“I like you, too.”
She wagged a finger, maybe the one she couldn’t quite put on my likable qualities. “This is not. Sex. You know?”
“I know. Have you seen the size of the hole in my ribs?” I shook my head muzzily. “Of course you have. Spectrochem vision chip, right?”
She nodded complacently.
“You really from a Renouncer family?”
A sour grimace. “Yeah. From being the operative word.”
“They’re not proud of you?” I gestured at her hair. “I’d have thought that qualifies as a pretty solid step on the road to Upload. Logically—”
“Yeah, logically. This is a religion you’re talking about. Renouncers make no more fucking sense than the Beards when it comes down to it.”
“So they’re not in favor?”
“Opinion,” she said with mock delicacy, “is divided on the matter. The aspirant hard-liners don’t like it; they don’t like anything that roots construct systems firmly to physical being. The preparant wing of the faith just want to play nice with everyone. They say any virtuality interface is, as you say, a step on the road. They don’t expect Upload to come in their lifetime, anyway; we’re all just handmaidens to the process.”
“So which are your folks?”
Sylvie shifted her body on the lounger again, frowned, and gave Jadwiga another shove to make space.
“Used to be moderate preps, that’s the faith I grew up in. The last couple of decades though, with the Beards and the whole antistack thing, a lot of moderates are turning into hard-line asps. My mother probably went that way. She was always the seriously pious one.” She shrugged. “No idea really. Haven’t been home in years.”
“Like that, huh?”
“Yeah, like that. There’s no fucking point. All they’d do is try and marry me off to some eligible local.” She snorted with laughter. “As if that’s going to happen while I’m carrying this stuff.”
I propped myself up a little, groggy with the drugs. “What stuff?”
“This.” She tugged at a handful of hair. “This fucking stuff.”
It crackled quietly around her grasp, tried to writhe away like thousands of tiny snakes. Under the crinkled black-and-silver mass of it, the thicker cords moved stealthily, like muscles under skin.
DeCom command datatech.
I’d seen a few like her before—a prototype variant back on Latimer, where the core of the new Martian machine interface industry was boiling into R&D overdrive. A couple more used as minesweepers in the Hun Home system. It never takes long for the military to bastardize cutting-edge technology for their own use. Makes sense. As often as not, they’re the ones paying for the R&D anyway.
“That’s not unattractive,” I said carefully.
“Oh sure.” She raked through the tresses and separated out the central cord until it hung clear of the rest, an ebony snake gripped in her fist. “That’s attractive, right? Because, after all, any red-blooded male’s just going to love a twice-prick-length member flopping around in bed at head height, right? Fucking competition anxiety and creeping homophobia, all in one.”
I gestured. “Well, women—”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’m straight.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” She let the cord fall and shook her head so the rest of the silvered mane rearranged itself as it had been. “Oh.”
A century ago they were harder to spot. Military systems officers might have extensive virtual training in how to deploy the racks of interface hardware built into their heads, but the hardware was internal. Externally, machine interface pros never looked much different from the next human sleeve—a bit sick around the gills maybe when they’d been in the field for too long, but that’s the same for any datarat with overexposure. You learn to ride it, they say.
The archaeologue finds just outside the Latimer system changed all that. For the first time in nearly six hundred years of scratching around across the Martians’ interstellar backyard, the Guild finally hit the jackpot. They found ships. Hundreds, quite possibly thousands of ships, locked into the cobwebbed quiet of ancient parking orbits around a tiny attendant star called Sanction. Evidence suggested they were the remains of a massive naval engagement and that some of them at least had faster-than-light stardrive capacity. Other evidence, notably the vaporization of an entire Archaeologue Guild research habitat and its seven-hundred-odd crew, suggested the vessels’ motive systems were autonomous and very much awake.
Up to that point, the only genuinely autonomous machines the Martians had left us were Harlan’s World’s very own orbital guardians, and no one was getting near them. Other stuff was automated but not what you’d call smart. Now here the archaeologue systems specialists were suddenly being asked to take on interface with crafty naval command intelligences an estimated half a million years old.
Some form of upgrade was in order. Definitely.
Now that upgrade was sitting across from me, sharing a military-issue endorphin rush and staring into an empty whiskey glass.
“Why’d you sign up?” I asked her, to fill the quiet.
She shrugged. “Why does anyone sign up for this shit? The money. You figure you’ll make back the sleeve mortgage in the first couple of runs, and then it’s all pure credit stacking up.”
“And it isn’t?”
A wry grin. “No, it is. But you know, there’s a whole lifestyle comes with it. And then, well, servicing costs, upgrades, repairs. Weird how fast the money spends itself. Stack it up, burn it down again. Kind of hard to save enough to ever get out.”
“The Initiative can’t last forever.”
“No? Lot of continent still to clean up over there, you know. We’ve barely pushed a hundred klicks out of Drava in some places. And even then you’ve got to do constant housecleaning everywhere you’ve been, keep the mimints from creeping back in. They’re talking about another decade minimum before they can start resettlement. And I’ll tell you, Micky, personally I think even that’s crabshit optimism, strictly for public consumption.”
“Come on. New Hok isn’t so big.”
“Well, spot the fucking offworlder.” She stuck out her tongue in a gesture that had more Maori challenge about it than childishness. “Might not be big by your standards—I’m sure they’ve got continents fifty thousand klicks across where you’ve been. Around here it’s a little different.”
I smiled. “I’m from here, Sylvie.”
“Oh yeah. Newpest. You said. So don’t tell me New Hok’s a small continent. Outside of Kossuth, it’s the biggest we’ve got.”
In actual fact, there was more landmass contained in the Millsport Archipelago than either Kossuth or New Hokkaido, but as with most of the island groups that made up the bulk of Harlan’s World’s available real estate, a lot of it was hard-to-use, mountainous terrain.
You’d think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate. You’d think they’d develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You’d think they wouldn’t fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn’t deploy weaponry that would render the theater of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.
Well, wouldn’t you?
“I’m going to bed,” slurred Sylvie. “Busy day tomorrow.”
I glanced across at the windows. Outside, dawn was creeping up over the Angier lamp glow, soaking it out on a blotter of pale gray.
“Sylvie, it is tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” She got up and stretched until something cracked. On the lounger, Jadwiga mumbled something and unkinked her limbs into the space Sylvie had vacated. “ ’loader doesn’t lift till lunchtime, and we’re pretty much stowed with the heavy stuff. Look, you want to crash, use Las’s room. Doesn’t look like he’s coming back. Left of the bathroom.”
“Thanks.”
She gave me a faded smile. “Hey, Micky. Lea
st I can do. G’night.”
“ ’Night.”
I watched her wander to her room, checked my timechip, and decided against sleep. Another hour, and I could go back to Plex’s place without disturbing whatever Noh dance his yakuza pals were wound up in. I looked speculatively at the kitchen space and wondered about coffee.
That was the last conscious thought I had.
Fucking synth sleeves.
CHAPTER FOUR
The sound of hammering woke me. Someone chemically too far gone to remember how to operate a flexdoor, reverting to Neanderthal tactics. Bang, bang, bang. I blinked eyes gone gummy with sleep and struggled upright in the lounger. Jadwiga was still stretched out opposite, still comatose by the look of it. A tiny thread of spit ran out of the corner of her mouth and dampened a patch on the lounger’s worn belacotton covering. Across at the window, bright sunlight streamed into the room and turned the air in the kitchen space hazy with luminescence. Late morning, at least.
Shit.
Bang, bang.
I stood, and pain flashed rustily up my side. Orr’s endorphins seemed to have leached out while I slept.
Bang, bang, bang.
“Fuck is that?” yelled someone from an inner room.
Jadwiga stirred on the lounger at the sound of the voice. She opened one eye, saw me standing over her, and thrashed rapidly into some kind of combat guard, then relaxed a little as she remembered me.
“Door,” I said, feeling foolish.
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “I hear it. If that’s fucking Lazlo forgotten his code again, he’s looking for a boot in the crotch.”
The banging at the door had stopped, presumably at the sound of voices from within. Now it started up again. I felt a jagged twinge in the side of my head.
“Will someone fucking answer that!” It was a female voice, but not one I’d heard before. Presumably Kiyoka, awake at long last.
“Got it,” Jadwiga yelled back, stumbling across the room. Her voice dropped back to a mutter. “Did anyone go down and check in with embarkation yet? No, course not. Yeah, yeah. Coming.”
She hit the panel, and the door folded itself up and away.
“You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?” she inquired acidly of whoever was outside. “We heard you the first ninety-seven ti— Hey!”
There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod, and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad. He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimeter from top to bottom, and spreading wings of tattoo work across both cheekbones.
It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.
Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone-identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.
“Kovacs.” Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. “What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’d have thought that was my line.”
Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.
“You were told,” snapped Yukio, “to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?”
“These your high-powered friends, Micky?” It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.
I nodded. “You might say that.”
Yukio’s eyes flickered to the woman’s voice and he frowned. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him; maybe it was just the five-to-three disadvantage he’d walked into.
“You know who I am,” he began. “So let’s not complicate matters any—”
“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” said Sylvie evenly. “But I know you’re in our place without an invitation. So I think you’d better just leave.”
The yakuza’s face flared disbelief.
“Yeah, get the fuck out of here.” Jadwiga threw up both hands in something midway between a combat guard and a gesture of obscene dismissal.
“Jad—” I started, but by then it had all already tipped too far.
Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching, and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me. Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it.
She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odor of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped.
I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns. I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad.
“Right.” Yukio looked around the rest of the room, wagging the blaster mainly in Sylvie’s direction. “That’s enough. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but you—”
Sylvie spat out a single word.
“Orr.”
Thunder detonated in the confined space again. This time, it was blinding. I had a brief impression of looping gouts of white fire, past me and branching, buried in Yukio, the enforcer in front of me, the man still halfway up from the floor. The enforcer flung out his arms, as if embracing the blast that drenched him from the chest down. His mouth gaped wide. His sunlenses flashed incandescent with reflected glare.
The fire inked out, collapsing afterimages soaking across my vision in tones of violet. I blinked through it, groping at detail.
The enforcer was two severed halves steaming up at me from the floor, Szeged still gripped in each fist. Excess discharge had welded his hands to the weapons.
The one getting up had never made it. He was down next to Jad again, gone from the chest up.
Yukio had a hole through him that had removed pretty much every internal organ he owned. Charred rib ends protruded from the upper half of a perfectly oval wound in which you could see the tiled floor he lay on like a cheap experia special effect.
The room filled with the abrupt reek of voided bowels.
“Well. That seemed to work.”
Orr stepped past me, peering down at what was apparently his handiwork. He was still stripped to the waist, and I saw where the discharge vents had blown open in a vertical line up one side of his back. They looked like massive fish gills, still rippling at the edges with dissipating heat. He went straight to Jadwiga and crouched over her.
“Narrow beam,” he diagnosed. “Took out the heart and most of the right lung. Not much we can do for her here.”
“Someone close the door,” suggested Sylvie.
• • •
As a council of war, it was pretty headlong. The deCom team had a couple of years of close-wired operational time behind them, and they communicated in a flickering shorthand that owed as much to internal tannoy and compressed symbol gesture as it did to actual speech. Envoy-conditioned intuition at full stretch gave me just enough of an edge to keep up.
“Report this?” Kiyoka, a slight woman in what had to be a custom-grown Maori sleeve, wanted to know. She kept looking at Jadwiga on the floor and biting her lip.
“To?” Orr flipped her a rapid thumb-and-little-finger gesture. His other hand traced tattooing across his face.
“Oh. And him?”
Sylvie did something with her face, gestured low. I missed it, guessed and g
rabbed.
“They were here for me.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Orr was looking at me with something that grazed open hostility. The vents in his back and chest had closed up, but looking at the massive muscled frame it wasn’t hard to imagine them ripping open for another blast. “Some nice friends you’ve got.”
“I don’t think they would have gotten violent if Jad hadn’t jumped the goon. It was a misunderstanding.”
“Misunder— fuck.” Orr’s eyes widened. “Jad is dead, you asshole.”
“She’s not Really Dead,” I said doggedly. “You can excise the stack and—”
“Excise?” The word came out lethally soft. He trod closer, looming. “You want me to cut up my friend?”
Playing back the position of the gunmetal discharge tubes from memory, I guessed most of his right side was prosthetic, charging the five vents from a power pack buried somewhere in the lower half of his rib cage. Given recent advances in nanotech, you could get large blotches of energy to go pretty much anywhere you wanted over a limited distance. The nanocon shepherd fragments just rode the blast like surfers, sucking power and tugging the containment field wherever the launch data had them headed.
I made a mental note, if I had to hit him, to go left.
“I’m sorry. I don’t see another solution right now.”
“You—”
“Orr.” Sylvie made a sideways chopping gesture. “Tats, this place, time.” She shook her head. Another sign, thumb and forefinger forced apart by the fingers of the other hand. From the look on her face, I got the sense she was emitting data through the team net as well. “Cache, the same. Three days. Puppetry. Torch and wipe, now.”
Kiyoka nodded. “Sense, Orr. Las? Oh.”
“Yeah, we can do that.” Orr wasn’t plugged all the way into this. He was still angry, speaking slowly. “Yeah, I mean. Okay.”
“ ’Ware?” Kiyoka again, some complex counting off from one hand, an inclination of her head. “Jet?”
“No, there’s time.” Sylvie made a flat-palmed motion. “Orr and Micky. Easy. You run blank. This, this, maybe this. Down.”