic on me?’

He thought back to Névant. Broken glass and blood. The night time streets of Istanbul, walking back to Moda and-

He put a tourniquet on it, twisted hard. Grimaced. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘How about I hand you this case in a bento box?’

‘I told you already I’m not a cop. And anyway, why would you do that? Last time I checked, you were playing on Manco Bambaren’s team.’

He was watching her face. No flicker on the name.

‘The people I work for hung me out to dry,’ she said. ‘You want to ask yourself why I left you and Merrin to fight it out?’

He shrugged. ‘Off the sinking ship in your little rat life-vest, I assume.’

‘You assume wrong.’

‘Want to back that up? You know, with evidence?’

‘Right here.’ She patted her jacket pocket. ‘We’ll get it in a moment. First, why don’t you play back the fight in starboard loading for me. Think it through.’

‘I think I’d rather just see this evidence.’

A thin smile. ‘You knock me down, take the others back inside and use their numbers against them.’ She mimed a pistol grip. ‘You take Huang’s sharkpunch, use it on him and Scotty, that’s Osborne to you, the Jesusland kid. So I hear both of them go down while I’m still on the floor, but that’s all it takes me to get back on my feet and there you are, mixing it up with Merrin and all that Mars-side tanindo shit. Now you really think I didn’t have time to swing back in there and pull you off him? Come on, Marsalis. Work the grey matter. I had all the time in the world, and keeping Merrin alive was my job.’

Hairline crack of unease. ‘Keeping Merrin alive?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Someone paid you to shadow him?’

‘Shadow him?’ She raised an elegant eyebrow. ‘No, just get him aboard the Cat. Hook up with Daskeen Azul and keep him there, look after him until further notice.’

The crack ran out, split wide, from unease to splintering confusion.

‘You’re saying . . . you’re telling me Merrin’s been locked down on Bulgakov’s Cat the last four months? He hasn’t been anywhere else?’

‘Sure. Took us about a week to get him there from Ward’s place, but since then? Yeah. Just a handling gig. Why?’

The quarry face of what he knew blew up. Detonated from within, multiple blasts in the thin Martian air and the building roar after, rock shattering and slumping, sliding down itself into rubble and dust. He glimpsed the new face of what was behind, the new surface exposed.

Onbekend’s face.

The trace familiarity about the features, the certainty he knew them from somewhere, had seen them before or features very like them.

Rovayo’s voice floated back through his head. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.

Yeah, he was. You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.

Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.

The enormity of it towered above him like the sky.

I’ve seen data, said Sevgi, the first day he met her, that puts Merrin in combat zones hundreds of kilometres apart on the same day, eye-witness accounts that say he took wounds we can’t find any medical records to confirm, some of them wounds he couldn’t possibly have survived if the stories were true. Sevgi in the prison interview room. He remembered the scent of her as she spoke and his throat locked up. Her voice ran on, wouldn’t get out of his head. Even that South American deployment has too much overlap to be wholly accurate. He was in Tajikistan, no he wasn’t, he was still in Bolivia; he was solo deployed, no, he was leading a Lawman platoon in Kuwait City.

The idiot pattern of the murders. Death in the Bay Area, then Texas and beyond, and then back to the Rim all over again, months later. No sense to the double back, unless . . .

Unless . . .

‘Onbekend,’ he said tightly. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Heard the name.’ Amused quirk in the corner of her mouth. ‘But it means-’

‘I know what it means. Are you working with anyone who has that name?’

‘No. I was working with a guy called Emil Nocera, and with Ulysses Ward, before Merrin went genetic and slaughtered them both. After that, I used Scotty to ride shotgun and pulled some contacts elsewhere. ’

‘What contacts?’

‘Just contacts. No one I see any reason to hand over to you. They’re peripheral, they don’t count. Rimside plug-ins for the people who hired me.’

Carl thought back to the boy with the machete, the gibbering religious abuse.

‘You sold Osborne some story about me?’

‘Not as such.’ Ren looked suddenly tired. ‘I told him Merrin was the, what you call it, the Second Coming? Christ returned and hiding because a black man was out there, coming to do him harm. Mix and match imagery, cooked it up from what I knew about Jesusland ideology and the way Osborne was rambling.’

Very Christlike, he remembered saying when he saw Merrin’s file photo. Very Faith Satellite channel.

He nodded. ‘I can see how that would work.’

‘Yeah, well. Jesuslander, you know. Seemed like a nice enough kid deep down, but you know what that old-time religion will do. Wasn’t hard to sell him the concept, half those people live their whole fucking lives waiting for their saviour to show up. They’d jump at the chance for a walk-on role.’ She shrugged, perfectly. ‘Plus, he was hot for me and concussed from a smack in the head he got from Merrin in the fight at Ward’s place. Poor little fucker never stood a chance.’

‘So I’m the black man.’

She pulled a face. ‘Yeah, you just showed up and fit the role a little too well.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Carl stirred through his recollections again, the fight in the night-time mall. ‘You didn’t send him after me then?’

‘No, that was all his idea.’ Ren’s tone was sour. ‘Thought it up all on his own, and I wasn’t there to stop him. Wasn’t for that, we might all have got off the Cat quietly, while RimSec were still clumping about up on deck trying to lock us down.’

‘You have any idea why you were supposed to bodyguard Merrin?’

‘None. I’m strictly for hire. Got the word he’d be coming in, emergency splashdown and Ward goes out to collect. My end was just keep him safe for a few months, they were going to need him later. We were going to do that at Ward’s place, but it seems Merrin had a few trust issues after what he went through aboard Horkan’s Pride.’

‘Yeah. Understandable. So how’d you talk him down?’

‘Initially?’ Ren grinned. ‘With ninjutsu.’

‘And after that?’

The grin stayed. ‘How do you think?’

‘Really? Osborne and Merrin? How’d you make that work?’

Another elegant shift of the grey fleeced shoulders. ‘Playing handmaiden to Christ, I get to do what I like in Scotty’s eyes. Or at least, he sells it to himself that way as long as he can, because he doesn’t want the rest of it to go away. Maybe that’s what really went wrong when you showed up. Who can tell?’

‘And Merrin?’

‘Well, I’d say Merrin never quite came back from that ride he took home on Horkan’s Pride. I’d been bracing myself for all the usual arrogant thirteen bullshit when he arrived.’ She shook her head. ‘Not much sign of it. I wouldn’t say he was broken, but I’m not sure he ever straightened out what was really going on. I rammed it home that if he made waves, he was just going to blow cover, and I guess he was smart enough to take that much in. He had covert training, right?’

‘Yeah. Field experience too.’

‘So. Something to hang onto, I guess.’

Carl felt the sequence of the fight rise up in his mind again. Slurred tanindo, the slack, not-quite-committed feel to the moves, the lack of force. Almost as if Merrin was still halfback on Mars and living a lesser gravitational pull. As if he’d never really made it home after all.

‘So, you had any field experience?’ he asked Ren.

‘Not as such.’

‘Not as such, huh?’ Carl glanced out across the bay to Marin. The light was almost gone now. ‘Who the fuck are you, Ren?’

‘That’s not what matters here.’

‘I think it is.’

She stared at him for a couple of seconds in the gloom. Put together a throwaway gesture.

‘I’m just some guy they hired.’

‘Just some guy. Right. With ninjutsu technique good enough to beat an ex-Lawman. Try again. Who are you?’

‘Look, it’s simple. Forget whatever skills I picked up on my way round the Pacific Rim. I got hired here, in California, to do a handling job, because that’s what I do. I did my job, I handled the mess when Merrin boiled over, and I kept him covered. Then, when the heat got turned up high again, my scumbag client cut me loose. And now I’m looking for payback.’

‘I thought you were here to help.’

‘I am. My payback is handing you the people who cut me loose.’

‘Not good enough.’

‘I’m sorry, it’ll have to do.’

‘Then go peddle your grudge to someone else.’

He turned his back and leaned on the seaward wall. Stared at the lights out across the water, tried hard not to think of Istanbul, and failed. Under certain superficial differences, the two cities shared an essence you couldn’t evade. Both freighted with the same distilled dream of shoreline, hills and suspension spans, the same hazy sunlit air and rumble by day, the same glimmer on water at evening as ferries criss-crossed the gloom, and traffic flowed in skeins of red and pale gold light, across the bridges and through the street-lamp studded veins of the city. What was in the air there, was here as well, and he felt it catching in his throat.

He heard her boots move behind him. Footfalls on evercrete, closing the gap. He looked out at the glimmer of lights.

‘Kind of careless tonight, aren’t you?’ She draped her arms on the wall, mimicked his posture about a metre off to his left.

He shrugged, didn’t look at her. ‘I figure if you want to feed me some information, it doesn’t pay you to take me out. You were going to do that, you would have done it a while ago.’

‘Fair analysis. Still a risk, though.’

‘I’m not feeling very risk-averse right now.’

‘Yeah, but you’re being fucking choosy about who you take your leads from. Mind telling me why?’

He tipped a glance at her.

‘How about because I don’t trust you any further than I would a Jesusland preacher with a choirboy? You’re handing me what looks like half of a solution, Ren. And it doesn’t match up with what I already know. To me, that stinks of deflection. You want me to believe you’re really ready to sell out your boss? Tell me who you are.’

Quiet. The city breathed. Reflected light trembled across the water.

‘I’m like you,’ she said.

‘You’re a variant?’

She squinted at the blade of her outstretched hand. ‘That’s right. Harbin black-lab product. Nothing but the best.’

‘You some kind of bonobo then?’

‘No, I am not some kind of fucking bonobo.’ There were a couple of grammes of genuine anger in the way her voice lifted. ‘I had sex with Merrin and Scotty for my operational benefit, not because I couldn’t keep my hands off them.’

‘Well, you know what?’ He kept his voice at a drawl, not really sure why he was pushing, just some vague intuitive impulse to feed the anger and keep Ren off balance. ‘The real bonobo females, the pygmy chimps in Africa? That’s what they do a lot of the time too. Fuck to calm the males down, keep them in line. I guess you could call that operational benefit, from a social point of view.’

She got off the wall and faced him.

‘I’m a fucking thirteen, Marsalis. A thirteen, just like you. Got that?’

‘Bullshit. They never built a female thirteen.’

‘Right. Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.’

She stood a metre off, and he saw her force the anger back down, iron it out of her stance and put it away. Shiver of unlooked-for fellow feeling as he watched it happen. She leaned on the wall again, and her voice came out cool and conversational.

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Marsalis, to wonder why Project Lawman failed so spectacularly? Has it occurred to you that just maybe cramming gene-enhanced male violent tendency into a gene-enhanced male chassis is overloading the donkey a little?’

Carl shook his head. ‘No, that hasn’t occurred to me. I was there when Lawman blew apart. What went wrong was that thirteens don’t like to do what they’re told, and as soon as the normal constraints come off, they stop doing it. You can’t make good soldiers out of thirteens. It’s that simple.’

‘Yeah, like I said. Overloading the donkey.’

‘Or just misunderstanding the concept of soldier.’ He brooded on the outline of the Marin headland against the sky, watched the neat, corpuscular flow of red dotted lights funnelling off the bridge and into a fold in the darkened hills. ‘Anyway, speaking of soldiering, if Harbin put you together, gave you the genes and the ninjutsu, I’ve got to assume that means you belong to Department Two.’

He thought she maybe shivered a little. ‘Not any more.’

‘Care to explain that?’

‘Hey, you asked who I was. No one said anything about a full fucking résumé.’

He found he was smiling in the gloom. ‘Just sketch it out for me. Bare bones, enough to convince. One thing I don’t intend to be is a cat’s paw for the Chinese security services.’

‘You’re starting to piss me off, Marsalis. I told you I don’t do that shit any more.’

‘Yeah, but I’m a naturally untrusting motherfucker. You want me to murder your boss for you? Indulge my curiosity.’

He heard her breath hiss out between her teeth.

‘Late ninety-six, I worked undercover to crack a Triad sex-slave operation in Hong Kong. When we finally hit them, it got bloody. Department Two aren’t overly concerned about innocent bystanders.’

‘Yeah, I heard that about them.’

‘Yeah, well I took the opportunity of all that blood and screaming to step out quietly. Disappeared in the crossfire, crossed the line. Used the contacts I’d made to hook a passage to Kuala Lumpur, and then points south.’ An odd weariness crept into her voice. ‘I was an enforcer in Jakarta for a while, played in the turf wars they had going against the yakuza, built myself an Indonesia-wide rep. Headed south again. Sydney and then Auckland. Corporate clients. Eventually the Rim States, because that’s where the real money is. And here we are. That sort out your curiosity for you?’

He nodded, surprised once again by the twinge of kinship he felt. ‘Yeah, that’ll do for the CV. But I do have one more question, general point of information you could clear up for me.’

Weary sigh. ‘And that is?’

‘Why bother with me? You’re lethal as shit, well-connected too. Staying one step ahead of RimSec and making it look easy. Why not go in and take this faithless fuck out for yourself? Not like you don’t know where he is, right?’

She was silent for a while.

‘It’s a simple question, Ren.’

‘I think I’ve told you enough. In the end, you’re a UNGLA bounty hunter. You take me down, it puts food on your table.’

‘I already know what you are,’ he said roughly. ‘You see me reaching for a Haag gun?’

Voice not quite even on those last two words. Her head tilted, as if she maybe caught the tremor. She examined the blade of her hand again.

‘You’ve made a career of betraying your own kind. No reason why you’d stop now, is there?’

‘Ren, let me tell you something. I’m not even sure I still have my licence.’ Memories of di Palma flitted through his head, the prissy bureaucratic superiority of the Agency. ‘And even if I do, first thing I plan on doing when I get back is turn it in.’

‘Change of heart, huh?’ It wasn’t quite a sneer.

‘Something like that. Now answer the question. Why me?’

More quiet. He noticed the chill in the air for the first time. His eyes kept sliding back to the Marin hills, the disappearing stream of traffic headed north. As if there was something there waiting for him. Ren seemed to be making calculations in her head.

‘Two reasons,’ she said, finally. ‘First, he’s likely to be expecting me. You, he’s got no reason to watch for.’

‘If I were standing where you are, that kind of risk wouldn’t be enough for me to hand things over to a proxy.’

‘I know. But you’re a male thirteen. I’m a little smarter than that. For me it’s enough to know that it’ll get done. I don’t have to be there and smell the blood.’

‘Maybe I’m smarter than you think. Maybe I just won’t do it.’

He saw her smile. ‘Well, we’ll see.’

‘You said two reasons.’

‘That’s right.’ Now she was the one looking out across the water. Her voice tinged with something that might have been embarrassment, might have been pride. ‘It seems I’m pregnant.’

The silence seemed to rush them, like dark fog coming in off the bay. The noises of the city, already faint, receded to the edge of perception. Carl placed his hands flat on the stonework of the wall, peered down at them in the gloom.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘Is it Merrin’s? Or machete boy’s?’

‘I don’t know, and I don’t much care. And nor will your Agency friends. It’s enough that the mother’s a certified thirteen, without worrying about the father as well. They’ll send everything they’ve got after me. I need to be leaving, Marsalis. Bowing out and heading somewhere safe.’

‘Right.’ He folded his arms against the chill, turned to face her. ‘On the other hand, you do have one major advantage over the Agency.’

‘Which is.’

‘They don’t even know you exist.’

And somewhere in his head, Sevgi Ertekin’s voice.

Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.

Carmen Ren regarded him narrowly. ‘That’s right. Right now, they don’t know I exist.’

Carl looked away across the bay again. Something was aching in his throat. Sevgi, Névant, all the others. His whole life seemed to pulse with grief.

‘They aren’t going to hear it from me,’ he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

It felt strange, walking into the Human Cost Foundation’s offices for real. Memories of the v-format clashed with the actual architecture of the reception space and the corridors leading off it. There was no Sharleen sitting there, no one in the waiting area at all, and the walls were a paler, colder blue than he recalled. The artwork he remembered wasn’t there, and the prints and Earth First shout-out posters that had replaced it seemed grubby and tired. Jeff, when he came out to greet them, looked similarly worn.

‘In the flesh,’ he said, hugging Norton briefly at the shoulders. ‘Nice surprise.’

Norton hugged back. ‘Yeah, strictly business, I’m afraid. Come to pick your professional brains again. This is Carl Marsalis. Marsalis, my brother Jeff.’

Jeff shook the thirteen’s hand without a blink. ‘Of course. Should have recognised you from the feed photos. Do you want to come through?’

They took a different corridor to the one Norton remembered from the virtual offices, and of course it didn’t blur out the way it had in the format. They passed doors with cheaply lettered plastic signs that hinted at the foundation’s daily round: trauma counselling, coastguard liaison, harassment response, funding . . . Through one open office door, Norton glimpsed a stout Asian woman looking sleepily into the middle distance and drinking from a styrofoam coffee cup. She half-raised a hand as they passed, but said nothing. Otherwise, the place seemed to be deserted.

‘Quiet this morning,’ Marsalis said.

Jeff glanced back across his shoulder. ‘Yeah, well it’s early yet. We’ve just ridden out a major funding crisis, so I sent everyone home with instructions to celebrate and come in late. In here.’

He let them into the office marked with the simple word directorate, closed the door carefully behind them. Changes from the virtual here too, the décor was a higher powered blend of reds and greys, the sofa was the same but it had been turned so its back was to the window and there was space to walk around behind it, a low coffee table in front. Ornaments had moved around, been replaced. The photo of Megan was gone from the desk, there was a smaller one of the kids instead. Jeff gestured at the sofa.

‘Grab a seat, both of you. How are COLIN treating you, Mr Marsalis?’

The thirteen shrugged. ‘Well, they got me out of jail in Jesusland.’

‘Yeah, I guess that could count as a pretty good opening offer.’ Jeff came round to the sofa and seated himself facing both of them. He put on a weary smile. ‘So what can I do for you guys?’

Norton shifted uncomfortably. ‘How much do you know about the Harbin black labs, Jeff?’

Raised brows. His brother blew out a long breath.

‘Well, not a whole lot. They keep that end sewn up pretty tight. Long way north, a long way from the sea. Very high security too. From what we can piece together, it’s where the high end product comes out.’

‘You ever meet a variant from the Harbin labs?’ Marsalis asked. ‘Human Cost ever handle any?’

‘Christ, no.’ Jeff sat back and rested his head on one hand. He seemed to be giving it some thought. ‘Well, certainly not since we’ve been set up in our current form anyway. I mean, before we got state funding, back before my time, they might have, I could check the files. But I doubt it. Most of the escapees we get are failed variants from the experimental camps. They don’t quite let them go, but they don’t much care what happens to them either, so it’s easier for them to slip out, grab a fishing boat or something, maybe stow away. Anyone coming out of Harbin though, they’d be very highly valued, and probably very loyal as well. I doubt they’d be interested in running, even if security was lax enough to let them.’

‘I met one last night,’ said Marsalis.

Jeff blinked. ‘A Harbin variant? Where?’

‘Here. In the city.’

‘Here? Jesus.’ Jeff looked at Norton. ‘You see this as well?’

Norton shook his head.

‘Well.’ Jeff spread his hands. ‘I mean, this is fucking serious, Tom. If someone out of Harbin is here, chances are they work for Department Two.’

‘No.’ Marsalis got up and went to the window. ‘I had quite a long talk with her. She bailed out of Department Two a while back.’

‘So.’ Jeff frowned. ‘Who’s she working for now?’

‘She’s working for you, Jeff,’ said the black man.

The moment hung in the room, creaked and turned like a corpse at the end of a rope. Norton was watching his brother’s eyes, and all he needed to see was there. Then Jeff jerked his eyes away, twisted about, stared up at Marsalis. The thirteen hadn’t turned from the window. Jeff looked at the broad back, the jacket lettered with S(t)igma, the lack of motion. He swung back to his brother.

‘Tom?’

Norton reached into his pocket and produced the phone. He looked into Jeff’s face and thumb-touched the playback.

‘Guava Diamond?’

‘Still holding.’

‘We are unable to assist, Guava Diamond. Repeat, we are unable to assist. Suggest-’

‘You what? You bonobo-sucking piece of shit, you’d better tell me I misheard that.’

‘There are control complications at this end. We cannot act. I’m sorry, Guava Diamond. You’re on your own.’

‘You will be fucking sorry if we make it out of this in one piece.’

‘I repeat, Guava Diamond, we cannot act. Suggest you implement Lizard immediately, and get off Bulgakov’s Cat while you can. You may still have time.’

Pause.

‘You’re a fucking dead man, Claw Control.’

Static hiss.

They all listened to the white-noise emptiness of it for a couple of moments, as if they’d just heard the last transmission of a plane going down into the ocean. Norton thumbed the phone to off.

‘That’s you, Jeff,’ he said quietly. ‘Tell me it’s not.’

‘Tom, you know you can fake a voice like that as easily as-’

He jammed to a halt as the black man’s hands sank weightily onto his shoulders from behind. Marsalis leaned over him.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

Jeff stared across the sofa space at Norton. ‘Tom? Tom, I’m your fucking brother, for Christ’s sake.’

Norton nodded. ‘Yeah. You’d better tell us everything you know.’

‘Tom, you can’t seriously-’

‘Sevgi is dead!’ Suddenly he was yelling, trembling, throat swollen with the force of it, memories of the hospital swirling. ‘She is fucking dead Jeff. Because you hid this from me, she is dead!’

Marsalis’s hands stayed where they were. Norton gritted his teeth, tried to master the shaking that would not stop. He clamped his mouth tight, breathing hard.

‘Bonobo-sucking piece of shit,’ he got out. ‘She called you right, didn’t she Jeff? She knew you well.’

‘Tom, you don’t understand.’

‘Not yet, we don’t,’ said Marsalis. He lifted one hand, slapped it down again on Jeff’s shoulder, encouraging. ‘But you are going to tell us.’

‘I.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘You don’t understand, I can’t.’

Marsalis lifted his head and looked directly at Norton. Norton felt something kick in his stomach, something that made him feel sick but was somehow a release as well. He nodded.

The black man hooked one hand into Jeff Norton’s throat, dragged him back against the sofa. His fingers dug in. His other arm wrapped around Jeff’s chest, pinning one arm, holding him in place. Jeff made a shocked, choking sound, flailed about on the sofa, tugged at the thirteen’s grip with his free hand. Marsalis grabbed the flapping arm at the wrist and held it out of the way. Jeff heaved, flopped, could not get loose.

‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand,’ said Marsalis coldly. It was the same voice that Norton had heard him use, in Quechua, on Gutierrez. ‘Someone is going to bleed for Sevgi Ertekin. Someone’s going to die. Right now, we’ve got you. You don’t give us someone else, then you’re it. You try keeping what you know from me, RimSec are going to find you floating in the bay with every bone in your body broken and both your eyes put out.’

Norton watched, made himself watch. Jeff’s gaze clawed frantically at him, out of a face turning blue. But Sevgi’s fading was crowded into his head like someone shouting themselves hoarse, and it kept him pinned in his seat, watching.

‘You killed her, Jeff,’ he said, and his voice had a quiet, reasonable tone to it that felt like the rising edge of madness. ‘Someone’s got to pay.’

‘Onbekend!’

It was a strangled grunt, barely recognisable. Marsalis caught it while Norton was still sorting meaning out of the crushed syllables. He unhinged his grip on Jeff’s throat and chest, hauled on the arm he’d captured at the wrist, dragged it up and round, so Jeff was forced flat to the sofa. Marsalis leaned over and pressed the side of Jeff’s head down hard into the fabric, dug into the other man’s temple with his knuckles. Jeff coughed and gagged, whooped for breath, eyes flooded with tears.

‘What about Onbekend?’ Norton asked.

The dizzying sense of insanity had not gone. It circled him like a street gang. He wondered, in the midst of the revolving horror of it all, if this was what it felt like to be a thirteen, if this was what you had to embrace to live the way Marsalis did and Merrin had. He wondered how easy it would be to let go, and if you could ever find your grip again afterwards.

Jeff made raw panting sounds.

‘What about Onbekend?’

‘All right, I’ll tell you, I’ll fucking tell you.’ Jeff’s voice cracked. He stopped trying to get loose. He lay on the sofa, swallowing breath, leaking slow tears onto the fabric. ‘Just let me up. Please.’

Again, Marsalis flickered a glance at Norton. Norton nodded. My brother’s not a soldier or a thug, he’d told the thirteen the previous night. He’s not physically tough that way, he won’t stand up. Just let me call it, we’ll get everything we need from him.

Marsalis hauled Jeff into a sitting position on the sofa. He moved and took up a position by the desk. Folded his arms.

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

Jeff’s eyes went from the black man to his brother. Norton stared back.

‘Tom . . .’

‘You heard him, Jeff. Let’s hear it.’

Jeff Norton seemed to collapse in on himself. He shuddered. Marsalis and Norton exchanged a glance. Norton lifted a hand in his lap. Wait. Jeff rubbed his hands over his face, dragged them back through his hair. He sniffed hard, wiped his eyes. Yeah, cry Jeff, Norton caught himself thinking, with a violence that rocked him to the core. Cry like the fucking rest of us have been. Like Sevgi and me and Marsalis and Megan and Nuying, for all I fucking know, and who knows how many others. Want to play alpha male, big brother? Welcome aboard.

Jeff dropped his hands. He dredged up a weak smile, pinned it in place. Playing himself to the cheap seats once again.

‘Look, you have no idea how deep this goes Tom. Onbekend’s not just some random thirteen-’

‘Yeah, he’s Merrin’s twin,’ Marsalis said flatly. ‘We already got that far. You had Carmen Ren hold Merrin safe while Onbekend went round leaving genetic trace at crime scenes all over Jesusland and the Rim. Come the right time, Merrin shows up conveniently dead and takes the rap for it all. The question is why? Who were all these people?’

Jeff closed his eyes. Sighed. ‘Can I have a drink, please?’

‘No, you can’t have a fucking drink,’ said Marsalis. ‘We just got through agreeing to let you live. Count your fucking blessings and talk.’

Jeff looked at his brother, pulled a weary face. Norton made the connection - Jeff had to have his props. Cheap seat appeal.

‘Sure. I’ll get you a drink, Jeff,’ he said gently. He met the black man’s disbelieving look, made the tiny raised hand gesture again. ‘Where’d you keep it?’

‘Wall cabinet. There’s a bottle of Martell in there and some glasses. Help yourselves.’ Jeff Norton turned to look at Marsalis. ‘He’s got you jumping pretty neatly to the line for a thirteen, hasn’t he?’

Marsalis looked down at him. A faint frown creased his brow. ‘You want to get that looked at.’

‘Get what looked at?’

Norton looked round from the open drinks cabinet, just in time to see the black man’s fist snap out from the waist. Short, hard and full force into Jeff’s nose. He heard the cracking sound it made as the cartilage broke. Jeff bucked and screamed. His hands flew to his face again. Blood streamed out between them.

‘Get that looked at,’ said Marsalis tranquilly.

Norton spotted a box of tissues on the desk. He hooked it up and carried it across to the sofa with the bottle of cognac and a single glass. He set everything down on the coffee table, tugged a tissue loose and handed it over to his brother.

‘Don’t fuck about, Jeff,’ he said quietly. ‘He wants you dead bad enough to taste, and I’m not that far behind him. Here, clean yourself up.’

Jeff took the tissue, then a couple more from the box. While he staunched the blood flow from his nose, Norton poured into the single glass. He pushed the cognac across the table top.

‘There’s your drink,’ he told his brother. ‘Now make it good.’

‘Scorpion Response,’ he told them.

Carl nodded. ‘Claw Control. Right. You’re still using the call signs, you sad fuck. What were you, Jeff, back-room support? You sure as fuck weren’t the front end of anything as nasty as Scorpion.’

‘You’ve heard of these guys?’ Norton asked him.

‘On the grapevine, yeah. Ghost squad in the Pacific Rim theatres, supposed to be one of the last covert initiatives before the secession.’ Carl looked speculatively down at Jeff Norton. ‘So let’s hear it, Jeff. What was your end?’

‘Logistics,’ the Human Cost director said sulkily. ‘I was the operations co-ordinator.’

‘Right.’

‘When the fuck was this?’ Norton stared at his brother. ‘You didn’t even move out here until ’94. You were in New York.’

Jeff Norton shook his head wearily. ‘I was out here all the time, Tom. Back and forth, Union to the Rim, Rim to South East Asia. We had offices all over. Half the time, I wasn’t home more than one weekend in five.’ He took the blood-clotted tissues away from his nose, dumped them on the coffee table and grimaced. ‘Anyway, how would you have known? We saw you what, once a month, if that?’

‘I was busy,’ said Norton numbly.

‘The way I heard it,’ Carl said. ‘Secession should have been the end of Scorpion Response. Supposed to have been wound up like all the other dirty little bags of deniability the American public didn’t need to be told about. That’s the official version, anyway. But this is the seventies, a good few years before they would have been employing you, Jeff. So what happened? They go private?’

Jeff shot him a startled look. ‘You heard that?’

‘No. But it wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of sneak-op thugs couldn’t face early retirement, and went to the market instead. That what happened?’

‘Scorpion Response were retained.’ Jeff was still sulking. More tissues, tugged up from the box on the table. Carl watched him impassively.

‘Retained by who?’

Norton had the answer for that already. ‘The Rim States. Got to be. They’ve just cut loose, the Pacific arena’s their future. Anything that gave them an edge had to be worth hanging onto, right.’

‘That’s right, little brother.’ Jeff moved the tissues from his nose long enough to knock back a chunk of the cognac. ‘Starting to see the big picture now?’

‘Lola Montes,’ Carl said. ‘Jasper Whitlock, Ulysses Ward, Eddie Tanaka. The rest of them. All Scorpion personnel?’

‘Yeah. Not those names, but yeah.’

‘And Onbekend.’

‘Yeah.’ Jeff Norton’s voice shaded with something. Carl thought it might be fear. ‘Him too. Some of the time. He came and went, you know. On secondment.’

‘But not Merrin?’

The Human Cost director sneered. ‘Onbekend was Merrin to us. We didn’t know about the other one, no one knew there were two.’ He looked down into his glass. ‘Not until now.’

Carl paced across the office to the drinks cabinet. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview Tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whisky from behind the bar and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and-

‘N-djinn search on the victims turned up no connections between them,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Which means you must have used some very high-powered Rim n-djinn capacity of your own to bury these people in their new lives. Now I can only see one reason why anybody would bother to do that.’

‘You were winding up.’ Realisation etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. ‘Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.’

Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty handed.

‘When, Jeff? When, and why?’

Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. ‘I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.’

The COLIN exec nodded. ‘You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you too. Had to be some time around then.’

Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

‘Little earlier in fact,’ he said. ‘Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes a while to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.’

Carl stepped closer. ‘I asked you why.’

The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

‘Can’t you guess?’

‘Jacobsen.’

The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’91 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armoured police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarised, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

Jacobsen.

Oh, yes, affected after all.

Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than three years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled towards one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward towards a choice of gallows.

And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand storeys tall, blotting out the sun.

Jacobsen.

Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. ‘That’s right, Jacobsen. We didn’t know what the accords would actually look like in ’92, it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.’

‘But.’ Tom Norton, shaking his head. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend. But all these other people - Montes, Tanaka and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?’

Carl stood over the Human Cost director, and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

‘It mattered,’ he said evenly, ‘because of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the personnel, was it? It was what Scorpion Response did. What was your brief, Jeff? And don’t ask me to guess again, because I will hurt you if you do.’

Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

‘Breeding,’ he said.

His brother blinked. ‘Breeding what?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tom, what do you think?’ Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle. The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. ‘Breeding fucking variants. Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.’

‘Over there?’ Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. ‘You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?’

‘Yeah.’ Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. ‘Scorpion Response had been running covert operations into South East Asia and China since the middle of last century. It was their playground, they got in and out of there like a greased dick. The new brief just meant going in and getting what looked like promising material. Pre-Jacobsen, variant science still looked like the way to go. The Chinese were still doing it full on, no human rights protest to get in the way, they were getting ahead of the game. We aimed to even up the race.’

Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

‘Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking people?’

His brother shrugged and drank. ‘Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.’

‘This is not possible.’ Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. ‘You’re telling us Human Cost was . . . you ran Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing programme?’

‘Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back-end shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.’ Jeff stared through his brother at something else. ‘Setting up the actual labs and the camps.’

‘Camps,’ Norton repeated sickly. ‘Black labs, here in the Rim? I don’t believe you. Where?’

‘Where do you think, little brother? Where do the Rim stick anything they don’t like the smell of?’

‘Jesusland.’ Carl nodded to himself. ‘Sure, why not? Just pre-empting Cimarron and Tanana, after all. Where’d you set up shop? Nevada? That’s nice and close to the fenceline. Utah, maybe?’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Wyoming. Big place, barely any population. No one to see what’s going on, no one to care, and state legislature in that part of the world will take your hand right off at the wrist if you offer good money for use of the land. We just told them it was another gene-modified crop project.’ Still, the glassy, through-everything stare. ‘I guess that’s even the truth when you get right down to it, right? So. We took a couple of hundred square kilometres, power-fenced it in. Minefields and scanners, big corporate keep-out notices.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I saw it once. I saw it working, all working perfectly and no one out there knew or cared.’

‘What happened to it all when you folded?’ Carl asked quietly.

‘Can’t you guess?’

The black man kicked out, smashed into Jeff Norton’s shin just below the knee. The Human Cost director yelped and hunched over. Carl grabbed his head by the hair and smashed his face down on the coffee table. Pulled back, smashed again-

Then Tom Norton was in his way. Restraining hands on him, pushing him back.

‘That’s enough,’ the COLIN exec said.

Carl nailed him with a look. ‘Get your hands off me.’

‘I said that’s enough. We need him conscious.’

At their feet, Jeff huddled away from the blows, curled up foetally on the floor space between coffee table and sofa. Carl stared at Norton a moment longer, then jerked a nod. He dragged the Human Cost director back to the sofa and dumped him there. Bent so he was eye to eye with him.

‘I told you not to make me guess again,’ he said evenly. ‘Now what happened to the Wyoming camp when Scorpion folded?’

‘All right.’ The words burst out of Jeff Norton like a dam breaking. His nose had started bleeding again, was leaking into his cupped hands. ‘We torched it, we fucking torched it, all right? Scorpion went in, they killed everyone, the subjects and the hired staff. Then they mined it, blew it up and burned everything to the ground. Left nothing but the ashes.’

In his mind, Carl saw how it would be, the sporadic clatter of small arms, the wailing panic and truncated shrieks, dying away to quiet and the crackle of flames. The ripcord string of crunch-thump explosions through the camp as the placed charges went up. And later, walking away, the fire on the darkened skyline in the distance when you turned to look back. Like Ahvaz, like Tashkent, like the hotels in Dubai. The age-old signal. The beast is out.

‘And no one said anything?’ Norton asked, disbelieving.

‘Oh, Jesus Tom, have you been listening to any fucking thing I’ve said?’ Jeff sobbed out a snot-thickened laugh. ‘This is the Republic you’re talking about. You know, Guantanamo syndrome? Do it far enough away, and no one gives a shit.’

Carl moved back to the desk and leaned against its edge. It wasn’t interrogation procedure, he should keep proximity, keep up the pressure. But he didn’t trust himself within arm’s reach of Jeff Norton.

‘Okay,’ he said grimly. ‘Scorpion Response ties all these people together, gives them a dirty little secret to keep, and Scorpion Response buries their details so there are no links left on the flow. None of that explains killing them all now, fourteen, fifteen years later. Someone’s cleaning house again. So why now?’

The Human Cost director lifted his bloodied face and bared his teeth in a stained grin. He seemed to be shaking, coming apart with something that was almost laughter.

‘Career fucking progression,’ he said bitterly. ‘Ortiz.’

CHAPTER FIFTY

They caught a crack-of-dawn Cathay Pacific bounce to New York the following morning. Carl would have preferred not to wait, but he needed time to make a couple of calls and plan. Also, he wanted Tom Norton to sleep on his choices - if he could sleep at all - and face the whole thing in the cold light of a new day. All things considered, he was playing with better cards than he’d expected, but Norton was still an unknown quantity, all the more so for the way things had finally boiled down at the Human Cost Foundation.

At the airport, Norton’s COLIN credentials got them fast-tracked through security and aboard before anyone else. Carl sat in a preferential window seat, waiting for the shuttle to fill, and stared out at an evercrete parking apron whipped by skirling curtains of wind-driven rain. Past the outlines of the terminal buildings, a pale, morose light was leaking across the sky between thick gunmetal cloud. The bad weather had blown in overnight, and looked set to stick around.

Forecasts for New York said cold, dry and clear. The thoughts in his head were a match.

The suborb shuttle shifted a little on its landing gear, then started to back out. Carl flexed his right hand, then held it cupped. Remembered the smooth glass weight of the ornament from the Human Cost director’s desk. He glanced across at Tom Norton in the seat next to him. The COLIN exec caught his eye - face haggard with the demons that had kept him from sleep.

‘What?’

Carl shook his head. ‘Nothing. Just glad you’re along.’

‘Leave me the fuck alone, Marsalis. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. I don’t need your combat-bonding rituals.’

‘Not about bonding,’ Carl looked back at the window. ‘I’m glad you’re here because this would have been about a hundred times harder to do.’

Brief quiet. In the window, the terminal building slid out of view as the shuttle turned to taxi. He could feel Norton hesitate.

‘That wouldn’t have stopped you, though,’ he said finally. ‘Would it.’

Carl rolled his head to face front, pressed back into the seat’s cushioning. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep either. Elena Aguirre had sat in the darkened corners of his hotel room on and off all night, pretending to be Sevgi Ertekin, and not quite pulling it off.

‘Not in the end, no.’

‘Is that how you do it?’ Norton asked him.

‘Do what?’

‘Become a thirteen. Is that what it’s about, just not letting yourself be stopped?’

Carl shot him a surprised look. ‘No. It’s about genetic wiring. Why, you feeling left out?’

‘No.’ Norton sank back in his seat as well. ‘Just trying to understand. ’

The shuttle trundled steadily out towards the runway. Rain swept the window pane, smeared diagonal with the wind. Soft chime - the fasten-webbing sign lit on the LCLS panel above their heads, complete with animated instructions. They busied themselves with the thick, padded tongues of fabric. Like the siren song lull of v-format prep, Carl usually had a hard time with how it felt once the webbing had him in its grip - it triggered tiny escape impulses across his body that he had to consciously hold down with Osprey-trained calm. But this time he finished smoothing the cross-folds over each other, drew a deep breath and found, with a shock like trying to walk up a step that wasn’t there, that he felt nothing at all. Only the sense of anchored purpose, soaking coldly through him like the woken mesh.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the man at his side. ‘About your brother, I’m sorry it had to work out this way.’

Norton said nothing.

Across the aisle and back, a soft but urgent chiming signalled that some idiot had failed to web up correctly. An attendant appeared and hurried down past them to help out. The shuttle’s motors picked up their idling whine, began to build force. On the LCLS panel, soft purple lettering in Chinese, then English, then Spanish, then Arabic, swelling forward, fading out. On station.

Carl glanced at the silent COLIN exec. ‘That’s part of the reason you’re here, right?’

‘Sevgi’s the reason I’m here.’ Norton’s voice came out tight.

The engines outside reached shrieking pitch, the shuttle unstuck and hurled itself down the runway. Carl felt himself pressed back into the cushioning once more, this time with outside force beyond his own strength.

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to it.

They hit the sky on screaming turbines, the suborbital fuel lit and kicked them up around the curve of the world. The webbing hugged them tight and close.

‘Fucking Ortiz,’ said Norton loudly, beside him.

In the judder and thrum of the trajectory, it wasn’t clear if he was talking to the man or just about him. And this time his tone was loose and hard to define, but somewhere at the bottom of it Carl thought he could hear something like despair.

Norton wasn’t really surprised when Jeff spat the name out, but not because it wasn’t a shock. Simply, surprise wasn’t an option any more, the glandular wiring that would have supplied it was running surge-overloaded, had been since the previous evening when Marsalis played him Jeff’s phone conversation and told him about Ren. And it certainly shouldn’t have mattered to him more than his own brother’s betrayal.

Somehow it did.

He still remembered the change when Ortiz came fully aboard at Jefferson Park, when the slim, dynamic Rim politician’s post morphed from consultative policy adviser to actual Americas policy director. He remembered the sudden sense of stripping down as layers of bureaucracy were lashed into efficiency or simply fired down to skeleton staffing levels. He remembered the way the little-fiefdom people like Nicholson and Zikomo ran for cover. The new hires and promotions, Andrea Roth, Lena Oyeyemi, Samson Chang. Himself. The tide of change and the clean air it seemed to bring in with it, as if someone had suddenly opened all the windows facing the East River.

On another day, some other time, he would have called the bringer of this news a liar to his face, would have refused to believe.

But there was too much else now. The old landscape had burned down around him, Sevgi, Jeff, the aftermath of the Merrin case - it was all on fire, too hot to touch anywhere without getting hurt.

‘It was Tanaka’s fucking idea from the start.’ Jeff, laying it out. Bloodied nose staunched once more, this time with torn twists of tissue pushed up each nostril, a freshened tumbler of cognac and, now, slightly slurring tones. ‘He comes to me two, two and a half years ago with this stupid fucking scheme. We can take Ortiz for some serious extra cash, if we just threaten to go public on Scorpion Response.’

‘Why you?’ Marsalis asked.

Jeff shrugged. ‘I was all he had. When we scattered back in ’94, there were no links, no looking back. I was the only one apart from Ortiz who kept my identity, the only one with any public profile. Tanaka - he was called Asano back then, Max Asano - sees me on the feeds, this conference in Bangkok on the Pacific Rim refugee problem. So he sneaks across the fenceline, tracks me to the house over in Marin and he lays it out for me. He’s got it all set up, the discreet clearing accounts in Hawaii, the back-sealed financial disconnect, the whole method. It’s all there for the taking.’

‘Ortiz?’ Norton still could not make it fit. ‘Joaquin Ortiz ran Scorpion Response? Why the hell would he get involved in something like that?’

Jeff shot him a weary look. ‘Oh, grow up, Tom. Because he’s a fucking politician, a power-broker with an eye to the main chance. He always has been. Back then, just after secession kicked in, he was a junior Rim staffer looking for an edge. He got Scorpion Response handed to him and he worked it as far as it would carry him, which was pretty much up to policy level. When Jacobsen came in and the oversight protocols looked too stiff to risk any more, he folded Scorpion up ahead of time and moved on to getting elected to the assembly instead. That’s how you do it, Tom. Stay ahead of the game, know when to get out and keep your eyes open for the next opportunity.’

‘The next opportunity being COLIN.’

‘Yeah, that’s right, little brother.’ Jeff’s expression turned hooded and resentful. ‘Fucking Ortiz does seven years of elected office in the Rim, which he then bargains into a consultancy with the Colony Initiative. Another six years there, climbs to the top of that tree as well, and now they’re talking about the UN.’

‘Ripe for the plucking,’ said Marsalis.

‘Yeah, well, that’s what Tanaka thought.’ Jeff swallowed brandy, shivered. ‘See, he figures there are twenty or thirty ex-Scorpion personnel scattered about North America with their new identities, so Ortiz can’t know who the blackmail’s coming from, and he can’t very well set out to find and kill them all. Plus he’s got access to COLIN-level funds these days, he can skim a few million off here and there, make the payments easily. It’s the line of least resistance.’

‘But that’s not Ortiz,’ said Norton automatically, startled.

‘No. That’s what Tanaka missed.’

‘And so did you,’ Marsalis pointed out. ‘Why did Tanaka need you in the first place? Why not take his demands straight to Ortiz?’

Another shrug. ‘He said he wanted a buffer. I don’t know, maybe he just wanted a friend, someone to work with. It’s got to be tough, right? Living a cover identity for the rest of your life. Covering for a past you can’t ever tell anyone about.’

Marsalis stared at Jeff like something he wanted to smash. ‘Oh, you’re breaking my fucking heart. So how come it took this Asano-Tanaka-whatever guy fourteen years to get around to blackmail?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jeff said tiredly. ‘Scorpion personnel all got seed money for going away, all part of the deal. But not everyone knows how to handle that. Maybe fourteen years was what it took for Tanaka to piss his stake away. Or maybe he just got unlucky a couple of years back and lost what he’d made. You slip financially in the Republic, there’s not a lot of help out there to get you back on your feet.’

‘Right. So this washed-up ex-sneak ops petty crook comes to you with some wide-eyed scheme for putting pressure on one of the most powerful men in American corporate and political life. And you just go along with it?’

Jeff drained his glass again, sat hunched forward over it. ‘Sure. Why not? It could have worked.’

‘This I’ve got to fucking hear. Worked how?’

Jeff reached for the bottle. ‘Tanaka’s idea was, he sends the blackmail demands to me, and I take it to Ortiz as if I’m scared. I steer Ortiz towards paying up, point out the smart move and offer to act as a conduit so he stays clean.’

Norton shook his head. ‘But that’s not Ortiz. He wouldn’t just . . . Christ, you should have known that, Jeff. Why didn’t you see it?’

Jeff gave him a hunted look. He uncorked the cognac.

‘Why do you think, little brother? I wanted the fucking money.’

‘Yeah, but you must have-’

‘Just fucking don’t, Tom. All right?’ The bottle slammed down, the pale liquid slopped and splashed up through the open neck. Jeff’s voice scaled upward, defensive to bitter fury. ‘What do you know about my life anyway? It’s okay for you, with your fucking COLIN badge, your promotion that I set up for you, your fucking loft apartment on Canal Street and your no-ties, no-costs jet-set fucking life. You know what I make here at Human Cost? For fourteen hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week, you know what I fucking make? I’ve got two kids, Tom, a wife with expensive tastes, no pension scheme yet. What do you know about all this, Tom? You float, you fucking float through life. So don’t come to me telling me what I should or shouldn’t have known. I wanted the money, that’s it. I was in.’

Norton stared at him, too numb to pick up pieces and make them fit. It was too much, too much of his world blown open.

‘I don’t live on Canal Street, Jeff,’ he said stupidly. ‘I never did. It’s Lispenard. You should know that.’

‘Don’t fucking tell me what I should know!’

‘Why don’t you tell us what went wrong?’ Marsalis suggested. ‘Ortiz wouldn’t roll over, right?’

‘No.’ Jeff reached for the bottle again. ‘At first, yes. He transferred some funds of his own, told me to make an interim payment and play for more time. Then, when Tanaka’s next demand came in, he just sat me down and told me what we were going to do.’

Marsalis nodded. ‘Wipe out everyone who could be doing it.’

‘He - ’ A helpless gesture. ‘He’d kept tabs on them all. I didn’t know that, but he knew where every single one of them was. Or where they’d started out from, anyway. Some of them had moved about, he said, so it’d take a little time to track them down. But one way or another, they all had to go. I sat there, Tom, I couldn’t fucking believe what I was hearing. I mean - ’ Jeff’s voice turned almost plaintive. ‘We hadn’t asked for that much, you know.’

‘It wasn’t the money,’ Norton said distantly.

Marsalis reached over and took the bottle out of Jeff’s trembling hands. He poured into the tumbler. ‘UN nomination. Just a step away. You fucked with the wrong patriarch just when he could least afford it.’

‘Yeah.’ Jeff sat and looked at the drink the thirteen had just made him. ‘That’s what he said. There’s too much at stake here, Jeff. We can’t be exposed now. We have to get tough. I tried to talk him down, tell him it wasn’t so much money. But he didn’t care. I told him he’d get caught, that nobody could get away with killing that many people, that many ex-sneak ops guys. You’d need a whole team of people to bring it off, and then they’d have the same goods on you as the original blackmailers.’

‘Or,’ said Marsalis, ‘you bring in the one member of the old team you can trust to get it done. The one person who also can’t afford the word to get out, and who won’t let nostalgia and camaraderie get in the way of doing the job. The one person who’s wired for it - a thirteen.’

Jeff just nodded, let the black man talk. He was emptied out.

‘Everyone thinks Merrin’s gone to Mars.’ Marsalis went on, nodding what might have been approval. ‘A thirteen called Merrin did go to Mars. So that makes the other Merrin, Onbekend, pretty invisible back here on Earth. He’s pulled his own disappearing act, found a surrogate brother down on the altiplano, a safe haven. A sideline in playing pistaco for his brother now and then, when the local bad guys need scaring, but the rest of his time’s his own. Until suddenly here’s his old boss banging on the door, telling him it’s all about to end. Some ungrateful fuck from the old team is threatening to blow everything wide open, and the only way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to go back and wipe out every member of the old team left alive. Does Onbekend want the work?’ Marsalis spread his hands. ‘Probably not, but what choice does he have? If Ortiz isn’t going to pay, the blackmailers are going to get angry and the word on Scorpion Response is going to get out. And there’s just no telling how far that thread can unravel. Whatever Onbekend’s managed to swing for himself down on Manco Bambaren’s patch is under threat. There’s a good chance he’s going to the tracts, because if they do find him it’s that or a bullet. Feel free to contribute, Jeff, if I’m getting any of this wrong.’

‘No, you’re right.’ Jeff sipped at his drink, held it in both hands before him, staring into space. ‘When Ortiz went to Onbekend with it, he saw what had to happen right away.’

Marsalis grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. ‘Clean sweep, huh? Just like Wyoming all over again.’

‘It was the only way,’ said Jeff.

‘Okay, but Onbekend isn’t stupid. He knows he isn’t going to get away with murdering thirty-odd ex-sneak op soldiers and not leave some trace of himself at least at a couple of the crime scenes. And once that genetic trace gets into the system, he’s as fucked as if he’d let Ortiz’s blackmailers go ahead and blow the whistle. Because the only living thirteen who’s supposed to have that gene-print is on Mars. So if it shows up around a stack of murder victims in the Rim or the Republic, all hell is going to break loose. That’s what he confronts Ortiz with, that’s the sticking point.’

‘And Ortiz is at COLIN,’ said Norton wonderingly.

‘Right. So he hatches the perfect alibi for Onbekend. Not only will they bring Merrin back from Mars to account for any genetic trace that crops up, they’ll set him up as the fall guy for the whole set of murders. Hold him in reserve while Onbekend gets the killing done, and then have him die in some plausible way and leave him for RimSec to find. With finesse, they could even set it up so RimSec get him pinned and kill him themselves. Medals all round, and no one looks too closely at the aftermath, because it’s so fucking neat. After all, you can’t argue with genetic trace, and there’s your monster, dead in the dirt.’

Norton looked at his brother and could not name the feeling that seeped into him. He hoped it was pity.

‘No wonder Ortiz paid up at the start, Jeff,’ he told him. ‘He had to have time to put all this in place. He had to get Merrin back here, before Onbekend could go to work.’

‘And Onbekend came over the Texas border and started with Tanaka.’ Marsalis nodded. ‘He could have stopped right there, if he’d only known. But he doesn’t know, doesn’t get the chance to get it out of Tanaka, maybe wouldn’t even have been able to afford to trust him even if he did, so he’s committed. He kills his way across the Republic, because those are the easiest ones - underfunded police departments, low-grade data-tech, highest murder rate on the planet and a massive underclass to hide out in. He only heads on to the Rim when the easy work is done, moving slower now because he’s got RimSec to contend with. But still, Jasper Whitlock and Lola Montes, he’s getting through them, probably only a handful left and then . . .’

They both turned to look at Jeff Norton.

‘What happened?’ Marsalis asked him softly. ‘You lose your nerve, playing both ends against the middle? Thought maybe Ortiz had worked you out, knew you were part of it after all ? You start to think maybe Onbekend’s last bullet was going to be for you?’

‘No!’

‘Don’t fucking lie to me.’

‘Then what happened in New York?’ Norton peered at his brother’s face. ‘Someone had Ortiz shot. Sure as hell wasn’t Tanaka, he was already in the ground. That leaves you, Jeff.’

Jeff looked away.

‘They were Tanaka’s,’ he muttered. ‘Dead-hand insurance. If anything went wrong, he’d given me this Houston number, in case he didn’t have time to set it off before he ran. Or in case he ... didn’t make it. The contract was already paid, I just had to call.’

‘Waited long enough, didn’t you?’ Marsalis coughed out a laugh. ‘Or did it take this crew of geniuses four months to get from Texas to the Union?’

Norton snapped his fingers. ‘Whitlock.’

He saw the way his brother flinched at the name. Oh, Christ, Jeff. Made it into words so he’d have to hear it, so he’d believe it.

‘Onbekend came across the fenceline into the Rim States and he killed Whitlock, October second. You must have caught it on the feeds, recognised Whitlock’s face.’

‘Yeah, right here in the Bay Area.’ Marsalis whistled long and low, mock-concerned. ‘Just a little too close for comfort, right Jeff?’

‘So you made the call,’ Norton said flatly.

‘All right, yes, I made the fucking call!’

Marsalis grunted. ‘And it all comes grinding to a halt. Onbekend on hold, at least until he finds out if Ortiz is going to live or die.’

‘It was right after Whitlock you called me,’ Norton realised suddenly. ‘Suggested I get Marsalis out of Jesusland and hire him. What was that, just a little added pressure, keep Onbekend on his toes?’

Amazement on the black man’s face. ‘You got me out of South Florida State, Jeff? I owe you for that?’ A chuckle broke out of him. ‘Oh man, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’

‘I got sick of waiting,’ Jeff snapped, voice tight with sudden, puny, fury. ‘Two fucking weeks after I called the Houston crew and nothing. I didn’t know anything about them, how good they’d be-’

‘They weren’t very good,’ said Marsalis sombrely.

‘Yeah, well, I thought maybe they’d got caught at the fence, trying to get into the Union. Or maybe just faded with the cash and walked. I had no fucking way of knowing, Tom. I was scared. I knew you wouldn’t bring UNGLA in, I tried to persuade you, thought maybe that’d scare Ortiz into pulling the plug. But you wouldn’t do it.’ Jeff looked across at Marsalis. ‘I thought maybe he’d scare Ortiz instead.’

Norton saw the black man walk to the desk and pick up a paperweight Jeff had brought back from a trip to England when he and Megan were first married. He weighed it in his hand.

‘There’s just a couple more things I’d like to know, Jeff,’ he said absently. ‘Then we’re done.’

‘Yeah?’ Jeff tugged at his drink. Grimaced as it went down. ‘What’s that?’

‘Ren. She didn’t know anything about Onbekend, where does she come into this?’

‘No. She’s freelance, we’ve used her in the past. I pulled her in because we needed someone who knows the Rim systems. Ortiz wanted to keep the Merrin end of things separate from the rest.’

‘And Daskeen Azul. They’re your people?’

A shrug. ‘Associates. You know how it works, Human Cost did them some favours in the past, they owed us.’

‘So who sent them up to find that corpse in the nets? You?’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Onbekend. He heard from down south that you and this COLIN cop were poking around. Told me to bring the denouement forward.’

Marsalis came back to the sofa, paperweight in his hand. He was frowning. ‘Against Ortiz’s orders?’

‘Ortiz was in the hospital.’ Jeff gestured wearily. ‘No one knew which way to jump. You ever met Onbekend?’

‘Briefly.’

‘Yeah, well, when he tells you to do something, you don’t argue with him.’

Marsalis hadn’t lost his frown. ‘And the soldiers?’

‘What soldiers?’

‘Someone sent a uniformed death squad after Ertekin and me. They pulled us over between Cuzco and Arequipa.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. Maybe someone panicked down there.’

‘Bambaren,’ the thirteen said softly. He crouched to Jeff’s eye level. ‘Do you think Manco Bambaren knows that Merrin existed? The other Merrin?’

‘I don’t know Manco Bambaren from a hole in the fucking ground.’ Jeff stared bitterly back at Marsalis. He seemed completely drunk now. ‘How the fuck would I know what he does or doesn’t know?’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said the black man softly. ‘Tell me, Jeff, did you set Onbekend on me, when I got back from Bulgakov’s Cat?’

‘No! That wasn’t me, I swear. Onbekend wanted you out of the picture, I think he’d maybe talked to Ortiz, but he was furious about something else anyway. I told him it was better to let things lie, but he wouldn’t listen. You don’t understand what he’s like. Once he’s decided, he doesn’t listen to anything or anyone who gets in his fucking way.’

‘Right. And I don’t suppose you know where I can find him now, do you?’

Jeff knocked back the rest of his drink. Shrugged. ‘You guess right. Last I heard, he was on his way back to the altiplano with a shoulder full of holes from a Marstech gun.’

‘You treated him here?’

‘At a Human Cost walk-in clinic, yeah. Over on Carmel.’

Marsalis came smoothly back to his feet. Norton saw how the thirteen’s fingers tightened on the paperweight, saw the heft in the arm. He stepped swiftly across, blocked Marsalis body to body. His eyes locked with the black man’s stare.

‘No,’ he said, very quietly. ‘Please.’

Marsalis stood coiled. His voice came back, also barely above a murmur. ‘Don’t get in my way, Norton.’

‘He didn’t kill Sevgi.’ Norton looked back at where Jeff sat slumped in one corner of the sofa, staring listlessly into his empty glass. He barely seemed aware of the other two men. ‘Look, you want to go after Onbekend, I’m with you. Ortiz too, if that’s what you want. But this is my brother, Marsalis.’

‘He’s going down anyway, Norton. He’ll do thirty years in a RimSec facility for this, minimum. I’d be doing him a favour.’

But a little of the tension seemed to drain from the thirteen’s stance. Norton raised his hand, palm out. The small gesture for enough.

‘Marsalis, please. I’m asking you for this. He’s my fucking brother.’

Marsalis stood there locked for a moment longer. It was like facing off against a wall.

‘Ortiz, and Onbekend,’ he said, as if checking a list.

Norton nodded. ‘Whatever you need.’

And the moment passed. Marsalis let go, Norton saw it go out of him like dark water down a drain. He shrugged and lobbed the paperweight down into Jeff’s lap. Jeff jolted with the shock, dropped his empty glass, fumbled with both hands to catch the spherical ornament before it rolled to the floor.

‘Fuck d’you do that for?’ he mumbled.

‘You’ll never know,’ Marsalis told him. Then, turning away to the door, voice trailing back. ‘Keep him here, Norton. Don’t touch the phones, or use yours in here. We’ll need to freeze and store their whole net just as it is. I’ll clean-call Rovayo from the street, get a RimSec CSI squad over here. Going to make her day - this should be enough to lever the Cat bust wide open all over again.’

‘Right.’

He paused at the door, looked back. ‘And don’t forget. We’ve got an arrangement now.’

Norton listened to him walk away down the corridor. Then he turned back to face his brother. Jeff looked disinterestedly up at him.

‘What now?’

Sudden, pulsing rage, up from the soles of his shoes and into the space behind his eyes. He bit it back as well as he could.

‘You know,’ he said, almost evenly, ‘I told Megan about you and Nuying.’

Jeff gaped up at him, eyes cognac-veiled and confused.

‘Maybe that’s simplifying it. I guess you could say she got it out of me. Or maybe not that either, maybe we both wanted it said, and we just helped each other get it out. If I’m honest, I think she already had a pretty good idea something was going on.’

Clumsily, his brother started to get up.

‘You fucking traitor,’ he said thickly.

‘Stay in your seat, Jeff.’ Suddenly, the rage came washing up out of him, would not be contained. ‘Because if you don’t, I will fucking kill you myself.’

And now, here it was. The moment that had been festering inside him for over two years. His brother blinking at him, like a deer staring into the headlights.

He drew in breath. He really was going to do this.

‘You want to know what Megan did when she found out?’ Another hard breath. ‘She fucked me, Jeff. We went to some motel up near Novato, and she fucked me raw. All afternoon and night. Best sex I ever had.’

And now Jeff came flailing up out of the sofa, roaring, fists swinging. Norton blocked, twisted and punched his brother in the side of the face. The first time he’d used his enforcement training in better than a year, it felt creakily unaccustomed, but it felt unexpectedly good as well. The blow connected, solidly, put Jeff down, crawling half on the sofa half on the floor. Norton grabbed him by the back of the collar, balled fist raised again.

And stopped.

No. You’re not Carl Marsalis.

Fist slowly unflexing, dropping away. He let go of the collar. Overpowering urge to shake himself, like a drenched dog. Instead, he stepped away, leaned against the edge of his brother’s desk.

‘This is going to be hard on her,’ he said, still breathing unevenly. ‘Megan and the kids. But don’t worry. When they send you up to Quentin Two for what you’ve done here, I’ll make sure she’s okay. I’ll take care of her.’

A low, grinding howl came up out of his brother’s throat as he propped himself up on the sofa, as if he’d swallowed broken glass. Norton felt a peculiarly comfortable calm settling into place on his shoulders. His breathing eased.

‘We’re good together, Jeff. She laughs when she’s around me. We’ll work something out.’

‘Fuck you!’ Spat out like blood.

There was a timid tap at the door. Norton glanced up, surprised.

‘Yeah?’

The door opened and the stout Asian woman peered round the edge. ‘Mr Norton, are you . . .’

She stared, eyes wide.

‘It’s okay,’ said Norton hurriedly. ‘I’m Jeff’s brother, Tom. Jeff’s been under a lot of strain recently. I’m sure you’ll have noticed. It’s uh, it’s gotten pretty bad.’

‘I, uhm-’

‘He really needs to be alone right now, just with family, you know. We’ve made the calls. If you could-’

‘Yes, of course, uhm ...’ She looked across at Jeff, where he now sat on the floor with his back to the sofa. Blood-flecked tissue in his nose, face smeared with tears and rage, uncapped bottle on the table in front of him. ‘Mr Norton, I’m so sorry, if there’s anything at all I can do . . .’

Jeff Norton stared back at her.

‘It’s okay, Lisa,’ he said dully. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. Could you show my brother where we keep our medical records from the Carmel clinic?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Imbued with a solid purpose, Lisa seemed to grow visibly stronger again. ‘You’re quite sure that-’

Jeff dragged up the husk of a smile. ‘Quite sure, Lisa.’

He turned to look at his brother, and there was an odd note of triumph suddenly in his voice. ‘Go ahead, little brother. You want to see something I kept back from your thirteen friend?’

Lisa vacillated in the doorway. Norton stared at Jeff.

‘This is about Onbekend?’

‘Just go look, Tom.’ He saw Norton’s hesitation and chuckled. ‘What am I going to do, make a dash for the airport while you’re gone? Seriously, go look. This is something I saved just for you. You’re going to love it.’

‘It’s, uh,’ Lisa gestured along the corrior. ‘This way.’

‘Jeff, if you knew something else about Onbekend, you should have-’

‘Just go fucking look, will you!’

So he went, left the door ajar and followed Lisa out into the corridor. In the doorway, he paused and turned, looked hard at his brother, pointed at him.

‘You stay right there.’

Jeff snorted, rolled his eyes and reached for the bottle of Martell.

Down the angled corridor, tracking Lisa’s stolid progress, floating behind the eyes with all that he was still trying to assimilate. He wondered vaguely if Marsalis hadn’t gone out into the street as much to clear his head as to keep the call to RimSec clean.

They were almost at the door marked Carmel Street Clinic when the single shot slammed behind them, so flat and undramatic that at first he mistook it for the sound of the door to Jeff’s office, the exit he hadn’t bothered to close.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

They had Joaquin Ortiz in a monitored convalescence suite on the newly nanobuilt upper levels at the Weill Cornell medical centre. He was tagged with microdoc sub-dermals that would broadcast a scream to the hospital system if his life signs dipped in any way, the receptionist explained with an enthusiastic smile, and he had panic buttons in the bathroom, next to his bed and on his wheelchair. A full crash team and a dedicated emergency room doctor were retained at all times on idle, specifically for the patients on these levels. Norton thanked her, and they went upstairs. A COLIN security detachment was on duty outside the suite, two hard-faced men and a woman who met them out of the elevator with professional tension that evaporated when they recognised Norton. Carl let them pad him down anyway, not sure if it was his thirteen status or just procedure that made them do it. The more relaxed they were, the better. Norton told the squad leader not to bother seeing them in, they’d be fine. Mr Ortiz knew they were coming.

The doors to the suite hummed smoothly back and they walked through. Ortiz was in a wheelchair in the living room, parked by the floor-to-ceiling windows. He wore loose grey silk pyjamas, held a book apparently forgotten in his hands, was lost instead in contemplation of the view out across the cubist thickets of the city to the park. He looked thin and breakable in the chair, tanned face hollowed out to a worn grey, the grizzled hair to white in places. He didn’t appear to have heard the door open, and he didn’t turn as they stepped into view from the entryway hall. Carl wondered if he already knew why they’d come.

‘Ortiz,’ Norton said harshly, moving a step ahead.

Ortiz prodded at the chair’s arm controls, and it coasted silently around on the spot to face them. He smiled, a little forcedly.

‘Tom Norton,’ he said, as if it were a philosophical question that had been troubling him. ‘I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother, Tom. I’ve been meaning to call you. And Carl Marsalis, of course. I still haven’t had the chance to thank you for saving my life.’

‘Don’t thank me yet.’

‘Ah.’ Something happened to the planes of the ravaged face. ‘Well, I didn’t imagine that this was a social call.’

‘Jeff talked.’ Norton was trembling with the force of what he’d carried inside him across the continent. ‘Scorpion Response. Wyoming. The whole thing. So don’t you tell me you’re sorry, you piece of shit. You did this, all of it. You’re the reason Jeff is dead.’

‘Am I?’ Ortiz didn’t seem to be disputing it. He placed his hands palm to palm in his lap, pressed them together, maybe to hold down his fear. ‘And so you’ve brought your avenging angel with you. Well, that is fitting I suppose, but I should warn you this chair has-’

‘We know,’ Carl said bleakly. ‘And I’m not here for Norton’s benefit. I came for Sevgi Ertekin.’

‘Ertekin?’ A frown crossed Ortiz’s face, then cleared. ‘Oh yes, the officer you stayed with in Harlem when we had you released. Yes, she died too, didn’t she? A few days ago. I’m afraid I’ve not been keeping up very closely with-’

‘She didn’t die.’ Carl held down the fury with distant, trained reflex. His voice was quiet and cold, like the faint bite of winter in the New York air outside. ‘Sevgi Ertekin was killed. By your avenging angel, Ortiz. By Onbekend. Merrin. Whatever you call him. She died saving my life.’

‘I am ... very sorry about that as well.’

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘For you? No, I don’t imagine it would be. I assume there was some . . .’ Ortiz frowned. ‘Some connection between you and this Ertekin.

Carl said nothing. The words would take him nowhere.

‘Yes, there must have been. You people care about so little in the end, need so little, of the material world and of other people. But when you do choose to own something or someone, when you consider that something or someone to be yours . . .’

‘Yes, then,’ said Carl, ‘nothing else matters.’

He met the COLIN director’s eyes, saw the way they flinched away.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Ortiz shakily, ‘that matters have run rather out of control in my ... my absence from the bridge, as it were. Your involvement, Onbekend, other changing factors. Had I not been removed so unexpectedly from managing the operation, perhaps things would not have become so tangled. I truly regret that, you must believe me.’

‘You still would have murdered over twenty men and women,’ said Norton violently. ‘Just to save your political fucking neck.’

Ortiz shook his head. ‘No, Tom, that isn’t-’

‘Don’t fucking use my name like we’re friends, you piece of shit!’

Carl put a hand on Norton’s arm. ‘Keep it down, Tom. We don’t want your security breaking the door down on us.’

The COLIN exec jerked away from him, looked at him as if he were contagious. In front of them, Ortiz was talking again.

‘-was not for me, personally. You must understand that. I’m a wealthy man, and I have access to even greater wealth through other channels if I need it. I could have afforded to pay off your brother and his accomplices-’

Norton stared. ‘You knew? You knew he was part of it?’

‘I suspected.’ Ortiz coughed a little, hunched over in the chair. He cleared his throat. ‘His story seemed feeble, I thought it was likely he was involved, but . . . we were once close associates, Tom. Friends, even. You must know I promoted you on his request, just the way I promoted him to Scorpion Response twenty years ago.’

Norton’s voice came through his teeth. ‘Am I supposed to be fucking grateful to you now?’

‘No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me, please. I suspected Jeff, I didn’t know for sure. But I did know that if I unleashed Onbekend on the others, whoever they were, Jeff would fold. If he had been involved, I knew he’d give me no more trouble. Even in the old days, even with Scorpion Response, he was a logistical manager, a facilitator. Not an operative, not a killer. Jeff never had the stomach for those things.’

Norton grinned savagely down at him. ‘That’s all you know. My brother sent those skaters to kill you. My brother got me to hire Marsalis out of South Florida State to crank up the pressure on you and Onbekend. He was playing you just like you played him.’

‘Is that so?’ An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. ‘Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic too thatyou, Mr Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very beginning. Variant thirteen, the avatars of purified violence, our saviours and our nemesis.’

Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice, and thought abruptly of Manco Bambaren’s mannered speeches on pistacos and human history. He wondered idly what genes the two men might share.

‘Where is Onbekend?’ he asked bluntly.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. ‘Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew-’

‘Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano. Back to Bambaren. That’s where you would have contacted him in the beginning to set this up, right?’

‘Yes, but through Bambaren’s organisation. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.’ Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. ‘Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you cannot control.’

‘You must have had direct contact with him after that,’ Carl said pragmatically. ‘You set him on me in San Francisco, after the Bulgakov’s Cat arrests.’

Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. ‘Believe me, Mr Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Allen Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa, he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift. And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.’

The shock sparked in him. ‘You had di Palma call me?’

‘Yes, Mr Marsalis.’ Ortiz sighed. ‘And not only then. From the very beginning, Gianfranco di Palma had instructions to remove you from the proceedings as rapidly as possible. We had simply not expected you to be so tenacious in a fight that was not your own.’

Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehemet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes. But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

‘Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?’ he asked distractedly

‘So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.’

Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. ‘You’re pulling favours with UNGLA already? You’ve got your hooks in that far?’

‘Tom, I have a secure nomination for Secretary General. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.’ The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. ‘Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and co-operative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.’

Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

‘One more year,’ said Ortiz urgently. ‘That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the general assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past - not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.’

Carl thought briefly of Lola Montalban, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

The quiet, filling him up ...

‘You’re full of shit, Ortiz.’ The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. ‘You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.’

‘No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.’ Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. ‘You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.’

Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back a half metre before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

‘A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries. Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?’

Carl pulled him back. ‘Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.’

But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage. Suddenly, the wheelchair held only an ill, old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

‘I . . . was . . . young. Foolish. I have no defence. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.’ Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. ‘There is a future on Mars, Mr Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programmes. I only sought to equalise the pressure, so when the explosion, the realisation finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.’

Carl nodded. ‘Yeah. Let’s get back to Onbekend.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘What does it matter what I believe? It won’t change what you’ve done. How did Onbekend find out he was Manco Bambaren’s half-brother ?’

Ortiz sighed. ‘I really don’t remember details of that sort. It was a long time ago. Yes, possibly, he used Scorpion Response time and resources to track his sourcemat mother down, discovered who she was and saw the angle. The work we were doing in Wyoming may have sparked his interest. It is through Scorpion channels that he discovered he had a twin, that I do know, so quite possibly he found Isabela Gayoso the same way. And I know that when he wasn’t seconded to us, Project Lawman deployed him in a covert capacity in Bolivia on at least one occasion, so he would perhaps have had opportunity then as well. All I can tell you is that when the time came to dissolve the Scorpion operation, he already had his place in the sun prepared. He knew that his twin had accepted Mars resettlement, and that Scorpion Response would be wiped from the flow by n-djinn. And Bambaren had made a place for him in his organisation. It was a perfect disappearing act.’

Yeah, until Stéphane Névant shows up trying to sell Bambaren a pistaco threat he already has blood-related access to and drawing down attention they can really all do without. Poor old Stéphane, right on target. Better intuition than you ever knew. No wonder Bambaren turned you over so fucking fast. All you were going to do was lead an UNGLA squad right to his half-brother’s door.

And no wonder Bambaren freaked when we showed up, set it all in motion, all over again. I thought I’d offended him when I talked about exemplary executions in some village square somewhere. Must have nailed something Onbekend did for him, too close to the truth for comfort.

He thought I was playing with him. Thought I’d come for his brother.

He thought of Sevgi Ertekin, propped against the side of the COLIN jeep, hands in pockets, jacket hooked back. Casual reveal of the shoulder-holstered Marstech gun, the telegraphed warning to Bambaren not to fuck up.

Sevgi, you should have been here to hear all of this. We were so fucking close after all.

But you would have told me not to gloat, it’s not attractive.

He focused hard on the man in the wheelchair. ‘Is Isabela Gayoso still alive?’

‘No, she died some years ago. Onbekend mentioned it to me in passing when we met in New York. She grew up in crushing poverty, it seems, and of course these things tend to take their toll later in life. From what I hear, Bambaren himself was lucky to survive his childhood. Neither of his siblings did.’

‘Does Bambaren know he has a second half-brother?’

‘No. We did not involve him. Onbekend has enough familia presence these days to make the contacts we needed at Bradbury and Wells, and to be convincing when he did. It took some time, but he convinced the Martian chapters that there is a wedge opening between the Lima clans and the altiplano.’ Ortiz’s shrunken shoulders lifted under the grey silk of the pyjamas. ‘From what I understand, it’s not far from the truth.’

‘And Merrin never knew who was hiring him either?’

‘Merrin was never aware that he had a twin in the first place. As I said, it was only through Scorpion Response intelligence that Onbekend discovered what had been done. Merrin never would have had access to the data. And you’ve seen Onbekend, he changed his face when he went underground back in ’94. No resemblance any longer.’

Carl thought about the echo in the features he’d seen the night Sevgi was shot. ‘No, there is a resemblance. If you look for it.’

‘Well, as I understand it the actual hiring was filtered through the Martian familia machine anyway. I doubt Merrin and Onbekend ever actually saw each other across the screen. The familias knew only that this was a personal matter, that the people at this end had chosen this particular man, Merrin, and that if they could not recruit him, there would be no deal.’

‘And Merrin?’ Norton wanted to know. ‘What was he told?’

Another fragile shrug. ‘That he had friends here on Earth who wanted him back, who would provide him with a new identity and the resources to disappear in comfort. We made it a very attractive package.’

The COLIN exec shook his head numbly. ‘So Onbekend just sold out his brother? His twin?’

‘Sacrified him, yes. What of it?’ Ortiz gestured. ‘They had never known each other, never met. What bond could there be?’

‘That’s not the point!’ But now Norton was looking at Carl. ‘He was his brother, for Christ’s sake!’

‘That is the point, Tom,’ Carl told him quietly. ‘Thirteens don’t do abstract allegiance. It’s not part of our make-up.’

‘But . . . Bambaren.’ Norton held out his hands. ‘That’s an abstract blood tie.’

Ortiz made an arid chuckling sound. ‘Yes, one that Onbekend has exploited to great benefit.’

‘Bambaren got used,’ said Carl, looking down at Ortiz. ‘Just like everybody else. Just like Scorpion Response, just like Human Cost. Just like Onbekend and Merrin. You got everybody dancing.’

‘Mr Marsalis, please understand-’

Enough.

Carl grabbed Ortiz under the arms and hauled him out of the chair in a single violent motion. The other man seemed to weigh almost nothing, but that might have been the mesh kicking in, or the rage. Ortiz kicked and struggled, but feebly. Carl held him in what felt for a moment like an embrace, stepped back clear of the panic-wired wheelchair and laid the COLIN director carefully down on the polished wood floor.

‘Wait, you can’t-’

But Ortiz’s voice was as weak as his struggles. Carl knelt and pressed a hand to the COLIN director’s chest to hold him still. He leaned over him, face impassive.

‘I know you, Ortiz,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen your kind making your speeches from every pulpit and podium on two planets, and you never fucking change. You lie to the cudlips and you lie to yourself so they’ll believe you better, and when the dying starts, you claim regret and you offer justification. But in the end, you do it all because you think it’s your right, and you do not care. If you really suspected Jeff Norton, if you knew what kind of man he was, you could have squeezed him for the names, dealt with whoever it was-’

‘It was Tanaka,’ Norton said, standing over Ortiz. ‘Only Tanaka.’

Carl nodded. ‘You could have stopped this thing as soon as it started. But what Tanaka and Jeff Norton could do, so could someone else sooner or later. So could any of the ones who knew about Wyoming, any of the ones who were left, and it could happen at any time. No matter what position you achieved, Scorpion Response was going to hang over you to the grave. You’d never be safe. So you saw a chance to clean house, and you took it, at whatever cost.’

And now Carl found a small truth seeping up inside him, an understanding.

‘You know, Ortiz, you would have made a pretty good thirteen. All you ever lacked was the strength, the power, and that, well, I guess you can always find a mob of cudlips to supply that for you.’

‘All right.’ Ortiz stopped struggling. The force came back into his voice. He spoke clearly and urgently. ‘Listen to me, please. If you kill me now, I have alarm systems attached to my body. They’re under the skin, inside me, you’ll never find them. There’ll be a crash team here in minutes.’

‘I won’t need that long,’ Carl told him.

Ortiz broke. His face seemed to crumple, his eyes closed, blinked open moist with tears.

‘But I want to live,’ he whispered. ‘I want to go on, I have work to do.’

Cold, cold pulse of rage. He felt his face move with it. ‘So did Sevgi Ertekin.’

‘Please believe me, Mr Marsalis, I truly do regret-’

Carl leaned closer. ‘I don’t want your regret.’

Ortiz swallowed, mustered control from somewhere.

‘Then, I have a request,’ he husked. ‘Please, at least may I phone and speak to my family first. To say goodbye.’

‘No.’ Carl hauled the COLIN director up onto his lap, locked an arm around the man’s neck, positioned his free hand against the skull. ‘I’m not here to ease your passing, Ortiz. I’m here to take what you owe.’

‘Please . . .’

Carl jerked and twisted. Ortiz’s neck snapped like rotten wood.

Soft, chiming sirens went off everywhere in the suite, the wail of distressed cudlip society. Man of substance down. Rally, gather, form a mob.

The beast is out.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The crash team were fast- less than two full minutes from when the microdocs tripped under Ortiz’s skin and the sirens went off. But well before that, the COLIN security detachment had heard the alarms and come through the door on general principles. They found Ortiz in his wheelchair, slumped over to one side, Norton and Marsalis standing staring at him.

‘Sir?’ the squad leader looked at Norton.

‘Lock this whole floor down,’ Norton told her absently. ‘Call in some more support to do it. I don’t want anyone, not even NYPD, getting up here without my say-so.’

‘But, but-’

‘Just do it.’ He turned to Carl. ‘You’d better get moving.’

Carl nodded, looked once more at Ortiz and then stepped outside the unconsciously tightening ring the security detachment had formed around the body. He headed out of the room without looking back, out of the suite and into the corridor where he met the crash team head on, all life-saving speed and resuscitation gear, trolley and white coats, dedicated emergency room doctor and all.

He stood aside to let them pass.

Outside the hospital, he walked rapidly away, two blocks west and four south, lost himself in the sun-glinting brawl and bustle of the city. He peeled off his S(t)igma jacket, pulled his pack of phones from it, then balled it up inside out and dropped it into the first recycling bin he saw. The cold bit through his shirt, but he had COLIN-APPROVED credit in his pockets, and he had time.

He stopped on a street corner, checked his watch and calculated travelling time to the JFK suborb terminal. Hoped Norton could hold up his end.

Then he pulled a new phone loose from the pack, clicked it on and waited for Union cover to catch up with it. With his other hand, he dug in his trouser pocket and tugged out the photo and list of scribbled numbers Matthew had hooked for him the night before.

‘Okay, Sev,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Let’s do this.’

She stepped into the gloom of the bar uncertainly, but with a certain confidence as well. They were after all on her home ground, Lower Manhattan, only a couple of blocks north of Wall Street and the NYPD dedicated Datacrime HQ. She hadn’t had to come far.

Two short steps in to let the door hinge shut behind her, and she scanned the room. He raised a hand as her gaze passed down the line of booths along the side wall opposite the bar. She didn’t respond to the wave, but she headed over. The single sodden suit, marooned on a stool at the end of the bar with his nth martini and no friends, gave her an unsubtle once-over as she passed him. Carl supposed she was worth the look. Long-limbed and well-shaped under her casual wear, shown off in her stride and the way she held herself. The single old-style bulb lamp in the middle of the ceiling burnished her hair golden as she passed beneath it, briefly lit the cheerleader good looks as well. She hadn’t changed much from the photo.

‘Amy Westhoff?’

He raised himself out of his seat as she reached his booth, offered her his hand. She took it, gave him a searching look.

‘Yeah. Agent . . . di Palma, is it?’

‘That’s right.’ He flashed his UNGLA ID, carefully held so she’d see the photo but not the name. Feigned a querying frown to distract her as he put the badge away again. ‘But I see you’ve come on your own?’

She made a dismissive gesture as she seated herself on the other side of the table. The lie hurried out. ‘Yeah, well, my partner’s wrapped up with uh, some other stuff right now. He couldn’t make it. Now, you said this is about the bust on Ethan Conrad four years back. I don’t really see how that can have anything to do with me, or with datacrime. ’

‘Well, it is only a stray lead. But then . . . can I get you a drink, maybe?’

‘No, thank you. I’ve got to go back on duty. Can we make this quick?’

‘Certainly.’ Carl sipped at the Red Stripe in front of him. ‘In fact, my own jurisdiction in this matter is, should I say, rather loose. Obviously we’re not on UN territory here.’

‘Not far from it, though.’

‘No, true enough.’ Carl put his drink down, let his hands drop into his lap. ‘Well then, I guess you’re familiar with the case. I understand you had some kind of relationship with Ethan Conrad, back before it was known what he was.’

Tautly. ‘That’s right, I did. Well before anybody knew what he was.’

‘Ah, yes, quite. Well, it’s just that I’ve received information from an NYPD officer, an ex-officer in fact, Sevgi Ertekin. Would you have heard of her?’

The waitress sauntered over, eyebrows raised, notepad not yet out of her apron pocket. It was early yet. Aside from the lonely broker, they had the place to themselves.

‘Get you guys any-’

‘We’re fine,’ said Amy Westhoff curtly.

The waitress shrugged and backed off. Carl gave an apologetic look. Westhoff waited until she’d gone back to the bar, before she spoke again.

‘I knew Ertekin, vaguely, yeah. So what’s she been saying?’

‘Well, she said that you tipped UNGLA off about Conrad’s thirteen status because you were jealous that he’d left you, and that you then tried to call and warn him at the last minute. But were too late, obviously. Now-’

‘That fucking bitch!’ But even in the low light, he could see that Amy Westhoff’s face had gone ashen.

‘You’d deny that then, I assume.’

Westhoff lifted a trembling finger. ‘You go back to that raghead bitch, and you tell her from me-’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Sevgi Ertekin is dead. But she did give me a message for you, something she meant to do but couldn’t manage.’

The blonde woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘What message?’

Then she flinched, yelped, reared back in the booth and looked down at her trouser leg. She pressed on her thigh with both hands.

‘What the fuck was that?’

‘That was a genetically modified curare flechette,’ Carl said coldly. ‘It’s going to paralyse your skeletal muscle system so you can’t breathe or call for help.’

Westhoff stared at him. Tried to get up from the table, made a muffled grunting sound instead and dropped back into her seat, still staring at him.

‘It’s a vastly improved variant on natural curare,’ he went on. ‘You might call it the thirteen of poisons. I think you’ll last about seven or eight minutes. Enjoy.’

He slid the Red Stripe over so it stood in front of her. Westhoff’s mouth twitched, and she slumped against the wall. Carl got up to go. He leaned in close.

‘Sevgi Ertekin wanted you dead,’ he told her softly. ‘And now you are.’

Then he eased out of the booth and headed for the door. On the way out, he looked across at the bar, where the waitress sat on a stool, fiddling with some aspect of her phone. As she glanced up at him, Carl fielded her gaze, rolled his eyes expressively, put on jilted, hurt and weary look. The girl pulled a sympathetic face, smiled at him and went back to her phone. He reached the door, pushed it open and let himself back out into the late afternoon chill.

He dropped the flechette gun down a grate on Wall Street, a little sad to see it go after the trouble Matthew had gone to in tracking down a suitably disreputable dealer for him, and the price the suitably disreputable dealer had screwed out of him when it became clear that Carl was in a hurry.

Then again, it had served its purpose.

Hope that was what you wanted, Sevgi.

He called Norton from a cab on the way to JFK.

‘Can you talk?’

‘Yeah, I’m back at Jefferson Park. Where are you?’

‘Brooklyn Bridge. On my way to the airport.’

‘You’re still here, in town?’ Norton’s voice punched out of the phone. ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Marsalis?’

‘I had a couple of things to do. Am I still safe to fly?’

Norton blew out a long breath. ‘Yeah, should be. I’ve got the NYPD hammering on my door and Weill Cornell screaming about lawsuits, but so far the COLIN brief is holding. Always knew there was some reason I took this job.’

‘That old-time corporate power, huh?’ Carl grew serious. ‘Think they’ll try and nail you though?’

‘Well, for now it’s my train set, so I’m fine. And anyway, I was in the bathroom, remember. No idea what was going on ’til you called me and there’s Ortiz, dead in his chair.’

‘Sounds kind of thin.’

‘It is kind of thin. But this is the most powerful non-governmental body on the planet we’re talking about, and right now they’ve got my back. Quit worrying about me, Marsalis. You want to help, just get your ass out of Union jurisdiction right now.’

‘On my way.’

He hung up, and looked out of the taxi window. Ribbed light blipped through the steel lattices of the bridge structure as they headed out over the span, strobed across his face and turned the air in the cab alternately dusty and dimmed. Back across the East River, Manhattan made its block graph skyline against a cold, perfect blue. The sun glowed and dripped like broken yolk off the top and down the side of one of the new black nanobuild towers. Departure clung to the shrinking scene like mist.

The same obscure desire he’d felt staring at the Marin headland two nights ago came and stabbed him in the heart all over again. He could not pin down what it meant, could only give it a name.

Sevgi.

CODA PISTACO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The path down into Colca was a foot-pounded dusty white, in places barely an improvement over the loose scree and scrub it cut through. Initially, it straggled and twisted along the rim of the canyon like a recently unwound length of cable with the worst of the kinks still not out. It headed out of the village in a relatively straight line, followed the line of the canyon more or less, brushed up to the edge now and then, close enough to offer a dizzying view downward, then slid away again as if unnerved by the drop. A couple of kilometres out of town, the path skirted a desolate cleared space with a paint-peeled rusting goal iron at either end. It kinked a couple more times and then found and dropped into a wide basin-shaped bite in the canyon wall, riding the curve around and down like the track of a roulette ball made visible on its fall towards the luck of the numbers. Thereafter, it fell abruptly off the edge of the canyon, spilled down the flank of the valley in a concertina of hairpin turns that made grudging concession to the steep angle of descent, and arrived at last, in dust and sliding pebbles, at an ancient wooden suspension bridge across the pale greenish flow of the river.

The bridge was not much more user-friendly than the path that led to it. The materials used in its construction didn’t look to have been renewed in decades, and where the planking had cracked and holed, the locals had placed rocks so there was no downward view into the water that might scare the mules which were still the only viable means of heavy transport down from the towns on the canyon rim. Infrastructural neglect was a general feature of the region - significant distance from the nearest prep camps meant no possible return on corporate funds deployed here, tourism was the only staple and the tourists liked their squalor picturesque - but here the process had been allowed to run a little further than elsewhere. Here visitors other than known locals were not encouraged, and tour companies had been persuaded to route their itineraries away, to other sections of the canyon. Here, comings and goings on the path were watched by men carrying weapons whose black and metal angles gleamed new and hi-tech in the harsh, altiplano sun. Here, it was rumoured, there lived a witch who, lacking the normal human capacity to survive the whole of the dry season awake, must fall into an enchanted sleep before the end of each year and could only be roused when the rains came, and only then by the call and ministrations of her pistaco lover.

‘You cannot seriously be planning to go down there now.’ Norton was shaking his head, but his tone carried less disbelief than weary resignation. He seemed to have lost all capacity for shock over the previous few days.

‘Better now than later,’ Carl told him soberly. ‘The more the dust settles, the more chance Bambaren and Onbekend have to take stock, and for them I’m a big black mark in the negative asset column. They don’t know about Sevgi, but they know the work I do for UNGLA, and they know I know about Onbekend. And they’re both cautious men. Leave it long enough, they’re going to start wondering where I am, and what I’m doing. But right now, they figure I’m scrambling for cover just like everybody else.’

‘Yeah, you should be.’

‘Getting hard to hold the line, is it?’

‘No, and that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying you need to think about what you’re going to do when this is over.’

Carl stared out at the slow night-time crawl of the cross-border traffic in the checkpoint lanes. ‘I’ll worry about that when it is over. Meantime - you made me a promise.’

‘And I came running, didn’t I?’ Norton gestured around the stark, utilitarian space they had to themselves. ‘I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Not like I haven’t got other things to do, or more attractive places to be doing them.’

He had a point. RimSec immigration division was widely recognised as the shitty end of the organisation’s sprawling jurisdiction, and the unlovely interior of the observation lodge offered mute testimony. Grey pressed-carbon lockers stood ranked along the back wall, a random scatter of cheap tables and chairs crowded one half of the limited floor space and a pool table clothed in garish orange baize took up the rest. A plastic rack held the warped and battered cues pinned to the wall like suspects, alongside a couple of vending machines whose wanly glowing display windows were racked with items that looked more like hazardous material in an isolation chamber than food or drink. Bleak LCLS panels in the roof, the long window of the observation port commanding its three-metre elevated view of the traffic. An unobtrusive back door led out to the cells.

They’d been sitting there since before it got dark.

Carl got up and prowled the room for the fifteenth time. He was beginning to think he could feel the soul of the place breathing, and it didn’t improve his mood much. The yellow-painted walls were institutionally uncared for, scarred in a hundred places at the pool table end with the memory of overzealous wind-up for irritable, jaw-rattling shots. Elsewhere forlorn-looking posters attempted to break up the monotony, everything from RimSec information flyers and mission statements to soft porn printout and announcements of local gigs and fiesta nights at clubs up the road in Blythe. None of it looked very appealing, less so than ever the fifteenth time around.

It wasn’t much of a place to say his farewells to Norton.

‘NYPD still giving you a lot of grief?’ he asked.

Norton gestured. ‘Sure, they’re pushing. They’d like to know where the hell you are, that’s for sure. Why you walked out like that. I’ve got you down as officially helping COLIN with its internal investigation, witness protected as part of the deal. They don’t buy it, but hey, they’re just cops. They don’t get to argue with us about stuff like this.’

‘They ask about anything else?’

The COLIN exec looked away. He’d never asked what Carl had found to do in Manhattan the rest of that day. ‘No, they haven’t. Why, is there something else I should know about?’

Carl gave the question a moment’s honest consideration. ‘That you should know about? No. Nothing else.’

The death of NYPD sergeant Amy Westhoff had made some headlines across the Union, he’d checked for it, but he doubted Norton had the spare time or energy to make any connection there still might be with Sevgi Ertekin. Four years was a long time, and he was pretty sure he’d covered his tracks when he called Westhoff. The woman’s guilt had done most of the heavy lifting for him.

‘If I’m honest,’ said Norton tiredly, ‘I’m more worried about the Weill Cornell people than the police. There’s some serious finance lying about in that place, some people with access to high-level ears, and some seriously dedicated medical staff who don’t like losing their patients under mysterious circumstances. Not to mention the fact that the Ortiz family’s personal physician has a consultant residency there.’

‘Did you have to pay off the crash team?’

‘No, they’re not the problem. They’re all juniors, looking to build careers, and they know what a malpractice suit can do to a résumé, even by association. I had them pronounce Ortiz dead at the scene, and then chased them out, told them it wasn’t their responsibility any longer. You should have seen their faces - they were all very relieved to get out of that room.’

Carl paused by a gig listing. Fat Men are Harder to Kidnap - Blythe Mars Memorial Hall, November 25th. Nearly three weeks away. He wondered briefly where he’d be when the Fat Men took the stage. Put the thought away, barely looked at.

‘Got an exit strategy for Ortiz yet?’

Norton peered into the dregs of coffee gone two hours cold. ‘Variations on a theme. Unsuspected late-stage viral contamination from the bioware slugs he was shot with. Or interface incompatibilities, his body rejected the nano-repair suite he was implanted with and he was too weak to survive the shock. Either way, you can be damn sure there’ll be no post-mortem worth worrying about. Joaquin Ortiz is going to get a statesman’s funeral, eulogies over a tragic untimely death, and his name on a big fucking plaque somewhere. None of this is ever going to come out. That’s how we buy the family’s silence.’

Carl gave him a curious look from across the room. Something had happened to Norton since he’d seen him last, something that went beyond the weary lack of capacity for surprise. It was hard to pin down, but the COLIN exec seemed to have taken to his new role as the Initiative’s fixer with a bitter, masochistic pleasure. In some obscure way, like a driven athlete with pain, he looked to be learning to enjoy the power he’d been handed. In the vacuum vortex created by the death of Ortiz and his brother, Tom Norton was the man of the hour, and he’d risen to it like a boxer to the bell, like the reluctant hero finally called to arms. As if, along with the young patrician demeanour and the studied press-conference calm, this was just part and parcel of what he’d been made for after all.

‘And the feeds?’ Carl asked him. ‘The press?’

Norton snorted. ‘Oh, the press. Don’t make me fucking laugh.’

Carl came back to the table and stood staring out of the observation port. Up and down the lines of traffic, breath frosted from the mouths of uniformed immigration officers as they moved briskly about in the chilled desert night, bending and peering into vehicles at random with long tubular steel flashlights raised to the shoulder like some kind of mini-bazooka. The queues stretched all the way back to the bridge, where Interstate 10 came across the Colorado River from Arizona under a frenzy of LCLS and wandering spotbeams. The prickly, piled-up fortifications around the bridge were blasted into black silhouette by the light.

‘Come on Suerte,’ he muttered. ‘Where the fuck are you?’

There were two armed guards hanging about at the far side of the suspension bridge in the canyon, both of them bored to distraction, yawning and cold, weapons slung. One, the younger of the two, a lad barely out of his teens called Lucho Acosta, sat on a rock where the path began again, tossing pebbles idly out into the river. His somewhat older companion was still on his feet but propped casually back against the rope cabling on one side of the bridge, smoking a handmade cigarette and tipping his head back occasionally to look up out of the canyon at the sky. Miguel Cafferata was sick of this gig, sick of being buried down here a day’s hard drive from the lights of Arequipa and his family, sick of the chafing bulk of the weblar jacket, slimline though it was supposed to be, and sick of Lucho who didn’t seem to have a single interest in life outside of football and porn. Miguel had the depressing sense when he spent time with the boy that he was looking at a premonition of his own son ten years hence, and the impression was making him irritable. When Lucho got to his feet and pointed upward to the path, he barely bothered following the gesture.

‘Mules coming down.’

‘Yeah, so I see.’

Conversation was exhausted between the two of them, they’d both been on the same duty every day for the last two weeks, the same dawn to mid-afternoon shift. The boss was twitchy, he wanted the place locked down tight, no unnecessary changing of the guard. The two of them watched in silence as the solitary figure and the two mules picked their way down the concertina turns of the path in the early morning sun. It was a common enough sight, and anyway, you couldn’t be surprised down here in daylight, except maybe by snipers or a fucking airstrike.

Even when the mule driver and his animals made it onto the last few hairpin twists before the bridge, Miguel didn’t tense as such. But a flicker of interest woke on his weathered face. Behind him, he heard Lucho get to his feet off the rock.

‘Isn’t that Sumariva’s mule, leading?’

Miguel shaded his eyes. ‘Looks like it. But that sure isn’t Sumariva. Way too big. And look at the way he’s walking.’

It was fair comment. The tall figure clearly didn’t have the hang of coming down a mountain path. He jolted heavily, scudding up powdery white dust every couple of steps. Seemed to be walking with a limp too, and he didn’t appear to have much idea of how to lead the mules. Big modern boots and a long coat plastered with the dust of his ungainly descent, battered leather Stetson. Beneath the brim of the hat, a face flashed pale. Miguel grunted.

‘It’s a fucking gringo,’ he said curiously.

‘You think . . .’

‘Don’t know. Supposed to be looking out for some black guy, not a gringo and a couple of mules. Maybe this is someone from the university. A lot of those guys are from the north, doing survey experiments down here for Mars. Testing equipment.’

The mules did appear, now that he looked, to be loaded with small, shallow-draft crates that winked metallic in the high-angled slant of the sun.

‘Well he ain’t fucking testing it around here,’ said Lucho, unshipping his shotgun with a youthful glower. He pumped a round into the chamber and stepped onto the bridge planking. Miguel winced wearily at the sound.

‘Just let him come to us, all right. No sense rushing up to meet him, and there’s no space to do a search on that side anyway. Let him get across to this side, then we’ll see who he is, turn him around and send him on his way.’

But when the gringo got to the bridge, he didn’t come out onto the planks immediately. Instead, he stopped and sent one of the mules across ahead of him. The animal made the crossing with accustomed docility, while back on the other side the gringo in the hat seemed more concerned with searching his pockets and fiddling with the webbing straps across the other animal’s back.

‘This is Sumariva’s mule,’ Lucho said as the animal clopped solemnly up to them, then past and onto the solid ground of the river bank, where it stood and waited for its owner to catch up. ‘You think he’d loan it out like that?’

‘For enough cash, yeah. Wouldn’t you?’ Miguel shifted to Spanish, raised his voice. ‘Hoy you, you can’t come down here. This is private property.’

The figure at the other end of the bridge waved an arm. The voice came back in Quechua. ‘Just give me a minute, will you.’

Then he started to lead the other mule out onto the bridge. Hat tilted down over his eyes

‘All right, you stay here,’ Miguel told the boy. The language had floored him, he’d never met a gringo before who spoke it. ‘I’ll go see what this is about.’

‘You want me to call it in?’

Miguel glanced at the mule standing there like the most ordinary thing in the world. It blinked back at him out of big liquid eyes. He grunted impatiently.

‘Nah, don’t bother. Not like they won’t hear it, if we have to shoot this guy.’

But he unslung his shotgun, and he went out to meet the new arrival with the vague crawl of unease in him. And he slowed as he closed the last few metres of the rapidly shrinking gap between himself and the advancing stranger. Came to a stop near the middle of the bridge, stood athwart and pumped a round of his own into the shotgun in his hands.

The stranger stopped at the dry rack-clack of the action.

‘That’ll do,’ Miguel said, in Quechua. ‘Didn’t you hear me? This is private fucking property.’

‘Yeah, I know that.’

‘So what the fuck are you doing down here, gringo?’

‘I’m here to see the witch.’

That was when the stranger tipped up his head so Miguel could see his face properly. It was also when he realised he’d made a mistake The white they’d seen flashing under the hat brim as he came down the path above was pasty and unreal, clotted and streaked on the face like a poorly applied clown’s mask, or a half-melted Day of the Dead candy skull. The eyes were dark and impassive, and they stared out of the disintegrating white face with no more humanity than a pair of gun muzzles

Pistaco.

Miguel had time for that single quailing thought, and then something erupted behind him in a string of firecracker fury. He looked up, tugged both ways at once, and the stranger’s long dusty coat split opened and he had a flash glimpse of some stubby, ugly weapon cradled there in the pistaco’s arms.

Deep throat-clearing cough, spiteful, shredding whine.

Then there was only impact, a sense of being tugged violently backward, a split second of the sky and Colca’s steep-angled sides tilting and spinning, and then everything was gone.

Carl Marsalis sprinted past the ruins of the first familia gunman, closed the gap with the second while the other man raised his shotgun and snapped off a useless blast from the hip. This one was already panicked beyond any professional combat training he might have had, the remote-triggered firecrackers in the lead mule’s panniers, the sudden explosive death of his comrade. Carl ran in firing, too far out for the sharkpunch to have any serious impact yet, but the boy ahead of him flinched and staggered with the few shards that found their mark.

It wasn’t an ideal weapon for the circumstances, and out of the water it was too fucking heavy for comfort. He’d had to drape the long elastic sling it came with around his neck, and stick a cling patch on his right thigh to hold the damn thing still under his coat. His leg ached with the extra effort of walking with the weight. But the patented Cressi sharkpunch had the sterling advantage that it was classed as subaqua sports equipment, which meant he’d got it through security in his baggage without a second look, when second looks were the last thing he needed. And a gun that punched razor-sharp spinning slivers of alloy through water hard enough to eviscerate a great white shark did have some considerable reach in air, even if the spread made accuracy a joke. The young guard had blood running down his face as he fumbled at the slide on his shotgun. He was probably dazed from the sound of the explosions, he was clearly terrified.

Carl closed the gap, pulled the trigger on the sharkpunch again. The boy slammed back against the side cables of the bridge. Large chunks of him slopped through and fell into the river, the rest collapsed skeletally onto the suddenly blood-drenched planking.

Over.

The mule carrying the firecrackers had, not unreasonably, panicked as much as anybody else. She was headed up the path along the riverside, bucking and snorting. No time to hang about. Carl loped after the animal, ears open for the sounds of other humans.

He met a third gunman a couple of hundred metres along the river, hurrying down the path towards the sounds of gunfire, a matt-grey Steyr assault rifle held unhandily across his body as he jogged. The man saw the mule, tried to get out of its way, and Carl darted round one side of the animal, threw out the sharkpunch and fired more or less blind. The other man went down as if ripped apart by invisible hands. Carl scanned the path up ahead, saw and heard nothing, and stopped by the ruins of the man he’d just killed. He crouched and scooped the Steyr up left-handed out of the mess, dumped it immediately with a grunt of frustration. The guy had still been holding it across his body when Carl shot him and the anti-shark load had smashed the breech beyond repair.

‘Fuck!’

He picked and prodded his way around the shattered carcase, sharkpunch still levelled watchfully over his knee at the path ahead. Came up finally with a blood-soaked holster holding a shiny new semi-automatic. He tugged the gun loose and held it up to the light - Glock 100 series, not a bad gun. Pricey, shiny ordnance for backwoods muscle like this, but Carl supposed even here the power of branding must hold sway.

Tight, adrenalin-crazy grin. He put down the sharkpunch for a moment, worked the action on the other weapon. It seemed to be undamaged, would be accurate to a point, but . . .

Still no decent longer-range weapon, the shotguns they’d been packing back at the river had no more reach than the sharkpunch, and he still had no clear idea how many more of Bambaren’s security there were between him and Greta Jurgens’ winter retreat. Outside of actual location, Suerte Ferrer had been hopelessly vague.

He shrugged and got back to his feet. Tucked the Glock into his waistband, hefted the sharkpunch again and moved past the shattered man on the ground. Up ahead, the path seemed to rise slowly out of the rock-walled groove where it ran along the riverside. The mule had bolted on ahead, seemed to have finally found open ground off to the right.

Carl settled the leather hat a little more carefully on his head and followed. The combat high pounded through him. The mesh picked up the beat, fed it. The grin on his face felt like it would never come off.

‘You need to get a sense of geography about this, Suerte.’

Suerte Ferrer glowered up from the holding-cell chair, as Carl walked around him. Immigration had cuffed him there. ‘Don’t need no fucking geography lessons from you, nigger.’

The insult twanged through him, freighted with memories from South Florida State. It was the first time he’d heard it since Dudeck.

Of course, he’d heard the word ‘twist’ a few times in the interim.

‘I see you’re acclimatising to Jesusland culture pretty well.’ Carl completed his circuit and leaned on the table at Ferrer’s level. Their captive was still grimy and tired-looking from his border transit in a false-bottomed crate purporting to contain experimentally gene-modified rapeseed oil. He flinched back as Carl went face to face with him. ‘You want to go back there, maybe, Suerte? That what you want?’

‘Quiros said-’

Carl slammed the table. ‘I don’t know this Quiros. And I don’t fucking want to know him. You think we pulled your autohauler out of the line for luck? You have been sold, to me, and by someone a lot further up the food chain than your pal Quiros. So if you think you’re going to get some slick down-the-wire Seattle lawyer come pull you out of here, you’re wrong.’

He went round the table and took a seat again, next to Norton, who’d done nothing but sit with his legs thrust out in front of him and stare sombrely the whole time. Carl jerked a thumb towards the cell door, which they’d left promisingly ajar when they came in.

‘Out there, Suerte, you’ve got a highway that goes in two directions. It goes west to the Freeport, or it goes east back into Jesusland and a bust for illegal crossover. Your choice which direction you get to take.’

‘Who the fuck are you people?’ Ferrer asked.

Norton exchanged a look with Carl. He leaned forward and cleared his throat. ‘We’re your fairy godmothers, Ferrer. Surprised you didn’t recognise us.’

‘Yeah, we’re looking to grant all your wishes.’

‘See, this identity is blown.’ Norton gestured at the table top, where the documents Ferrer had been carrying were spread out. ‘Carlton Garcia. RimSec have a want out on you under that name from San Diego to Vancouver and back. Even if we hadn’t fished you out here, you’d get about three days into the Rim before you tripped something and end up either busted or yoked to some gangmaster who’ll put you to work fifteen hours a day in a trench and expect you to suck his dick for the privilege.’

Carl grinned skullishly. ‘Was that the Rimside dream you had in mind, Suerte?’

‘Go west, young man, go west,’ Norton said piously. ‘But go with some cash and a decent fake ID.’

‘Both of which we’ll give you,’ Carl told him. ‘Together with a bus ticket right into the Freeport. And all you’ve got to do is answer a couple of questions we have about your cousin Manco Bambaren.’

‘Hey!’ Suerte Ferrer backed up in the chair. His hands chopped a flat cross out of the air in front of him. ‘I don’t know nothing about Manco’s operation, they didn’t tell me shit about any of that. I didn’t live down there more than a couple of years on and off anyway.’

Carl and Norton swapped another look. Carl sighed.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Norton started to get up. ‘We’ll tell the migra boys not to rough you up too bad before they dump you back over.’

‘Hope you’ve enjoyed your brief stay in the Land of Opportunity.’

‘Wait!’

Greta Jurgens’ hibernation retreat was an environment-blended two-storey lodge built right into the side of a cliff face set back a couple of dozen metres from the river bank. Fifteen metres or more of scrubby open ground from where the path from the bridge rose out of the groove it followed along the river, rounded a worn rock bluff and petered out in the scrub a handful of paces from the front door. The upper storey windows were blanked with carbon fibre security shutters, but downstairs there was activity. Motion visible through a wide picture window, and men darting in and out of the open door with weapons in their hands. Carl counted five before he slid back into cover, none of them yet kitted out in the weblar jackets the three down by the river had worn. One of them, older and apparently in charge, was already on the phone for further orders. Carl crouched where the rock wall on the right of the path still rose over a metre high and listened to the reports of his coming.

‘. . . sounds like a whole fucking squad.’ Voice panicky and small across the distance and the steady white noise pour of the river in the background. ‘I can’t raise Lucho or Miguel down at the bridge. There’s a fucking mule here with panniers that look like they fucking blew up or something. I don’t know if-’

Pause.

‘All right then, but you’d better make it quick.’ A shouted aside. ‘You fucking idiots get your jackets on.

Shit.

Well, not like you weren’t expecting this.

He went round the corner of the shallowing rock wall at a taut bent-kneed run, sharkpunch slung and cling-patched to his thigh once more, Glock held out in both hands at head height before him like some kind of venerated icon.

It took them the first three metres to spot him, another two before they realised he wasn’t one of their own. He held fire until they realised, didn’t want to waste the shots. But as the yells erupted and weapons came up, he squeezed the trigger and the pistol yapped in his hands like a badly behaved little dog. He came on in, same rapid pace, straight line towards them, make the shots count.

The older guy with the phone, jittering in front of his own men’s guns, tugging a pistol loose from somewhere. Carl’s third and fourth shots put him down, staggering back against the wall and doorjamb behind him, clawing for support, sinking fast. One down. More yelling, boiling confusion. Someone got off return fire - at fucking last, Jesus where’d you get these guys, Manco - but it crackled nowhere near, and the mesh made him ignore it. No time, no time, still firing, the steady, flat smack of the Glock rounds, the picture window starred and cratered, had to be security glass. Another guy with a Steyr, shooting wildly from the hip, correct right with the Glock and knock him off his feet like some tugging trick with a wire. Two down. The others were in the game now, cacophony of gunblasts, automatic stutter and the dull boom of shotguns. Pale dry earth erupted from the ground to his right and in front, he darted left, lost some focus, thought he tagged a third target as the guy darted back inside the lodge, couldn’t be sure. The two remaining outside huddled back towards the door as well, weapons held higher, they’d be getting the range. Shotgun blast, he caught the outer edge of the spread, felt a couple of pellets sting through in his legs. He sprinted the rest of the way in, emptying the Glock as he came. A slug finally caught him somewhere low in the ribs, hammerblow impact and he staggered, jerked to a halt, nearly went over. His hat came off, bared his face to the light and his remaining opponents. He saw the shock in their eyes. He snarled and got the Glock back in line, kept pulling the trigger. One of the two men jolted, stumbled backwards, firing wildly, one-handed, winged but not down. The Glock locked out on the last round, he threw it away. Less than half a dozen metres now, he ripped the sharkpunch clear and up, aimed vaguely for both men, pulled the trigger.

The picture window shattered in the centre, became a sudden, jagged-toothed mouth. The two men were both hurled back off their feet and hard against it, the remaining glass was suddenly awash with red and clots of gore, the bodies fell in shredded chunks. Carl got to within two metres of the door, put another shot through on general principles, and then stopped.

Listen.

Faint scrabbling sound from within, off to the right. He threw himself inside, falling and twisted in the air, saw vague movement above the rise of a breakfast bar and fired at it. Another gun went off at the same time and he felt a second impact in the ribs. But the edges of the bar ripped apart in flying splinters, and the darkened form in the kitchenette behind blew backwards. Wet, uncooked meat noise and a shriek. He hit the ground, skidded painfully into the back of a woodframe armchair.

And everything stopped again.

This time for real.

‘It’s simple enough,’ he told Norton, after the interrogation was done. They were playing an inept game of pool on the garish orange table. ‘I don’t have to find Onbekend now. He’ll come to me.’

‘If he doesn’t just have you picked off at whatever airport you’re planning to use.’

‘Yeah, well, like I said they’re kind of busy right now. And I’ll be going in under a fresh identity. No COLIN badge, no UNGLA accreditation, no weapons, nothing to ring any bells.’

Norton paused, chin hovering over the cue. ‘No weapons?’

‘Not as such, no. I aim to look like a tourist.’

‘And this fresh identity.’ The COLIN exec rammed his shot home. ‘I assume you’re looking to me for that.’

‘No, I’ve got a friend back in London can handle that for me, have the stuff couriered across inside a day. What I need from you is the cash. Free wafers, untraceable back to COLIN. My credit still good for that?’

‘You know it is.’

‘Good. And can you persuade RimSec to keep Ferrer locked up somewhere until end of next week? Make sure he doesn’t have a change of heart and go squawking down the wires to Bambaren?’

‘I suppose so.’ Norton looked vainly for position, tried a double, took it too fast and missed. ‘But look. You don’t know this Jurgens will be there. What if she’s not sleeping yet?’

‘It’s November, Norton.’ Carl chalked his cue. ‘Jurgens was almost flaking out when I talked to her nearly three weeks ago. She’s got to be under by now.’

‘I thought they had drugs that’ll unlock the hibernation.’

‘Yeah.’ Carl lined up his shot, eased back with due regard for the scarred yellow wall behind him. Sharp snap and the target ball disappeared into a corner pocket as if sucked there by vacuum. The cueball stood solid in its place. ‘I knew this hibernoid back on Mars, we used to go the same tanindo classes. He was a private detective, occasional enforcer too. Very tough guy, always getting into scrapes. I don’t think I ever knew him when he wasn’t carrying some kind of injury. And he told me that no beating he ever took hurt as much as the time he dosed himself with that wake-up shit.’

‘Yeah, but if they’re worried about-’

‘Norton, they don’t know any reason why I’d be coming after them like this. They don’t know Ertekin was anything to me. And if there’s going to be any COLIN fallout in the air, the very best thing Onbekend can do with his girlfriend right now is put her away somewhere safe and cosy for the next several months. Believe me, she’s there. Just a question of getting to her, digging in and waiting for Onbekend to come running. And then killing the motherfucker.’

He slammed the next shot, rattled it in the jaws. It didn’t go down.

He peeled off his coat, unslung the sharkpunch and dumped it on the kitchenette bar. He checked himself for damage. The Marstech impact jacket, disguised through airport security as part of his scuba gear, had soaked up the slugs he’d collected and left him with no worse than bruising, maybe a couple of cracked ribs. He pressed on the tender areas, grimaced and shrugged. He’d got off lightly.

So far.

He stripped the dead men of their weapons, piled them up on the shot-splintered breakfast bar. He dragged the worst of the wreckage from the man he’d killed in the kitchenette out the door and left him with his companions. He’d get the rest with a mop and bucket if there was time.

In the upstairs gallery of the lodge, he found a room that extended back into the cliff the house was built against. There was a heavy-duty lock on the door but he shot it out with one of his several newly acquired handguns. The door swung weightily inward on a curved womb-like space lit by subdued orange LCLS panelling at knee height along the walls. He found a panel of switches next to the door and flipped them until a harsher white light sprang up. Assumption confirmed - he’d found Greta Jurgens.

She lay like some dead Viking noblewoman on a broad, carved wood platform with lines that vaguely suggested a boat. Thick tangles of grey-green insulene foam netting supported her and wrapped her over. Carl could smell the stuff as he stepped towards her, the signature nanotech reek of tightly engineered carbon plastics. He’d used the netting on Mars a lot, camping out on expeditions in the Wells uplands.

-Flash recall of sitting out in the warm glow of a heating element while the Martian night came on in all its thin-air glory, thick shingles of stars everywhere and the tiny, on-and-off tracery of burn-up from the left-over seed particles as they kept coming down, decades overdue for their date with atmospheric modification. Sutherland, staring up there at it all, pleased smile on the scarred ebony features, like all of it, the sky and everything in it, had been put there just for him. Musing, nodding along with whatever it was the young Carl Marsalis had been bitching about. Soaking it up, then turning it around so Carl’d have to look at it from an angle that hadn’t occurred to him before. You ever wondered, soak, if that doesn’t just mean . . . . . .

Jurgens stirred just barely as the lights came up, but the down end of her cycle had her buried too deep for any substantial reaction. She was naked in the foam, skin taut and shiny with the adipose buildup, lidded eyes bruised and gummed shut with the secretions of the hibernoid sleep. Carl stood looking down at her for a long while, handgun at the end of his arm like a hammer. Images of the last month flickered behind his eyes like flames, like something burning down.

South Florida State. The Perez nanorack. Sevgi Ertekin beside him on the beach. New York, and the futon she made up for him. Gunfire in the street outside, the first warm crushing pressure as he flattened her under him.

Istanbul, the walk to Moda. The gleaming, glittering grins-in-darkness escaping feel to everything they did.

His mouth twitched upward in echo.

The wind across the stones at Sacsayhuaman. Sevgi leaned against the jeep at his back, the tight feeling of cover, of safety.

The road to Arequipa, her face in the soft dashboard glow.

San Francisco and Bulgakov’s Cat, the predawn view out of starboard loading. Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.

Sevgi dead.

The smile fell off his face. He stared down at the sleeping woman.

Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?

So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.

The mesh surged a little in the pit of his stomach, maybe aftermath of the firefight, maybe something else. He thought of Sevgi’s eyes closing in the hospital. He stared at Jurgens like she was a problem he had to solve.

Only live with what you’ve done, and try in future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is.

He reached out left-handed. Spread the foam netting a little thicker over the hibernoid’s body, pulled it up where one pale shoulder was exposed.

Then he went rapidly back to the door and killed the bright white LCLS, because something was happening to his vision that felt like blindness. He stood a moment in the warm orange gloom, looked twitchily around as if someone was there next to him, then he slipped quietly out and closed the door behind him.

He moved along the gallery, checked doors until he found a darkened, windowless chamber with the fragrant hygiene reek of a woman’s bathroom. He stepped inside, touched the switch panel and more bright white light exploded across the pastel tiled space. His own face mugged him from a big circular mirror in one wall - sweat-streaked whitener melting and streaking, the black coming up underneath, eyes ringed with the stuff like dark water at the bottom of a pair of pale psychedelic wells. Fuck, no wonder the guys at the bridge freaked. He supposed he owed Carmen Ren for the inspiration.

Wherever she was right now.

He wondered briefly if Ren would make it, if she’d stay ahead of the cudlips and the Agency the way she had before. He wondered if the child growing inside her would make it out into the world safely, and what would happen then. What Ren would have to do to protect it after that.

He remembered the level gaze, the way she’d backed him off with nothing more than a look and the way she stood, the reek of survivability that came off her as she faced him by the tower. Not a bad set of cards to play with. He thought she might be in with a better chance than most of her male counterparts.

Mostly, he was just glad he wouldn’t be the one sent to bring her down.

In a drawer beside the basin, he found capsules he recognised - codeine married to a tweaked caffeine delivery kick. They’d do for his ribs. He ran water from infrared taps into the broad, shallow scoop of marble in front of the mirror, soaped up and started washing the white shit off his face. It took a while. When he’d got the worst off, he stuck his head under the tap and ran the water on his scalp and the back of his neck. He took one of Greta Jurgens’ pastel towels off the rail beside the basin and scrubbed himself dry with it, stared into the mirror again and didn’t scare himself so much this time.

Now let’s see if you can scare Onbekend.

He crunched up the codeine in his mouth, dry-swallowed a couple of times, tongued the clogged residue off his teeth and rinsed it down with a swallow of water from the tap. He looked at himself once more in the mirror, as if his reflection might have some useful advice for him, then he shrugged and extinguished the light.

He went downstairs to wait.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Norton told him.

Carl walked past him around the table, eyeing up the angles. ‘Yeah, I do.’

‘It isn’t going to bring her back.’

He settled to a long, narrow shot down the side cushion. ‘I think we’ve already had this argument.’

‘For Christ’s sake, I’m not arguing with you, Marsalis. I’m trying to make you see sense, maybe stop you throwing your life away down there. Look, Saturday is Sevgi’s funeral. I can get you cleared through Union immigration, and keep the police off your back for the time it’d take. Why don’t you come?’

‘Because, as far as I can see, that won’t bring her back either.’

Norton sighed. ‘This isn’t what she would have wanted, Marsalis.’

‘Norton, you don’t have the faintest fucking idea what Sevgi would have wanted.’ He rolled the shot, shaved the angle too fine and watched it knock the object ball into the cushion and away from the pocket. ‘And nor do I.’

‘Then why are you going down there?’

‘Because someone once told me the key to living with what you’ve done is to only do those things you’re happy to live with. And I can’t live with Sevgi dead and Onbekend still walking around.’

Carl braced his arms wide on the edge of the table and nodded at the messed-up tangle of balls on the table.

‘Your shot,’ he said. ‘See what you can make of that.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking half-heartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there either. Something was in the way.

He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.

It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin county, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the 59th Street Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone, his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead. For the ancient central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone, some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone? Let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her and finally get rid of this fucking ache.

So.

Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay - think she might be over there? Or in amongst all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.

For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.

And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest, and the stinging salve of the hate.

And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.

There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate - both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.

The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down towards the water, building another rock wall at its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight and panned experimentally across the cleared ground. He was pretty sure he could knock down anyone coming for the house before they’d made a couple of metres in the open. They might try a rush assault but it wasn’t likely - they didn’t know how many were in the house, or what they might have done with Greta Jurgens, whether she was alive or dead, safe in her womb or dragged downstairs ready to be held up rag-doll limp as a shield.

And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean - he sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal - who the fuck she expecting man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blowjobs or something.

Like Stéphane Névant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.

Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.

It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.

A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air, the head jerked back down.

Just so they’re clear on the situation.

‘Marsalis?’

Manco Bambaren’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows and edged an eye around. Steep early afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now the helicopters were gone - the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.

‘Black man, is that you?’

‘Good guess,’ he shouted back, dumping Bambaren’s Spanish for Quechua. ‘What do you want?’

Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua - there was no guarantee he’d have learnt it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambaren’s pet pistaco, he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.

Sure enough, Bambaren stayed in Spanish. ‘It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?’

‘Sure. Come on in.’

‘You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?’

Carl grinned. ‘I don’t know, you going to take the word of a twist on that?’

‘Yes. I will.’

‘Then come on across. No weapons, no body armour, hands where I can see them.’ Carl paused. ‘Oh yeah, and bring your brother with you.’

Long, long silence. The crickets scraped in the heated air outside.

‘What’s the matter, Manco? You not been watching the feeds? It’s all burned down now, didn’t you know? Ortiz is gone, COLIN are cleaning house. We know all about Onbekend. So let’s see both of you.’

It took a couple of minutes, but then the two figures emerged from the cover down by the path and walked steadily up towards the lodge, hands clasped over their heads. Carl watched them over the Steyr’s sight. Onbekend was holding one arm lopsided, as if it hurt to lift. Carl remembered Sevgi in the Bayview bar - Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.

Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers.

He lined up on Onbekend’s face, flexed his trigger finger a couple of times, took up the tension. Then let it go, put the gun aside impatiently. He picked up a handgun, another Glock, from the pile on the floor, checked the load and snapped the slide. As Bambaren and Onbekend reached the doorway, he stepped back, mindful of sniping angles through the picture window, wagged the pistol at them.

‘Come on in.’

Onbekend stared at him, spat out English. ‘Where is she, Marsalis?’

‘Not so hasty. Back there to the table in the alcove, both of you. Hands on your head at all times. I’m not going to mess about padding you down, so if either of you do move a hand anywhere near your body without my permission, I’ll just make the assumption and kill you. Got that?’

Bambaren pivoted back and forth slightly, eyes sweeping the open-plan space inside the lodge. Understanding widened his eyes.

‘You came here alone?’

‘Go to the table. Sit down in the two chairs I’ve pulled out. Keep your hands on your heads until you’re seated, and then put them on the table in front of you. No sudden moves. Sudden movement will get you dead.’

He tugged the door closed, pulled it until the latch whined over into lock.

‘Marsalis, I have fifteen men out there.’ Bambaren’s voice was low and conversational as he walked to the table. He’d shifted into English as well. ‘You’re sealed in. Let’s talk about this.’

‘We’re going to talk about it. But you’re going to be sitting down when we do. Hands where I can see them, and then flat on the table in front of you.’

They seated themselves, awkward with the need to keep their hands lifted. Bambaren took the head of the table, Onbekend the seat adjacent. This far back in the open-plan space, the lodge made inroads into the cliff face and it was cool and dim, so the two men looked like part of some arcane spiritualist gathering, stiff-backed in the chairs, palms down on the wood, expressions taut. Carl pulled out a chair opposite Onbekend and sat in it, well back from the edge of the table. He floated the Glock on his knee.

‘And now what?’ the other thirteen asked evenly.

‘Now we talk about why I shouldn’t kill you both. Any ideas?’

‘Are you so anxious to die, black man?’ Bambaren asked.

Carl gave him a faint smile. ‘Well, fifteen to one is long odds, it’s true. But then again, eight to one didn’t look good either, and there they all are, out there for the flies.’

‘Have you learnt nothing?’ Onbekend was looking at him with the same contempt he’d given off in the Bayview bar. ‘Are you still nothing better than a soldier for the cudlips.’

Bambaren stiffened. Carl put a small smile together.

‘Want to be careful who you use that word around, brother. It’s not Manco here’s fault he didn’t get an upgraded limbic system and a beefed-up area thirteen out of Isabela’s raw materials.’

Onbekend barely flickered a glance at Bambaren. ‘I’m not talking about Manco, and he knows it. I’m talking about the men at the UN you sold your soul to.’

‘I’m not here for them.’

Onbekend’s eyes narrowed. ‘Then why did you come?’

‘Because you killed a friend of mine.’

‘If you have friends, hired man, then I don’t know them. Who have I killed?’

‘You shot a woman called Sevgi Ertekin, a police officer, when she chased you out into the street in Bayview. You shot her with a Haag pistol, and she died.’

‘Were you fucking her?’

‘Yeah, we were fucking each other. Rather like you and Jurgens.’

Onbekend’s face whitened as he saw the corollary. He cleared his throat.

‘It was a firefight,’ he said quietly. ‘Not personal. You would have done the same in my place.’

Carl thought of Horkan Garrod camp and Gaby. The Haag shells knocking her down.

‘That’s not the issue.’

‘Then what is?’

Carl stared at the other thirteen. ‘Payment.’

‘Listen to me, Marsalis.’ Manco Bambaren, misunderstanding what he’d heard. ‘Whatever you think you’re owed, we can come to an agreement.’

‘Manco, shut up.’ The tayta looked at Onbekend, as if the thirteen had slapped him. Onbekend ignored him, maybe didn’t even notice. His eyes had never left Carl’s face. ‘You want me to buy Greta’s life with my own?’

‘Why not? It’s the same deal you offered Toni Montes in the Freeport, isn’t it? Her life for her children.’

Onbekend looked down at his hands. ‘If you knew what Toni Montes had done with her life before she acquired that name, had done with other children before she acquired her own, you would perhaps not judge me so harshly.’

‘I don’t judge you at all. I just want you dead.’

‘If you kill him, black man, you’ll have to kill me as well.’ There was a quiet determination in Bambaren’s voice. ‘And then my men will cut you down like a rabid dog.’

Carl threw him a glance. He smiled, shook his head a little.

‘You’re really enjoying having a younger brother all over again, aren’t you Manco? Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. But do you want to know something about this brother of yours?’ He nodded at Onbekend. ‘This brother of yours is a twin. You’ve actually got two younger brothers by way of your mother’s rather desperate attempts to stay afloat in Peru’s new corporate dream. The other one’s called Allen Merrin. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Do you want to know why?’

Bambaren looked back and forth between the two thirteens.

‘He’s dead because you killed him, Marsalis,’ Onbekend said casually. ‘That’s what I heard.’

‘He’s dead because his twin brother, Onbekend here, had him brought back from Mars as a sacrificial gene set. Sold him to the people he’s been working for. Would have used him to explain away-’

‘But you did kill him, didn’t you?’

The tayta stared at Onbekend. ‘What is this? What’s he talking about?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing, Onbe.’ There was a gathering tightness in Bambaren’s voice now. The same thing Carl had seen on his face when Onbekend used the word cudlip. ‘What is he talking about?’

‘I’m talking about Isabela’s other modified son, Manco.’ Carl kept the pistol raised in Onbekend’s direction. ‘The egg your mother sold to the gringos subdivided a few days in, and Project Lawman ended up with two identical thirteens for the price of one. That’s very handy when it comes to scene of crime genetic trace. While your brother here went about slaughtering inconvenient colleagues from his past, he also arranged for his twin to take the fall for it.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Manco. This is-’

‘Is he lying?’ The look on the tayta’s face marked it as rhetorical. His voice sank almost to a whisper. ‘You did this? You used your own blood to cover yourself?’

‘Manco, there really wasn’t much option. I told you the situation Ortiz put me in, I told you the danger it-’

‘You did not tell me this!’

And now Bambaren was trembling, still staring at the thirteen whose genes he shared. His face twitched with suppressed rage.

‘A brother?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘A twin? You sold your twin brother? After you came to me and I gave you-’

‘It’s not important, Manco. I never knew him, we never even met-’

‘He was your blood!’ Bambaren started to get up. Carl wagged the Glock at him and he sank back, sat like something coiled. ‘He was your mother’s blood! I told you when you came to me, blood is everything . The corporations have stolen our souls, they shatter the bonds that make us strong, turn us into uniform strangers living out our lives alone in polymered boxes. Family is all we have.’

‘Not if you’re a thirteen,’ Carl told him sombrely.

There was a long pause.

‘Manco, listen to me,’ Onbekend said. ‘I did this to protect-’

‘Did you ever even tell our mother?’ Bambaren’s face had gone cold and hard as the stones out at Sacsayhuaman, and his voice had grown quiet as the wind. ‘Did you ever tell Isabela that she had another son somewhere?’

Onbekend’s temper snapped across. ‘For fuck’s sake, Manco, there would have been no point!’

‘No?’

‘No. He was on Mars!’

The quiet swept in after the words like a tide, like a breath snuffing candle flames out. They sat in silence in the dim light.

‘I don’t suppose you’d like to know how your other brother was persuaded to come home from Mars, would you, Manco?’

Onbekend tensed. His voice grated. ‘Marsalis, I’m warning you.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Carl told him. ‘I’ll put you down before your arse comes off the chair.’

He shifted slightly towards Bambaren. Kept the Glock levelled on the thirteen. The tayta stared back at him.

‘See, Manco, your unexpected brother here did a deal with Mars. I’m guessing you didn’t know about that?’

‘It was not a deal,’ Onbekend growled. ‘It was a strategy, a deception.’

‘Okay, he organised a deception, in your name. Your other brother was supposed to be coming back as an assassin for the Martian chapters. Some story about clearing out the Lima familias by way of reparation, laying the whole afrenta marciana to rest so you could all do business with Mars again. That about right, Onbekend?’

‘You did this?’ Manco Bambaren whispered. ‘Even this?’

‘Come on, Manco we’ve talked about it often enough.’ Onbekend gestured impatiently. ‘It wasn’t for real anyway, but-’

‘You used my name?’

‘By association, yeah. Marsalis, you fuck, listen to me-’

Bambaren lunged across the table at Onbekend. The thirteen jumped, blindsided, fended him off. Carl raised the Glock.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said warningly.

Bambaren appeared not to hear. He braced his arms on the table, still staring down into the face of the man he’d made into his brother. Rage brought up his accent, bruised the English he used.

‘You used my fucking name?’

‘Sit down, Manco,’ Carl told him. ‘I won’t tell you again.’

But the familia chief did not sit. Instead, he turned himself deliberately to face Carl and the Glock. He drew a deep breath.

‘I wish to leave now,’ he said stiffly. ‘I have no further interest in this matter. I withdraw my protection from Greta Jurgens.’

‘Oh, Manco, you can’t fucking-’

‘Don’t tell me what I can do, twist.’ Manco pushed himself off the table with his hands. He looked at Carl. ‘Well? Is our business concluded, black man?’

‘Sure.’ Carl hadn’t expected it to work nearly this well, but he wasn’t about to miss the sudden bonus. ‘Walk to the door, hands on your head. Let yourself out and shut it behind you. And I’d better hear those helicopters leaving inside ten minutes.’

Bambaren stood up and laced his hands together over his head. He and Onbekend looked at each other for a long moment.

‘Don’t do this,’ Onbekend said tightly. ‘I’m your brother, Manco. Fourteen years, I’m your fucking brother.’

‘No.’ Bambaren’s voice was as cold now as the chill coming off the alcove rock. ‘You are not my brother, you are a mistake. My mistake, my mother’s mistake, and the mistake of gringos without souls. You are a twisted fucking thing, a thing that crept into my family and used me, a thing that cut the living fat from my bones to feed itself. I should have listened to the others when you came.’

‘You used me too, you fuck!’

‘Yes. I used you for what you are.’ Bambaren spat on the table in front of the thirteen. ‘Twist! Pistaco! You are nothing to me.’

Onbekend stared down at the spittle. Then, abruptly, he swayed to his feet.

‘That’s it, Onbekend.’ Carl rapped on the table top, gestured with the Glock. ‘Sit the fuck down.’

There was a grim smile stamped onto Onbekend’s mouth. ‘I don’t think so.’

Carl came to his feet like whiplash. The chair went over behind him, the Glock levelled on Onbekend’s face.

‘I said-’

And then Bambaren was on him like an opsdog.

Later, he never knew why the tayta jumped. Maybe the rage, rage at Onbekend but sloshing generally to include all thirteens, maybe all variants, maybe just anybody within reach. Maybe rage at the unaccustomed powerlessness of sitting at the table under another man’s gun. Or maybe - he hated the thought - not rage at all, maybe the two of them, Bambaren and Onbekend, the two unlikely brothers, maybe in the end they just played Carl, improvised, used the angle and it worked.

Bambaren slapped a hand into the Glock, swept it wide and came round the edge of the table yelling. The gun went off, once, nowhere useful. Carl twisted, took the other man’s momentum and dumped it over his hip. Most of him was still trying to work out where Onbekend had gone. Bambaren clung on with street fighter savagery, fingers digging for eyes, knee to groin. Carl dropped the gun. They both went down, thrashing to get the upper position.

Tanindo and the mesh won out. Bambaren had an antique street-honed savagery to call on, but it was blurred with age and years of rank. Carl broke his holds, took the punches through the padding of the weblar jacket, teeth gritted tight as pain flared across his cracked ribs and through the codeine veil. He vented a snarl, smothered a knee jab to his groin and then smashed an elbow into the tayta’s face. The other man reeled off him. Carl stabbed stiffened fingers in under the chin. Bambaren gagged and-

Behind him, the recently familiar chatter of a Steyr assault rifle erupted across the lounge space. Short, controlled burst.

He flailed loose of Bambaren, rolled for the cover of the table and the chairs around it. The tayta yelled something, and then another brief storm of automatic fire swept over them both and the shout choked off. The tabletop ripped through in splinters, the assault rifle slugs punched through as if it were cardboard. He heard impacts off the rock behind him. Something slammed into his back, ricochet he knew fleetingly. The Glock, the fucking Glock-

-was gone. From his position on the floor, he saw Onbekend’s legs moving forward, cautious, bent-knee stance, edging round for a clear shot. He did the only thing left, stormed to his feet, mesh-fed speed and raging strength, hurled the chewed-up table up off two legs and forward like a shield. Onbekend snapped off more fire, the table toppled like a tossed playing card, impossibly slow, he dodged sideways. The Steyr chattered, impacts caught him, the impact jacket squeezed and warmed as it worked, the shots twisted and slammed him backwards into the alcove wall . . .

And the firing stopped.

It was almost comical. Onbekend stood with the suddenly silent weapon in his hands. Faint ping of the load alert, into the quiet like a dripping tap. His gaze dropped from Carl’s face to the Steyr, saw the blinking red light. He’d had no time to check the magazine, must have grabbed the first decent weapon he saw off the pile on the breakfast bar, and he’d come away with one almost fully discharged.

Carl came off the wall with a yell.

Onbekend threw the emptied Steyr at him, he batted it aside. The other thirteen tried to grapple, he punched and stamped the attempt apart, drove Onbekend back across the lounge space in a flurry of tanindo technique. The thirteen blocked and covered, launched jabbing counters, but all the time Carl read out the damage Sevgi’s slugs had done in the way the other man moved. He felt a snarl peel his lips, savage satisfaction, the heart-deep anticipation of damage. He closed, broke up a defence, lanced a high blow through and caught Onbekend across the jaw. The other thirteen staggered, his back was almost to the shattered picture window now. Blood and translucent light behind - Carl caught it out of the corner of his eye, dull red smears on the jagged lower line of the remaining glass, glint of the sun’s rays on the saw-toothed edges. He closed with Onbekend again-

And there was a crouched figure beyond the glass.

Carl had time to register the shocked, frightened face, the raised shotgun. His attack momentum was already committed, all he could do was let it carry him stumbling across the lounge space, trying to get out of the way. The shotgun went off, fresh glass smashed off the ruined window and Onbekend bellowed. Carl fetched up against the breakfast bar, clawed down a clatter of weapons and hit the floor. He grabbed at random, found himself with another of the assault rifles, dragged it around - safety off - and triggered it just as the door blew inward.

There were a pair of Bambaren’s men gathered there. They’d shot out the lock, burst in, one high, one low. Carl was sitting on the floor, back to the breakfast bar, nowhere near where they’d expected. He held down the trigger on the Steyr and sprayed. The hammering fire kicked both men backwards, limbs waving as if they were trying to fend the bullets off. One of them flew back through the entryway and landed in a puffed cloud of dust outside, the other caught an ankle at the door jamb and went down tangled where he was. Carl skidded back upright, got cover at the edge of the picture window and then hooked round and hosed the shotgunner off his feet.

Sporadic fire from further off. No more bodies. In the sudden quiet, the Steyr pinged insistently for more ammunition. The weapon’s previous owner had doubled magazines, taped two back to back and inverted. Carl unlocked the gun, swapped the ends and snicked the fresh magazine into place.

Somewhere on the floor, Onbekend groaned.

Carl peered out and saw crouched figures backing hastily off, slithering back to their cover by the path. He chased them with a quick burst from the Steyr, drew a deep breath, went back to the doorway, shoved the body on the threshold out of the way with his boot so he could get the door closed. Halfway through, he realised the man was still alive, breathing shallowly and rapidly, eyes closed. Carl shot him in the head with the Steyr, kicked him the rest of the way out and shut the door. Then he dragged an armchair across the floor and pushed it hard up against the handle. Vague realisation of pain as he worked - he stopped and looked down at the impact jacket, saw the shiny bulges where the gene-tweaked weblar had stopped the slugs and melted closed around them. But blood trickled down past the lower hem of the garment. He pulled it up and saw an ugly gouge in the flesh above his hip. Angled fire from someone as he jumped or twisted or fell some time in the last minute and a half. Could have been Onbekend or the guys in the door, maybe even a stray long shot from outside.

With the sight, the pain rolled in. He sagged onto the arm of the wedging chair

‘That’s fucking ironic,’ Onbekend coughed wetly from the floor. ‘I come that close to taking you down and one of Manco’s fucking goons takes me out instead.’

Carl shot him a tired look. ‘You were nowhere near.’

‘Yeah? Well, fuck you.’ Onbekend propped himself up. ‘Manco?’

No reply.

‘Manco?’

Carl watched the other thirteen’s face curiously from across the room. Onbekend’s features contorted with effort as he tried to get himself into a sitting position. His chest was drenched with blood from the shotgun blast. He growled through gritted teeth, pushed with both hands, couldn’t do it. He fell back.

‘I’ll go look,’ Carl told him.

Manco Bambaren was flat on his back in a pool of his own blood, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. It looked to have been instant - Onbekend’s shots must have nailed him across the chest as he was trying to get up. Carl looked down at the familia chief for a moment, then headed back.

‘He’s dead,’ Onbekend said. Blood in his throat turned his voice deep and muddy. ‘Right?’

‘Yeah, he’s dead. Nice shooting.’

A bubbling laugh. ‘I was trying for you.’

‘Yeah? Try harder next time.’ Carl felt spreading wet warmth, glanced down at his leg and saw blood soaking through the material of his trousers at the belt and thigh. Even through the painkillers, his chest ached as if he’d been crushed in a vice. He wondered if the weblar had failed, let something through somewhere else as well - it could happen with multiple impacts in the same region of the jacket, he’d seen it before. Or maybe someone out there, some fucking gun fetishist, had an armour-piercing load he liked to show off. Power enough to bring down a coked-up black man, just like in Rovayo’s history books, power enough to bring down the thirteen. Power to stop the beast in its tracks.

‘Ah. Not a complete waste, then.’

Onbekend had seen the blood as well.

Carl sank onto the floor, put his back against the armchair he had blocking the door and pulled his feet in so his knees went up. He propped the Steyr on his legs and checked the load. Filtering sunlight slanted in past him, missed his shoulder by a half metre, made him shiver unreasonably in the contrasting shade.

‘How many are there out there really?’ he asked Onbekend.

The other thirteen turned his head and grinned across the short expanse of stone-tiled floor that separated them. His teeth were bloody.

‘More than you’re in any state to deal with, I’d say.’ He swallowed liquidly. ‘Tell me something, Marsalis. Tell me the truth. You didn’t hurt Greta, did you?’

Carl looked at him for a while. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.’

‘That’s good.’ A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. ‘Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.’

‘I’m not your fucking brother.’

Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.

Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.

So.

He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.

‘Fifteen.’

He looked across at Onbekend. ‘What?’

‘Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.’

‘Fifteen, huh?’

‘Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?’

‘Three.’ Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. ‘Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?’

Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. ‘Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips. No contest.’

Carl grimaced. ‘Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?’

‘Nah, stay a while. Gives us time to talk.’

Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. ‘We’ve got something to talk about?’

‘Sure we do.’ Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.’

‘See what?’

‘What we are.’ The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. ‘Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.’

The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the grey matt surface of the weapon in his hands.

‘But not us, right?’

‘Fucking right, not us.’ Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. ‘Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the nineteen-hundreds. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?’

Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

But let Onbekend talk his way out.

‘Tell you how you get that,’ the dying thirteen rasped. ‘How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis - we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.’ More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. ‘Modern humans are fucking infantilised adolescent cut-offs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?’

‘Yeah, so did we,’ Carl said sombrely. ‘Remember.’

‘They tried to contain us.’ Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desprately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like for ever. ‘But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.’

‘If you say so.’ Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving towards Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

‘Yeah, I do fucking say so.’ The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the suntouched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead, the arm was limp behind it. ‘We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.’

‘You aren’t,’ Carl pointed out.

Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. ‘No, but you can.’

‘I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.’

‘Hey, you’re the lottery guy.’ Onbekend was gasping now. ‘Telling me you don’t feel lucky?’

‘I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.’

Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. ‘There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.’

He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

‘You’ll show them,’ he bubbled.

The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

Outside, Carl could hear Bambaren’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

It was almost as if she was there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

We all will.

Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines and then slung it round his neck, adjusted the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.

A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.

You’ll show them.

‘Yeah, right,’ he muttered.

Drag the armchair aside, crack the door and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.

I’ll see you in the garden.

The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.

Deep breath.

Then he went out into the sun.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This has been a tough one, and I owe a great deal of thanks in a great many places. I have begged, borrowed and stolen from just about everywhere to get Black Man written.

It being a novel of science fiction, let’s start with the science.

The original idea for variant thirteen was inspired by the theorising of Richard Wrangham on the subject of diminishing human aggression, as described by Matt Ridley in his excellent book Nature Via Nurture. I have taken vast fictional liberties with these ideas and variant thirteen as it emerges in this book is in no way intended to represent either Mr Wrangham’s or Mr Ridley’s thoughts on the subject. These gentlemen simply provided me with a springboard - the rather ugly splash that follows is of my making alone.

The concept of artificial chromosome platforms is also borrowed, in this case from Gregory Stock’s fascinating and slightly scary book Redesigning Humans, which, along with Nature Via Nurture and Stephen Pinker’s brilliant The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, has served as the bulk inspiration for most of the future genetic science I’ve dreamed up here. Once again, any mangling or misuse of the material I found in these outstanding works must be laid solely at my door.

Yaroshanko intuitive function, though my own invention, owes a large debt of inspiration to very real research done on social networks, as described in Mark Buchanan’s book Small World. And I’m personally indebted to Hannu Rajaniemi at the University of Edinburgh for taking the time to (try to) explain quantum game theory and its potential applications to me, thus giving me the basis for the New Maths and its subtle but far-reaching social impact. Thanks also must go to Simon Spanton, star editor, for patiently helping me wrangle the technical logistics of Mars-Earth cryocapping.

In the political sphere, I was heavily influenced by two very perceptive and rather depressing books about the United States, The Right Nation by John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge and What’s the Matter with America by Thomas Frank, as well as the brilliant and slightly less depressing Stiffed by Susan Faludi. While these books all fed into the concept of the Secession and the gender themes arising in Black Man, the Confederated Republic itself (aka Jesusland) was inspired by the now famous Jesusland map meme, created (according to Wikipedia) by one G. Webb on the message board yakyak.org. Way to go, G! Special personal thanks must also go to Alan Beatts of Borderlands books in San Francisco for listening to my meanderings over whisky and schwarma, and lending me a little informed American opinion with which to polish up what I had.

For insights into a possible future (and widely misunderstood past) Islam, I’m also indebted to Tariq Ali for A Clash of Fundamentalisms, Karen Armstrong for Islam; A Short History and the very courageous Irshad Manji for The Trouble With Islam Today. Here also, I have done my fair share of mangling, and the outcomes in Black Man do not necessarily bear any relation to anything these authors might endorse.

And finally, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to all those who waited with such immense patience, and still told me to take all the time I needed:

Simon Spanton - again! - and Jo Fletcher at Gollancz, Chris Schluep and Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, my agent Carolyn Whitaker, and last but not least, all those well-wishers who emailed me during 2006 with messages of condolence, reassurance and support. This book would not exist without you.

Copyright

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Richard Morgan 2013

Altered Carbon Copyright © Richard Morgan 2002

Broken Angels Copyright © Richard Morgan 2003

Woken Furies Copyright © Richard Morgan 2005

Market Forces Copyright © Richard Morgan 2004

Black Man Copyright © Richard Morgan 2007

All rights reserved.

The right of Richard Morgan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 473 202979 9

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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