Like not being alone.
The ripwing and I sat hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.
TWENTY-ONE
We pulled into Newpest harbour a little after noon the next day and crept to a mooring with painstaking care. The whole port was jammed up with hoverloaders and other vessels fleeing the threat of heavy weather in the eastern gulf, and the harbourmaster software had arranged them according to some counterintuitive mathematical scheme that the Haiduci’s Daughter didn’t have an interface for. Japaridze took the con on manual, cursing machines in general and the Port Authority AI in particular as we wound our way through the apparently random thickets of shipping.
“Fucking upgrade this, upgrade that. If I’d wanted to be a fucking techhead, I would have got a job with deCom.”
Like me, he had a slight but insistent hangover.
We said our farewells on the bridge and I went down to the foredeck. I tossed my pack ashore while the autograpples were still cranking us in, and leapt the closing gap to the wharf from the rail. It got me a couple of glances from bystanders but no uniformed attention. With a circling storm out on the horizon and a harbour packed to capacity, port security had other things to worry about than reckless disembarkation. I picked up the pack, slung it on one shoulder and drifted into the sparse flow of pedestrians along the wharf. The heat settled on me wetly. In a couple of minutes I was off the waterfront, streaming sweat and flagging down an autocab.
“Inland harbour,” I told it. “Charter terminal, and hurry.”
The cab made a U-turn and plunged back into the main crosstown thoroughfares. Newpest unfolded around me.
It’s changed a lot in the couple of centuries I’ve been coming back to it. The town I grew up in was low-lying, like the land it was built on, sprawling in stormproofed snub profile units and superbubbles across the isthmus between the sea and the great clogged lake that would later become the Weed Expanse. Back then Newpest carried the fragrance of belaweed and the stink of the various industrial processes it was subject to like the mix of perfume and body odour on a cheap whore. You couldn’t get away from either without leaving town.
So much for youthful reminiscence.
As the Unsettlement receded into history, a return to relative prosperity brought new growth, out along the inner shore of the Expanse and the long curve of the coastline, and upward into the tropical sky. The height of the buildings in central Newpest soared, rising on the back of increased confidence in storm management technology and a burgeoning, moneyed middle class who needed to live near their investments but didn’t want to have to smell them. By the time I joined the Envoys, environmental legislation had started to take the edge off the air at ground level and there were skyscrapers downtown to rival anything you could find in Millsport.
After that, my visits were infrequent and I wasn’t paying enough attention to notice when exactly the trend started to reverse and why. All I knew was that now there were quarters of the southern city where the stink was back, and the brave new developments along the coast and the Expanse were collapsing, kilometre by kilometre, into creeping shantytown decay.
In the centre there were beggars on the streets and armed security outside most of the large buildings. Looking out of the side window of the auto cab, I caught an echo of irritated tension in the way people moved that hadn’t been there forty years ago.
We crossed the centre in a raised priority lane that sent the digits on the cab meter spinning into a blur. It didn’t last long—aside from one or two glossy limos and a scattering of cabs, we had the vaulted road to ourselves and when we picked up the main Expanse highway on the other side, the charge count settled down to a reasonable rate. We curled away from the high-rise zone and out across the shanties. Low-level housing, pressed up close to the carriageway. This story I already knew from Segesvar. The cleared embankment space on either side of the road had been sold off while I was away and previous health and safety restrictions waived. I caught a glimpse of a naked two-year-old child gripping the wire fence around a flat roof, mesmerised by the blastpast of the traffic two metres from her face. On another roof further along, two kids not much older hurled makeshift missiles that missed and fell bouncing in our wake.
The inland harbour exit sprang on us. The autocab took the turn at machine velocity, drifted across a couple of lanes and braked to a more human speed as we rode the spiral curve through the shanty neighbourhood and down to the fringes of the Weed Expanse. I don’t know why the programme ran that way—maybe I was supposed to be admiring the view; the terminal itself was pretty to look at anyway—steel-boned and up jutting, plated in blue illuminum and glass. The carriageway ran through it like thread through a fishing float.
We drew up smoothly inside and the cab presented the charge in brilliant mauve numerals. I fed it a chip, waited for the doors to unlock and climbed out into vaulted, air-conditioned cool. Scattered figures wandered back and forth or sat about the place either begging or waiting for something. Charter company desks were ranked along one wall of the building, backed and crowned with a range of brightly-coloured holos that in most cases included a virtual customer service construct. I picked one with a real person, a boy in his late teens who sat slumped over the counter fiddling with the quickplant sockets in his neck.
“You for hire?”
He turned lacklustre eyes on me without lifting his head.
“Mama.”
I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalise. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.
“Where you want to go?”
“Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.”
He smirked. “Yeah, Vchira Beach—it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?”
“Southern reach. The Strip.”
“Sourcetown.” His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. “You a surfer?”
“Do I look like a surfer?”
Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blonde woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared Give me Mitzi Harlan’s job—I could do it lying down. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.
“Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?”
“Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?”
She shrugged. “I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.”
“An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?”
She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. “Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?”
“Just what you see.”
“Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.”
The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the two-fifty mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.