Marooned centuries from the last moments of living experience you recall. Sleeved out of time. A lifetime away from everyone and everything you knew. Like some fucking criminal. Well, Envoy assimilation technique will by now have some of this locked down, but still—

“How did you—”

“Your digitised personality file was acquired for the family some time ago. As I said, I can give you more detail later. You need not concern yourself too much with this. The contract I am here to offer you is lucrative and, we feel, ultimately rewarding. What’s important is for you to understand the extent to which your Envoy skills will be put to the test. This is not the Harlan’s World you know.”

“I can deal with that.” Impatiently. “It’s what I do.”

“Good. Now, you will of course want to know—”

“Yeah.” Shut down the shock, like a tourniquet on a bleeding limb. Drag up competence and a drawled lack of concern once more. Grab on to the obvious, the salient point in all of this. “Just who the fuck is this ex-Envoy you so badly want me to catch?”

Maybe it went something like that.

Then again, maybe not. I’m inferring from suspicion and fragmented knowledge after the event. Building it up from what I can guess, using Envoy intuition to fill in the gaps. But I could be completely wrong.

I wouldn’t know.

I wasn’t there.

And I never saw his face when they told him where I was. Told him that I was, and what he’d have to do about it.

PART 1

THIS IS WHO YOU ARE

ONE

Damage.

The wound stung like fuck, but it wasn’t as bad as some I’d had. The blaster bolt came in blind across my ribs, already weakened by the door plating it had to chew through to get to me. Priests, up against the slammed door and looking for a quick gut-shot. Fucking amateur night.

They’d probably caught almost as much pain themselves from the pointblank blowback off the plating. Behind the door, I was already twisting aside. What was left of the charge ploughed a long, shallow gash across my ribcage and went out, smouldering in the folds of my coat. Sudden ice down that side of my body and the abrupt stench of fried skin-sensor components. That curious bone-splinter fizzing that’s almost a taste, where the bolt had ripped through the biolube casing on the floating ribs.

Eighteen minutes later, by the softly glowing display chipped into my upper left field of vision, the same fizzing was still with me as I hurried down the lamp-lit street, trying to ignore the wound. Stealthy seep of fluids beneath my coat. Not much blood. Sleeving synthetic has its advantages.

“Looking for a good time, sam?”

“Already had one,” I told him, veering away from the doorway. He blinked wave-tattooed eyelids in a dismissive flutter that said your loss and leaned his tightly-muscled frame languidly back into the gloom. I crossed the street and took the corner, tacking between a couple more whores, one a woman, the other of indeterminate gender. The woman was an augment, forked dragon tongue flickering out around her overly prehensile lips, maybe tasting my wound on the night air. Her eyes danced a similar passage over me, then slid away. On the other side, the cross-gender pro shifted its stance slightly and gave me a quizzical look but said nothing.

Neither were interested. The streets were rain-slick and deserted, and they’d had longer to see me coming than the doorway operator. I’d cleaned up since leaving the citadel, but something about me must have telegraphed the lack of business opportunity.

At my back, I heard them talking about me in Stripjap. I heard the word for broke.

They could afford to be choosy. In the wake of the Mecsek Initiative, business was booming. Tekitomura was packed that winter, thronging with salvage brokers and the deCom crews that drew them the way a trawler wake draws ripwings. Making New Hok safe for a New Century, the ads went. From the newly built hoverloader dock down at the Kompcho end of town it was less than a thousand kilometres, straight line distance, to the shores of New Hokkaido, and the loaders were running day and night. Outside of an airdrop, there is no faster way to get across the Andrassy Sea. And on Harlan’s World, you don’t go up in the air if you can possibly avoid it. Any crew toting heavy equipment—and they all were—was going to New Hok on a hoverloader out of Tekitomura. Those that lived would be coming back the same way.

Boom town. Bright new hope and brawling enthusiasm as the Mecsek money poured in. I limped down thoroughfares littered with the detritus of spent human merriment. In my pocket, the freshly excised cortical stacks clicked together like dice.

There was a fight going on at the intersection of Pencheva Street and Muko Prospect. The pipe houses on Muko had just turned out and their synapse-fried patrons had met late-shift dock workers coming up through the decayed quiet of the warehouse quarter. More than enough reason for violence. Now a dozen badly co-ordinated figures stumbled back and forth in the street, flailing and clawing inexpertly at each other while a gathered crowd shouted encouragement. One body already lay inert on the fused glass paving, and someone else was dragging their body, a limb’s length at a time, out of the fray, bleeding. Blue sparks shorted off a set of overcharged power knuckles, elsewhere light glimmered on a blade. But everyone still standing seemed to be having a good time and there were no police as yet.

Yeah, part of me jeered. Probably all too busy up the hill right now.

I skirted the action as best I could, shielding my injured side. Beneath the coat, my hands closed on the smooth curve of the last hallucinogen grenade and the slightly sticky hilt of the Tebbit knife.

Never get into a fight if you can kill quickly and be gone.

Virginia Vidaura—Envoy Corps trainer, later career criminal and sometime political activist. Something of a role model for me, though it was several decades since I’d last seen her. On a dozen different worlds, she crept into my mind unbidden, and I owed that ghost in my head my own life a dozen times over. This time I didn’t need her or the knife. I got past the fight without eye contact, made the corner of Pencheva and melted into the shadows that lay across the alley mouths on the seaward side of the street. The timechip in my eye said I was late.

Pick it up, Kovacs. According to my contact in Millsport, Plex wasn’t all that reliable at the best of times, and I hadn’t paid him enough to wait long.

Five hundred metres down and then left into the tight fractal whorls of Belacotton Kohei Section, named centuries ago for the habitual content and the original owner/operator family whose warehouse frontages walled the curving maze of alleys. With the Unsettlement and the subsequent loss of New Hokkaido as any kind of market, the local belaweed trade pretty much collapsed and families like Kohei went rapidly bankrupt. Now the grime-filmed upper-level windows of their façades peered sadly across at each other over gape-mouthed loading bay entrances whose shutters were all jammed somewhere uncommitted between open and closed.

There was talk of regeneration of course, of reopening units like these and retooling them as deCom labs, training centres and hardware storage facilities.

Mostly, it was still just talk—the enthusiasm had kindled on the wharf line units facing the hoverloader ramps further west, but so far it hadn’t spread further in any direction than you could trust a wirehead with your phone. This far off the wharf and this far east, the chitter of Mecsek finance was still pretty inaudible.