Southward, Rila speared up out of the sea, distant enough to appear slim and weaponish—a dark, crooked blade, unlit but for the cluster of lights from the citadel at the top.
I looked at it and smoked in silence for a while.
He’s up there.
Or somewhere downtown, looking for you.
No, he’s there. Be realistic about this.
All right, he’s there. And so is she. So for that matter is this Aiura, and a couple of hundred handpicked Harlan family retainers. Worry about stuff like that when you get to the top.
A launch barge slid past in the moonlight, on its way out to a firing position farther up the Reach. At the rear, the deck was piled high with tumbled packages, webbing, and helium cylinders. The sawn-off forward superstructure thronged with figures at rails, waving and firing flares into the night. A sharp hooting lifted from the vessel as it passed, the Harlan birthday hymn picked out in harsh collision alert blasts.
Happy birthday, motherfucker.
“Kovacs?”
It was Sierra Tres. She’d reached the cockpit without me noticing, which said either a lot for her stealth skills or as much for my lack of focus. I hoped it was the former.
“You okay?”
I considered that for a moment. “Do I not look okay?”
She made a characteristically laconic gesture and seated herself in the other pilot chair. For quite a long time, she just looked at me.
“So what’s going on with the kid?” she asked finally. “You looking to recapture your long-lost youth?”
“No.” I jerked a thumb southward. “My long-lost fucking youth is out there somewhere, trying to kill me. There’s nothing going on with Isa. I’m not a fucking pedophile.”
Another long, quiet spell. The launch barge slipped away into the evening. Talking to Tres was always like this. Under normal circumstances, I’d have found it irritating, but now, caught in the calm before midnight, it was curiously restful.
“How long do you think they had that viral stuff tagged to Natsume?”
I shrugged. “Hard to tell. You mean, was it long-term shadowing or a trap set specifically for us?”
“If you like.”
I knocked ash off the cigar and stared at the ember beneath. “Natsume’s a legend. Granted a dimly remembered one, but I remember him. So will the copy of me the Harlans have hired. He probably also knows by now that I talked to people back in Tekitomura, and that I know they’re holding Sylvie at Rila. He knows what I’d do, given that information. A little Envoy intuition would do the rest. If he’s in tune, then yeah, maybe he had them clip some viral watchdogs to Natsume, waiting for me to show up. With the backing he’s got now, it wouldn’t be hard to write a couple of shell personalities, have them wired in with faked credentials from one of the other Renouncer monasteries.”
I drew on the cigar, felt the bite of the smoke, and let it up again.
“Then again, maybe the Harlan family had Natsume tagged from way back anyway. They’re not a forgiving lot, and him climbing Rila like that made them look stupid, even if it wasn’t much more than a Quellboy poster stunt.”
Sierra was silent, staring ahead through the cockpit windshield.
“Comes to the same thing in the end,” she said at last.
“Yes, it does. They know we’re coming.” Oddly enough, saying it made me smile. “They don’t know exactly when or exactly how, but they know.”
We watched the boats around us. I smoked the Erkezes down to a stub. Sierra Tres sat silent and motionless.
“I guess Sanction Four was hard,” she said later.
“You guess right.”
For once I beat her at her own taciturn game. I flicked the spent cigar away and fished out another two. I offered her one and she shook her head.
“Ado blames you,” she told me. “So do some of the others. But I don’t think Brasil does. He appears to like you. Always has, I think.”
“Well, I’m a likable guy.”
A smile bent her mouth. “So it seems.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looked away over the forward decks of the trimaran. The smile was gone now, retracted into habitual cat-like calm.
“I saw you, Kovacs.”
“Saw me where?”
“Saw you with Vidaura.”
That sat between us for a while. I drew life into my cigar and puffed enough smoke to hide behind.
“See anything you liked?”
“I wasn’t in the room. But I saw you both going there. It didn’t look as if you were planning a working lunch.”
“No.” Memory of Virginia’s virtual body crushed against mine sent a sharp twinge through the pit of my stomach. “No, we weren’t.”
More quiet. Faint basslines from the clustered lights of southern Kanagawa. Marikanon crept up and joined Daikoku in the northeastern sky. As we drifted idly southward, I could hear the almost subsonic grinding of the maelstrom in full flow.
“Does Brasil know?” I asked.
Now it was her turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Have you told him?”
“No.”
“Has she?”
And more quiet. I remembered Virginia’s throaty laughter, and the sharp, unmatching shards of the three sentences she used to dismiss my concerns and open the floodgates.
This isn’t something that’s going to bother Jack. This isn’t even real, Tak. And anyway, he isn’t going to know.
I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amid bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.
Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.
Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started. It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.
Hey, she was there, too.
After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.
“Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,” she said cryptically and wandered off toward the stern.
• • •
A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fair-weather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi, and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock—from several of our nearest neighbors, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.
Boubin Islander bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.
Then the real fireworks began.
“Look,” Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of childlike excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. “There go the first ones. Liftoff.”
On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy, Boubin Islander had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy—you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.
“And they?
??ve cut the ropes,” the presenter informed us gaily. “The balloons are rising. I can see the—”
“Do we have to have this on?” I asked.
Brasil shrugged. “Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.”
The next moment, the sky cracked open.
Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-meter demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine-swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.
The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.
The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.
Even the radio commentator shut up.
From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again; night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colors again. The scorched air snarled.
Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien-built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-meter line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images. Radio reception died.
“Time to go,” said Brasil.
He was grinning.
So, I realized, was I.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from Boubin Islander’s dive steps, let go of the rail, and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of meters below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet, and blew it clear of water.
Tres bobbed up a few meters away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgment. I cast about for Brasil.
“Jack?”
His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.
“Under you. Chilly, huh?”
“Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?”
“What do you think?”
“All right, then. You know what to do?”
I heard her sigh. “Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.”
“Got it in one.”
I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colors were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.
There was a kind of comfort in that.
“All right then.” I drew air, harder than necessary. “Let’s do this.”
I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over, and began to swim.
Brasil had taken us as far south of the general traffic as was safe without attracting attention, but we were still a long way off the Crags. Under normal circumstances, getting there would have been a couple of hours’ hard work at least. Currents, sucked south through the Reach by the maelstrom, helped somewhat, but the only thing that really made the scuba approach viable was the modified buoyancy system. With electronic security in the archipelago effectively blinded and deafened by the orbital storm, no one was going to be able to pick up a one-man grav engine underwater. And with a carefully applied vector, the same power that maintained diver flotation would also drive us south at machine speed.
Like seawraiths out of the Ebisu daughter legend, we slid through the darkened water an arm’s reach apart, while above us the surface of the sea bloomed silently and repeatedly with reflected angelfire. The Anderson rig clicked and bubbled gently in my ears, electrolyzing oxygen directly from the water around me, blending in helium from the ultracomp mini tank on my back, feeding it to me, then patiently shredding and dispersing my exhaled breath in bubbles no larger than fish eggs. Distantly, the maelstrom growled a bass counterpoint.
It was very peaceful.
Yeah, this is the easy part.
A memory drifted by in the flashlit gloom. Night-diving off Hirata’s Reef with a girl from the upscale end of Newpest. She’d blown into Watanabe’s one night with Segesvar and some of the other Reef Warriors, part of a mixed bag of slumming daddy’s girls and Stinktown hardboys. Eva? Irena? All I remembered was a gathered-up rope of dark honey hair, long sprawling limbs, and shining green eyes. She was smoking seahemp roll-ups, badly, choking and wheezing on the rough blend with a frequency that made her harder-edged friends laugh out loud. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Making a—for me—rare effort, I peeled her away from Segesvar, who in any case seemed to be finding her a drag, parked us in a quiet corner of Watanabe’s near the kitchens, monopolized her all evening. She seemed to come from another planet entirely—a father who cared and worried about her with an attention I would have jeered at under different circumstances, a mother who worked part time just so she doesn’t feel like a complete housewife, a home out of town that they owned, visits to Millsport and Erkezes every few months. An aunt who had gone offworld to work, they were all so proud of her, a brother who hoped to do the same. She talked about it all with the abandon of someone who believes these things to be entirely normal, and she coughed on the seahemp, and she smiled brilliantly at me, often.
So, she said on one of those occasions, what do you do for fun?
I, uh. I. Reef dive.
The smile became a laugh. Yeah, Reef Warriors, somehow I guessed. Go down much?
It was supposed to be my line, the line we all used on girls, and she’d stolen it out from under me. I didn’t even mind much.
Far side of Hirata, I blurted out. You want to try sometime?
Sure, she matched me. Want to try right now?
It was deep summer in Kossuth, inland humidity had hit 100 percent weeks ago. The thought of getting into the water was like an infectious itch. We slipped out of Watanabe’s and I showed her how to read the autocab flows, pick out an unfared one, and jump the roof. We rode it all the way across town, sweat cooling on our skin.
Hang on tight.
Yeah, I never would have thought of that, she yelled back, and laughed into my face in the slipstream.
The cab stopped for a fare near the Port Authority, and we tumbled off, scaring the prospective customers into a clutch of mannered yelps. Shock subsided into mutters and disapproving glares that sent us reeling off, stifling cackles. There was a hole in harbor security down at the eastern corner of the hoverloader docks—a blind spot torn by some preteen for-kicks hacker the previous year; he’d sold it to the Reef Warriors for holoporn. I got us through the gap, sneaked us down to one of the ’loader ramps, and stole a real-keel tender. We poled and paddled our way silently out of the harbor, then started the motor and tore off in a wide, cream-waked arc for Hirata, whooping.
Later, sunk in the silence of the dive, I looked up at the Hotei-toned, rippling surface and saw her body above me, pale against the black straps of the buoyancy jacket and the ancient compressed-air rig. She was lost in the moment, drifting, maybe gazing at the towering wall of the reef beside us, maybe just luxuriati
ng in the cool of the sea against her skin. For about a minute, I hung below her, enjoying the view and feeling myself grow hard in the water. I traced the outlines of her thighs and hips with my eyes, zeroed in on the shaved vertical bar of hair at the base of her belly and the glimpse of lips as her legs parted languidly to kick. I stared at the taut muscled belly emerging from the lower edge of the buoyancy jacket, the obvious swelling at her chest.
Then something happened. Maybe too much seahemp, never a smart idea before a dive. Maybe just some fatherly echo from my own home life. The reef edged in from the side of my vision, and for one terrible moment it seemed to be tilting massively over, falling on us. The eroticism of the languid drift in her limbs shriveled to sudden, cramping anxiety that she was dead or unconscious. I kicked myself upward in sudden panic, grabbed her shoulders with both hands, and tilted her around in the water.
And she was fine.
Eyes widened a little in surprise behind the mask, hands touching me in return. A grin split her mouth, and she let air bubble out through her teeth. Gestures, caresses. Her legs wrapped around me. She took out the regulator, gestured for me to do the same, and kissed me.
“Tak?”
Afterward, in the gear ’fab the Reef Warriors had blown and set atop the reef, lying with me on an improvised bed of musty winter wet suits, she seemed surprised at how carefully I handled her.
You won’t break me, Tak. I’m a big girl.
And later, legs wrapped around me again, grinding against me, laughing delightedly.
Hang on tight!
I was too lost in her to steal her comeback from the roof of the autocab.
“Tak, you hear me?”
Eva? Ariana?
“Kovacs!”
I blinked. It was Brasil’s voice.
“Yeah, sorry. What is it?”
“Boat coming.” On the heels of his words, I picked it up as well, the scraping whine of small screws in the water, sharp over the backdrop growl of the maelstrom. I checked my proximity system, found nothing on grav trace. Went to sonar and found it, southwest and coming fast up the Reach.