‘I think that’s probably enough,’ she said. ‘We’d better get back.’
And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.
I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I reentered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a co-ordination that spoke volumes.
‘You’ll get your money back, you know,’ I told him.
Brasil twitched impatiently. ‘I know that, Tak. I’m not concerned about the money. We would have cleared your debt with Segesvar as simple payment, if you’d asked. We still can – you could consider it a bounty for what you’ve brought us if you like.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ I said stiffly. ‘I’m considering it a loan. I’ll pay you back as soon as things have calmed down.’
A stifled snort from Sierra Tres. I turned on her.
‘Something amusing you?’
‘Yeah. The idea that things are going to calm down any time soon.’
We watched the creep of night, across the sea in front of us. At the darkened end of the horizon, Daikoku crept up to join Marikanon in the western sky. Further along the beach, the rest of Brasil’s crew were building a bonfire. Laughter cracked around the gathering pile of driftwood, and bodies clowned about in dim silhouette. In defiance of any misgivings either Tres or I might have, there was a deep calm soaking into the evening, as soft and cool as the sand underfoot. After the manic hours of the virtuality, there seemed nothing that really needed to be done or said until tomorrow. And right now tomorrow was still rolling round the other side of the planet, like a wave out deep and building force. I thought that if I were Koi, I’d believe I could feel the march of history holding its breath.
‘So I take it no one’s going to get an early night,’ I said, nodding at the preparations for the bonfire.
‘We could all be Really Dead in a couple of days,’ Tres said. ‘Get plenty of sleep then.’
Abruptly, she tugged her T-shirt cross-armed up over her head. Her breasts lifted and then swung disconcertingly as she completed the movement. Not what I needed right now. She dumped the T-shirt in the sand and started down the beach.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ she called back to us. ‘Anyone coming?’
I glanced at Brasil. He shrugged and went after her.
I watched them reach the water and plunge in, then strike out for deeper water. A dozen metres out, Brasil dived again, popped out of the water almost immediately and called something to Tres. She eeled about in the water and listened to him for a moment, then submerged. Brasil dived after her. They were down for about a minute this time, and then both surfaced, splashing and chattering, now nearly a hundred metres from the shore. It was, I thought, like watching the dolphins off Hirata’s reef.
I angled right and set off along the beach towards the site of the bonfire. People nodded at me, some of them even smiled. Daniel, of all people, looked up from where he sat in the sand with a few others I didn’t know and offered me a flask of something. It seemed churlish to refuse. I knocked back the flask and coughed on vodka rough enough to be homemade.
‘Strong stuff,’ I wheezed and handed it back.
‘Yeah, nothing like it this end of the Strip.’ He gestured muzzily. ‘Sit down, have some more. This is Andrea, my best mate. Hiro. Watch him, he’s a lot older than he looks. Been at Vchira longer than I’ve been alive. And this is Magda. Bit of a bitch, but she’s manageable once you get to know her.’
Magda cuffed him good-naturedly across the head and appropriated the flask. For lack of anything else to do, I settled onto the sand amongst them. Andrea leaned across and wanted to shake my hand.
‘Just want to say,’ she murmured in Millsport-accented Amanglic, ‘thanks for what you’ve done for us. Without you, we might never have known she was still alive.’
Daniel nodded, vodka lending the motion an exaggerated solemnity. ‘That’s right, Kovacs-san. I was out of line back there when you arrived. Fact, and I’m being honest now, I thought you were full of shit. Working some angle, you know. But now with Koi on board, man we are fucking rolling. We’re going to turn this whole planet upside fucking down.’
Murmured agreement, a little fervent for my tastes.
‘Going to make the Unsettlement look like a wharf brawl,’ said Hiro.
I got hold of the flask again and drank. Second time around, it didn’t taste so bad. Maybe my taste buds were stunned.
‘What’s she like?’ asked Andrea.
‘Uh.’ An image of the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita flickered through my mind. Face smeared in the throes of climax. The swilling cocktail of hormones in my system lurched at the thought. ‘She’s. Different. It’s hard to explain.’
Andrea nodded, smiling happily. ‘You’re so lucky. To have met her, I mean. To have talked to her.’
‘You’ll get your chance, And.’ Daniel said, slurring a little. ‘Soon as we take her back from those motherfuckers.’
A ragged cheer. Someone was lighting the bonfire.
Hiro nodded grimly. ‘Yeah. Payback time for the Harlanites. For all the First Family scum. Real Death, coming down.’
‘It’ll be so good,’ said Andrea, as we watched the flames start to catch. ‘To have someone again who knows what to do.’
PART FOUR
This Is All That Matters
‘This much must be understood: Revolution requires Sacrifice. ’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
North-eastward around the curve of the world from Kossuth, the Millsport Archipelago lies in the Nurimono Ocean, like a smashed plate. Once, aeons ago, it was a massive volcanic system, hundreds of kilometres across, and the legacy still shows in the peculiarly curved outer edges of the rim islands. The fires that fuelled the eruptions are long extinct, but they left a towering, twisted mountainscape whose peaks comfortably rode out the later drowning as the sea rose. In contrast to other archipelago chains on Harlan’s World, the volcanic dribbling provided a rich soil base and most of the land is thickly covered with the planet’s beleaguered land vegetation. Later, the Martians came and added their own colonial plantlife. Later still, humans came and did the same.
At the heart of the archipelago, Millsport itself sprawls in evercrete and fused-glass splendour. It’s a riot of urban engineering, every available crag and slope forested with spires, extending out onto the water in broad platforms and bridges kilometres in length. Cities on Kossuth and New Hokkaido have grown to substantial size and wealth at various times over the last four hundred years, but there’s nothing to match this metropolis anywhere on the planet. Home to over twenty million people, gateway to the only commercial spaceflight launch windows the orbital net will permit, nexus of governance, corporate power and culture, you can feel Millsport sucking at you like the maelstrom from anywhere else on Harlan’s World you care to stand.