‘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.