Crouched in the shadow of a discarded freight container at one end of the wharf, I wondered for a moment how the other Kovacs was coping, out in the Uncleared. Like me, he’d have the standard Newpest native’s dislike for the cold, like me he’d be—
You don’t know that, you don’t know that’s who he—
Yeah, right.
Look, where the fuck are the yakuza going to get hold of a spare personality copy of an ex-Envoy? And why the fuck would they take the risk? Under all that Old Earth ancestor crabshit veneer, in the end they’re just fucking criminals. There’s no way—
Yeah, right.
It’s the itch we all live with, the price of the modern age. What if? What if, at some nameless point in your life, they copy you. What if you’re stored somewhere in the belly of some machine, living out who knows what parallel virtual existence or simply asleep, waiting to be released into the real world.
Or already unleashed and out there somewhere. Living.
You see it in the experia flicks, you hear the urban myths of friends of friends, the ones who through some freak machine error end up meeting themselves in virtual or, less often, reality. Or the Lazlo-style conspiracy horror stories of military-authorized multiple sleeving. You listen, and you enjoy the existential shiver it sends up your spine. Once in a very long time, you hear one you might even believe.
I’d once met and had to kill a man who was double-sleeved.
I’d once met myself, and it hadn’t ended well.
I was in no hurry to do it again.
And I had more than enough else to worry about.
Fifty meters down the dock, the Daikoku Dawn bulked dimly in the blizzard. She was a bigger vessel than the Guns for Guevara, by the look of her an old commercial ’loader, taken out of mothballs and regeared for deCom haulage. A whiff of antique grandeur hung about her. Light gleamed cozily from portholes and clustered in colder white and red constellations on the superstructure above. Earlier, there’d been a desultory trickle of figures up the gangways as the outgoing deComs went aboard, and lights at the boarding ramps, but now the hatches were closing up and the hoverloader stood isolated in the chill of the New Hok night.
Figures through the muffling swirl of white on black to my right. I touched the hilt of the Tebbit knife and cranked up my vision.
It was Lazlo, leading with a wincefish flex in his stride and a fierce grin on his snow-chilled face. Oishii and Sylvie in tow. Chemical functionality troweled across the woman’s features, a more intense control in the other command head’s demeanor. They crossed the open ground along the quayside and slipped into the shelter of the container. Lazlo scrubbed at his face with both hands and shook the melting snow from splayed fingers. He’d strapped his healing arm with a combat servosplint and didn’t seem to be feeling any pain. I caught the blast of alcohol on his breath.
“Okay?”
He nodded. “Anyone who’s interested, and a few who probably weren’t, now knows Kurumaya’s got us locked down. Jad’s still in there, being loudly pissed off to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Oishii? You set?”
The command head regarded me gravely. “If you are. Like I said, you’ll have five minutes max. All I can do without leaving traces.”
“Five minutes is fine,” said Lazlo impatiently.
Everybody looked at Sylvie. She managed a wan smile under the scrutiny.
“Fine,” she echoed. “Scan up. Let’s do it.”
Oishii’s face took on the abrupt inwardness of net time. He nodded minutely to himself.
“They’re running the navigational systems at standby. Drives and systems test in two hundred and twenty seconds. You’d better be in the water by the time it kicks in.”
Sylvie scraped up some hollow-eyed professional interest and a stifled cough.
“Hull security?”
“Yeah, it’s on. But the stealth suits should throw back most of the scan. And when you get down to water level, I’m going to pass you off as a couple of ripwings waiting for easy fish in the wake turbulence. Soon as the system test cycle starts, get up that chute. I’ll vanish you on the internal scanners, and the navgear will assume it lost the rips in the wake. Same for you coming out, Lazlo. So stay in the water until she’s well down the estuary.”
“Great.”
“You get us a cabin?” I asked.
The corner of Oishii’s mouth twitched. “Of course. No luxury spared for our fugitive friends. Starboard lower are mostly empty, S-thirty-seven is all yours. Just push.”
“Time to go,” hissed Lazlo. “One at a time.”
He flitted out of the cover of the container with the same accomplished wincefish lope I’d seen deployed in the Uncleared, was a moment exposed to view along the quay, and then swung himself lithely off the edge of the wharf and was gone again. I glanced sideways at Sylvie and nodded.
She went, less smoothly than Lazlo, but with an echo of the same grace. I thought I heard a faint splash this time. I gave her five seconds and followed, across the blizzard-shrouded open space, crouch to grab the top rung of the inspection ladder, and down, hand-over-rapid-hand, to the chemical stink of the estuary below. When I was immersed to the waist I let go and fell back into the water.
Even through the stealth suit and the clothes I wore over it, the shock of entry was savage. The cold stabbed through, clutched at my groin and chest, and forced the air out of my lungs through gritted teeth. The gecko-grip cells in my palms flexed their filaments in sympathy. I drew in a fresh breath and cast about in the water for the others.
“Over here.”
Lazlo gestured from a corrugated section of the dock where he and Sylvie were clinging to a corroded cushioning generator. I slipped through the water toward them and let my genetech hands grip me directly to the evercrete. Lazlo breathed in jerkily and spoke through chattering teeth.
“Get ttto the stttern and tttread water between the dock and the hull. You’ll sssee the launchers. Dddddon’t dddrink the water, eh.”
We traded clenched grins and kicked off.
It was hard work, swimming against a body reflex that wanted nothing more than to curl up tight against the cold and shudder. Before we’d gone halfway, Sylvie was falling behind and we had to go back for her. Her breath was coming in harsh bursts, her teeth were gritted, and her eyes were starting to roll.
“Cccan’t hold it tttogether,” she muttered as I turned in the water and Lazlo helped haul her onto my chest. “Dddon’ttt tell me we’re whu-whu-wwinning, whu-winning fffucking wh-what?”
“Be okay,” I managed through my own clamped jaws. “Hold on. Las, you keep going.”
He nodded convulsively and flailed off. I struck out after him, awkward with the burden on my chest.
“Is there no other fucking choice?” she moaned, barely above a whisper.
Somehow I got us both to the rising bulk of the Daikoku Dawn’s stern where Lazlo was waiting. We paddled around into the crevice of water between the ’loader’s hull and the dock, and I slapped a hand against the evercrete wall to steady myself.
“Llless thththan a mmminute,” said Lazlo, presumably from reference to a retinal time display. “Lllet’s hope Oishii’ssss ppplugged well in.”
The hoverloader awoke. First the deep thrum as the antigrav system shifted from buoyancy to drive, then the shrill whining of the air intakes and the frrr-frump along the hull as the skirts filled. I felt the sideways tug of water swirling around the vessel. Spray exploded from the stern and showered me. Lazlo offered me one more wide-eyed grin and pointed.
“Up there,” he yelled over the engine noise.
I followed the direction of his arm and saw a battery of three circular vents, hatches sliding out of the way in spiral petals. Maintenance lights showed inside the chutes, a chain-link inspection ladder up the ’loader’s skirt to the lip of the first opening.
The note of the engines deepened, settling down.
Lazlo went first, up the rungs of the ladder and on
to the scant, down-curving ledge offered by the top of the skirt. Braced against the hull above, he gestured down at me. I shoved Sylvie toward the ladder, yelled in her ear to climb, and saw with relief that she wasn’t too far gone to do it. Lazlo grabbed her as soon as she got to the top, and after some maneuvering the two of them disappeared inside the shaft. I went up the ladder as fast as my numbed hands would pull me, ducked inside the chute and out of the noise.
A couple of meters above me I saw Sylvie and Lazlo, limbs splayed between protrusions on the inside of the launch tube. I remembered the wincefish’s casual boast the first time I met him—a seven-meter crawl up a polished steel chimney. Nothing to it. It was a relief to see that, like a lot of Lazlo’s talk, this had been an exaggeration. The tube was far from polished smooth, and there were numerous handholds built into the metal. I gripped experimentally at a scooped-out rung over my head and found I could haul myself up the incline without too much effort. Higher up. I found smoothly rounded bumps in the metal where my feet could take some of my body’s weight. I rested against the faintly shuddering surface of the tube for a moment, recalled Oishii’s five-minute maximum, and got moving again.
At the top of the chute, I found a bedraggled Sylvie and Lazlo braced on a finger-thin rim below an open hatchway filled with sagging orange canvasynth. The wincefish gave me a weary look.
“This is it.” He thumped the yielding surface above his head. “This is the bottom-level raft. First to drop. You squeeze in here, get on top of the raft, and you’ll find an inspection hatch that leads to the crawl space between levels. Just pop the nearest access panel and you’re out in a corridor somewhere. Sylvie, you’d better go first.”
We worked the canvasynth raft back from one edge of the hatchway, and warm, stale air gusted through into the chute. I laughed with sheer involuntary pleasure at the feel of it. Lazlo nodded sourly.
“Yeah, enjoy. Some of us are going back in the fucking water now.”
Sylvie squeezed through, and I was about to follow when the wincefish tugged at my arm. I turned back. He hesitated.
“Las? Come on, man, we’re running out of time.”
“You.” He lifted a warning finger. “I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her. You keep her safe till we can get to you. Till she’s back online.”
“All right.”
“I’m trusting you,” he repeated.
Then he turned, unlatched his hold on the hatch, and was sliding rapidly down the curve of the launcher chute. As he disappeared at the bottom, I heard a faint whoop come floating back up.
I stared after him for what seemed like far too long, then turned and forced my way irritably through the canvasynth barrier between myself and my newly acquired responsibilities.
The memory rolled back over me.
In the bubblefab—
“You. Help me. Help me!“
Her eyes pin me. Muscles of her face taut with desperation, mouth slightly open. It’s a sight that sends a deep and unlooked-for sense of arousal bubbling through my guts. She’s thrown back the sleeping bag and leaned across to grab at me, and in the low light from the muffled illuminum lamp, under the reaching arm, I can see the slumped mounds her breasts make across her chest. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen her like this—the Slipins don’t suffer from coyness, and after a month of close-quarters camping across the Uncleared I could probably draw most of them naked from memory—but something about Sylvie’s face and posture is suddenly deeply sexual.
“Touch me.” The voice that is not hers rasps and prickles the hairs on my neck erect. “Tell me you’re fucking real.”
“Sylvie, you’re not—”
Her hand shifts, from my arm to my face.
“I think I know you,” she says wonderingly. “Black Brigade elect, right. Tetsu battalion. Odisej? Ogawa?”
The Japanese she’s using is archaic, centuries out of date. I fight down the ghost of a shiver and stay in Amanglic. “Sylvie, listen to me—”
“Your name’s Silivi?” Face racked with doubt. She shifts languages to meet me. “I don’t remember, I, it’s, I can’t—”
“Sylvie.”
“Yeah, Silivi.”
“No,” I say through lips that feel numb. “Your name’s Sylvie.”
“No.” There’s a sudden panic in her now. “My name’s. My name’s. They call me, they called me, they—”
Her voice stops up and her eyes flinch sideways, away from mine. She tries to get up out of the sleeping bag. Her elbow skids on the slick material of the lining, and she slips over toward me. I put out my arms and they’re suddenly full of her warm, tightly muscled torso. The fist I snapped closed when she spoke opens involuntarily and the cortical stacks crushed inside it spill onto the floor. My palms press against taut flesh. Her hair moves and brushes at my neck and I can smell her, warmth and female sweat welling up out of the opened sleeping bag. Something trips again in the pit of my stomach, and maybe she can feel it, too, because she makes a low moaning sound into the flesh of my throat. Lower down in the confines of the bag, her legs shift around impatiently and then part for my hand as it slides down over one hip and between her thighs. I’m stroking her cunt before I realize what I’m doing, and she’s damp to the touch.
“Yes.” It gusts out of her. “Yes, that. There.”
This time when her legs shift, her whole body tilts from the hips upward and her thighs spread as wide as the sleeping bag will allow. My fingers slip into her and she makes a tight hissing noise, pulls back from the clasp on my neck, and glares at me as if I’ve just stabbed her. Her fingers hook into my shoulder and upper arm. I rub long, slow ovals up inside her and feel her hips pump in protest at the deliberate pace of the motion. Her breath starts to come in shortening bursts.
“You’re real,” she mutters in between. “Oh, you’re real.”
And now her hands are moving over me, fingers tangling in the fastenings of my jacket, rubbing at my rapidly swelling crotch, gripping my face at the jaw. She seems unable to decide what to do with the body she’s touching, and slowly the realization soaks through me that as she slides irretrievably into the crevasse of her orgasm, she’s testing the assertion coming faster and faster across her lips you’re real, you’re real, you’re fucking real, aren’t you, you’re real, oh, you’re real, yes, you fucker, yes, yes, you’re real you’re fucking real—
Her voice locks up in her throat with her breath, and her stomach flexes her almost double with the force of the climax. She twines around me like the long lethal ribbons of belaweed out beyond Hirata’s Reef, thighs clenched on my hand, body folded onto and over my chest and shoulder. From somewhere
I know she’s staring off that shoulder at the shadows on the far side of the
bubblefab.
“My name is Nadia Makita,” she says quietly.
And again, it’s like current through my bones. Like the moment she grabbed my arm, the shock of the name. The litany kicks off in my head. It’s not possible it’s not—
I ease her loose from my shoulder, pull her back, and the motion dislodges a fresh wave of pheromones. Our faces are a couple of centimeters apart.
“Micky,” I mutter. “Serendipity.”
Her head darts forward like a bird’s and her mouth fastens on mine, shutting off the words. Her tongue is hot and feverish, and her hands are working at my clothes again, this time with determined purpose. I struggle out of my jacket, unfasten the heavy canvasynth trousers, and her hand is burrowing in the gap as they open. Weeks in the Uncleared with barely the privacy to masturbate, a body kept on ice for centuries, it’s all I can do to keep from coming as her hand closes around the shaft of my cock. She feels it and grins in the kiss, lips unsticking from mine, the faintest scrape of teeth on teeth and the grate of a chuckle deep in her throat. She kneels upright on the sleeping bag, balancing with one arm on my shoulder while the other stays between my legs, working. Her fingers are long and slim and hot and clammy with sweat, curling into a practiced g
rip and pumping gently up and down. I force the trousers down past my hips and lean backward to give her space. The ball of her thumb rubs back and forth against my glans like a metronome. I groan my lungs empty and instantly she slackens the pace almost to a halt. She presses her free hand flat on my chest, pushes me toward the floor while her grip on my hard-on tightens almost to crushing. Coiled muscle in my stomach keeps me flexed upright from the floor against the pressure she’s exerting and damps down the pulsing need to come.
“Do you want to be inside me?” she asks seriously.
I shake my head. “Whatever, Sylvie. Whatever—”
A hard tug on the root of my cock. “My name is not Sylvie.”
“Nadia. Whatever.” I grasp her by one curved ass cheek, one long hard thigh, and drag her forward onto me. She takes the hand from my chest, reaches down and spreads herself, then sinks slowly onto my cock. Our gasps blend at the contact. I search inside myself somewhere for a little Envoy control, settle my hands at her hips, and help her lift herself up and down. But this isn’t going to last long. She reaches for my head and draws it down to one swollen breast, presses my face into the flesh, and guides me to the nipple. I suck it in and grip the other breast in one hand while she rises on her knees and rides us both to a climax that dims out my vision as it explodes through us.
We collapse onto each other in the dimly lit bubblefab, slick with sweat and shuddering. The heater throws a reddish glow across our tangled limbs and tight-pressed bodies and there’s a tiny sound in the gloom that could be this woman weeping or maybe just the wind outside, trying to find a way in.
I don’t want to look her in the face to find out which.
• • •
In the bowels of the steadily thrumming Daikoku Dawn, we levered ourselves up from the crawl space into a corridor and made our dripping way to S37. As promised, the door flexed open at a push. Inside, lights sprang up in an unexpectedly luxurious space. I’d subconsciously been preparing myself for something along the lines of the spartan two-bunk accommodation we’d had on the Guns for Guevara, but Oishii had done us proud. The cabin was a well-appointed comfort class with an autoform bed space that could be programmed to swell up as twin singles or a broad double. The fixtures showed wear, but a faint smell of mothball antibacterials clung to the air and made everything seem pristine.