After that, my visits were infrequent and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice when exactly the trend started to reverse and why. All I knew was that now there were quarters of the southern city where the stink was back, and the brave new developments along the coast and the Expanse were collapsing, kilometre by kilometre, into creeping shantytown decay. In the centre there were beggars on the streets and armed security outside most of the large buildings. Looking out of the side window of the autocab, I caught an echo of irritated tension in the way people moved that hadn’t been there forty years ago.
We crossed the centre in a raised priority lane that sent the digits on the cab meter spinning into a blur. It didn’t last long – aside from one or two glossy limos and a scattering of cabs, we had the vaulted road to ourselves and when we picked up the main Expanse highway on the other side, the charge count settled down to a reasonable rate. We curled away from the high-rise zone and out across the shanties. Low-level housing, pressed up close to the carriageway. This story I already knew from Segesvar. The cleared embankment space on either side of the road had been sold off while I was away and previous health and safety restrictions waived. I caught a glimpse of a naked two-year-old child gripping the wire fence around a flat roof, mesmerised by the blastpast of the traffic two metres from her face. On another roof further along, two kids not much older hurled makeshift missiles that missed and fell bouncing in our wake.
The inland harbour exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighbourhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the programme ran that way – maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway – steel-boned and upjutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.
We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly-coloured holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.
‘You for hire?’
He turned lacklustre eyes on me without lifting his head.
‘Mama.’
I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalise. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.
‘Where you want to go?’
‘Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.’
He smirked. ‘Yeah, Vchira Beach – it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?’
‘Southern reach. The Strip.’
‘Sourcetown.’ His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. ‘You a surfer?’
‘Do I look like a surfer?’
Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blonde woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared Give me Mitzi Harlan’s job – I could do it lying down. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.
‘Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?’
‘Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.’
‘An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?’
She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. ‘Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?’
‘Just what you see.’
‘Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.’
The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the two-fifty mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.
‘Sure. Seems very reasonable You want to show me my ride?’
Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package – a blunt-nosed twenty-metre twin turbine rig that deserved the name hoverloader more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sealanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armoured skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.
‘That get much use?’ I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.
She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. ‘There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or,’ – an involuntary glance back towards the terminal building – ‘wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?’
‘No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.’ I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one. Dialled a local number.
‘Southside holdings,’ said an androgynous synth voice. ‘Due to—’
I reeled off the fourteen-digit discreet coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.
‘Kovacs, where the fuck have you been?’
I grinned despite myself. ‘Hey Rad. Nice to talk to you too.’
‘It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?’