“So who’d he kill, Plex?”
“I. I don’t know, man.” He licked his lips. “A lot of people. All her team, all the people she—”
He stopped. I nodded, mouth tight. Detached regret for Jad, Kiyoka, and the others clamped and tamped down where it wouldn’t get in the way.
“Yes. Her. Next question.”
“Look, man, I can’t help you. You shouldn’t even—”
I shifted toward him, impatiently. Raging at the edges like lit paper. He flinched again, worse than he had when he thought I was Yukio.
“All right, all right. I’ll tell you. Just leave me alone. What do you want to know?”
Go to work. Soak it up.
“First of all I want to know what you know, or think you know, about Sylvie Oshima.”
He sighed. “Man, I told you not to get involved. Back in that sweeper bar. I warned you.”
“Yeah, me and Yukio both, it seems. Very public-spirited of you, running around warning everybody. Why’d she scare you so much, Plex?”
“You don’t know?”
“Let’s pretend I don’t.” I raised a hand, displacement gesture as the anger threatened to get out. “And let’s also pretend that if you try to lie to me, I’ll torch your fucking head off.”
He swallowed. “She’s, she says she’s Quellcrist Falconer.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “So is she?”
“Fuck, man, how would I know?”
“In your professional opinion, could she be?”
“I don’t know.” He sounded almost plaintive. “What do you want from me? You went with her to New Hok, you know what it’s like up there. I suppose, yeah, I suppose she could be. She might have stumbled on a cache of backed-up personalities. Gotten contaminated somehow.”
“But you don’t buy it?”
“It doesn’t seem very likely. I can’t see why a personality store would be set up to leak virally in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, even for a bunch of fuckwit Quellists. Where’s the value? And least of all a backup of their precious fucking revolutionary wet-dream icon.”
“So,” I said tonelessly. “Not a big fan of the Quellists, then?”
For the first time I could remember, Plex seemed to shed his shield of apologetic diffidence. A choked snort came out of him—someone with less breeding would have spit, I guessed.
“Look around you, Kovacs. You think I’d be living like this if the Unsettlement hadn’t hit the New Hok weed trade the way it did? Who do you think I’ve got to thank for that?”
“That’s a complex historical question—”
“Like fuck it is.”
“—that I’m not really qualified to answer. But I can see why you’d be pissed off. It must be tough having to trawl your playmates out of second-rate dance halls like this one. Not being able to afford the dress code on the First Families party circuit. I feel for you.”
“Ha fucking ha.”
I felt the way my own expression chilled over. Evidently he saw it, too, and the sudden rage leaked back out of him almost visibly. I talked to stop myself hitting and hurting him.
“I grew up in a Newpest slum, Plex. My mother and father worked the belaweed mills, everybody did. Temp contracts, day rate, no benefits. There were times we were lucky if we ate twice a day. And this wasn’t any fucking trade slump, either, it was business as usual. Motherfuckers like you and your family got rich off it.” I drew a breath and cranked myself back down to a dead irony. “So you’re going to have to forgive my lack of sympathy for your tragically decayed aristo circumstances, because I’m a little short right now. ’Kay?”
He wet his lips and nodded.
“Okay. Okay, man, it’s cool.”
“Yeah.” I nodded back. “Now. No reason for a stored copy of Quell to be set on viral deploy, you said.”
“Yeah. Right, that’s right.” He was stumbling over himself to get back to safe ground. “And, anyway, look, she’s, Oshima’s loaded to the eyes with all sorts of baffles to stop viral stuff soaking through the coupling. That deCom command shit is state of the art.”
“Yeah, so that brings us back to where we started. If she isn’t really Quell, why are you so scared of her?”
He blinked at me. “Why am I—? Fuck, man, because whether she is Quell or whether she isn’t, she thinks she is. That’s a major psychosis. Would you put a psychotic in charge of that software?”
I shrugged. “From what I saw in New Hok, half of deCom would qualify for the same ticket. They’re not overly balanced as a profession.”
“Yeah, but I doubt many of them think they’re the reincarnation of a revolutionary leader three centuries dead. I doubt they can quote—”
He stopped. I looked at him.
“Quote what?”
“Stuff. You know.” He looked away, twitchily. “Old stuff from the war, the Unsettlement. You must have heard the way she talks sometimes, that period-flick Japanese she comes out with.”
“Yeah, I have. But that’s not what you were going to say, Plex. Is it.”
He tried to get up from the automold. I stepped closer and he froze. I looked down at him with the same expression I’d had when I talked about my family. Didn’t even lift the shard gun.
“Quote what?”
“Man, Tanaseda would—”
“Tanaseda isn’t here. I am. Quote. What?”
He broke. Gestured weakly. “I don’t even know if you’d understand what I’m talking about, man.”
“Try me.”
“Well, it’s complicated.”
“No, it’s simple. Let me help you get started. The night I came to collect my sleeve, you and Yukio were talking about her. At a guess, you’d been doing some business with her, at a second guess you’d met her in that sweeper dock dive you took me to for breakfast, right?”
He nodded reluctantly.
“Okay. So the only thing I can’t work out is why you were so surprised to see her there.”
“I didn’t think she’d come back,” he muttered.
I remembered my first view of her that night, the entranced expression on her face as she stared at herself in the mirrorwood bar. Envoy recall dug out a fragment of conversation from the Kompcho apartment, later. Orr, talking up Lazlo’s antics:
. . . still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?
And Sylvie: What’s that?
You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko. Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.
And Jad: She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament.
I shivered. No, not equipped. Not equipped to remember anything much, wandering around in the Tekitomura night torn between Sylvie Oshima and Nadia Makita, aka Quellcrist fucking Falconer. Not equipped to do anything except maybe navigate by dredged-up fragments of recall and dream, and fetch up in some vaguely remembered bar where, just as you were trying to put yourself back together, some hard-faced gang of bearded scum with a license to kill from God came to grind your face in the assumed inferiority of your gender.
I remembered Yukio when he burst into the Kompcho apartment the next morning. The fury in his face.
Kovacs, what exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?
And his words to Sylvie when he saw her.
You know who I am.
Not a passing reference to his evident membership of the yakuza. He thought she knew him.
And Sylvie’s even response. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Because at that moment, she didn’t. Envoy recall froze frame for me on the disbelief in Yukio’s face. Not offended vanity after all. He was genuinely shocked.
In the scant seconds of the confrontation, in the seared flesh and blood of the aftermath, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he was so angry. Anger was a constant. The constant companion of the last two years and longer, rage in myself and the rage reflecting from those aroun
d me. I no longer questioned it, it was a state of being. Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.
Or:
Because you just wandered into the midst of a complicated deal with a dangerously unstable woman with a head full of state-of-the-art battletech software and a direct line back to—
What?
“What was she selling, Plex?”
The breath came out of him. He seemed to crumple with it.
“I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. She called it the Qualgrist Protocol. Something biological. They took it away from me as soon as I hooked her up with them. Soon as I told them the preliminary data checked out.” He looked away again, this time with no trace of nerves. His voice took on a slurred bitterness. “Said it was too important for me. Couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut. They brought in specialists from Millsport. Fucking Yukio came with them. They cut me out.”
“But you were there. You’d seen her that night.”
“Yeah, she was giving them stuff on blanked deCom chips. Pieces at a time, you know, ’cause she didn’t trust us.” He coughed out a laugh. “No more than we trusted her. I was supposed to go along each time and check the prelim scrollup codes. Make sure they were genuine antiques. Everything I okayed, Yukio took and handed on to his pet fucking EmPee team. I never saw any of it. And you know who fucking found her in the first place? I did. She came to me first. And all I get is flushed out with a finder’s fee.”
“How’d she find you?”
A dejected shrug. “Usual channels. She’d been asking around Tekitomura for weeks, apparently. Looking for someone to move this stuff for her.”
“But she didn’t tell you what it was?”
He picked moodily at a smear of bodypaint on the automold. “Nope.”
“Plex, come on. She made a big enough splash with you that you called in your yak pals, but she never showed you what it was she had.”
“She asked for the fucking yak, not me.”
I frowned. “She did?”
“Yeah. Said they’d be interested, said it was something they could use.”
“Oh, that’s crabshit, Plex. Why would the yakuza be interested in a biotech weapon three centuries old? They’re not fighting a war.”
“Maybe she thought they could sell it on to the military for her. For a percentage.”
“But she didn’t say that. You just told me she said it would be something they could use.”
He stared up at me. “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not wired for that fucking Envoy total-recall shit like you. I don’t remember what she said, exactly. And I don’t fucking care. Like they said, it’s got nothing to do with me anymore.”
I stepped away from him. Leaned back on the container wall and examined the shard gun absently. Peripheral vision told me he wasn’t moving from his slump on the automold. I sighed and it felt like weight shifting off my lungs, only to settle in again.
“All right, Plex. Just a couple more questions, easy ones, and I’m out of your hair. This new edition of me they’ve got, it was chasing Oshima, right? Not me?”
He clicked his tongue, barely audible above the fusion beat outside.
“Both of you. Tanaseda wants your head on a stick for what you did to Yukio, but you’re not the main attraction.”
I nodded bleakly. For a while I’d thought Sylvie must have somehow given herself away down in Tekitomura yesterday. Talked to the wrong person, been caught on the wrong surveillance cam, done something to bring the pursuit team crashing down on us like angelfire. But it wasn’t that. It was simpler and worse—they’d vectored in on my own unshielded blunder through the Quellcrist Falconer archives. Must have had a global watch on the dataflows since this whole fucking mess blew up.
And you walked right into it. Nice going.
I grimaced. “And is Tanaseda running this?”
Plex hesitated.
“No? So who’s reeling his line in then?”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t back up on me, Plex.”
“Look, I don’t fucking know. I don’t. But it’s up the food chain, I know that. First Families is what I hear, some Millsport court spymistress.”
I felt a qualified sense of relief. Not the yakuza, then. Nice to know my market value hadn’t fallen that far.
“This spymistress got a name?”
“Yeah.” He got up abruptly and went to the hospitality module. Stared down into the smashed interior. “Name of Aiura. Real hardcase by all accounts.”
“You haven’t met her?”
He poked about in the debris I’d left, found an undamaged pipe. “No. I don’t even get to see Tanaseda these days. No way I’d be let inside something at First Families level. But there’s stuff about this Aiura on the court gossip circuit. She’s got a reputation.”
I snorted. “Yeah, don’t they all.”
“I’m serious, Tak.” He fired up the pipe and looked reproachfully at me through the sudden smoke. “I’m trying to help you here. You remember that mess about sixty years ago, when Mitzi Harlan wound up in a Kossuth skullwalk porn flick?”
“Vaguely.” I’d been busy at the time, stealing bioware and offworld databonds in the company of Virginia Vidaura and the Little Blue Bugs. High-yield criminality masquerading as political commitment. We watched the news for word of the police efforts at pursuit, not much else. There hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the incessant scandals and misdemeanors of Harlan’s World’s aristo larvae.
“Yeah, well, the word is that this Aiura ran damage limitation and cleanup for the Harlan family. Closed down the studio with extreme prejudice, hunted down everyone involved. I heard most of them got the skyride. She took them up to Rila Crags at night, strapped them to a grav pack each, and just flipped the switch.”
“Very elegant.”
Plex drew his lungs full of smoke and gestured. His voice came out squeaky.
“Way she is, apparently. Old school, you know.”
“You got any idea where she got the copy of me from?”
He shook his head. “No, but I’d guess Protectorate military storage. He’s young, a lot younger than you. Are now, I mean.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Yeah, they hauled me in for an interview last month when he first got up here from Millsport. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they talk. He’s still calling himself an Envoy.”
I grimaced again.
“He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—”
“Yeah, all right, he’s young. Got it. Did he say anything about me?”
“Not really, mostly he just asked questions and listened. Only.” Plex drew on the pipe again. “I got the impression he was, I don’t know, disappointed or something. About what you were doing these days.”
I felt my eyes narrow. “He said that?”
“No, no.” Plex waved the pipe, trickled smoke from his nose and mouth. “Just an impression I got, ’s all.”
I nodded. “Okay, one last question. You said they took her to Millsport. Where?”
Another pause. I shot him a curious look.
“Come on, what have you got to lose now? Where are they taking her?”
“Tak, let it go. This is just like the sweeper bar, all over again. You’re getting involved in something that doesn’t—”
“I’m already involved, Plex. Tanaseda’s taken care of that.”
“No, listen. Tanaseda will deal. You’ve got Yukio’s stack, man. You could negotiate for its safe return. He’ll do it, I know him. He and Hirayasu senior go back a century
or more. He’s Yukio’s sempai, he’s practically his adoptive uncle. He’ll have to cut a deal.”
“And you think this Aiura’s going to let it go at that?”
“Sure, why not.” Plex gestured with the pipe. “She’s got what she wants. As long as you stay out of—”
“Plex, think about it. I’m double-sleeved. That’s a UN rap, big-time penalties for all involved. Not to mention the issue of whether they’re even entitled to hold a stored copy of a serving Envoy in the first place. If the Protectorate ever finds out about this, Aiura the spymistress is going to be looking at some serious storage, First Families connections or not. The sun’ll be a fucking red dwarf by the time they let her out.”
Plex snorted. “You think so? You really think the UN are going to come out here and risk upsetting the local oligarchy for the sake of one double-sleeving?”
“If it’s made public enough, yes. They’ll have to. They can’t be seen to do anything else. Believe me, Plex, I know, I used to do this for a living. The whole Protectorate system hangs together on an assumption that no one dare step out of line. As soon as someone does, and gets away with it, no matter how small that initial transgression, it’ll be like the first crack in the dam wall. If what’s been done here becomes common knowledge, the Protectorate will have to demand Aiura’s cortical stack on a plate. And if the First Families don’t comply, the UN will send the Envoys, because a refusal by local oligarchy to comply can only be read one way, as insurrection. And insurrections get put down, wherever they are, at whatever cost, without fail.”
I watched him, watched it sink in as it had sunk into me when I first heard the news in Drava. The understanding of what had been done, the step that had been taken, and the sequence of inevitability that we were all now locked into. The fact that there was no way back from this situation that didn’t involve someone called Takeshi Kovacs dying for good.
“This Aiura,” I said quietly, “has backed herself into a corner. I would love to know why, I would love to know what it was that was so fucking important it was worth this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. One of us has to go, me or him, and the easiest way for her to make that happen is to keep sending him after me until either he kills me or I kill him.”