“That was quick. You want to get back already?”
Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.
“You see any reason to hang about?”
“Hey, it’s not so bad. I get down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time. ’S a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.”
I looked up, surprised. “Yeah.”
“Someone asking after you.”
I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation. The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.
“What did they want?”
“Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.”
I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.
“So what’d you tell him?”
“Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed rack with livewire soon as look at them.”
“This guy young or old?”
“Oh, young. Carried himself, too, know what I mean?”
Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind. Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.
Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.
Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.
“Tak—”
“You go back with the others now,” I said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Tak, we need you to—”
I smiled at her. “Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything anymore. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do anymore.”
She looked steadily back at me.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Rip out his throat and be right back.”
She shook her head.
“Is this really all you want?”
The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.
“What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah, right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia, you’ve done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.”
“So what instead? This? More pointless slaughter?”
I shrugged. “Pointless slaughter is what I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. You made me good at it, Virginia.”
That took her like a slap across the face. She flinched. Sierra Tres and the pilot looked on, curious. The woman who called herself Quell, I noticed, had gone below to the cabin.
“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”
I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”
“But it doesn’t solve anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”
“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.
“I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?”
Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.
“Only when I’m killing them.”
She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”
“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”
She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.
She turned away without a word.
• • •
The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water, and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face. I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.
Sanctified solo assassins.
I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death, and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover, either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.
The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark. They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.
So far.
I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins; you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to. You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matte, low-profile pirate skimmers amid the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot, and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.
Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly kept façades, and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris-strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon. A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.
I found him well before evening.
It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defenses of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board-hire place called the Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of
the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.
“Sure, he checked in about a week back,” the girl on reception volunteered as she worked stacking a pile of well-worn surfboards against a rack along one wall. “I was expecting all sorts of trouble, me being a female and dressed like this, y’know. But he didn’t seem to fix on it at all.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, got a real balance about him, too, you know what I’m saying? I thought he might even be a rider.” She laughed, a carefree, teenage sound. “Crazy, huh? But I guess even up there they’ve got to have surfers, right?”
“Surfers everywhere,” I agreed.
“So you want to talk to this guy? Leave a message?”
“Well.” I eyed the pigeonhole system behind the reception desk. “It’s actually something I’ve got to leave for him, if that’s okay. A surprise.”
That appealed to her. She grinned and got up. “Sure, we can do that.”
She left the boards and came around to the other side of the counter. I dug around in my pocket, found a spare chargepack for the Rapsodia, and fished it out.
“There you go.”
She took the little black device curiously. “That’s it? You don’t want to scribble him a note to go with it or something?”
“No, it’s fine. He’ll understand. Just tell him I’ll be back tonight.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want to do.” A cheerful shrug, and she turned to the pigeonholes. I watched her slide the chargepack in amid the dust on ledge 74.
“Actually,” I said with feigned abruptness. “Can I get a room?”
She turned back, surprised. “Well, uh, sure . . .”
“Just for tonight. Just makes more sense than getting a place somewhere else and then coming back, you know.”
“Sure, no problem.” She prodded a display screen to life on the counter, scrutinized it for a moment, and then gave me the grin again. “If you like, you know, I could put you on the same landing as he is. Not next door, it’s taken, but a couple of doors down, that’s free.”
“That’s very kind,” I said. “Tell you what then, you just tell him I’m here, give him my room number, he can come and buzz me. In fact, you can give me the hardware back.”
Her brow creased with the flurry of changes. She picked up the Rapsodia chargepack doubtfully.
“So you don’t want me to give him this?”
“Not anymore, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I think I’d prefer to give it to him myself, directly. It’s more personal that way.”
• • •
Upstairs, the doors were old-style hinged. I broke into 74 using no more skill than I’d had as a sixteen-year-old street thug cracking cut-rate dive-supplier warehouses.
The room beyond was cramped and basic. A capsule bathroom, a disposable mesh hammock to save on space and laundry, storage drawers molded into the walls, and a small plastic table and chair. A variable-transparency window wired clumsily to the room’s climate control system—the priest had left it dimmed. I cast about for somewhere to hide myself in the gloom and was driven into the capsule for lack of alternatives. Sting of recent antibac spray in my nose as I stepped in—the clean cycle must have run not long ago. I shrugged, breathed through my mouth, and searched the cabinets for painkillers to flatten the rolling wave of my hangover. In one, I found a foil of basic heatstroke pills for tourists. I dry-swallowed a couple and seated myself on the closed toilet unit to wait.
There’s something wrong here, the Envoy sense admonished me. Something doesn’t fit.
Maybe he’s not what you think.
Yeah, right—he’s a negotiator, come to talk you down. God’s changed his mind.
Religion’s just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can’t do the same when it comes to the crunch.
These people are sheep. They’ll do whatever their holy men tell them.
Sarah seared across my mind. Momentarily, the world tilted around me with the depth of my fury. For the thousandth time I imagined the scene again, and there was a roaring in my ears like a distant crowd.
I drew the Tebbit knife and looked down at the dull, dark blade.
Slowly, with the sight, Envoy calm soaked back through me. I settled again in the small space of the capsule, letting it drench me to a chilled purpose. Fragments of Virginia Vidaura’s voice came with it.
Weapons are an extension. You are the killer and destroyer.
Kill quickly and be gone.
It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone.
I frowned a little at that one. It’s not good when your formative icons start getting inconsistent on you. When you find out they’re just as human as you.
The door wittered to itself and began to open.
Thought vanished like shreds in the slipstream of enabled force. I came out of the capsule, around the edge of its door, and stood braced with the knife, ready to reach and stab.
He wasn’t what I’d imagined. The skimmer pilot and the girl downstairs had both remarked on his poise, and it showed in the way he spun at the tiny sounds of my clothing, the shift of air in the narrow room. But he was slim and slight, shaven skull delicate, beard an out-of-place idiocy on the fine features.
“You looking for me, holy man?”
For a moment we locked gazes and the knife in my hand seemed to tremble of its own accord.
Then he reached up and tugged at his beard, and it came away with a short static crackle.
“Of course I’m looking for you, Micky,” said Jadwiga tiredly. “Been chasing you for nearly a month.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Yeah, twice at least.” Jad picked morosely at the beard prosthesis in her hands. We sat together at the cheap plastic table, not looking at each other. “Only reason I’m here, I guess. They weren’t looking for me when they came for the others.”
I saw Drava again as she told it, a mind’s-eye view of swirling snow on nighttime black, the frosted constellations of camp lights and infrequent figures moving between buildings, hunched up against the weather. They’d come the following evening, unannounced. It wasn’t clear if Kurumaya had been bought off, threatened with higher authority, or simply murdered. Behind the funneled force of Anton’s command software on max override, Kovacs and his team located Sylvie’s team by net signature. They kicked in doors, demanded submission.
Apparently didn’t get it.
“I saw Orr take someone down,” Jad went on, talking mechanically as she stared into her own memories. “Just the flash. He was yelling for everyone to get out. I was bringing carryout back from the bar. I didn’t even.”
She stopped.
“It’s okay,” I told her.
“No, it’s not fucking okay, Micky. I ran away.”
“You’d be dead if you hadn’t. Really Dead.”
“I heard Kiyoka screaming.” She swallowed. “I knew it was too late, but I.”
I hurried her past it. “Did anyone see you?”
A jerky nod. “Traded shots with a couple of them on the way across to the vehicle sheds. Fuckers were everywhere, seemed like. But they didn’t come after me. I think they thought I was just a stroppy bystander.” She gestured at the Eishundo sleeve she wore. “No trace on the net search, see. Far as that fucker Anton’s concerned, I was invisible.”
She’d lifted one of the Dracul bugs, powered it up, and driven right off the side of the dock.
“Had a squabble with the autosub systems getting up the estuary,” she said, and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re not supposed to do that, put vehicles in the water without authorization. But the clear tags worked in the end.”
And out onto the Andrassy Sea.
I nodded mechanically, exact inverse of my near disbelief. She’d ridden the bug without resting, nearly a thousand kilometers back to Tekitomura and a quiet nighttime landing in a cove out of to
wn to the east.
She shrugged it off.
“I had food and water in the panniers. Meth to stay awake. The Dracul’s got Nuhanovic guidance. Main thing I worried about was keeping low enough to the water to look like a boat, not a flying machine, trying not to upset the angelfire.”
“And you found me how?”
“Yeah, that’s some weird shit.” For the first time, something bloomed in her voice that wasn’t weariness and rancid rage. “I sold the bug for quick cash at Soroban wharf, I was walking back up toward Kompcho. Coming down from the meth. And it’s like I could smell you or something. Like the smell of this old family hammock we had when I was a kid. I just followed it, like I said I was coming down, running on autopilot. I saw you on the wharf, going aboard this piece-of-shit freighter. Haiduci’s Daughter.”
I nodded again, this time in sudden comprehension as large chunks of the puzzle fell into place. The dizzying, unaccustomed sense of family longing swam back over me. We were twins, after all. Close scions from the long-dead house of Eishundo.
“You stowed away, then. It was you trying to get inside that pod when the storm hit.”
She grimaced. “Yeah, creeping around on deck’s fine when the sun’s shining. Not something you want to try when there’s heavy weather coming in. I should have guessed they’d have it alarmed up the ass. Fucking webjelly oil, you’d think it was Khumalo wetware the price they get for it.”
“You stole the food out of communal storage, too, second day out.”
“Hey, your ride was flying departure lights when I saw you go aboard. Left inside an hour. Didn’t exactly leave me much time to go stock up on provisions. I went a day without food before I figured you weren’t getting off at Erkezes, you were in for the long haul. I was fucking hungry.”
“You know there was nearly a fight over that. One of your deCom colleagues wanted to brain someone for stealing it.”
“Yeah, heard them talking. Fucking burnouts.” Her voice took on a kind of automated distaste, a macro of opinion over old ground. “Kind of sad-case losers get the trade a bad name.”