‘Yeah,’ Jadwiga managed, straightfaced. ‘See if he wants to give you a hand.’
The laughter erupted, explosive in the confined space. An unwanted grin forced its way onto my mouth.
‘You motherfuckers.’
It didn’t help. The hilarity scaled upward. On the bed, Sylvie stirred and opened her eyes at the sound. She propped herself up on one elbow and coughed painfully. The laughter drained out of the room as rapidly as it had come.
‘Micky?’ Her voice came out weak and rusty.
I turned to the bed. Caught out of the corner of one eye the venomous glare Orr fired at me. I leaned over her.
‘Yeah, Sylvie. I’m here.’
‘What are you laughing for?’
I shook my head. ‘That’s a very good question.’
She gripped my arm with the same intensity as that night in Oishii’s encampment. I steeled myself for what she might say next. Instead, she just shivered and stared at her fingers where they sank into the arm of the jacket I was wearing.
‘I,’ she muttered. ‘It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—’
‘Leave her alone, Micky.’ Orr tried to shoulder me aside, but Sylvie’s grip on my arm defeated the move. She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘What’s going on?’ she pleaded.
I glanced sideways at the giant.
‘You want to tell her?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Night fell across Drava in swathes of snow-chipped gloom, settling like a well worn blanket around the huddled ’fabs of the beachhead and then the higher, angular ruins of the city itself. The microblizzard front came and went with the wind, brought the snow in thick, swirling wraps that plastered your face and got inside the neck of your clothing, then whirled away, thinning out to almost nothing, and then back again to dance in the funnelled glare of the camp’s Angier lamps. Visibility oscillated, went down to fifty metres and then cleared, went down again. It was weather for staying inside.
Crouched in the shadow of a discarded freight container at one end of the wharf, I wondered for a moment how the other Kovacs was coping, out in the Uncleared. Like me, he’d have the standard Newpest native’s dislike for the cold, like me he’d be—
You don’t know that, you don’t know that’s who he—
Yeah, right.
Look, where the fuck are the yakuza going to get hold of a spare personality copy of an ex-Envoy? And why the fuck would they take the risk? Under all that Old Earth ancestor crabshit veneer, in the end they’re just fucking criminals. There’s no way—
Yeah, right.
It’s the itch we all live with, the price of the modern age. What if? What if, at some nameless point in your life, they copy you. What if you’re stored somewhere in the belly of some machine, living out who knows what parallel virtual existence or simply asleep, waiting to be released into the real world.
Or already unleashed and out there somewhere. Living.
You see it in the experia flics, you hear the urban myths of friends of friends, the ones who through some freak machine error end up meeting themselves in virtual or, less often, reality. Or the Lazlo-style conspiracy horror stories of military-authorised multiple sleeving. You listen, and you enjoy the existential shiver it sends up your spine. Once in a very long time, you hear one you might even believe.
I’d once met and had to kill a man who was double-sleeved.
I’d once met myself, and it hadn’t ended well.
I was in no hurry to do it again.
And I had more than enough else to worry about.
Fifty metres down the dock, the Daikoku Dawn bulked dimly in the blizzard. She was a bigger vessel than the Guns for Guevara, by the look of her an old commercial ’loader, taken out of mothballs and regeared for deCom haulage. A whiff of antique grandeur hung about her. Light gleamed cosily from portholes and clustered in colder white and red constellations on the superstructure above. Earlier, there’d been a desultory trickle of figures up the gangways as the outgoing deComs went aboard, and lights at the boarding ramps, but now the hatches were closing up and the hoverloader stood isolated in the chill of the New Hok night.
Figures through the muffling swirl of white on black to my right. I touched the hilt of the Tebbit knife and cranked up my vision.
It was Lazlo, leading with a wincefish flex in his stride and a fierce grin on his snow-chilled face. Oishii and Sylvie in tow. Chemical functionality trowelled across the woman’s features, a more intense control in the other command head’s demeanour. They crossed the open ground along the quayside and slipped into the shelter of the container. Lazlo scrubbed at his face with both hands and shook the melting snow from splayed fingers. He’d strapped his healing arm with a combat servosplint and didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. I caught the blast of alcohol on his breath.
‘Okay?’
He nodded. ‘Anyone who’s interested, and a few who probably weren’t, now knows Kurumaya’s got us locked down. Jad’s still in there, being loudly pissed off to anyone who’ll listen.’
‘Oishii? You set?’
The command head regarded me gravely. ‘If you are. Like I said, you’ll have five minutes max. All I can do without leaving traces.’
‘Five minutes is fine,’ said Lazlo impatiently.
Everybody looked at Sylvie. She managed a wan smile under the scrutiny.
‘Fine,’ she echoed. ‘Scan up. Let’s do it.’
Oishii’s face took on the abrupt inwardness of net time. He nodded minutely to himself.
‘They’re running the navigational systems at standby. Drives and systems test in two hundred and twenty seconds. You’d better be in the water by the time it kicks in.’
Sylvie scraped up some hollow-eyed professional interest and a stifled cough.
‘Hull security?’
‘Yeah, it’s on. But the stealth suits should throw back most of the scan. And when you get down to water level, I’m going to pass you off as a couple of ripwings waiting for easy fish in the wake turbulence. Soon as the system test cycle starts, get up that chute. I’ll vanish you on the internal scanners, and the navgear will assume it lost the rips in the wake. Same for you coming out, Lazlo. So stay in the water until she’s well down the estuary.’
‘Great.’
‘You get us a cabin?’ I asked.
The corner of Oishii’s mouth twitched. ‘Of course. No luxury spared for our fugitive friends. Starboard lower are mostly empty, S37 is all yours. Just push.’
‘Time to go,’ hissed Lazlo. ‘One at a time.’
He flitted out of the cover of the container with the same accomplished wincefish lope I’d seen deployed in the Uncleared, was a moment exposed to view along the quay and then swung himself lithely off the edge of the wharf and was gone again. I glanced sideways at Sylvie and nodded.
She went, less smoothly than Lazlo, but still with an echo of the same grace. I thought I heard a faint splash this time. I gave her five seconds and followed, across the blizzard-shrouded open space, crouch to grab the top rung of the inspection ladder and down, hand over rapid hand, to the chemical stink of the estuary below. When I was immersed to the waist I let go and fell back into the water.
Even through the stealth suit and the clothes I wore over it, the shock of entry was savage. The cold stabbed through, clutched at my groin and chest and forced the air out of my lungs through gritted teeth. The gekko-grip cells in my palms flexed their filaments in sympathy. I drew in a fresh breath and cast about in the water for the others.
‘Over here.’
Lazlo gestured from a corrugated section of the dock where he and Sylvie were clinging to a corroded cushioning generator. I slipped through the water towards them and let my genentech hands grip me directly to the evercrete. Lazlo breathed in jerkily and spoke through chattering teeth.