He was on his own.
It wasn’t the face I remembered, not even close. He’d sleeved to fairer and broader features than the last time around, a tangled mane of blond traced with gray, and cheekbones that owed at least as much to Slavic genes as they did to his predilection for Adoracion custom. But the body wasn’t much different—inside the loose coveralls he wore, he still had the height and slim breadth in chest and shoulders, the tapered waist and legs, the big hands. And his moves still radiated the same casual poise when he made them.
I knew him as certainly as if he’d torn open the coverall to show me the scars on his chest.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” he said mildly. “Do I know you?”
I grinned.
“Hello, Jack. How’s Virginia these days?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.”
She sat on the slope of the dune at my side and traced triangles in the sand between her feet with a bottleback prod. She was still wet from the swim, water pearling on sun-darkened skin all over the surfer sleeve, razored black hair spiked damp and uneven on top of her head. The elfin face beneath was taking some getting used to. She was at least ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. Then again, she was probably having the same problem with me. She stared down at the sand as she spoke, features unreadable. She talked hesitantly, the same way she’d woken me in the spare room at dawn, asking if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. She’d had all night to get over the surprise, but she still looked at me in snatched glances, as if it weren’t allowed.
I shrugged.
“I’m the believable part, Virginia. I’m not the one back from the dead. And don’t call me kid.”
She smiled a little. “We’re all back from the dead at some point, Tak. Hazards of the profession, remember?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” She stared away down the beach for a while, where the sunrise was still a blurred blood rumor through early-morning mist. “So do you believe her?”
“That she’s Quell?” I sighed and scooped up a handful of sand. Watched it trickle away through my fingers and off the sides of my palm. “I believe she believes she is.”
Virginia Vidaura made an impatient gesture. “I’ve met wireheads who believe they’re Konrad Harlan. That isn’t what I asked you.”
“I know what you asked me, Virginia.”
“Then deal with the fucking question,” she said without heat. “Didn’t I teach you anything in the Corps?”
“Is she Quell?” Trace moisture from the swim had left tiny lines of sand still clinging to my palms. I brushed my hands together brusquely. “How can she be, right? Quell’s dead. Vaporized. Whatever your pals back at the house might like to wish for in their political wet dreams.”
She looked over her shoulder, as if she thought they might hear us. Might have woken and come stretching and yawning down to the beach after us, rested and ready to take violent offense at my lack of respect.
“I can remember a time you might have wished for it, too, Tak. A time you might have wanted her back. What happened to you?”
“Sanction Four happened to me.”
“Ah, yes. Sanction Four. Revolution called for a bit more commitment than you’d expected, did it?”
“You weren’t there.”
A small quiet opened up behind the words. She looked away. Brasil’s little band were all nominally Quellists—or neoQuellists at least—but Virginia Vidaura was the only one among them with Envoy conditioning. She’d had the capacity for willful self-deception gouged out of her in a way that would permit no easy emotional attachment to legend or dogma. She’d have, I reasoned, an opinion worth listening to. She’d have perspective.
I waited. Down the beach, wavecrash kept up a slow, expectant backbeat.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”
Her mouth quirked. “Still quoting her, though, I see.”
“Paraphrasing. Look, Virginia, you correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no record of any backup of Nadia Makita ever made. Right?”
“There’s no record of any backup of Takeshi Kovacs, either. Seems to be one out there, though.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me. But that’s the fucking Harlan family, and you can see a rationale for why they’d do it. You can see the value.”
She looked sidelong at me. “Well, it’s good to see your time on Sanction Four didn’t damage your ego.”
“Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have uses. It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.”
“Hardly plankton-standard.” She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. “Takeshi, you know Yaros and I . . .”
“Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.”
“Really?”
“Well, what he really said was ah fuck it, but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?”
She sighed. “No. It didn’t.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“There’s no point, it was all so long ago.” A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. “I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.”
I shrugged. “We must be prepared to live on time scales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realize our own dreams.”
This time the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.
“You trying to be fucking funny?”
“No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—”
“Shut up, Tak.”
The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognize them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—
Well, never mind.
I shut up. Listened to the waves.
A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and gray, but all the way up four stories of seaward-facing rooms the windows winked broadly at us.
An off note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.
“Ouch.” I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.
“At least he’s trying,” she said obscurely.
“Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.”
She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.
“You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?”
“I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like around here?”
• • •
Surfers.
You’ll find them pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World, because pretty much everywhere on Harlan’s World there’s an ocean that throws waves to die for. And to die for has a couple of meanings here. Zero point eight G, remember, and three moons—you can ride a wave along some parts of Vchira for half a dozen kilometers at a time, and the height of the things some of these guys get up on has to be seen to be believed. But the low gravity and the trilunar tug has its flip side, and the oceans on Ha
rlan’s World run current systems like nothing ever seen on Earth. Chemical content, temperature, and flow all vary alarmingly, and the sea does bitchy, unforgiving things with very little warning. The turbulence theorists are still coming to grips with a lot of it, back in their modeled simulations. Out on Vchira Beach, they’re doing a different kind of research. More than once I’ve seen the Young effect played out to perfection on a seemingly stable nine-meter face, like some Promethean myth in frame advance—the perfect rising shoulder of water eddies and stumbles drunkenly under the rider, then shatters apart as if caught by artillery frag fire. The sea opens its throat, swallows the board, swallows the rider. I’ve helped pull the survivors from the surf a few times. I’ve seen the dazed grins, the glow that seems to come off their faces as they say things like I didn’t think that bitch was ever going to get off my chest or man, did you see that shit come apart on me or most often of all, urgently, did you get my plank out okay, sam. I’ve watched them go back out again, the ones who didn’t have dislocated or broken limbs or cracked skulls from the wipeout, and I’ve watched the gnawing want in the eyes of the ones who have to wait to heal.
I know the feeling well enough. It’s just that I tend to associate it with trying to kill people other than myself.
“Why us?” Mari Ado asked with the blunt lack of manners she obviously thought went with her offworld name.
I grinned and shrugged.
“Couldn’t think of anyone else stupid enough.”
She took a feline kind of offense at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder, and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner, too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that; it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker, and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.
“Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction Four.”
Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.
Ado glanced sideways. “Don’t you think, Sierra?”
Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty. The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue color-washed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than sprayon swimwear and some cheap jewelry. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten. But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.
Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylized grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done, and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.
I cleared my throat.
“You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction Four’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.”
As an insult, it was as unjust as it was complex. Mari Ado, ex of the Little Blue Bugs, was criminally competent in a number of insurgency roles that had nothing to do with wavecraft, and for that matter no less well endowed physically than a number of the other female bodies in the room, Virginia Vidaura included. But I knew she was sensitive about her shape, and unlike Virginia or myself, she’d never been offworld. In effect I’d called her a local yokel, a surf nerd, a cheap source of sexual service, and sexually unappealing all in one. Doubtless Isa, had she been there to witness it, would have yipped with delight.
I’m still a little sensitive myself where Sanction IV’s concerned.
Ado looked back across the table to the big oak armchair at the end. “Throw this motherfucker out, Jack.”
“No.” It was a low drawl, almost sleepy. “Not at this stage.”
He sprawled almost horizontal in the dark wood seat, legs stretched out in front of him, face drooping forward, opened hands pressed loosely one on top of the other in his lap, almost as if he was trying to read his own palm.
“He’s being rude, Jack.”
“So were you.” Brasil curled himself upright and forward in the chair. His eyes met mine. A faint sweat beaded his forehead. I recognized the cause. Fresh sleeve notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much. He hadn’t given up his bad habits.
“But she’s got a point, Kovacs. Why us? Why would we do this for you?”
“You know damned well this isn’t for me,” I lied. “If the Quellist ethic isn’t alive on Vchira, then tell me where the fuck else I go looking for it. Because time is short.”
A snort from down the table. A young male surfer I didn’t know. “Man, you don’t even know if this is Quell we’re talking about. Look at you, you don’t even believe it yourself. You want us to go up against the Harlan family for the sake of a glitch in some deCom psychobitch’s fucked-up head? No way, sam.”
There were a couple of mutterings I took for assent. But the majority stayed silent and watched me.
I hooked the young surfer’s gaze. “And your name is?”
“Fuck’s it to you, sam?”
“This is Daniel,” said Brasil easily. “He hasn’t been here long. And yes, you’re looking at his real age there. Listening to it, too, I’m afraid.”
Daniel flushed and looked betrayed.
“Fact remains, Jack. We’re talking about Rila Crags here. No one ever got inside there without an invitation.”
A smile tripped like lightning from Brasil to Virginia Vidaura and on to Sierra Tres. Even Mari Ado chortled sourly into her coffee.
“What? Fucking what?”
I was careful not to join in the grinning as I looked across at Daniel. We might need him. “I’m afraid you are showing your age there, Dan. Just a little.”
“Natsume,” said Ado, as if explaining something to a child. “Name mean anything to you?”
The look she got back was answer enough.
“Nikolai Natsume.” Brasil smiled again, this time for Daniel. “Don’t worry about it, you’re a couple of hundred years too young to remember him.”
“That’s a real story?” I heard someone mutter, and felt a strange sadness seep into me. “I thought it was a propaganda myth.”
Another surfer I didn’t know twisted in her seat to look at Jack Soul Brasil, protest in her face. “Hey, Natsume never got inside.”
“Yeah, he did,” said Ado. “You don’t want to believe that crap they sell in school these days. He—”
“We can discuss Natsume’s achievements later,” said Brasil mildly. “For now it’s enough that if we have to crack Rila, the precedent already exists.”
There was a brief pause. The surfer who hadn’t believed in Natsume’s existence outside legend was whispering in Daniel’s ear.
“Okay, that’s fine,” someone else said finally, “but if the Harlan family have this woman, whoever she is, is there any point in mounting a raid? Interrogation tech they’ve got up at Rila, they’ll have cracked her by now.”
“Not necessarily.” Virginia Vidaura leaned forward across her cleared plate. Small breasts moved under her sprayon. It was strange seeing her in the surfer uniform, too. “DeCom are running state-of-the-art gear and more capacity than most AI mainframes. They’re built as well as the wetware engineers know how. Supposed to be able to beat Martian naval intelligence sy
stems, remember. I think even good interrogation software is going to look pretty sick against that.”
“They could just torture her,” said Ado, returning to her seat. “This is the Harlans we’re talking about.”
I shook my head. “If they try that, she can just withdraw into the command systems. And besides, they need her coherent at complicated levels. Inflicting short-term pain isn’t going to get them there.”
Sierra Tres lifted her head.
“You say she’s talking to you?”
“I think so, yes.” I ignored a couple more disbelieving noises from down the table. “At a guess, I’d say she’s managed to use her deCom gear to hook into a phone I used to call one of her crew a while back. Probably a residual trace in the team net system, she could run a search for it. But he’s dead now and it’s not a good connection.”
Hard laughter from a couple of the company, Daniel included. I memorized their faces.
Maybe Brasil noticed. He gestured for quiet.
“Her team are all dead, right?”
“Yes. That’s what I was told.”
“Four deComs, in a camp full of deComs.” Mari Ado made a face. “Slaughtered just like that? Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“I don’t—”
She talked over me. “That they’d let it happen, I mean. This, what’s his name, Kurumaya was it? Old-school deCom big daddy, he’s going to just let the Harlanites walk in and do that under his nose? And what about the rest of them? Doesn’t say much for their esprit de corps, does it?”
“No,” I said evenly. “It doesn’t. DeCom runs as a competition-based nail-it-and-cash-in bounty dynamic. The crews are tight-knit internally. Outside of that, from what I saw there’s not a lot of loyalty. And Kurumaya will have bowed to whatever oligarchy pressure was brought to bear, probably after the event. Sylvie’s Slipins never did themselves any favors with him, certainly not enough for him to buck the hierarchy.”
Ado curled her lip. “Sounds charming.”
“Signs of the times,” said Brasil unexpectedly. He looked at me. “When you strip away all the higher loyalties, we inevitably fall back on fear and greed. Right?”