I frowned and thought about it. What kind of big heat?

If I knew that, you’d have to pay me for it. But as it happens, I don’t. Only players talked to me were bent Millsport PD, and them you can buy for the price of an Angel Wharf blowjob. Anybody could have sent them.

And I don’t suppose you told them anything about me.

Don’t suppose I did. You planning on soaking up this line much longer, Kovacs?

Only, I’m not like you. I have a social life.

No, I’m gone. Thanks for the newsflash, Isa.

She grunted. My clit-tingling pleasure. You stay in one piece, maybe we get to do some more business I can charge you for.

I pressed the sealseam of my newly acquired coat closed to the collar, flexed my hands inside the black polalloy gloves—spike of brief agony from the left—and poured gangster attitude into my stride as I came round the curve of the alley. Think Yukio Hirayasu at his most youthfully arrogant. Ignore the fact the coat wasn’t hand-tailored—straight-to-street off-the-rack branded was the best I could do at short notice, a garment the real Hirayasu wouldn’t have been seen dead in. But it was a rich matt black to match the spray-on gloves and, in this light, it should pass. Envoy deceit would do the rest.

I’d thought briefly about crashing Plex’s party the hard way. Going in heavy against the door, or maybe scaling the back of the warehouse and cracking a skylight entry. But my left arm was still a single throbbing ache from fingertip to neck and I didn’t know how far I could trust it to do what I wanted in a critical situation.

The door detail saw me coming and drew together. Neurachem vision calibrated them for me at distance—cheap, wharf-front muscle, maybe some very basic combat augmentation in the way they moved. One of them had a tactical marine tattoo across his cheek, but that could have been a knock-off, courtesy of some parlour with army surplus software.

Or, like a lot of tacs, he could just have fallen on post-demob hard times.

Downsizing. The universal catch-all and catechism on Harlan’s World these days. Nothing was more sacred than cost cutting, and even the military weren’t entirely safe.

“Hold it, sam.”

It was the one with the tattoo. I cut him a withering glance. Halted, barely.

“I have an appointment with Plex Kohei. I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”

“Appointment?” His gaze lifted and slipped left, checking a retinal guest list. “Not tonight you don’t. Man’s busy.”

I let my eyes widen, built the volcanic pressure of fury the way I’d seen it from the yak captain in Dig 301’s footage.

“Do you know who I am?” I barked.

The tattooed doorman shrugged. “I know I don’t see your face on this list. And round here, that means you don’t get in.”

At my side, the others were looking me up and down with professional interest. Seeing what they could break easily. I fought down the impulse to take up a fighting stance and eyed them with mannered disdain instead.

Launched the bluff.

“Very well. You will please inform your employer that you have turned Yukio Hirayasu from his door, and that thanks to your diligence in this matter, he will now speak to me in sempai Tanaseda’s presence tomorrow morning, unadvised and thus unprepared.”

Gazes flew back and forth between the three of them. It was the names, the whiff of authentic yakuza clout. The spokesman hesitated. I turned away. Was only midway through the motion when he made up his mind, and broke.

“Alright. Hirayasu-san. Just one moment please.”

The great thing about organised crime is the level of fear it likes to maintain among its minions and those who associate with them. Thug hierarchy. You can see the same pattern on any of a dozen different worlds—the Hun Home triads, Adoracion’s familias vigilantes, the Provo Crews on Nkrumah’s Land. Regional variations, but they all sow the same crop of respect through terror of retribution. And all reap the same harvest of stunted initiative in the ranks. No one wants to take an independent decision, when independent action runs the risk of reinterpretation as a lack of respect. Shit like that can get you Really Dead.

Better by far, to fall back on hierarchy. The doorman dug out his phone and punched up his boss.

“Listen, Plex, we’ve—”

He listened a moment himself, face immobile. Angry insect sounds from the phone. I didn’t need neurachem to work out what was being said.

“Uh, yeah, I know you said that, man. But I’ve got Yukio Hirayasu out here wanting a word, and I—”

Another break, but this time the doorkeep seemed happier. He nodded a couple of times, described me and what I’d just said. At the other end of the line, I could hear Plex dithering. I gave it a couple of moments, then snapped my fingers impatiently and gestured for the phone. The doorman caved in and handed it over. I mustered Hirayasu’s speech patterns from memory a couple of months old, coloured in what I didn’t know with standard Millsport gangster idiom.

“Plex.” Grim impatience.

“Uh. Yukio? That really you?”

I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. “No, I’m a fucking ledgedust dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.”

“Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were gone.”

“Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”

“Tana—” Plex swallowed audibly. “Is Tanaseda here?”

“Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.”

“All over what?”

“All over what?”

I cranked the yelp again. “What do you fucking think?”

I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.

“I thought they—”

“Are you going to fucking let me in or what?”

The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.

Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene—translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.

A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood warm. The music got even louder.

We forged through the tightly packed dancespace without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissed-out vacant. The take scene is pretty laid back wherever you go on Harlan’s World—careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amidst incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody wants them outside of the military.