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?’