That caused a minor storm.
“Oh, come on—”
“What?”
“It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi’s sake.”
“Schneider, she never died.”
“Now there,” Deprez said ironically, “is an article of faith.”
Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.
“All right, she never died that we know of. She just disappeared. But you don’t get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.”
“Maybe it was a valediction.”
“Maybe it was bullshit.” I stood up, unsteadily. “You want the quote, I’ll give you the quote.”
“Yeahhh!!”
“All right!!”
They scooted back to give me room.
I cleared my throat. “I have no excuses, she said. This is from the Campaign Diaries, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, fucked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan’s World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said, I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. That’s exactly what she said.”
Applause, like startled birds across the deck.
I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.
“Give us a poem,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” jeered Schneider. “A war poem.”
Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok, and Munharto, gathered around, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.
Where were my excuses?
“I never learned her poetry,” I lied, and walked away along the ship’s rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it were clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.
“Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.” It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. “No joke if you’re from the H World, huh?”
“It isn’t that.”
“No?”
“Nah. She was a fucking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death single-handed than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.”
“Impressive.”
I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself smiling. I shook my head. “Oh, Cruickshank, Cruickshank.”
“What?”
“You’re going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you’re standing on my side of the interface.”
“Yeah, right, old man.”
I shook my head again, but couldn’t seem to shake the grin loose. “Suit yourself.”
“Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.”
“Gosh, almost a whole decade.”
“I’m twenty-two, Kovacs.” She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black-and-starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn’t match the smile. “Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That’s out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal’s flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.”
“Dead at twenty-two.” It came out harsher than I’d meant.
Cruickshank drew a slow breath. “Man, you are in a shitty mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I’m back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I’m a big girl, Kovacs, so how ’bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.”
I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realization that she was right than anything else.
“Whatever you say. Big girl.”
“Yeah, I saw you looking.” She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out toward the beach. “So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?”
Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.
“I don’t know, Cruickshank. I’m not convinced this is the time and place.”
“Gate got you spooked, huh?”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
She waved it away. “Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?”
“Well, she did before, by all accounts.”
“Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.”
“Well, I guess that’s military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it sometime.”
“Back off, Kovacs.” There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. “We don’t work the camps, man. That’s government levy. Strictly homegrown.”
Riding the updraft. “Cruickshank, you don’t know a fucking thing.”
She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.
“Well, uh, I know what they say about Carrera’s Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy, by all accounts. So maybe you want to make sure you’re clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?”
She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.
“Sorry.”
“Skip it.” But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.
“No, really. I’m sorry. This place is killing me.”
An unwilling smile curled her lip.
“I mean it. I’ve been killed before, more times than you’d believe.” I shook my head. “It’s just . . . it never took this long before.”
“Yeah. Plus, you’re rappeling after the archaeologue, right?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“It is now.” She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off, and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. “I don’t blame you. She’s smart, she’s got her head wrapped around stuff that’s just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.”
She looked around.
“Surprise you, huh?”
“A little.”
“Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we’ve got back there, it’s going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Yeah.” She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. “I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.”
She looked at me.
“Feels weird, you know. It’s like I died. And now I’ve come back, and I have to face this moment. I don’t know if it should scare me. But it doesn’t. Man, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.”
There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.
She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.
“See you there, Kov
acs,” she murmured.
I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.
Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?
Extenuating circumstances. I’m dying.
The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we’d hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.
Chemicals.
That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that fucking wolf splice again. Don’t forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.
No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.
I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.
I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—
Fuck off.
I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned, and walked rapidly to the main companionway.
“Hoy, Kovacs?” It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. “Where you going, man?”
“Call of nature,” I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half a meter at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem, and lurched into the narrow space behind.
Illuminum tiles with badly fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, molded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.
Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see how the new harvest begins?
Get the fuck out of my head, Semetaire.
You are mistaken. I am no charlatan, and Semetaire is only one of a hundred names. . . .
Whoever you are, you’re looking for an antipersonnel round in the face.
But you brought me here.
I don’t think so.
I saw a skull, lolling at a rakish angle in the nets. Sardonic amusement grinning from blackened, eaten-back lips.
I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but I am finished there now. And there is work for me here.
Now you’re mistaken.
When I want you, I’ll come looking for you. Kovacs-vacs-vacs-vacs-vacs . . .
I blinked. The datadisplay ripped light across my open eyes. Someone moved behind me.
I straightened up and stared into the bulkhead above the desk. The dull metal threw back blue from the display. Light caught on a thousand tiny dents and abrasions.
The presence behind me shifted—
I drew breath.
And spun, murderous.
“Shit, Kovacs, you want to give me a heart attack?”
Cruickshank was a step away, hands on her hips. The datadisplay glow picked out the uncertain grin on her face and the unseamed shirt beneath her chameleochrome jacket.
The breath gusted out of me. My adrenaline surge collapsed.
“Cruickshank, what the fuck are you doing down here?”
“Kovacs, what the fuck are you doing here? You said a call of nature. What are you planning to do, piss on the datacoil there?”
“What did you follow me down here for?” I hissed. “You going to hold it for me?”
“I don’t know. That what you like, Kovacs? You a digital man? That your thing?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. Semetaire was gone, but the thing in my chest was still coiling languidly through me. I opened my eyes again, and she was still there.
“You going to talk like that, Cruickshank, you’d better be buying.”
She grinned. One hand brushed with apparent casualness at the unseamed opening of her shirt, thumb hooking in and slipping the fabric back to reveal the breast beneath. She looked down at her own recently acquired flesh as if entranced by it. Then she brought her fingers back to brush the nipple, flicking back and forth at it until it had stiffened.
“I look like I’m only looking, Envoy guy?” she asked lazily.
She looked up at me and it got pretty frantic after that. We closed and her thigh slid between mine, warm and hard through the soft cloth of the coveralls. I pushed her hand away from her breast and replaced it with my own. The closure became a clinch, both of us looking down at the exposed nipple squeezed between us, and what my fingers were doing to it. I could hear her breath starting to scrape as her own hand unclasped my waistband and slid inside. She cupped the end of my cock and kneaded at it with thumb and palm.
We fell sideways onto the bedshelf in a tangle of clothing and limbs. A salt damp and mustiness almost visibly rose around us on impact. Cruickshank threw out one booted foot and kicked the cabin door closed. It shut with a clang that must have been heard all the way back up to the party on deck. I grinned into Cruickshank’s hair.
“Poor old Jan.”
“Huh?” She turned from what she was doing to my prick for a moment.
“I think, ahhhh, I think this is going to piss him off. He’s been drifting after you since we left Landfall.”
“Listen, with legs like these, anyone with a male heterosex gene code is going to be drifting after me. I wouldn’t—” She started to stroke, paced a pair of seconds apart. “—Read. Anything. Into it.”
I drew breath. “Okay, I won’t.”
“Good. Anyway.” She lowered one breast toward the head of my prick and began to rub slow circles around the nipple with my glans. “He’s probably got his hands full with the archaeologue.”
“What?”
I tried to sit up. Cruickshank pushed me back down absently, most of her still focused on the rubbing friction of glans on breast.
“Nah, you just stay there till I’m finished with you. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but seeing as”—she gestured at what she was doing—“well, I guess you can deal with it. Seen the two of them sloping off together a couple of times now. And Schneider always comes back with this big shit-eating grin, so I figure, you know . . .” She shrugged, and went back to the timed strokes. “Well, he’s not a. Bad looking. Guy for a. White boy and. Wardani, well. She’d probably. Take whatever. She can get. You liking this, Kovacs?”
I groaned.
“Thought so. You guys.” She shook her head. “Standard porn-construct stuff. Never fails.”
“You come here, Cruickshank.”
“Ah-ah. No way. Later. I want to see your face when you want to come and I don’t let you.”
She had working against her the alcohol and the pipe, impending radiation poisoning, Semetaire rustling around in the back of my head, and now the thought of Tanya Wardani in Schneider’s embrace—still Cruickshank had me there in less than ten minutes with the combination of hard strokes and soft brushstrokes across her breasts. And when she got me there, she pulled me back from the brink three times with pleased, excited sounds in her throat, before finally masturbating me rapidly and violently to a climax that spattered us both with semen.
The release was like something being unplugged in my head. Wardani and Schneider, Semetaire and impending death, all went with it, blown out of my skull through my eyes with the force of the orgasm. I went limp in the narrow bed space, and the cabin beyond spun away into distant irrelevance.
When I felt something again, it was the smooth brush of Cruickshank’s thigh as she swung herself astride my chest and seated herself there.
“Now, Envoy guy,” she said, reaching down for my head with both hands. “Let’s see you pay that off.
”
Her fingers laced across the back of my head and she held me to the budding folds of flesh like a nursing mother, rocking gently. Her cunt was hot and wet on my mouth and the juices that pooled and slipped out of her tasted of bitter spice. There was a scent to her like delicately burned wood and a sound in the back of her throat like a saw blade rubbing back and forth. I could feel the tension welling up in the long muscles of her thighs as her climax built, and toward the end she lifted fractionally from her seat on my chest and began tilting her pelvis back and forth in a blind echo of coitus. The cage of fingers nursing my head between her thighs made tiny flexing motions, as if she were losing her grip on the last handhold over an abyss. The noise in her throat became a tight and urgent panting, sawing toward a hoarse cry.
You don’t lose me that easily, Wedge Wolf
Cruickshank rose on her haunches, muscles locked up rigid, and yelled her orgasm into the damp air of the cabin.
Not that easily.
She shuddered and sank back, crushing the air out of me. Her fingers let go and my head dropped back to the clammy sheets.
I am locked in and
“Now,” she said, reaching back along my body. “Let’s see what we . . . Oh.”
You couldn’t miss the surprise in her voice, but she hid the attendant disappointment well. I was semierect in her hand, an unreliable hard-on bleeding back to the muscles my body thought it needed to fight or run from the thing in my head.
Yes. Do you see how the new harvest begins? You can run, but—
Get the fuck out of my head.
I propped myself up on my elbows, feeling the shutdown settling over my face in tight masking bands. The fire we’d lit in the cabin was guttering out. I tried for a smile and felt Semetaire take it away from me.
“Sorry about that. I guess. This dying thing’s getting to me sooner than I thought.”
She shrugged. “Hey, Kovacs. The words just physical were never truer than right here and now. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”
I winced.