I remembered Yukio when he burst into the Kompcho apartment the next morning. The fury in his face.
Kovacs, what exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?
And his words to Sylvie when he saw her.
You know who I am.
Not a passing reference to his evident membership of the yakuza. He thought she knew him.
And Sylvie’s even response. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Because at that moment, she didn’t. Envoy recall froze frame for me on the disbelief in Yukio’s face. Not offended vanity after all. He was genuinely shocked.
In the scant seconds of the confrontation, in the seared flesh and blood of the aftermath, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he was so angry. Anger was a constant. The constant companion of the last two years and longer, rage in myself and the rage reflecting from those around me. I no longer questioned it, it was a state of being. Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.
Or:
Because you just wandered into the midst of a complicated deal with a dangerously unstable woman with a head full of state-of-the-art battle-tech software and a direct line back to—
What?
‘What was she selling, Plex?’
The breath came out of him. He seemed to crumple with it.
‘I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. She called it the Qualgrist Protocol. Something biological. They took it away from me as soon as I hooked her up with them. Soon as I told them the preliminary data checked out.’ He looked away again, this time with no trace of nerves. His voice took on a slurred bitterness. ‘Said it was too important for me. Couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut. They brought in specialists from Millsport. Fucking Yukio came with them. They cut me out.’
‘But you were there. You’d seen her that night.’
‘Yeah, she was giving them stuff on blanked deCom chips. Pieces at a time, you know, ’cause she didn’t trust us.’ He coughed out a laugh. ‘No more than we trusted her. I was supposed to go along each time and check the prelim scrollup codes. Make sure they were genuine antiques. Everything I okayed, Yukio took and handed on to his pet fucking EmPee team. I never saw any of it. And you know who fucking found her in the first place. I did. She came to me first. And all I get is flushed out with a finder’s fee.’
‘How’d she find you?’
A dejected shrug. ‘Usual channels. She’d been asking around Tekitomura for weeks, apparently. Looking for someone to move this stuff for her.’
‘But she didn’t tell you what it was?’
He picked moodily at a smear of bodypaint on the automould. ‘Nope.’
‘Plex, come on. She made a big enough splash with you that you called in your yak pals, but she never showed you what it was she had.’
‘She asked for the fucking yak, not me.’
I frowned. ‘She did?’
‘Yeah. Said they’d be interested, said it was something they could use.’
‘Oh, that’s crabshit, Plex. Why would the yakuza be interested in a biotech weapon three centuries old. They’re not fighting a war.’
‘Maybe she thought they could sell it on to the military for her. For a percentage.’
‘But she didn’t say that. You just told me she said it would be something they could use.’
He stared up at me. ‘Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not wired for that fucking Envoy total-recall shit like you. I don’t remember what she said, exactly. And I don’t fucking care. Like they said, it’s got nothing to do with me any more.’
I stepped away from him. Leaned back on the container wall and examined the shard gun absently. Peripheral vision told me he wasn’t moving from his slump on the automould. I sighed and it felt like weight shifting off my lungs, only to settle in again.
‘Alright, Plex. Just a couple more questions, easy ones, and I’m out of your hair. This new edition of me they’ve got, it was chasing Oshima, right? Not me?’
He clicked his tongue, barely audible above the fusion beat outside.
‘Both of you. Tanaseda wants your head on a stick for what you did to Yukio, but you’re not the main attraction.’
I nodded bleakly. For a while I’d thought Sylvie must have somehow given herself away down in Tekitomura yesterday. Talked to the wrong person, been caught on the wrong surveillance cam, done something to bring the pursuit team crashing down on us like angelfire. But it wasn’t that. It was simpler and worse – they’d vectored in on my own unshielded blunder through the Quellcrist Falconer archives. Must have had a global watch on the dataflows since this whole fucking mess blew up.
And you walked right into it. Nice going.
I grimaced. ‘And is Tanaseda running this?’
Plex hesitated.
‘No? So who’s reeling his line in then?’
‘I don’t—’
‘Don’t back up on me, Plex.’
‘Look, I don’t fucking know. I don’t. But it’s up the food chain, I know that. First Families is what I hear, some Millsport court spymistress.’
I felt a qualified sense of relief. Not the yakuza, then. Nice to know my market value hadn’t fallen that far.
‘This spymistress got a name?’
‘Yeah.’ He got up abruptly and went to the hospitality module. Stared down into the smashed interior. ‘Name of Aiura. Real hardcase by all accounts.’
‘You haven’t met her?’
He poked about in the debris I’d left, found an undamaged pipe. ‘No. I don’t even get to see Tanaseda these days. No way I’d be let inside something at First Families level. But there’s stuff about this Aiura on the court gossip circuit. She’s got a reputation.’
I snorted. ‘Yeah, don’t they all.’
‘I’m serious, Tak.’ He fired up the pipe and looked reproachfully at me through the sudden smoke. ‘I’m trying to help you here. You remember that mess about sixty years ago, when Mitzi Harlan wound up in a Kossuth skullwalk porn flic?’
‘Vaguely.’ I’d been busy at the time, stealing bioware and offworld databonds in the company of Virginia Vidaura and the Little Blue Bugs. High-yield criminality masquerading as political commitment. We watched the news for word of the police efforts at pursuit, not much else. There hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the incessant scandals and misdemeanours of Harlan’s World’s aristo larvae.
‘Yeah, well, the word is that this Aiura ran damage limitation and clean-up for the Harlan family. Closed down the studio with extreme prejudice, hunted down everyone involved. I heard most of them got the skyride. She took them up to Rila Crags at night, strapped them to a grav pack each and just flipped the switch.’
‘Very elegant.’
Plex drew his lungs full of smoke and gestured. His voice came out squeaky.
‘Way she is, apparently. Old school, you know.’
‘You got any idea where she got the copy of me from?’
He shook his head. ‘No, but I’d guess Protectorate military storage. He’s young, a lot younger than you. Are now, I mean.’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘Yeah, they hauled me in for an interview last month when he first got up here from Millsport. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they talk. He’s still calling himself an Envoy.’
I grimaced again.
‘He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—’