Blackmail. Influence. Leverage to get government concessions. Blind eyes turned to the right activities, shares in the right ongoing state enterprises. Collaboration at repression for a price. All very genteel.”
“But you suckered them.”
She nodded bleakly. “I showed them the site, gave them the codes. Told them the virus transmitted sexually, so they’d think they had control. It does that too, in fact, and Plex was too sloppy with the biocodes to dig any deeper than he did. I knew I could trust him to screw up to that extent.”
I felt another faint smile flicker across my own face. “Yeah, he has a talent for that. Must be the aristo lineage.”
“Must be.”
“And with the grip the yakuza have on the sex industry in Millsport, you called it just right.” The intrinsic joy of the scam sank into me like a shiver rush—there was a smooth, machined Tightness to it worthy of Envoy planning. “You gave them a threat to hold over the Harlanites that they already had the perfect delivery system for.”
“Yes, so it seems.” Her voice was blurring again as she dropped away into her memories. “They were going to sleeve some yak soldier or other in one of the Sanshin bodies and take it to Millsport to demonstrate what they had. I don’t know if he ever got that far.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. The yakuza are pretty meticulous about their leverage schemes. Man, I’d have given a lot to see Tanaseda’s face when he showed up at Rila with that package and the Harlan gene specialists told him what he’d really got on his hands. I’m surprised Aiura didn’t have him executed on the spot. Shows remarkable restraint.”
“Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it. By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.” She shrugged. “You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked round at me again and her face was miserable with contained anger.
“Alright, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?”
I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’re right, I wasn’t there.”
And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.
Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.
THIRTY-SEVEN
In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.
Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.
I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.
“Tres?” he asked us quietly.
Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. “Still mending. We left her with. With Her.”
“Right. Good.”
The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.
“We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?”
Koi shook his head. “Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.”
“Mari Ado?”
He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
The rayhunter’s skipper came down the gangway with a couple of ship’s officers I knew well enough to nod at in corridors. Koi seemed to know them all—they traded gruff arm’s-length grippings of shoulders and a skein of rapid Stripjap before the skipper grunted and moved off towards the harbour master’s tower with the others in tow. Koi turned back to face us.
“They’ll stay docked long enough to file for grav system repairs. There’s another raychaser in on the port side, they’re old friends of his. They’ll buy some fresh kill to haul into Newpest tomorrow, just for appearances.
Meantime, we’re out of here at dawn with one of Segesvar’s contraband skimmers. It’s the closest thing to a disappearing act we could arrange.”
I avoided looking at Brasil’s face. My gaze ranged instead over the cityscape superstructure of the urbraft. Mostly, I was awash with a selfish relief that Virginia Vidaura figured in the list of survivors, but some small Envoy part of me noted the evening flow of crowds, the possible vantage points for observers or sniperfire.
“Can we trust these people?”
Koi nodded. He seemed relieved to bury himself in details. “The very large majority, yes. Pictures is Drava-built, most of the onboard shareholders are descendants of the original co-operative owners. The culture’s broadly Quellist-inclined, which means a tendency to look out for each other but mind their own business if no one’s needing help.”
“Yeah? Sounds a little Utopian to me. What about casual crew?”
Koi’s look sharpened to a stare. “Casual crew and newcomers know what they’re signing on for. Pictures has a reputation, like the rest of the rafts. The ones who don’t like it don’t stay. The culture filters down.”
Brasil cleared his throat. “How many of them know what’s going on?”
“Know that we’re here? About a dozen. Know why we’re here? Two, both ex-Black Brigade.” Koi looked up at the rayhunter, searchingly.
“They’ll both want to be there for Ascertainment. We’ve got a safe house set up in the stern lowers where we can do it.”
“Koi,” I slotted myself into his field of vision. “We need to talk first. There are a couple of things you should know.”
He regarded me for a long moment, lined face unreadable. But there was a hunger in his eyes that I knew I wasn’t going to get past.
“It’ll have to wait,” he told me. “Our primary concern here is to confirm her identity. I’d appreciate it if none of you call me by name until that’s done.”
“Ascertain,” I said sharply. The audible capitalisation of her was starting to piss me off. “You mean ascertain, right Koi?”
His gaze skipped off my shoulder and back to the rayhunter’s side.
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” he said.
A lot has been made of Quellism’s underclass roots, particularly over the centuries since its principal architect died and passed conveniently beyond the realm of political debate. The fact that Quellcrist Falconer chose to build a powerbase among the poorest of Harlan’s World’s labour force has led to a curious conviction among a lot of neoQuellists that the intention during the Unsettlement was to create a leadership drawn exclusively from this base. That Nadia Makita was herself the product of a relatively privileged middle class background goes carefully unremarked, and since she never rose to a position of political governance, the central issue of who’s going to run things after all this blows over never had to be faced. But the intrinsic contradiction at the heart of modern Quellist thought remains, and in neoQuellist company it’s not considered polite to draw attention to it.