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.