I think he was still alive when I got back to my feet and went to help Segesvar. The sounds he was making followed me all the way out of the alley, and news reports the next day said he’d finally bled to death some time close to dawn. Then again, the same sounds followed me around for weeks afterwards, whenever I went anyway quiet enough to hear myself think. For the best part of the next year, I woke up with them clotted in my ears as often as not.
I looked away from it. The glass panels of the terminal slid back into focus. Across the table, Segesvar was watching me intently. Maybe he was remembering too. He grimaced.
‘So you don’t think I have a right to be angry about this? You disappear for nine weeks without a word, leave me holding your shit and looking like a fool in front of the other haiduci. Now you want to reschedule the finance? You know what I’d do to anyone else who pulled this shit?’
I nodded. Recalled with wry humour my own fury at Plex a couple of months back as I stood seeping synthetic body fluids in Tekitomura.
We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak.
I’d wanted to kill him, just for saying it like that.
‘You think thirty per cent is unjust?’
I sighed.
‘Rad, you’re a gangster and I’m.’ I gestured. ‘No better. I don’t think either of us knows much about what’s just and unjust. You do what you like. I’ll find you the money.’
‘Alright.’ He was still staring at me. ‘Twenty per cent. That fit your sense of commercial propriety?’
I shook my head, said nothing. I dug in my pocket for the cortical stacks, kept my fist closed as I leaned across with them. ‘Here. This is what you came for. Four fish. Do what you want with them.’
He pushed my arm aside and jabbed an angry finger in my face.
‘No, my friend. I do what you want with them. This is a service I’m providing you, and don’t you fucking forget that. Now, I said twenty per cent. Is that fair?’
The decision crystallised out of nowhere, so fast it was like a slap across the back of the head. Picking it apart later, I couldn’t decide what triggered it, only that it felt like listening again to that tiny voice out of the darkness, telling me to hurry. It felt like a sudden prickle of sweat across my palms and the terror that I was going to be too late for something that mattered.
‘I meant what I said, Rad. You decide. If this is costing you face with your haiduci pals, then drop it. I’ll throw these over the side somewhere out on the Expanse and we can call time on the whole thing. You hit me with the bill, I’ll find a way to pay it.’
He threw up his hands in a gesture he’d copied when we were still young, from haiduci experia flics like Friends of Ireni Cozma and Outlaw Voices. It was a fight not to smile as I saw it. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the druglike grip of a decision taken and what it meant. In the gravity of the moment, Segesvar’s voice was suddenly a buzzing at the margins of relevance. I was tuning him out.
‘Alright, fuck it. Fifteen per cent. Come on, Tak. That’s fair. Any less, my own fucking people are going to take me out for mismanagement. Fifteen per cent, right?’
I shrugged and held out my closed hand again. ‘Alright, fifteen per cent. Do you still want these?’
He brushed my fist with his palm, took the stacks with classic street sleight-of-hand and pocketed them.
‘You drive a hard fucking bargain, Tak,’ he growled. ‘Anybody ever tell you that?’
‘That’s a compliment, right?’
He growled again, wordless this time. Stood up and brushed off his clothes as if he’d been sitting on a baling dock. As I followed him to my feet, the ragged man with the begging tray vectored in on us.
‘DeCom vet,’ he mumbled. ‘Got fried making New Hok safe for a new century, man, took down big co-op clusters. You got—’
‘No, I haven’t got any money,’ said Segesvar impatiently. ‘Look, you can have that coffee if you want it. It’s still warm.’
He caught my glance.
‘What? I’m a fucking gangster, right? What do you expect?’
Out on the Weed Expanse, a vast quiet held the sky. Even the snarl of the skimmer’s turbines seemed small scale, soaked up by the emptied, flatline landscape and the piles of damp cloud overhead. I stood at the rail, hair plastered back by the speed of our passage, and breathed in the signature fragrance of raw belaweed. The waters of the Expanse are clogged with the stuff, and the passage of any vessel brings it roiling to the surface. We left behind a broad wake of shredded vegetation and muddied grey turbulence that would take the best part of an hour to settle.
To my left, Suzi Petkovski sat in the cockpit and steered with a cigarette in one hand, eyes narrowed against the smoke and the glare off the clouded sky. Mikhail was on the other walkway, slumped on the rail like a long sack of ballast. He’d been sullen for the whole voyage so far, eloquently conveying his resentment at having to come along but not much else besides. At intervals, he scratched morosely at the jackpoints in his neck.
An abandoned baling station flashed up on our starboard bow, this one not much more to it than a couple of bubblefab sheds and a blackened mirrorwood jetty. We’d seen more stations earlier, some still working, lit within and loading onto big automated barges. But that was while our trajectory still hugged the Newpest lakeside sprawl. Out this far, the little island of stilled industry only amped up the sense of desolation.
‘Weed trade’s been bad, huh?’ I shouted over the turbines.
Suzi Petkovski glanced briefly in my direction.
‘Say what?’
‘The weed trade,’ I yelled again, gesturing back at the station as it fell behind. ‘Been bad recently, right?’
She shrugged.
‘Never secure, way the commodities market swings. Most of the independents got squeezed out a long time ago. Out here, KosUnity run these big mobile rigs, do all their own processing and baling right on board. Hard to compete with that.’
It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics was some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.
I went back to watching the skyline.
After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment, then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing and pressed it to my ear.
‘Yeah, what?’
The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear
there isn’t much time left
‘Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.’
can’t hold them back much longer…
‘Yeah, I’m working on it.’
working now… It sounded like a question.
‘Yeah, I said—’
there are wings out there… a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked…
It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again
cracked open from edge to edge… it’s beautiful, Micky…
And gone.
I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.