‘Yeah, alright, he’s young. Got it. Did he say anything about me?’
‘Not really, mostly he just asked questions and listened. Only,’ Plex drew on the pipe again. ‘I got the impression he was, I don’t know, disappointed or something. About what you were doing these days.’
I felt my eyes narrow. ‘He said that?’
‘No, no,’ Plex waved the pipe, trickled smoke from his nose and mouth. ‘Just an impression I got, ’s all.’
I nodded. ‘Okay, one last question. You said they took her to Millsport. Where?’
Another pause. I shot him a curious look.
‘Come on, what have you got to lose now? Where are they taking her?’
‘Tak, let it go. This is just like the sweeper bar, all over again. You’re getting involved in something that doesn’t—’
‘I’m already involved, Plex. Tanaseda’s taken care of that.’
‘No, listen. Tanaseda will deal. You’ve got Yukio’s stack, man. You could negotiate for its safe return. He’ll do it, I know him. He and Hirayasu senior go back a century or more. He’s Yukio’s sempai, he’s practically his adoptive uncle. He’ll have to cut a deal.’
‘And you think this Aiura’s going to let it go at that?’
‘Sure, why not.’ Plex gestured with the pipe. ‘She’s got what she wants. As long as you stay out of—’
‘Plex, think about it. I’m double-sleeved. That’s a UN rap, big-time penalties for all involved. Not to mention the issue of whether they’re even entitled to hold a stored copy of a serving Envoy in the first place. If the Protectorate ever finds out about this, Aiura the spymistress is going to be looking at some serious storage, First Families connections or not. The sun’ll be a fucking red dwarf by the time they let her out.’
Plex snorted. ‘You think so? You really think the UN are going to come out here and risk upsetting the local oligarchy for the sake of one double sleeving?’
‘If it’s made public enough, yes. They’ll have to. They can’t be seen to do anything else. Believe me, Plex, I know, I used to do this for a living. The whole Protectorate system hangs together on an assumption that no one dare step out of line. As soon as someone does, and gets away with it, no matter how small that initial transgression, it’ll be like the first crack in the dam wall. If what’s been done here becomes common knowledge, the Protectorate will have to demand Aiura’s cortical stack on a plate. And if the First Families don’t comply, the UN will send the Envoys, because a refusal by local oligarchy to comply can only be read one way, as insurrection. And insurrections get put down, wherever they are, at whatever cost, without fail.’
I watched him, watched it sink in as it had sunk into me when I first heard the news in Drava. The understanding of what had been done, the step that had been taken and the sequence of inevitability that we were all now locked into. The fact that there was no way back from this situation that didn’t involve someone called Takeshi Kovacs dying for good.
‘This Aiura,’ I said quietly, ‘has backed herself into a corner. I would love to know why, I would love to know what it was that was so fucking important it was worth this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. One of us has to go, me or him, and the easiest way for her to make that happen is to keep sending him after me until either he kills me or I kill him.’
He looked back at me, pupils blasted wide with the mix of whiff and mushrooms, pipe forgotten and trailing faint fumes from the cupped bowl of his hand. Like it was all too much to take in. Like I was a piece of take hallucination that refused to morph into something more pleasant or just go away.
I shook my head. Tried to get Sylvie’s Slipins out of it.
‘So, like I said, Plex, I need to know. I really need to know. Oshima, Aiura, and Kovacs. Where do I find these people?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s no good, Tak. I mean, I’ll tell you. You really want to know, I’ll tell you. But it isn’t going to help. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no way you can—’
‘Why don’t you just tell me, Plex. Get it off your chest. Let me worry about the logistics.’
So he told me. And I did the logistics, and worried at it.
All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reef dive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.
PART THREE
That Was a While Ago
‘That Quell, sure, man, she got something going on, something you gotta think about. Thing is, some things last, some things don’t, but sometimes you got something don’t last won’t be because it’s gone, be because it’s waiting for its time to come again, maybe waiting on a change. Music’s like that, and so is life, man, so is life.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
There were storm warnings all the way south.
On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models of the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout. Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.
This one had been building for a while – I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava – and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbours among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.
The skipper of the Haiduci’s Daughter took it philosophically.
‘Seen worse,’ he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge. ‘Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.’
I grunted noncommittally. He squinted away from the display at me.
‘You were away then, right?’
‘Yeah, offworld.’
He laughed raspingly. ‘Yeah, that’s right. All that exotic travel you been doing. So when do I get to see your pretty face on KossuthNet, then? Got a one-to-one lined up with Maggie Sugita when we get in?’
‘Give me time, man.’
‘More time? Haven’t you had enough time yet?’
It was the line of banter we’d maintained all the way down from Tekitomura. Like quite a few freight skippers I’d met, Ari Japaridze was a shrewd but relatively unimaginative man. He knew next to nothing about me, which, he told me, was the way he liked things to stay with his passengers, but he was nobody’s fool. And it didn’t take an archaeologue to work out that if a man comes aboard your raddled old freighter an hour before it leaves and offers as much for a cramped crewroom berth as you’d pay for a Saffron Line cabin – well, that man probably isn’t on friendly terms with law enforcement. For Japaridze, the holes he’d turned up in my knowledge of the last couple of decades on Harlan’s World had a very simple explanation. I’d been away, in the time-honoured criminal sense of the word. I countered this assumption with the simple truth about my absence and got the rasping laugh every time.