So I did.
Envoy competence, one out of the manual – work with the tools to hand. I cast about in the immediate environment, summoned what I had that could be influenced and saw it immediately. Personal shit had done the damage, personal shit would haul us out of the swamp, not to mention solve some more of my own more personal problems by way of a side-effect. The irony of it grinned back at me.
Not everyone was so amused. Ado for one.
‘Trust the fucking haiduci?’ There was a well-bred Millsport sneer behind the words. ‘No thank you.’
Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow.
‘We’ve used them before, Mari.’
‘No, you’ve used them before. I steer well clear of scum like that. And anyway, this one you don’t even know.’
‘I know of him. I’ve dealt with people who’ve dealt with him before, and from what I hear he’s a man of his word. But I can check him out. You say he owes you, Kovacs?’
‘Very much so.’
She shrugged. ‘Then that should be enough.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sierra. You can’t—’
‘Segesvar is solid,’ I interrupted. ‘He takes his debts seriously in both directions. All it needs is the money. If you’ve got it.’
Koi glanced at Brasil, who nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We can get it easily enough.’
‘Oh, happy fucking birthday, Kovacs!’
Virginia Vidaura nailed Ado with a stare. ‘Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Mari. It isn’t your money. That’s safely on deposit in a Millsport merchant bank, isn’t it?’
‘What’s that supposed to—’
‘Enough,’ said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day – real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old-style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialled the discreet coding on speaker phone with no visual.
It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amidst a lot of background noise, some of it real/virtual adjustment connection flutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.
‘I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?’
‘How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.’
The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.
‘I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.’
I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.
‘Check the account,’ I told Segesvar. ‘The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.’
‘You’re calling from a construct?’
‘Go check your cashflow, Rad. I’ll hold.’
The rest was easy.
In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep and most programmes don’t bother to include the sub-routines that would cause it. Long term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely… odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that. You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.
We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, running what-if scenarios and bickering. Every now and then one of us would vent an exasperated grunt, fall backwards into the knee-deep water of the mapping construct and backstroke off out of the archipelago, towards the horizon. Provided you chose your angle of escape carefully and didn’t collide with an unremembered islet or scrape your back on a reef, it was an ideal way to get away and unwind. Floating out there with the voices of the others grown faint with distance, you could feel your consciousness loosen off again, like a cramped muscle relaxing.
At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included. You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.
‘There you are,’ she said, with an odd lightness of tone.
‘Here I am,’ I agreed.
She cleared her throat. ‘How’s your head?’
‘Cooling off.’ I raised the sake cup in one hand. ‘Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.’
‘You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.’
But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand and poured.
‘Kampai,’ she said.
‘Por nosotros.’
We drank. She settled onto the automould opposite me. ‘Trying to make me feel homesick?’
‘Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?’
‘I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.’
‘Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.’
‘And the beach life.’ She reclined a little on the automould and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and tanned from life on Vchira, and the spray-on swimsuit she was wearing showed it off full-length. I felt my pulse pick up slightly.
‘Very beautiful,’ I admitted. ‘Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.’
She seemed to realise the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.
‘What else did he tell you?’
‘Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.’
‘You were looking for me.’
‘Yeah.’ Something stopped me at that simple admission. ‘I was.’
‘And now that you’ve found me, what?’
My pulse had settled at an accelerated pounding. The edged whine of overstay in virtual was back. Images cascaded through my head. Virginia Vidaura, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, unattainable Envoy trainer, poised before us at induction, a dream of female competence beyond everyone’s reach. Splinters of mirth in voice and eyes that might have kindled to sensuality in a less clearly defined set of relationships. A cringingly clumsy attempt at flirtation from Jimmy de Soto once in the mess bar, slapped down with brutal disinterest. Authority wielded with an utter lack of sexual tension. My own lurid undischarged fantasies, slowly flattening under an immense respect that went in at the same bone deep level as the Envoy induction.