I touched the chime patch, pulled open the flap and went in. On one side of the interior, Jadwiga and Kiyoka sprang hastily apart on a tangle of bedding. Opposite them, beside a muffled illuminum night-lamp, Sylvie lay corpselike in her sleeping bag, hair combed carefully back from her face. A portable heater glowed at her feet. There was no one else in the ’fab.
‘Where’s Orr?’
‘Not here.’ Jad rearranged her clothing crossly. ‘You might have fucking knocked, Micky.’
‘I did.’
‘Okay, you might have fucking knocked and waited, then.’
‘Sorry, it’s not what I was expecting. So where’s Orr?’
Kiyoka waved an arm. ‘Gone on the bug with Lazlo. They volunteered for perimeter watch. Got to show willing, we figured. These people are going to carry us home tomorrow.’
‘So why don’t you guys use one of the other ’fabs?’
Jadwiga looked across to Sylvie. ‘Because someone’s got to keep watch in here too,’ she said softly.
‘I’ll do it.’
They both looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then at each other. Then Kiyoka shook her head.
‘Can’t. Orr’d fucking kill us.’
‘Orr isn’t here.’
Another exchange of glances. Jad shrugged.
‘Yeah, fuck it, why not.’ She stood up. ‘C’mon, Ki. Watch won’t change for another four hours. Orr’s not going to be any the wiser.’
Kiyoka hesitated. She leaned over Sylvie and put a hand on her forehead.
‘Alright, but if anything—’
‘Yeah, I’ll call you. Go on, get out of here.’
‘Yeah, Ki – come on.’ Jadwiga chivvied the other woman to the doorflap. As they were stepping out she paused and grinned back at me. ‘And Micky. I’ve seen the way you look at her. No peeking and prodding, eh? No squeezing the fruit. Keep your fingers out of pies that don’t belong to you.’
I grinned back. ‘Fuck you, Jad.’
‘Yeah, you wish. In your dreams, man.’
Kiyoka mouthed a more conventional thanks, and they were gone. I sat down beside Sylvie and stared at her in silence. After a couple of moments, I reached out and stroked her brow in an echo of Kiyoka’s gesture. She didn’t move. Her skin was hot and papery dry.
‘Come on, Sylvie. Pull out of there.’
No response.
I took back my hand and stared at the woman some more.
What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?
She’s not Sarah. Sarah’s gone. What the fuck are you—
Oh, shut up.
It’s not like I had another choice, is it?
Recall of the final moments in Tokyo Crow came and demolished that one. The safety of the table with Plex, the warm anonymity and the promise of a ticket out tomorrow – I remembered standing up and walking away from it all, as if in answer to a siren song. Into the blood and fury of the fight.
In retrospect it was a moment so hinged, so loaded with implications of shifting fate, that it should have creaked at me as I moved to step through it.
But in retrospect they always are.
Got to say, Mick, I like you. Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows. Can’t. Put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.
That’s nice.
But it’s not enough.
My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve, it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone-new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.
Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. A half dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament micro-jacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others – precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.
The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state-installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel. I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.
I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.
Is this enough?
Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.
I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.
Is this—
A hand closed on my arm.
The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.
‘You,’ she said in Japanese, and coughed. ‘Help me. Help me.’
It was not her voice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro-government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.
‘Merry fucking Christmas,’ muttered one of Oishii’s crew.
Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.
We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.