‘I guess Sanction IV was hard,’ she said later.
‘You guess right.’
For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.
‘Ado blames you,’ she told me. ‘So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.’
‘Well, I’m a likeable guy.’
A smile bent her mouth. ‘So it seems.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.
‘I saw you, Kovacs.’
‘Saw me where?’
‘Saw you with Vidaura.’
That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.
‘See anything you liked?’
‘I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.’
‘No.’ Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. ‘No, we weren’t.’
More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa. Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the north eastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.
‘Does Brasil know?’ I asked.
Now it was her turn to shrug. ‘I don’t know. Have you told him?’
‘No.’
‘Has she?’
And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.
This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.
I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amidst bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.
Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.
Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started. It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.
Hey, she was there too.
After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.
‘Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,’ she said cryptically, and wandered off towards the stern.
A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fairweather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock – from several of our nearest neighbours, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.
Boubin Islander bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.
Then the real fireworks began.
‘Look,’ Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of child-like excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. ‘There go the first ones. Lift-off.’
On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy, Boubin Islander had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy – you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.
‘And they’ve cut the ropes,’ the presenter informed us gaily. ‘The balloons are rising. I can see the—’
‘Do we have to have this on?’ I asked.
Brasil shrugged. ‘Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.’
The next moment, the sky cracked open.
Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-metre demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.
The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.
The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.
Even the radio commentator shut up.
From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again, night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colours again. The scorched air snarled.
Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien-built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-metre line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images. Radio reception died.
‘Time to go,’ said Brasil.
He was grinning.
So, I realised, was I.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from Boubin Islander’s dive steps, let go the rail and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of metres below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet and blew it clear of water.
Tres bobbed up, a few metres away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgement. I cast about for Brasil.
‘Jack?’
His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.
‘Under you. Chilly, huh?’
‘Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Alright, then. You know what to do?’
I heard her sigh. ‘Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.’
‘Got it in one.’
I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colours were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.