“She could have left.”
“They had a fucking child, all right?” Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. “They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.”
Vidaura nodded. “And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.”
“Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.”
“So what happened? She upset some venerable male?”
“No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable.” The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. “Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.”
The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earth-bound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, prehuman, interstellar civilization cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels: God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Resleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.
I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. “She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the center of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.”
I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicolored idiot tide it was.
“Afterward, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometers out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.”
“That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.”
“Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.”
I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.
“So you’ve been there,” she murmured.
I nodded. “Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, sniveling by her grave. I got the story out of him.” My face twitched with the memory. “Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.”
“And then?”
“And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.”
She shook her head slightly. “The rest of who?”
“The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.” I looked at my hands. “And a few others who got in my way.”
She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.
“Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.”
“You’ve got Envoy recall,” she said numbly.
I gestured again. “Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—”
“You took their stacks?”
“Josef and the priests’, yes.”
“You destroyed them?”
“Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.” I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now. And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. “Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.”
“I think I see where this is going.”
“Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.” I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. “I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.”
Vidaura looked down into her lap. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
“No, it’s just a theory.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there’s a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they’ve gone to hell. Either way suits me.”
“How are you financing this?” she whispered.
I found a bared-teeth grin from somewhere and put it on. “Well, contrary to popular belief, some parts of what happened on Sanction Four worked out quite well for me. I’m not short of funds.”
She looked up, face tightening toward anger. “You made money out of Sanction Four?”
“Nothing I didn’t earn,” I said quietly.
Her features smoothed somewhat as she backed the anger up. But her voice still came out taut. “And are these funds going to be enough?”
“Enough for what?”
“Well.” She frowned. “To finish this vendetta. You’re hunting down the priests from the village but—”
“No, I did that last year. It didn’t take me very long, there weren’t that many. Currently, I’m hunting down the ones who were serving members of the Ecclesiastical Mastery when she was murdered. The ones who wrote the rules that killed her. That’s taking me longer; there are a lot of them, and they’re more senior. Better protected.”
“But you’re not planning to stop with them?”
I shook my head. “I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I don’t know how much Virginia told the others once we got back inside the cranked-up virtuality. I stayed down in the mapping construct while the rest of th
em adjourned to the hotel-suite section, which somehow I couldn’t help thinking of as upstairs. I don’t know what she told them, and I didn’t much care. Mostly, it was a relief just to have let someone else in on the whole story.
Not to be the only one.
People like Isa and Plex knew fragments, of course, and Radul Segesvar somewhat more. But for the rest, the New Revelation had hidden what I was doing to them from the start. They didn’t want the bad publicity or the interference of infidel powers like the First Families. The deaths were passed off as accidents, monastery burglaries gone wrong, unfortunate petty muggings. Meanwhile, the word from Isa was that there were private contracts out on me at the Mastery’s behest. The priesthood had a militant wing, but they obviously didn’t place too much faith in it, because they’d also seen fit to engage a handful of Millsport sneak assassins. One night in a small town on the Saffron Archipelago, I let one of them get close enough to test the caliber of the hired help. It wasn’t impressive.
I don’t know how much Virginia Vidaura told her surfer colleagues, but the presence of the priest in Kem Point alone made it very clear that we could not return from a raid on Rila Crags and stay on the Strip. If the New Revelation could track me this far, so could others far more competent.
As a sanctuary, Vchira Beach was blown.
Mari Ado voiced what was probably a general feeling.
“You’ve fucked this up, dragging your personal crabshit into the harbor with you. You find us a solution.”
So I did.
Envoy competence, one out of the manual—work with the tools to hand. I cast about in the immediate environment, summoned what I had that could be influenced, and saw it immediately. Personal shit had done the damage; personal shit would haul us out of the swamp, not to mention solve some more of my own more personal problems by way of a side effect. The irony of it grinned back at me.
Not everyone was so amused. Ado for one.
“Trust the fucking haiduci?” There was a well-bred Millsport sneer behind the words. “No thank you.”
Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve used them before, Mari.”
“No, you’ve used them before. I steer well clear of scum like that. And anyway, this one you don’t even know.”
“I know of him. I’ve dealt with people who’ve dealt with him before, and from what I hear he’s a man of his word. But I can check him out. You say he owes you, Kovacs?”
“Very much so.”
She shrugged. “Then that should be enough.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sierra. You can’t—”
“Segesvar is solid,” I interrupted. “He takes his debts seriously in both directions. All it needs is the money. If you’ve got it.”
Koi glanced at Brasil, who nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “We can get it easily enough.”
“Oh, happy fucking birthday, Kovacs!”
Virginia Vidaura nailed Ado with a stare. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Mari. It isn’t your money. That’s safely on deposit in a Millsport merchant bank, isn’t it?”
“What’s that supposed to—”
“Enough,” said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day—real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old-style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialed the discreet coding on speakerphone with no visual.
It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amid a lot of background noise, some of it real–virtual adjustment connection flutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.
“I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?”
“How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.”
The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.
“I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.”
I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.
“Check the account,” I told Segesvar. “The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.”
“You’re calling from a construct?”
“Go check your cash flow, Rad. I’ll hold.”
The rest was easy.
• • •
In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep, and most programs don’t bother to include the subroutines that would cause it. Long-term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely . . . odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that. You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.
We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, running what-if scenarios, and bickering. Every now and then one of us would vent an exasperated grunt, fall backward into the knee-deep water of the mapping construct, and backstroke off out of the archipelago, toward the horizon. Provided you chose your angle of escape carefully and didn’t collide with an unremembered islet or scrape your back on a reef, it was an ideal way to get away and unwind. Floating out there with the voices of the others grown faint with distance, you could feel your consciousness loosen off again, like a cramped muscle relaxing.
At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included. You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.
“There you are,” she said, with an odd lightness of tone.
“Here I am,” I agreed.
She cleared her throat. “How’s your head?”
“Cooling off.” I raised the sake cup in one hand. “Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.”
“You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.”
But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand, and poured.
“Kampai,” she said.
“Por nosotros.”
We drank. She settled onto the automold opposite me. “Trying to make me feel homesick?”
“Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?”
“I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.”
“Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.”
“And the beach life.” She reclined a little on the automold and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and tanned from life on Vchira, and the sprayon swimsuit she was wearing showed it off full-length. I felt my pulse pick up slightly.
“Very beautiful,” I admi
tted. “Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.”
She seemed to realize the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.
“What else did he tell you?”
“Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.”
“You were looking for me.”
“Yeah.” Something stopped me at that simple admission. “I was.”
“And now that you’ve found me, what?”
My pulse had settled at an accelerated pounding. The edged whine of overstay in virtual was back. Images cascaded through my head. Virginia Vidaura, hard-eyed, hard-bodied, unattainable Envoy trainer, poised before us at induction, a dream of female competence beyond everyone’s reach. Splinters of mirth in voice and eyes that might have kindled to sensuality in a less clearly defined set of relationships. A cringingly clumsy attempt at flirtation from Jimmy de Soto once in the mess bar, slapped down with brutal disinterest. Authority wielded with an utter lack of sexual tension. My own lurid undischarged fantasies, slowly flattening under an immense respect that went in at the same bone-deep level as the Envoy induction.
And then combat, the final dissipation of any romantic fumes that might have endured the training years. Vidaura’s face in a dozen different sleeves on a dozen different worlds, sharpened with pain or fury or just the intense focus of mission time. The stink of her too-long-unwashed body in a cramped shuttle on the dark side of Loyko’s moon, the slick feel of her blood on my hands one murderous night in Zihicce when she almost died. The look on her face when the orders to crush all resistance in Neruda came through.