‘Crabshit!’ It was me. He’d stepped towards the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. ‘You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—’
I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathised – the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.
‘Wouldn’t I?’ I gestured, ‘You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there – they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.’
Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.
‘You’ll forgive me,’ she said politely, ‘if I don’t take this on trust.’
I nodded. ‘Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.’
It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed. She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.
‘How do you plan to leave?’ she asked me.
‘Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain a half dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.’
‘Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,’ drawled Kovacs. ‘Not a good time to be flying, tonight.’
I stared back at him with dislike. ‘I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.’
‘And Mitzi Harlan?’ The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. ‘What assurances do I have of her safety?’
Brasil stirred at my side, for the first time since the confrontation began.
‘We are not murderers.’
‘No?’ Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. ‘Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.’
For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. ‘Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—’
‘I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,’ I said loudly. ‘Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.’
Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.
I saw the decision take root in her.
‘Very well,’ she said briskly. ‘You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.’
I smeared her a brief smile. ‘Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?’
They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death-white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.
I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.
‘Is that her?’ asked Tres tautly.
I lifted my free hand. ‘Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?’
‘I would advise against overreaction.’ But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were. ‘The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.’
My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.
‘Have you fed her?’ I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.
‘Intravenously.’ Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. ‘You must understand that—’
‘We understand perfectly,’ said Brasil, ‘We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.’
He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle. Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.
‘No! Stand down. All of you.’
I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, ‘You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.’
A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced towards us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.
I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot, then she looked back at me and gestured an okay. I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.
‘Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her. Everybody else stays back.’
It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted round to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the grey-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.
And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoopcopter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer