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—