The inland harbor exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes, and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighborhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the program ran that way—maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway—steel-boned and up-jutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.
We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock, and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly colored holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.
“You for hire?”
He turned lackluster eyes on me without lifting his head.
“Mama.”
I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalize. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.
“Where you want to go?”
“Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.”
He smirked. “Yeah, Vchira Beach—it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?”
“Southern reach. The Strip.”
“Sourcetown.” His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. “You a surfer?”
“Do I look like a surfer?”
Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blond woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared GIVE ME MITZI HARLAN’S JOB—I COULD DO IT LYING DOWN. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.
“Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?”
“Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?”
She shrugged. “I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.”
“An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?”
She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. “Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?”
“Just what you see.”
“Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.”
The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the 250 mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.
“Sure. Seems very reasonable. You want to show me my ride?”
• • •
Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package—a blunt-nosed twenty-meter twin-turbine rig that deserved the name hoverloader more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sea-lanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armored skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.
“That get much use?” I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.
She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. “There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or”—an involuntary glance back toward the terminal building—“wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?”
“No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.” I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one. Dialed a local number.
“Southside Holdings,” said an androgynous synth voice. “Due to—”
I reeled off the fourteen-digit discrete coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.
“Kovacs, where the fuck have you been?”
I grinned despite myself. “Hey, Rad. Nice to talk to you, too.”
“It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?”
“It’s been two months, Radul.”
“It’s been more than two.”
“It’s been nine weeks—that’s my final offer.”
He laughed down the line, a sound that reminded me of a trawl winch cranking at speed. “Okay, Tak. So how was your trip? Catch any fish?”
“Yes, I did.” I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the cortical stacks. “Got some for you right here as promised. Canned for ease of carriage.”
“Of course. Hardly expect you to bring it fresh. Imagine the stink. Especially after three months.”
“Two months.”
The trawler winch again. “Nine weeks, I thought we agreed. So are you in town, finally?”
“Near enough, yeah.”
“You coming out to visit?”
“Yeah, see, that’s the problem. Something’s come up and I can’t. But I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fish—”
“No, nor would I. Your last consignment hasn’t kept well. Barely fit for consumption these days. My boys think I’m crazy still serving it up, but I told them. Takeshi Kovacs is old school. He pays his debts. We do what he asks, and when he surfaces finally, he will do what is right.”
I hesitated. Calibrated.
“I can’t get you your money right now, Rad. I daren’t go near a major credit transaction. Wouldn’t be good for you any more than for me. I’ll need time to sort it out. But you can have the fish, if you send someone to collect in the next hour.”
The silence crawled back onto the line. This was pushing the elastic of the debt to failure point, and we both knew it.
“Look, I got four. That’s one more than expected. You can have them now, all of them. You can serve them up without me, use them how you like, or not at all if my credit’s really out.”
He said nothing. His presence on the line was oppressive, like the wet heat coming off the Weed Expanse. Envoy sense told me this was the break, and Envoy sense is rarely wrong.
“The money’s coming, Rad. Hit me with a surcharge, if that’s what it takes. As soon as I’m done with this other shit, we’re back to business as usual. This is strictly temporary.”
Still nothing. The silence was beginning to sing, th
e tiny lethal song of a cable snagged and under stress. I stared out across the Expanse, as if I could find him and make eye contact.
“He would have gotten you,” I said bluntly. “You know that.”
The silence lasted a moment longer, then snapped across. Segesvar’s voice rang with false boisterousness.
“What you talking about, Tak?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Our meth-dealing friend, back in the day. You ran with the others, Rad, but the way your leg was, you wouldn’t have had a chance. If he’d come through me, he would have caught you up. You know that. The others ran, I stayed.”
On the other end of the line I heard him breathe out, like something uncoiling.
“So,” he said. “A surcharge. Shall we say thirty percent?”
“Sounds reasonable,” I lied, for both of us.
“Yes. But I think your previous fish will have to be taken off the menu now. Why don’t you come here to give your traditional valediction, and we’ll discuss the terms of this. Refinancing.”
“Can’t do that, Rad. I told you, I’m only passing through. An hour from now I’m gone again. Be a week or more before I can get back.”
“Then.” I could almost see him shrug. “You will miss the valediction. I would not have thought you would want that.”
“I don’t.” This was punishment, another surcharge on top of my volunteered thirty percent. Segesvar had me worked out; it’s a core skill in organized crime, and he was good at his trade. The Kossuth haiduci might not have the cachet and sophistication of the yakuza farther north, but it’s essentially the same game. If you’re going to make a living out of extortion, you’d better know how to get to people. And how to get to Takeshi Kovacs was painted all over my recent past like blood. It couldn’t have taken a lot of working out.
“Then come,” he said warmly. “We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake. Old times’ sake, heheh? And a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.”
Out of nowhere, Lazlo’s face.
I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her.
I glanced across to where Suzi Petkovski was lowering the canopy back over the turbine.
“Sorry, Rad. This is too important to juggle. You want your fish, send someone out to the inland harbor. Charter terminal, ramp seven. I’ll be here for an hour.”
“No valediction?”
I grimaced. “No valediction. I don’t have the time.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I think,” he said finally, “that I would like very much to look in your eyes right now, Takeshi Kovacs. Perhaps I will come myself.”
“Sure. Be good to see you. Just make it inside the hour.”
He hung up. I gritted my teeth and smashed a fist against the crate beside me.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
You look after her, right. You keep her safe.
Yeah, yeah. All right.
I’m trusting you, Micky.
All right, I fucking hear you.
The chime of a phone.
For a moment, I held the one I was using stupidly to my ear. Then it hit me that the sound came from the opened pack beside me. I leaned over and pushed aside three or four phones before I found the one with the lit display. It was one I’d used before, one with a broken seal.
“Yeah?”
Nothing. The line was open but there was no sound on it. Not even static. Perfect black silence yawned into my ear.
“Hello?”
And something whispered up out of the dark, just barely more audible than the tension I’d felt in the previous call.
hurry
And then there was only the silence again.
I lowered the phone and stared at it.
I’d made three calls in Tekitomura, used three phones from the pack. I’d called Lazlo, I’d called Yaroslav, I’d called Isa. It could have been any of the three who had just rung. To know for sure, I’d need to check the log to see whom the phone had connected with before.
But I didn’t need to.
A whisper out of dark silence. A voice over distance you couldn’t measure.
hurry
I knew which phone it was.
And I knew who was calling me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Segesvar was as good as his word. Forty minutes after he hung up, a garish red-and-black open-top sports skimmer came howling off the Expanse and into the harbor at illegal speed. Every head on the wharf turned to watch it arrive. It was the kind of boatcraft that on the seaward side of Newpest would have occasioned an instant Port Authority override ’cast and an ignominious stall in the water there and then. I don’t know whether the inland harbor was ill equipped, if Segesvar had expensive counterjamming software installed in his rich-kid toy, or if the Weed Expanse gangs just had the Inland PA in their pocket. In any event, the Expansemobile didn’t stall out. Instead it banked about, raising spray, and made a fast line for the gap between ramps six and seven. A dozen meters out, it cut its motors and swept in on momentum. Behind the wheel, Segesvar spotted me. I nodded and raised one hand. He waved back.
I sighed.
This stuff trails out behind us across the decades, but it isn’t like the spray Radul Segesvar’s arrival was cutting from the water in the harbor. It doesn’t fall tracelessly back. It just hangs there instead, like the raised dust you get in the wake of a Sharyan desert cruiser, and if you turn about and head back into your own past, you find yourself coughing on it.
“Hey, Kovacs.”
It was a shout, maliciously loud and cheerful. Segesvar was standing up in the cockpit, still steering. Broad, gull-wing-frame sunshades covered his eyes in conscious rejection of the Millsport fashion for ultra-engineered finger-width lenses. A paper-thin, hand-sanded iridescent swamp-panther-skin jacket draped his frame. He waved again and grinned. From the bow of the vessel a grapple line fired with a metallic bang. It was harpoon-headed, unrelated to any of the sockets along the ramp edge, and it chewed a hole in the evercrete facing of the wharf half a meter below the point where I stood. The skimmer cranked itself in and Segesvar leapt out of the cockpit to stand on the bow, looking up at me.
“You want to bellow my name a couple more times?” I asked him evenly. “In case someone didn’t get it first time around.”
“Oops.” He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. “Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?”
“Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?”
“I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?”
I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The haiduci straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in, and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own—pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry. It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties. Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d resleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most haiduci—and like me—he’d had his share of time in storage.
“Nice sleeve,” he said, pacing a circle around me. “Very nice. What happened to the other one?”
“Long story.”
“Which you’re not going to tell me.” He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. “Right?”
“Right.”
He sighed theatrically. “This is disappo
inting, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as closemouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.”
I shrugged. “I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.”
“Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.”
He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one who got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.
“There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?”
“If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.”
“Some other time.”
“Yeah, you’re always so fucking driven, aren’t you? If it’s not the Envoys or the neoQuells, it’s some fucking private revenge scheme. You know, Tak, it isn’t really my business, but someone needs to tell you this and looks like I get the job. You need to stop and smell the weed, man. Remember that you’re living.” He put his sunlenses back on and jerked his head toward the terminal. “All right, come on then. Machine coffee, why not. It’ll be a novelty.”
Back in the cool, we sat at a table near glass panels that gave a view out onto the harbor. Half a dozen other spectators sat in the same area with their associated baggage, waiting. A wasted-looking man in rags was doing the rounds among them, holding out a tray for credit chips and a hard-luck story for anyone who was interested. Most weren’t. There was a faint odor of cheap antibacterial in the air that I hadn’t noticed before. The cleaning robots must have been by.