It was inspired guesswork, a blind leap off the rapid scaffolding of Envoy intuition, but it seemed to hit home. The Slipins looked back and forth at each other, and finally Lazlo nodded.

“He’s right, Orr. No way can I get you up that chute quietly.”

The ordnance giant stared at me for what seemed like a long time.

Finally, he looked away, at the woman on the bed.

“If you hurt her in any way at all—”

I sighed. “The best way I know to hurt her, Orr, is to leave her here. Which I don’t plan to do. So save the attitude for Kovacs.”

“Yeah,” said Jadwiga grimly. “And this is a promise. As soon as Sylvie’s back on line, we take that motherfucker and we—”

“Admirable,” I agreed. “But a little premature. Plan your revenge later, okay? Right now let’s just all concentrate on surviving.”

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

When pressed, Lazlo admitted that security around the ‘loader ramps at Kompcho was lax verging on laughable. At the Drava beachhead, with mimint assault a constant fear, the dockside would be sewn up tight with electronic intrusion countermeasures.

“So,” I tried for patient calm. “You’ve never actually done this life-raft chute thing in Drava?”

“Well, yeah, once.” Lazlo scratched his ear. “But I had some jamming help from Suki Bajuk.”

Jadwiga snorted. “That little trollop.”

“Hey, jealous. She’s a fucking good command deCom. Even whiffed off her head, she greased the entry codes like—”

“Not all she greased that weekend, from what I hear.”

“Man, just because she isn’t—”

“Is she here?” I asked loudly. “Now, in the beachhead?”

Lazlo went back to scratching his ear. “Dunno. We could check, I guess, but—”

“It’ll take forever,” predicted Kiyoka. “And anyway, she may not be up for another code greasing, if she finds out what this is about. Helping you get your kicks is one thing, Las. Bucking Kurumaya’s lockdown might not appeal so much, you know what I mean?”

“She doesn’t have to know,” said Jadwiga.

“Don’t be a bitch, Jad. I’m not putting Suki in the firing line without—”

I cleared my throat. “What about Oishii?”

They all looked round at me. Orr’s brow furrowed. “Maybe. He and Sylvie go back to the early days. Hired on as sprogs together.”

Jadwiga grinned. “Sure he’ll do it. If Micky asks him.”

“What?”

There were grins appearing on everyone’s mouths now, it seemed.

Welcome release to the building tension. Kiyoka sniggered behind a hand pressed to her nose. Lazlo looked elaborately at the ceiling. Stifled snorts of hilarity. Only Orr was too angry to join in the fun.

“Didn’t you notice over the last couple of days, Micky?” Jadwiga, playing this one until it creaked. “Oishii likes you. I mean, he really likes you.”

I looked around the cramped room at my companions, and tried to match Orr for deadpan lack of amusement. Mostly, I was irritated at myself. I hadn’t noticed, or at least hadn’t identified the attraction for what—Jadwiga said—it was. For an Envoy, that was a serious failure to perceive exploitable benefit.

Ex-Envoy.

Yeah, thanks.

“That’s good,” I said evenly. “I’d better go talk to him, then.”

“Yeah,” Jadwiga managed, straightfaced. “See if he wants to give you a hand.”

The laughter erupted, explosive in the confined space. An unwanted grin forced its way onto my mouth.

“You motherfuckers.”

It didn’t help. The hilarity scaled upward. On the bed, Sylvie stirred and opened her eyes at the sound. She propped herself up on one elbow and coughed painfully. The laughter drained out of the room as rapidly as it had come.

“Micky?” Her voice came out weak and rusty.

I turned to the bed. Caught out of the corner of one eye the venomous glare Orr fired at me. I leaned over her.

“Yeah, Sylvie. I’m here.”

“What are you laughing for?”

I shook my head. “That’s a very good question.”

She gripped my arm with the same intensity as that night in Oishii’s encampment. I steeled myself for what she might say next. Instead, she just shivered and stared at her fingers where they sank into the arm of the jacket I was wearing.

“I,” she muttered. “It knew me. It. Like an old friend. Like a—”

“Leave her alone, Micky.” Orr tried to shoulder me aside, but Sylvie’s grip on my arm defeated the move. She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“What’s going on?” she pleaded.

I glanced sideways at the giant.

“You want to tell her?”

THIRTEEN

Night fell across Drava in swathes of snow-chipped gloom, settling like a well worn blanket around the huddled ‘fabs of the beachhead and then the higher, angular ruins of the city itself. The microblizzard front came and went with the wind, brought the snow in thick, swirling wraps that plastered your face and got inside the neck of your clothing, then whirled away, thinning out to almost nothing, and then back again to dance in the funnelled glare of the camp’s Angier lamps. Visibility oscillated, went down to fifty metres and then cleared, went down again. It was weather for staying inside.

Crouched in the shadow of a discarded freight container at one end of the wharf, I wondered for a moment how the other Kovacs was coping, out in the Uncleared. Like me, he’d have the standard Newpest native’s dislike for the cold, like me he’d be—

You don’t know that, you don’t know that’s who he—

Yeah, right.

Look, where the fuck are the yakuza going to get hold of a spare personality copy of an ex-Envoy? And why the fuck would they take the risk? Under all that Old Earth ancestor crabshit veneer, in the end they’re just fucking criminals. There’s no way—

Yeah, right.

It’s the itch we all live with, the price of the modern age. What if? What if, at some nameless point in your life, they copy you. What if you’re stored somewhere in the belly of some machine, living out who knows what parallel virtual existence or simply asleep, waiting to be released into the real world.

Or already unleashed and out there somewhere. Living.

You see it in the experia flics, you hear the urban myths of friends of friends, the ones who through some freak machine error end up meeting themselves in virtual or, less often, reality. Or the Lazlo-style conspiracy horror stories of military-authorised multiple sleeving. You listen, and you enjoy the existential shiver it sends up your spine. Once in a very long time, you hear one you might even believe.

I’d once met and had to kill a man who was double-sleeved.

I’d once met myself, and it hadn’t ended well.

I was in no hurry to do it again.

And I had more than enough else to worry about.

Fifty metres down the dock, the Daikoku Dawn bulked dimly in the blizzard. She was a bigger vessel than the Guns for Guevara, by the look of her an old commercial ‘loader, taken out of mothballs and regeared for deCom haulage. A whiff of antique grandeur hung about her. Light gleamed cosily from portholes and clustered in colder white and red constellations on the superstructure above. Earlier, there’d been a desultory trickle of figures up the gangways as the outgoing deComs went aboard, and lights at the boarding ramps, but now the hatches were closing up and the hoverloader stood isolated in the chill of the New Hok night.

Figures through the muffling swirl of white on black to my right. I touched the hilt of the Tebbit knife and cranked up my vision.

It was Lazlo, leading with a wincefish flex in his stride and a fierce grin on his snow-chilled face. Oishii and Sylvie in tow. Chemical functionality trowelled across the woman’s features, a more intense control in the other command head’s demeanour. They crossed the open ground along the quayside and slipped into the shelter of the container. Lazlo scrubbed at his face with both hands and shook the melting snow from splayed fingers.