He didn’t sound that upset.

“You recommend a good place for breakfast?” I asked.

Silence. A polite static backdrop. I weighed the phone in my palm for a moment, then tossed it back to Yukio.

“So.” I looked from the yakuza to Plex and back. “Either of you recommend a good place for breakfast?”

TWO

Before Leonid Mecsek unleashed his beneficence on the struggling economies of the Saffron Archipelago, Tekitomura scraped a seasonal living out of big game bottleback charters for rich sportsmen across from Millsport or the Ohrid Isles, and the harvest of webjellies for their internal oils.

Bioluminescence made these latter easiest to catch at night, but the sweeper crews that did it tended not to stay out for more than a couple of hours at a time. Longer and the webjellies’ gossamer fine stinging aerials got plastered so thick over clothing and onboard surfaces that you could lose serious productivity to toxin inhalation and skin burns. All night long, the sweepers came in so that crew and decks could be hosed clean with cheap biosolvent. Behind the Angier lamp-glare of the hosing station, a short parade of bars and eating houses stayed open until dawn.

Plex, spilling apologies like a leaky bucket, walked me down through the warehouse district to the wharf and into an unwindowed place called Tokyo Crow. It wasn’t very different from a low-end Millsport skipper’s bar mural sketches of Ebisu and Elmo on the stained walls, interspersed with the standard votive plaques inscribed in Kanji or Amanglic Roman: calm seas, please, and full nets. Monitors up behind the mirrorwood bar, giving out local weather coverage, orbital behaviour patterns and global breaking news. The inevitable holoporn on a broad projection base at the end of the room. Sweeper crew members lined the bar and knotted around the tables, faces blurred weary. It was a thin crowd, mostly male, mostly unhappy.

“I’ll get these,” said Plex hurriedly, as we entered.

“Too fucking right, you will.”

He gave me a sheepish look. “Um. Yeah. What do you want, then?”

“Whatever passes for whisky around here. Cask strength. Something I’ll be able to taste through the flavour circuits in this fucking sleeve.”

He sloped off to the bar and I found a corner table out of habit. Views to the door and across the clientele. I lowered myself into a seat, wincing at the movement in my blaster-raked ribs.

What a fucking mess.

Not really. I touched the stacks through the fabric of my coat pocket. I got what I came for.

Any special reason you couldn’t just cut their throats while they slept?

They needed to know. They needed to see it coming.

Plex came back from the bar, bearing glasses and a tray of tired-looking sushi. He seemed unaccountably pleased with himself.

“Look, Tak. You don’t need to worry about those sniffer squads. In a synth sleeve—”

I looked at him. “Yes. I know.”

“And, well, you know. It’s only six hours.”

“And all of tomorrow until the ‘loader ships out.” I hooked my glass. “I really think you’d better just shut up, Plex.”

He did. After a couple of brooding minutes, I discovered I didn’t want that either. I was jumpy in my synthetic skin, twitching like a meth comedown, uncomfortable with who I physically was. I needed distraction.

“You know Yukio long?”

He looked up, sulkily. “I thought you wanted—”

“Yeah. Sorry. I got shot tonight, and it hasn’t put me in a great mood. I was just—”

“You were shot?”

“Plex.” I leaned intently across the table. “Do you want to keep your fucking voice down.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I mean.” I gestured helplessly. “How the fuck do you stay in business, man? You’re supposed to be a criminal, for Christ’s sake.”

“It wasn’t my choice,” he said stiffly.

“No? How’s that work, then? They got some kind of conscription for it up here?”

“Very funny. I suppose you chose the military, did you? At seventeen fucking standard years old?”

I shrugged. “I made a choice, yeah. Military or the gangs. I put on a uniform. It paid better than the criminal stuff I was already doing.”

“Well, I was never in a gang.” He knocked back a chunk of his drink.

“The yakuza made sure of that. Too much danger of corrupting their investment. I went to the right tutors, spent time in the right social circles, learnt to walk the walk, talk the talk, and then they plucked me like a fucking cherry.”

His gaze beached on the scarred wood of the table top.

“I remember my father,” he said bitterly. “The day I got access to the family datastacks. Right after my coming-of-age party, the next morning. I was still hungover, still fried and Tanaseda and Kadar and Hirayasu in his office like fucking vampires. He cried that day.”

“That Hirayasu?”

He shook his head. “That’s the son. Yukio. You want to know how long I’ve known Yukio? We grew up together. Fell asleep together in the same Kanji classes, got wrecked on the same take, dated the same girls. He left for Millsport about the time I started my dh/biotech practicals, came back a year later wearing that fucking stupid suit.” He looked up. “You think I like living out my father’s debts?”

It didn’t seem to need an answer. And I didn’t want to listen to any more of this stuff. I sipped some more of the cask-strength whisky, wondering what the bite would be like in a sleeve with real taste buds. I gestured with the glass. “So how come they needed your de-and-re-gear tonight. Got to be more than one digital human shunting-set in town, surely.”

He shrugged. “Some-kind of fuck-up. They had their own gear, but it got contaminated. Sea water in the gel feeds.”

“Organised crime, huh.”

There was a resentful envy in the way he stared at me. “You don’t have any family, do you?”

“Not so’s you’d notice.” That was a little harsh, but he didn’t need to know the close truth. Feed him something else. “I’ve been away.”

“In the store?”

I shook my head. “Offworld.”

“Offworld? Where’d you go?” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, barely held back by the ghost of breeding. The Glimmer system has no habitable planets apart from Harlan’s World. Tentative terraforming down the plane of the ecliptic on Glimmer V won’t yield useful results for another century. Offworld for a Harlanite means a stellar-range needle cast, shrugging off your physical self and re-sleeving somewhere light years distant under an alien sun. It’s all very romantic and in the public consciousness known needlecast riders are accorded a celebrity status somewhat akin to pilots back on earth during the days of intra-system spaceflight.

The fact that, unlike pilots, these latter-day celebrities don’t actually have to do anything to travel the hypercaster, the fact that in many cases they have no actual skills or stature other than their hypercast fame itself, doesn’t seem to impede their triumphant conquest of the public imagination.

Old Earth is the real jackpot destination, of course, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go, so long as you come back. It’s a favourite boost technique for fading experia stars and out-of-favour Millsport courtesans. If you can just somehow scrape up the cost of the ‘cast, you’re more or less guaranteed years of well-paid coverage in the skullwalk magazines.

That, of course, doesn’t apply to Envoys. We just used to go silently, crush the odd planetary uprising, topple the odd regime, and then plug in something UN-compliant that worked. Slaughter and suppression across the stars, for the greater good—naturally—of a unified Protectorate.

I don’t do that any more.

“Did you go to Earth?”

“Among other places.” I smiled at a memory that was getting on for a century out of date. “Earth’s a shit-hole, Plex. Static fucking society, hyper-rich immortal overclass, cowed masses.”