She’s not.
I know she’s not. It’s not possi—
What, just like it’s not possible there’s another Takeshi Kovacs out there hunting you? Where’s your sense of wonder, Tak?
I stood and watched.
And in the end I shrugged irritably and climbed into the bedspace beside her, and tried to sleep.
It took a while.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The crossing back to Tekitomura was far faster than our trip out had been with the Guns for Guevara. Flogging steadily through the icy sea away from the New Hok coast, the Daikoku Dawn was constrained by none of the caution her sister ship had shown going in, and ran at full speed for the bulk of the voyage. According to Sylvie, we raised Tekitomura on the horizon not long after the sun came up and woke her through windows we’d forgotten to blank. Less than an hour after that we were crowding the ramps at Kompcho.
I woke to a sunlit cabin, stilled engines and Sylvie, dressed and staring at me over arms folded across the backrest of a chair she’d straddled beside the bedspace. I blinked at her.
‘What?’
‘What the fuck were you doing last night?’
I propped myself upright beneath the covers and yawned. ‘You want to expand on that a little? Give me some idea what you’re talking about?’
‘What I’m talking about,’ she snapped, ‘is waking up with your dick jammed against my spine like a fucking shard blaster barrel.’
‘Ah.’ I rubbed at one eye. ‘Sorry.’
‘Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?’
I shrugged. ‘Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?’
‘Oh.’ She looked away. ‘I don’t remember doing that.’
‘Well you did.’ I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was. I nodded at what she was wearing. ‘Clothes are dry, I see.’
‘Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.’ Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, ‘I’ll get yours for you.’
We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed. We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.
‘We’d better get you covered up,’ I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. ‘No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.’
She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. ‘I thought the idea was to leave traces.’
‘Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.’
‘Alright.’
The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct – a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.
‘How may I help you?’
‘I have vital information for you,’ I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. ‘I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hoverloader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.’
The construct smiled again. ‘That’s impossible, sir.’
‘Yeah? Then go check out cabin S37.’ I cut the call, turned off the terminal and nodded at Sylvie, who was struggling to get the last of her riotous hair stuffed inside the curtain-cloth headscarf.
‘Very becoming. We’ll make a god-fearing maiden of modest demeanour out of you yet.’
‘Fuck off.’ The natural spring in the command head mane was still pushing the edges of the scarf forward and out. She attempted to smear the cloth backward, out of the way of her peripheral vision. ‘You think they’ll come here?’
‘Eventually. But they’ve got to check the cabin, which they’ll be in no hurry to do, crank call like that. Then check back with Drava, then trace the call. It’ll be the rest of the day, maybe longer.’
‘So we’re safe leaving this place untorched?’
I glanced around at the shabby little room. ‘Sniffer squad won’t get much off what we’ve touched that isn’t blurred with the last dozen occupants. Maybe just enough to confirm against the cabin traces. Not worth worrying about. Anyway, I’m short on incendiaries right now. You?’
She nodded at the door. ‘Get them anywhere on Kompcho wharf for a couple of hundred a crate.’
‘Tempting. Bit rough on the other guests, though.’
A shrug. I grinned.
‘Man, wearing that thing’s really pissing you off, isn’t it. Come on, we’ll break the trail somewhere else. Let’s get out of here.’
We went down canted plastic stairs, found a side exit and slipped into the street without checking out. Back into the pulsing flow of deCom commerce and stroll. Groups of sprogs clowning around on corners for attention, crew packs ambling along in the subtly integrated fashion I’d started to notice at Drava. Men, women and machines carrying hardware. Command heads. Dealers of knocked-off chemicals and small novelty devices working from laid-out plastic sheets that shimmered in the sun. The odd religious maniac declaiming to passing jeers. Street entertainers aping the local trends for laughs, running cheap holo storytell and cheaper puppet shows, collection trays out for the sparse shower of near-exhausted credit chips and the hope that not too many spectators would fling the totally exhausted variety. We cut back and forth in it for a while, surveillance evasion habit on my part and a vague interest in some of the acts.
‘—the blood curdling story of Mad Ludmila and the Patchwork Man—’
‘—hardcore footage from the deCom clinics! See the latest in surgery and body testing to the limits, ladies and gentlemen, to the very limits—’
‘—the taking of Drava by heroic deCom teams in full colour—’
‘—God—’
‘—pirated full sense repro. One hundred per cent guaranteed genuine! Josefina Hikari, Mitzi Harlan, Ito Marriott and many more. Get wet with the most beautiful First Family bodies in surroundings that—’
‘—deCom souvenirs. Karakuri fragments—’
On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium. Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.
Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.