Yeah. I looked at him bleakly. Where’d you hear that then?

A shrug. Around. You know how it is. So why you going up north again?

The vibroknife broke through into flesh and muscle again. I switched it off and started to lever the severed section of spine out of Yukio Hirayasu’s neck.

Yakuza gentry, dead and destacked. Courtesy of Takeshi Kovacs, because that was the way the label was going to read, whatever I did now.

Tanaseda was going to be looking for blood. Hirayasu senior too, presumably.

Could be he saw his son as the lipslack fuck-up he evidently was, but somehow I doubted it. And even if he did, every rule of obligation the Harlan’s World yakuza girded themselves with was going to force him to make it right. Organised crime is like that. Radul Segesvar’s Newpest haiduci mafia or the yak, north or south, they’re all the fucking same.

Fucking blood tie junkies.

War with the yakuza.

Why you going up north again? I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago.

“Micky?” For a moment, the name meant nothing to me. “Hey, Mick, you okay?”

I looked up. She was watching me with narrow concern. I forced a nod.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Well, do you think you could pick it up a bit? Orr’ll be back and he’ll want to get started.”

“Sure.” I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. “I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.”

“You’ll see.”

“Party trick, huh?”

She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamour of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.

“Why don’t you come with us, Micky?”

I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. “What?”

“Come with us.”

“To Drava?

“Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?”

I freed the blade and finished the incision. “I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.”

“What if I could set that up for you?”

“Sylvie.” I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward.

“Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?”

She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realisation that there was something here.

“Last time we were out,” she said slowly, “we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete re-sleeving unit and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.”

“Well, that’d make sense. That’s where you’re taking Jadwiga?”

She nodded.

I looked pensively at the chunk of spine in my hand, the ragged-lipped wound it had come out of. I thought about what the yakuza would do to me if they caught up with me in this sleeve.

“How long are you going over for?”

She shrugged. “Long as it takes. We’re provisioned for three months, but last time we filled our quota in half that time. You could come back sooner if you like. The ‘loaders run out of Drava all the time.”

“And you’re sure this stuff in the bunker is still functional.”

She grinned and shook her head.

“What?”

“It’s New Hok, Micky. Over there, everything’s still functional. That’s the whole problem with the fucking place.”

FIVE

The hoverloader Guns for Guevara was exactly what she sounded like—a low-profile, heavily armoured shark of a vessel, spiking weaponry along her back like dorsal spines. In marked contrast to the commercial ‘loaders that plied the routes between Millsport and the Saffron Archipelago, she had no external decks or towers. The bridge was a snubbed blister on the forward facings of the dull grey superstructure and her flanks swept back and out in smooth, featureless curves. The two loading hatches, open on either side of her nose, looked built to disgorge flights of missiles.

“You sure this is going to work?” I asked Sylvie as we reached the downward slope of the docking ramp.

“Relax,” growled Orr, behind me. “This isn’t the Saffron Line.”

He was right. For an operation that the government claimed was being run under stringent security guidelines, deCom embarkation struck me as sloppy in the extreme. At the side of each hatch, a steward in a soiled blue uniform was taking hardcopy documentation and running the authorisation flashes under a reader that wouldn’t have looked much out of place in a Settlement-Years experia flic. The ragged queues of embarking personnel snaked back and forth across the ramp, ankle deep in carry-on baggage.

Bottles and pipes passed back and forth in the cold, bright air. There was highly-strung hilarity and mock sparring up and down the lines, repeated jokes over the antique reader. The stewards smiled back repeatedly, wearily.

“And where the fuck is Las?” Kiyoka wanted to know.

Sylvie shrugged. “He’ll be here. He always is.”

We joined the back of the nearest queue. The little knot of deComs ahead of us glanced round briefly, spent a couple of measured looks on Sylvie’s hair, then went back to their bickering. She wasn’t unusual among this crowd. A tall, black sleeve a couple of groups down had a dreadlocked mane of similar proportions, and there were others less imposing here and there.

Jadwiga stood quiet beside me!

“This thing with Las is pathological,” Kiyoka told me, looking anywhere but at Jad. “He’s always fucking late.”

“It’s wired into him,” said Sylvie absently. “You don’t get to be a career wincefish without a tendency towards brinkmanship.”

“Hey, I’m a wincefish, and I turn up on time.”

“You’re not a lead wincefish,” said Orr.

“Oh, right. Listen we’re all—” she glanced at Jadwiga and bit her lip.

“Lead’s just a player position. Las is wired no different to me or—”

Looking at Jad, you’d never have guessed she was dead. We’d cleaned her up in the apartment—beam weapons cauterise, there’s not often much in the way of blood—rigged her in a tight marine surplus combat vest and jacket that covered the wounds, fitted heavy black EV lenses over her shocked open eyes. Then Sylvie got in through the team net and fired up her motor systems. I’d guess it took a little concentration, but nothing to the focus she’d have to have online when she deployed the team against the mimints on New Hok. She got Jad walking at her left shoulder and we formed a phalanx around them. Simple commands to facial muscles clamped the dead deCom’s mouth shut and the grey pallor, well, with the EV lenses on and a long grey sealwrap bag slung over one shoulder, Jad looked no worse than she should have done on a shiver comedown with added endorphin crash. I don’t suppose the rest of us looked too hot either.

“Authorisation, please.”

Sylvie handed over the sheaf of hardcopy, and the steward set about passing it through the reader one sheet at a time. She must have sent a tiny jolt through the net to the muscles in Jadwiga’s neck at the same time, because the dead woman tilted her head, a little stiffly, as if scanning the ‘loader’s armoured flank. Nice touch, very natural.

“Sylvie Oshima. Crew of five,” said the steward, looking up to count.

“Hardware already stowed.”

“That’s right.”

“Cabin allocation.” He squinted at the reader’s screen. “Sorted. P19 to 22, lower deck.”

There was a commotion back up near the top of the ramp. We all looked back, apart from Jadwiga. I spotted ochre robes and beards, angry gesticulating and voices raised.