‘You don’t think he made four hundred metres either then?’
‘I don’t know.’ I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. ‘He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defences. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred metres off the water when it took them all out.’
She shot me an amused look. ‘I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.’
‘Oh. Sorry. You seem older.’
‘Thank you.’
‘In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.’
‘Or we got lucky.’
‘Or we got lucky,’ I echoed.
Brasil came up the companionway and stalked towards us. There was an uncharacteristic anger flickering around in the way he moved and he looked at me with open dislike. I spared him a return glance, then went back to staring at the water.
‘I won’t have you talking to her like that again,’ he told me.
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘I’m serious, Kovacs. We all know you’ve got a problem with political commitment, but I’m not going to let you vomit up whatever fucked-in-the-head rage you’re carrying all over this woman.’
I swung on him.
‘This woman? This woman? You’re calling me fucked in the head. This woman you’re talking about is not a human being. She’s a fragment, a ghost at best.’
‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Tres quietly.
‘Oh please. Can neither of you see what’s happening here? You’re projecting your desires onto a fucking digitised human sketch. Already. Is this what’s going to happen if we get her back to Kossuth? Are we going to build a whole fucking revolutionary movement on a mythological scrap?’
Brasil shook his head. ‘The movement’s already there. It doesn’t need to be built, it’s ready to happen.’
‘Yeah, all it needs is a figurehead.’ I turned away as the old weariness rose in me, stronger even than the anger. ‘Which is handy, because all you’ve got is a fucking figurehead.’
‘You do not know that.’
‘No, you’re right.’ I began to walk away. There isn’t far you can go on a thirty-metre boat, but I was going to open up as much space as I could between myself and these sudden idiots. Then something made me swing about to face them both across the deck. My voice rose in abrupt fury. ‘I don’t know that. I don’t know that Nadia Makita’s whole personality wasn’t stored and then left lying around in New Hok like some unexploded shell nobody wanted. I don’t know that it didn’t somehow find a way to get uploaded into a passing deCom. But what are the fucking chances?’
‘We can’t make that judgment yet,’ Brasil said, coming after me. ‘We need to get her to Koi.’
‘Koi?’ I laughed savagely. ‘Oh, that’s good. Fucking Koi. Jack, do you really think you’re ever going to see Koi again? Koi is more than likely blasted meat scraped up off some back street in Millsport. Or better yet, he’s an interrogation guest of Aiura Harlan. Don’t you get it, Jack? It is over. Your neoQuellist resurgence is fucked. Koi is gone, probably the others are too. Just more fucking casualties on the glorious road to revolutionary change.’
‘Kovacs, you think I don’t feel for what happened to Isa?’
‘I think, Jack, that provided we rescued that shell of a myth we’ve got down there, you don’t much care who died or how.’
Sierra Tres moved awkwardly on the rail. ‘Isa chose to get involved. She knew the risks. She took the pay. She was a free agent.’
‘She was fifteen fucking years old!’
Neither of them said anything. They just watched me. The slap of water on the hull grew audible. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath and looked at them again. I nodded.
‘It’s okay,’ I said tiredly. ‘I see where this is going. I’ve seen it before, I saw it on Sanction IV. Fucking Joshua Kemp said it at Indigo City. What we crave is the revolutionary momentum. How we get it is almost irrelevant, and certainly not admitting of ethical debate – historical outcome will be the final moral arbiter. If that isn’t Quellcrist Falconer down there, you’re going to turn it into her anyway. Aren’t you.’
The two surfers traded a look. I nodded again.
‘Yeah. And where does that leave Sylvie Oshima? She didn’t choose this. She wasn’t a free agent. She was a fucking innocent bystander. And she’ll be just the first of many if you get what you want.’
More silence. Finally, Brasil shrugged.
‘So why did you come to us in the first place?’
‘Because I fucking misjudged you, Jack. Because I remembered you all as better than this sad wish-fulfilment shit.’
Another shrug. ‘Then you remember wrong.’
‘So it seems.’
‘I think you came to us out of lack of options,’ said Sierra Tres soberly. ‘And you must have known that we would value the potential existence of Nadia Makita above the host personality.’
‘Host?’
‘No one wants to harm Oshima unnecessarily. But if a sacrifice is necessary, and this is Makita—’
‘But it isn’t. Open your fucking eyes, Sierra.’
‘Maybe not. But let’s be brutally honest, Kovacs. If this is Makita, then she’s worth a lot more to the people of Harlan’s World than some mercenary deCom bounty hunter you happen to have taken a shine to.’
I felt a cold, destructive ease stealing up through me as I looked at Tres. It felt almost comfortable, like homecoming.
‘Maybe she’s worth a lot more than some crippled neoQuellist surf bunny too. Did that ever occur to you? Prepared to make that sacrifice, are you?’
She looked down at her leg, then back at me.
‘Of course I am,’ she said gently, as if explaining to a child. ‘What do you think I’m doing here?’
An hour later, the covert channel broke open into sudden, excited transmission. Detail was confused but the gist was jubilantly clear. Soseki Koi and a small group of survivors had fought their way clear of the Mitzi Harlan debacle. The escape routing out of Millsport had held up.
They were ready to come and get us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As we steered into the village harbour and I looked around me, the sense of deja vu was so overpowering, I could almost smell burning again. I could almost hear the panicked screams.
I could almost see myself.
Get a grip, Tak. It didn’t happen here.
It didn’t. But it was the same loosely-gathered array of hard-weather housing backing up from the waterfront, the same tiny core of main-street businesses along the shoreline and the same working harbour complex at one end of the inlet. The same clutches of real-keel inshore trawlers and tenders moored along the dock, dwarfed by the gaunt, outrigged bulk of a big ocean-going rayhunter in their midst. There was even the same disused Mikuni research station at the far end of the inlet and, not far back behind, the crag-perched prayer house that would have replaced it as the village’s focal point when the project funding fell through. In the main street, women went drably wrapped, as if for work with hazardous substances. Men did not.