Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.
It wasn’t over. Not nearly.
Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been – none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.
The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.
Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full check-up.
She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?
A detached deCom shrug. Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.
The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.
Burn some of that stored credit, grinned Jadwiga. Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.
The beachhead gate juddered up for us and we passed through into the compound. In comparison to the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ’fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.
‘Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,’ Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. ‘See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?’
Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.
‘I’ll go, skipper,’ offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing. Frosted snow crunched under his feet. ‘Rest of you go get some coffee or something.’
‘Cool,’ said Jadwiga. ‘And don’t let old Shig give you a hard time, Las. He doesn’t like our story, he can go fuck himself.’
‘Yeah, I’ll tell him that.’ Lazlo rolled his eyes. ‘Not. Hey, Micky, want to come along and give me some moral support?’
I blinked. ‘Uh, yeah. Sure. Ki, Jad? One of you want to take the bug?’
Kiyoka slid off her pillion seat and ambled over. Lazlo joined Oishii and looked back at me. He inclined his head towards the centre of the camp.
‘Come on then. Let’s get this over with.’
Kurumaya, perhaps predictably, was less than happy to see members of Sylvie’s crew. He made the two of us wait in a poorly-heated outer chamber of the command ’fab while he processed Oishii and allocated billets. Cheap plastic seats were racked along the partition walls and a corner-mounted screen gave out global news coverage at backdrop volume. A low table held an open-access datacoil for detail junkies, an ashtray for idiots. Our breath clouded faintly in the air.
‘So what did you want to talk to me about?’ I asked Lazlo, blowing on my hands.
‘What?’
‘Come on. You need moral support like Jad and Ki need a dick. What’s going on?’
A grin surfaced on his face. ‘Well, you know I always wonder about those two. Sort of thing that keeps a man awake at night.’
‘Las.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He leaned on his good elbow in the chair, dumped his feet on the low table. ‘You were there with her when she woke up, right.’
‘Right.’
‘What did she say to you? Really.’
I shifted round to look at him. ‘Like I told you all last night. Nothing you could quote. Asking for help. Calling for people who weren’t there. Gibberish. She was delirious for most of it.’
‘Yeah.’ He opened his hand and examined the palm as if it might be a map of something. ‘See, Micky, I’m a wincefish. A lead wincefish. I stay alive by noticing peripheral stuff. And what I notice peripherally is that you don’t look at Sylvie like you used to.’
‘Really?’ I kept my tone mild.
‘Yeah, really. Until last night when you looked at her, it was like you were hungry and you thought she might taste good. Now, well.’ He turned to meet my eyes. ‘You’ve lost your appetite.’
‘She isn’t well, Las. I’m not attracted to sickness.’
He shook his head. ‘Won’t scan. She was ill all the way back from the listening-post gig, but you still had that hunger. Softer maybe, but it was still there. Now, you look at her like you’re waiting for something to happen. Like she’s some kind of bomb.’
‘I’m worried about her. Just like everybody else.’
And beneath the words, the thought ran like a thermocline. So noticing this stuff keeps you alive, does it, Las? Well, just so you know, talking about it like this is likely to get you killed. Under different circumstances with me, it already would have.
We sat side by side in brief silence. He nodded to himself.
‘Not going to tell me, huh?’
‘There’s nothing to tell, Las.’
More quiet. On the screen, breaking news unreeled. Accidental death (stack-retrievable) of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district, hurricane building in the Gulf of Kossuth, Mecsek to slash public health spending by end of year. I watched it without interest.
‘Look, Micky.’ Lazlo hesitated. ‘I’m not saying I trust you, because I don’t really. But I’m not like Orr. I’m not jealous about Sylvie. For me you know, she’s the skipper and that’s it. And I do trust you to look after her.’
‘Thanks,’ I said dryly. ‘And to what do I owe this honour?’
‘Ah, she told me a little about how the two of you met. The Beards and everything. Enough to figure that—’
The door flexed back and Oishii emerged. He grinned and jerked a thumb back the way he’d come.
‘All yours. See you in the bar.’
We went in. I never found out what Lazlo had figured out or how far off the truth he might have been.
Shigeo Kurumaya was at his desk, seated. He watched us come in without getting up, face unreadable and body locked into a stillness that telegraphed his anger as clearly as a yell. Old school. Behind him, a holo made the illusion of an alcove in the ’fab wall where shadows and moonlight crawled back and forth around a barely visible scroll. On the desk, the datacoil idled at his elbow, casting stormy patterns of coloured light across the spotless work surface.