Kiyoka reached up and took Jadwiga’s new, long-fingered hand, but it was a conscious movement, almost hesitant. It’s a standard problem with resleeves. The pheremonal mix is never the same, and entirely too much of most sex-based relationships is built on that stuff.
“She’s fucked, Jad. I can’t do anything for her. I wouldn’t know where to start.” Kiyoka gestured at the datacoil again. “I just don’t know what’s going on in there.”
Silence. Everybody staring at the storm of color in the coil.
“Ki.” I hesitated, weighing the idea. A month of shared operational deCom had gone some way to making me part of the team, but Orr at least still saw me as an outsider. With the rest, it depended on mood. Lazlo, usually full of easy camaraderie, was prone to occasional spasms of paranoia in which my unexplained past suddenly made me shadowy and sinister. I had some affinity with Jadwiga, but a lot of that was probably the close genetic match on the sleeves. And Kiyoka could sometimes be a real bitch in the mornings. I wasn’t really sure how any of them would react to this. “Listen, is there any way we can fire the decoupler?”
“What?” Orr, predictably.
Kiyoka looked unhappy. “I’ve got chemicals that might do it, but—”
“You are not fucking taking her hair.”
I got up from the bed and faced the giant. “And if what’s in there kills her? You’d prefer her long-haired and dead, would you?”
“You shut your fucking m—”
“Orr, he’s got a point.” Jadwiga moved smoothly between us. “If Sylvie’s caught something off the co-op and her own antivirals won’t fight it, then that’s what the decoupler’s for, isn’t it?”
Lazlo nodded vigorously. “Might be her only hope, man.”
“She’s been like this before,” said Orr stubbornly. “That thing at Iyamon Canyon last year. She was out for hours, fever through the roof, and she woke up fine.”
I saw the look swoop among them. No. Not fine exactly.
“If I induce the decoupler,” said Kiyoka slowly, “I can’t tell what damage it’ll do her. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s fully engaged with the command software. That’s how come the fever—she should be shutting down the link and she isn’t.”
“Yeah. And there’s a reason for that.” Orr glared around at us. “She’s a fucking fighter, and she’s in there, still fighting. She wanted to blow the coupling, she’d have done it herself.”
“Yeah, and maybe whatever she’s fighting won’t let her.” I turned back to the bed. “Ki, she’s backed up, right? The cortical stack’s nothing to do with the command software?”
“Yeah, it’s security-buffered.”
“And while she’s like this, the stack update is locked out, right?”
“Uh, yeah, but . . .”
“Then even if decoupling does damage her, we’ve got her in one piece on stack. What update cycle do you guys run?”
Another exchange of glances. Kiyoka frowned. “I don’t know, it’ll be near to standard, I guess. Every couple of minutes, say.”
“Then—”
“Yeah, that’d suit you, wouldn’t it, Mister fucking Serendipity.” Orr jabbed a finger in my direction. “Kill the body, cut out the life with your little knife. How many of those fucking cortical stacks are you carrying around by now? What’s that about? What are you planning to do with them all?”
“That’s not really the issue here,” I said mildly. “All I’m saying is that if Sylvie comes out of the decouple damaged, we can salvage the stack before it updates and then go back to the bunker and—”
He swayed toward me. “You’re talking about fucking killing her.”
Jadwiga pushed him back. “He’s talking about saving her, Orr.”
“And what about the copy that’s living and breathing right here and now. You want to slit her throat just because she’s brain-damaged and we’ve got a better copy backed up? Just like you’ve done with all these other people you don’t want to talk about?”
I saw Lazlo blink and look at me with newly suspicious eyes. I lifted my hands in resignation. “Okay, forget it. Do what you want, I’m just working my passage here.”
“We can’t do it anyway, Mick.” Kiyoka was wiping Sylvie’s brow again. “If the damage was subtle, it’d take us more than a couple of minutes to spot it and then it’s too late, the damage gets updated to the stack.”
You could kill this sleeve, anyway, I didn’t say. Cut your losses, cut its throat right now and excise the stack for—
I looked back at Sylvie and bit down on the thought. Like looking at Jadwiga’s clone-related sleeve, it was a kind of mirror, a flash glimpse of self that caught me out.
Maybe Orr was right.
“One thing’s sure,” said Jadwiga somberly. “We can’t stay out here in this state. With Sylvie down, we’re running around the Uncleared with no more survivability than a bunch of sprogs. We’ve got to get back to Drava.”
More silence, while the idea settled in.
“Can she be moved?” I asked.
Kiyoka made a face. “She’ll have to be. Jad’s right, we can’t risk staying out here. We’ve got to pull back, tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Yeah, and we could use some cover coming in,” muttered Lazlo. “It’s better than six hundred klicks back, no telling what we’re going to run into. Jad, any chance we could dig up some friendlies en route? I know it’s a risk.”
A slow nod from Jadwiga. “But probably worth it.”
“Going to be the whole night,” said Lazlo. “You got any meth?”
“Is Mitzi Harlan straight?”
She touched Kiyoka’s shoulder again, hesitant caress turning to business-like clap on the back, and left. With a thoughtful backward glance at me, Lazlo followed her out. Orr stood over Sylvie, arms folded.
“You don’t fucking touch her,” he warned me.
• • •
From the relative safety of the Quellist listening post, Jadwiga and Lazlo spent the rest of the night scanning the channels, searching the Uncleared for signs of friendly life. They reached out across the continent with delicate electronic tendrils, sat sleep-deprived and chemically wired in the backwash glow of their portable screens, looking for traces. From where I stood and watched, it looked a lot like the submarine hunts you see in old Alain Marriott experia flicks like Polar Quarry and The Deep Chase. It was in the nature of the work that deCom crews didn’t do much long-range communication. Too much risk of being picked up by a mimint artillery system or a marauding pack of karakuri scavengers. Electronic transmission over distance was slashed to an absolute minimum of needlecast squirts, usually to register a kill claim. The rest of the time, the crews ran mostly silent.
Mostly.
But with skill you could feel out the whisper of local net traffic among the members of a crew, the flickering traces of electronic activity that the deComs carried with them like the scent of cigarettes on a smoker’s clothes. With more skill, you could tell the difference between these and mimint spoor and, with the right scrambler codes, you could open communication. It took until just before dawn, but in the end Jad and Lazlo managed to get a line on three other deCom crews working the Uncleared between our position and the Drava beachhead. Coded needlecasts sang back and forth, establishing identity and clearance, and Jadwiga sat back with a broad tetrameth grin on her face.
“Nice to have friends,” she said to me.
Once briefed, all three crews agreed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to provide cover for our retreat within their own operational range. It was pretty much an unwritten rule of deCom conduct in the Uncleared to offer that much succor—you never knew when it might be you—but the competitive standoffishness of the trade made for grudging adherence. The positions of the first two crews forced us into a long, crooked path of withdrawal, and both were grumpily unwilling to move either to meet us or to provide escort south. With the third we got lucky. Oishii Eminescu was camped 250 kilometers northwe
st of Drava with nine heavily armed and equipped colleagues. He offered immediately to move up and fetch us from the previous crew’s cover radius, and then to bring us all the way back to the beachhead.
• • •
“Truth is,” he told me, as we stood at the center of his encampment and watched the daylight leach out of another truncated winter afternoon, “we can use the break. Kasha’s still carrying some splash damage from that emergency deal we worked in Drava night before you guys got in. She says she’s fine, but you can feel it in the wires when we’re deployed that she’s not. And the others are pretty tired, too. Plus we’ve done three clusters and twenty-odd autonomous units in the last month. That’ll do us for now. No point in pushing it till it breaks.”
“Seems overly rational.”
He laughed. “You don’t want to judge us all by Sylvie’s standards. Not everybody’s that driven.”
“I thought driven came with the territory. DeCom to the max and all that.”
“Yeah, that’s the song.” A wry grimace. “They sell it to the sprogs that way, and then yeah, the software, it naturally inclines you to excess. That’s how come the casualty rates. But in the end, it’s just software. Just wiring, sam. You let your wiring tell you what to do, what kind of human being does that make you?”
I stared at the darkening horizon. “I don’t know.”
“Got to think past that stuff, sam. Got to. It’ll kill you if you don’t.”
On the other side of one of the bubblefabs, someone went past in the thickening gloom and called something out in Stripjap. Oishii grinned and yelled back. Laughter rattled back and forth. Behind us, I caught the scent of wood smoke as someone kindled a fire. It was a standard deCom camp—temporary ’fabs blown and hardened from stock that would dissolve down just as rapidly as soon as it was time to move on. Barring occasional stopovers in abandoned buildings like the Quellist listening post, I’d been living in similar circumstances with Sylvie’s crew for most of the last five weeks. Still, there was a relaxed warmth around Oishii Eminescu that was at odds with most of the deComs I’d run into so far. A lack of the usual racing-dog edginess.
“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.
“Oh, a while. While longer than I’d like, but—”
A shrug. I nodded.
“But it pays. Right?”
He grinned sourly. “Right. I’ve got a younger brother studying Martian artifact tech in Millsport, parents both coming up on needing resleeves they can’t afford. Way the economy’s going right now, nothing else I could do would pay enough to cover the outlay. And the way Mecsek’s butchered the education charter and the sleeve pension system, these days you don’t pay, you don’t get.”
“Yeah, they’ve really fucked things up since I was last here.”
“Been away, huh?” He didn’t push the point the way Plex had. Old-style Harlan’s World courtesy—if I wanted to tell him I’d been doing time in storage, he probably figured I’d get around to it. And if I didn’t, well, then, what business was it of his anyway.
“Yeah, about thirty, forty years. Lot of changes.”
Another shrug. “Been coming for longer than that. Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened. Mecsek’s just the late-stage bad news.”
“This enemy you cannot kill,” I murmured.
He nodded and finished the quote for me. “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.”
“So I guess someone’s not been watching the waves very carefully.”
“That isn’t it, Micky.” He was looking away toward the failing light in the west, arms folded. “Times have changed since she was around, that’s all. What’s the point of toppling a First Families regime, here or anywhere else, if the Protectorate are just going to come in and unload the Envoys on you for your trouble?”
“You got a point there.”
He grinned again, more real humor in it this time. “Sam, it’s not a point. It’s the point. It’s the single big difference between then and now. If the Envoy Corps had existed back in the Unsettlement, Quellism would have lasted about six months. You can’t fight those fuckers.”
“They lost at Innenin.”
“Yeah, and how often have they lost since? Innenin was a minor glitch, a blip on the scope, strictly.”
Memory roared briefly down on me. Jimmy de Soto screaming and clawing at the ruins of his face with fingers that have already scooped out one eye and look like getting the other if I don’t . . .
I locked it down.
Minor glitch. Blip on the scope.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said.
“Maybe I am,” he agreed quietly.
We stood for a while in silence after that, watching the dark arrive. The sky had cleared enough to show a waning Daikoku spiked on mountains to the north and a full but distant Marikanon like a copper coin thrown high over our heads. Swollen Hotei still lay below the horizon to the west. Behind us, the fire settled in. Our shadows shaded into solidity amid flickering red glow.
When it started to get too hot to stand there comfortably, Oishii offered a mannered excuse and drifted away. I endured the heat across my back for another minute after he’d gone, then turned and stared blink-eyed into the flames. A couple of Oishii’s crew crouched on the far side of the fire, warming their hands. Rippling, indistinct figures in the heated air and darkness. Low tones of conversation. Neither of them looked at me. Hard to tell if that was old-style courtesy like Oishii’s or just the usual deCom cliquishness.
What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?
Always the easy questions.
I left the fire and picked my way through the bubblefabs to where we’d pitched three of our own, diplomatically separate from Oishii’s. Smooth cold on my face and hands as my skin noticed the sudden lack of warmth. Moonglow on the ’fabs made them look like breaching bottlebacks in a sea of grass. When I reached the one where Sylvie was bedded down, I noticed brighter light splintering out around the closed flap. The others were in darkness. Alongside, two bugs leaned at canted angles on their parking racks, steering gear and weapons stands branching against the sky. The third was gone.
I touched the chime patch, pulled open the flap, and went in. On one side of the interior, Jadwiga and Kiyoka sprang hastily apart on a tangle of bedding. Opposite them, beside a muffled illuminum night-lamp, Sylvie lay corpse-like in her sleeping bag, hair combed carefully back from her face. A portable heater glowed at her feet. There was no one else in the ’fab.
“Where’s Orr?”
“Not here.” Jad rearranged her clothing crossly. “You might have fucking knocked, Micky.”
“I did.”
“Okay, you might have fucking knocked and waited, then.”
“Sorry, it’s not what I was expecting. So where’s Orr?”
Kiyoka waved an arm. “Gone on the bug with Lazlo. They volunteered for perimeter watch. Got to show willing, we figured. These people are going to carry us home tomorrow.”
“So why don’t you guys use one of the other ’fabs?”
Jadwiga looked across to Sylvie. “Because someone’s got to keep watch in here, too,” she said softly.
“I’ll do it.”
They both looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then at each other. Then Kiyoka shook her head.
“Can’t. Orr’d fucking kill us.”
“Orr isn’t here.”
Another exchange of glances. Jad shrugged.
“Yeah, fuck it, why not.” She stood up. “C’mon, Ki. Watch won’t change for another four hours. Orr’s not going to be any the wiser.”
Kiyoka hesitated. She leaned over Sylvie and put a hand on her forehead.
“All right, but if anything—”
“Yeah, I’ll call you. Go on, get out of here.”
“Yeah, Ki—come on.” Jadwiga chivied the other woman to
the doorflap. As they were stepping out, she paused and grinned back at me. “And Micky. I’ve seen the way you look at her. No peeking and prodding, eh? No squeezing the fruit. Keep your fingers out of pies that don’t belong to you.”
I grinned back. “Fuck you, Jad.”
“Yeah, you wish. In your dreams, man.”
Kiyoka mouthed a more conventional thanks, and they were gone. I sat down beside Sylvie and stared at her in silence. After a couple of moments, I reached out and stroked her brow in an echo of Kiyoka’s gesture. She didn’t move. Her skin was hot and papery dry.
“Come on, Sylvie. Pull out of there.”
No response.
I took back my hand and stared at the woman some more.
What the fuck are you doing out here, Kovacs?
She’s not Sarah. Sarah’s gone. What the fuck are you—
Oh, shut up.
It’s not like I had another choice, is it?
Recall of the final moments in Tokyo Crow came and demolished that one. The safety of the table with Plex, the warm anonymity, and the promise of a ticket out tomorrow—I remembered standing up and walking away from it all, as if in answer to a siren song. Into the blood and fury of the fight.
In retrospect it was a moment so hinged, so loaded with implications of shifting fate, that it should have creaked at me as I moved to step through it.
But in retrospect they always are.
Got to say, Micky, I like you. Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows. Can’t put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.
That’s nice.
But it’s not enough.
My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve; it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone-new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket, and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.