‘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.