En-suite facilities were almost the size of another single cabin themselves, complete with airblast drier in the shower cabinet. We peeled naked and dumped our soaked clothing, then took turns rinsing the chill out of our bones first under a pummelling hail of hot water, then in a gently buffeting storm of warm air. It took a while, one at a time, but there was no hint of invitation in Sylvie’s face as she stepped into the cabinet and so I stayed outside rubbing at my chilled flesh. At one point, watching her as she turned with water streaming down over her breasts and belly, trickling between her legs and tugging at a tiny tuft of drenched pubic hair, I felt myself beginning to harden. I moved quickly to pick up the jacket from my stealth suit and sat awkwardly with it covering my erection.
The woman in the shower caught the movement and looked at me curiously, but she said nothing. No reason why she should. Last time I’d seen Nadia Makita, she’d been slipping into a post-coital drowse in a bubblefab out on the New Hok plains. Small, confident smile on her lips, one arm wrapped loosely around my thigh. When I finally pulled loose, she only turned over in the sleeping bag and muttered to herself.
She hadn’t been back since.
And meanwhile you dressed and tidied up before the others got back, like a criminal trying to cover his tracks.
Met Orr’s suspicious gaze with even Envoy deceit.
Slipped away with Lazlo to your own ‘fab, to lie awake until dawn, disbelieving what you’d seen and heard and done.
Finally, Sylvie stepped out of the cabinet airblasted all but dry. With an effort I stopped myself staring at the suddenly sexualised landscape of her body and went to change places with her. She said nothing, just touched me on one shoulder with a loosely curled fist and frowned. Then she disappeared into the cabin next door.
I stayed under the shower for nearly an hour, turning back and forth in water just below scalding, masturbating vaguely and trying not to think too much about what I was going to have to do when we got to Tekitomura.
The Daikoku Dawn throbbed around me as she ploughed southward.
When I got out of the shower, I dumped our soaked clothing in the cabinet and left the airblast on full, then wandered through to the cabin.
Sylvie was sleeping soundly beneath the coverlet of a bedspace she’d programmed to mould as a double.
I stood and watched her sleep for a long time. Her mouth was open and her hair was in chaotic disarray around her face. The ebony central cord had twisted so that it lay phallically across one cheek. Imagery I didn’t need. I smoothed it back with the rest of the hair until her face was clear.
She muttered in her sleep and moved the same loosely curled fist she’d punched me with up to touch her mouth. I stood and watched her some more.
She’s not.
I know she’s not. It’s not possi—
What, just like it’s not possible there’s another Takeshi Kovacs out there hunting you? Where’s your sense of wonder, Tak?
I stood and watched.
And in the end I shrugged irritably and climbed into the bedspace beside her, and tried to sleep.
It took a while.
FOURTEEN
The crossing back to Tekitomura was far faster than our trip out had been with the Guns for Guevara. Flogging steadily through the icy sea away from the New Hok coast, the Daikoku Dawn was constrained by none of the caution her sister ship had shown going in, and ran at full speed for the bulk of the voyage. According to Sylvie, we raised Tekitomura on the horizon not long after the sun came up and woke her through windows we’d forgotten to blank. Less than an hour after that we were crowding the ramps at Kompcho.
I woke to a sunlit cabin, stilled engines and Sylvie, dressed and staring at me over arms folded across the backrest of a chair she’d straddled beside the bedspace. I blinked at her.
“What?”
“What the fuck were you doing last night?”
I propped myself upright beneath the covers and yawned. “You want to expand on that a little? Give me some idea what you’re talking about?”
“What I’m talking about,” she snapped, “is waking up with your dick jammed against my spine like a racking shard blaster barrel.”
“Ah.” I rubbed at one eye. “Sorry.”
“Sure you are. Since when are we sleeping together?”
I shrugged. “Since you decided to mould the bedspace as a double, I guess. What was I supposed to do, sleep on the floor like a fucking seal?”
“Oh.” She looked away. “I don’t remember doing that.”
“Well you did.” I moved to get out of bed, noticed suddenly that the offending hard-on was still very much in evidence, and stayed where I was.
I nodded at what she was wearing. “Clothes are dry, I see.”
“Uhm, yeah. Thanks. For doing that.” Hurriedly, maybe guessing my physical state, “I’ll get yours for you.”
We left the cabin and found our way up to the nearest debarkation hatch without meeting anyone. Outside in brilliant winter sunlight, a handful of security officers stood around on the ramp talking bottleback fishing and the waterfront property boom. They barely gave us a glance as we passed.
We made the top of the ramp and slipped into the ebb and flow of the Kompcho morning crowds. A couple of blocks on and three streets back from the wharf run, we found a flophouse too seedy to have surveillance and rented a room that looked onto an internal courtyard.
“We’d better get you covered up,” I told Sylvie, cutting a swathe from one of the tatty curtains with the Tebbit knife. “No telling how many religious maniacs are still on the streets around here with a picture of you close to their hearts. Here, try this on.”
She took the makeshift headscarf and examined it with distaste. “I thought the idea was to leave traces.”
“Yeah, but not for the citadel’s thugs. Let’s not complicate our lives unnecessarily, eh.”
“Alright.”
The room boasted one of the most battered-looking datascreen terminals I’d ever seen, sealed into a table over by the bed. I fired it up and killed the video option at my end, then placed a call to the Kompcho harbour master. Predictably, I got a response construct—a blonde woman in an early twenties sleeve, fractionally too well groomed to be real. She smiled for all the world as if she could see me.
“How may I help you?”
“I have vital information for you,” I told her. They’d print the voice for sure, but on a sleeve three centuries unused what were the chances of a trace? Even the company who built the damned thing didn’t exist any more. And with no face to work with, they’d have a hard time tracking me from incidental video footage. It ought to keep the trail cold enough to be safe for a while. “I have reason to believe that the recently arrived hover loader Daikoku Dawn was infiltrated by two unauthorised passengers before departure from Drava.”
The construct smiled again. “That’s impossible, sir.”
“Yeah? Then go check out cabin S37.” I cut the call, turned off the terminal and nodded at Sylvie, who was struggling to get the last of her riotous hair stuffed inside the curtain-cloth headscarf.
“Very becoming. We’ll make a god-fearing maiden of modest demeanour out of you yet.”
“Fuck off.” The natural spring in the command head mane was still pushing the edges of the scarf forward and out. She attempted to smear the cloth backward, out of the way of her peripheral vision. “You think they’ll come here?”
“Eventually. But they’ve got to check the cabin, which they’ll be in no hurry to do, crank call like that. Then check back with Drava, then trace the call. It’ll be the rest of the day, maybe longer.”
“So we’re safe leaving this place untorched?”
I glanced around at the shabby little room. “Sniffer squad won’t get much off what we’ve touched that isn’t blurred with the last dozen occupants. Maybe just enough to confirm against the cabin traces. Not worth worrying about. Anyway, I’m short on incendiaries right now. You?”