‘I hate the fucking place,’ Mari Ado told me as we prowled the well-to-do streets of Tadaimako looking for a coffee house called Makita’s. Along with Brasil, she was throttling back on her spinal-fever complex for the duration of the raid, and the change was making her irritable. ‘Fucking metropolitan tyranny gone global. No single city should have this much influence.’
It was a standard rant – one from the Quellist manual. They’ve been saying essentially the same thing about Millsport for centuries. And they’re right, of course, but it’s amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.
‘You grew up here, didn’t you?’
‘So?’ She swung a glare on me. ‘Does that mean I’ve got to like it?’
‘No, I guess not.’
We continued in silence. Tadaimako buzzed primly about us, busier and more genteel than I remembered from thirty-plus years before. The old harbour quarter, once a seedy and faintly dangerous playground for aristo and corporate youth, had now sprouted a glossy new crop of retail outlets and cafés. A lot of the bars and pipe houses I remembered were gone to a relatively clean death – others had been made over into excruciating imagistic echoes of themselves. Every frontage on the street shone in the sun with new paint and antibac sheathing, and the paving beneath our feet was immaculately clean. Even the smell of the sea from a couple of streets further down seemed to have been sanitised – there was no tang of rotting weed or dumped chemicals, and the harbour was full of yachts.
In keeping with the prevailing aesthetic, Makita’s was a squeaky clean establishment trying hard to look disreputable. Artfully grimed windows kept out most of the sun and inside the walls were decorated with reprinted Unsettlement photography and Quellist epigrams in workmanlike little frames. One corner held the inevitable iconic holo of the woman herself, the one with the shrapnel scar on her chin. Dizzy Csango was on the music system. Millsport Sessions, Dream of Weed.
At a back booth, Isa sat and nursed a long drink, nearly down to the dregs. Her hair was a savage crimson today, and a little longer than it had been. She’d greysprayed opposing quadrants of her face for a harlequin effect and her eyes were dusted with some haemoglobin-hungry luminescent glitter that made the tiny veins in the whites glow as if they were going to explode. The datarat plugs were still proudly on display in her neck, one of them hooked up to the deck she’d brought with her. A datacoil in the air above the unit kept up the fiction that she was a student doing some pre-exam catch-up. It also, if our last meeting was anything to go by, laid down a natty little interference field that would render conversation in the booth impossible to eavesdrop on.
‘What took you so long?’ she asked.
I smiled as I sat down. ‘We’re fashionably late, Isa. This is Mari. Mari, Isa. So how are we doing?’
Isa took a long, insolent moment to check out Mari, then turned her head and unjacked with an elegant, much practised gesture that showed off the nape of her neck.
‘We’re doing well. And we’re doing it silently. Nothing new on the Millsport PD net, and nothing from any of the private security outfits the First Families like to use. They don’t know you’re here.’
I nodded. Gratifying though the news was, it made sense. We’d hit Millsport across the earlier part of the week, split into half a dozen separate groups, arrivals co-ordinated days apart. Fake ID at Little Blue Bug standards of impenetrability and a variety of different transport options ranging from cheap speed-freighters to a Saffron Line luxury cruiser. With people streaming into Millsport from all over the planet for the Harlan’s Day festivities, it would have been either very bad luck or very bad operational management if any of us had been picked up.
But it was still good to know.
‘What about security up at the Crags?’
Isa shook her head. ‘Less noise out of there than a priest’s wife coming. If they knew what you had planned, there’d be a whole new protocol layer and there isn’t.’
‘Or you haven’t spotted it,’ said Mari.
Isa fixed her with another cool stare. ‘My dear, do you know anything at all about dataflow?’
‘I know what levels of encryption we’re dealing with.’
‘Yes, so do I. Tell me, how do you think I pay for my studies?’
Mari Ado examined her nails. ‘With petty crime, I assume.’
‘Charming.’ Isa shuttled her gaze in my direction. ‘Where did you get her, Tak? Madame Mi’s?’
‘Behave, Isa.’
She gusted a long-suffering teenage sigh. ‘Alright, Tak. For you. For you, I won’t rip this mouthy bitch’s hair out. And Mari, for your information, I am gainfully employed nights, under a pseudident, as a freelance security software scribe for more corporate names than you’ve probably given back-street blowjobs.’
She waited, tensed. Ado looked back at her with glittery eyes for a moment, then smiled and leaned forward slightly. Her voice rose no higher than a corrosive murmur.
‘Listen, you stupid little virgin, if you think you’re going to get a cat fight out of me, you’re badly mistaken. And lucky too. In the unlikely event that you could push my buttons sufficient to piss me off that far, you wouldn’t even see me coming. Now why don’t we discuss the business at hand, and then you can go back to playing at datacrime with your study partners and pretending you know something about the world.’
‘You fucking whor—’
‘Isa!’ I put a snap into my voice and a hand in front of her as she started to rise. ‘That’s enough. She’s right, she could kill you with her bare hands and not even break a sweat. Now behave, or I’m not going to pay you.’
Isa shot me a look of betrayal and sat back down. Under the harlequin face paint, it was hard to tell, but I thought she was flushing furiously. Maybe the crack about virginity had touched a nerve. Mari Ado had the good grace not to look pleased.
‘I didn’t have to help you,’ Isa said in a small voice. ‘I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.’
‘We won’t,’ I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. ‘Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?’
What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matt-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to-date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week. Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool. Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.
But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?
I certainly didn’t at her age.
If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—
Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it’s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.