“Sure. Seems very reasonable You want to show me my ride?”

Suzi Petkovski’s skimmer was pretty much the standard package—a blunt-nosed twenty-metre twin turbine rig that deserved the name hover loader more purely than did any of the huge vessels plying the sealanes of Harlan’s World. There was no antigrav system to kick up the buoyancy, just the engines and the armoured skirt, a variant on the basic machine they’ve been building since the pre-diaspora days on Earth. There was a sixteen-seat cabin forward and freight rack storage aft, railed walkways along either side of the superstructure from cockpit to stern. On the roof behind the pilot’s cupola, a nasty-looking ultravibe cannon was mounted in a cheap autoturret.

“That get much use?” I asked, nodding up at the weapon’s split snout.

She swung herself up onto the opened turbine mounting with accustomed grace, then looked back down at me gravely. “There are still pirates on the Expanse, if that’s what you mean. But they’re mostly kids, mostly methed to the eyes or,”—an involuntary glance back towards the terminal building—“wirehead cases. Rehabilitation projects all folded with the funding cuts, we got a big street problem and it spills over into banditry out there. But they’re not much to shout about, any of them. Usually scare off with a couple of warning shots. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You want to leave your pack in the cabin?”

“No, it’s okay, it’s not heavy.” I left her to the turbine and retreated to a shaded area at the end of the wharf where empty crates and canisters had been piled without much care. I seated myself on one of the cleaner ones and opened my pack. Sorted through my phones and found an unused one.

Dialled a local number.

“Southside holdings,” said an androgynous synth voice. “Due to—”

I reeled off the fourteen-digit discreet coding. The voice sank into static hiss and then silence. There was a long pause, then another voice, human this time. Male and unmistakable. The bitten-off syllables and squashed vowels of Newpest-accented Amanglic, as raw as they had been when I first met him on the streets of the city a lifetime ago.

“Kovacs, where the fuck have you been?”

I grinned despite myself. “Hey Rad. Nice to talk to you too.”

“It’s nearly three fucking months, man. I’m not running a pet hotel down here. Where’s my money?”

“It’s been two months, Radul.”

“It’s been more than two.”

“It’s been nine weeks—that’s my final offer.”

He laughed down the line, a sound that reminded me of a trawl winch cranking at speed. “Okay, Tak. So how was your trip? Catch any fish?”

“Yes, I did.” I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the cortical stacks. “Got some for you right here as promised. Canned for ease of carriage.”

“Of course. Hardly expect you to bring it fresh. Imagine the stink. Especially after three months.”

“Two months.”

The trawler winch again. “Nine weeks, I thought we agreed. So are you in town, finally?”

“Near enough, yeah.”

“You coming out to visit?”

“Yeah, see, that’s the problem. Something’s come up and I can’t. But I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fish—”

“No, nor would I. Your last consignment hasn’t kept well. Barely fit for consumption these days. My boys think I’m crazy still serving it up, but I told them. Takeshi Kovacs is old school. He pays his debts. We do what he asks, and when he surfaces finally, he will do what is right.”

I hesitated. Calibrated.

“I can’t get you your money right now, Rad. I daren’t go near a major credit transaction. Wouldn’t be good for you any more than for me. I’ll need time to sort it out. But you can have the fish, if you send someone to collect in the next hour.”

The silence crawled back onto the line. This was pushing the elastic of the debt to failure point, and we both knew it.

“Look, I got four. That’s one more than expected. You can have them now, all of them. You can serve them up without me, use them how you like, or not at all if my credit’s really out.”

He said nothing. His presence on the line was oppressive, like the wet heat coming off the Weed Expanse. Envoy sense told me this was the break, and Envoy sense is rarely wrong.

“The money’s coming, Rad. Hit me with a surcharge, if that’s what it takes. As soon as I’m done with this other shit, we’re back to business as usual. This is strictly temporary.”

Still nothing. The silence was beginning to sing, the tiny lethal song of a cable snagged and under stress. I stared out across the Expanse, as if I could find him and make eye contact.

“He would have got you,” I said bluntly. “You know that.”

The silence lasted a moment longer, then snapped across. Segesvar’s voice rang with false boisterousness.

“What you talking about, Tak?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Our meth-dealing friend, back in the day. You ran with the others, Rad, but the way your leg was, you wouldn’t have had a chance. If he’d come through me, he would have caught you up. You know that. The others ran, I stayed.”

On the other end of the line I heard him breathe out, like something uncoiling.

“So,” he said. “A surcharge. Shall we say thirty per cent?”

“Sounds reasonable,” I lied, for both of us.

“Yes. But I think your previous fish will have to be taken off the menu now. Why don’t you come here to give your traditional valediction, and we’ll discuss the terms of this. Refinancing.”

“Can’t do that, Rad. I told you, I’m only passing through. An hour from now I’m gone again. Be a week or more before I can get back.”

“Then,” I could almost see him shrug. “You will miss the valediction. I would not have thought you would want that.”

“I don’t.” This was punishment, another surcharge on top of my volunteered thirty per cent. Segesvar had me worked out, it’s a core skill in organised crime and he was good at his trade. The Kossuth haiduci might not have the cachet and sophistication of the yakuza further north, but it’s essentially the same game. If you’re going to make a living out of extortion, you’d better know how to get to people. And how to get to Takeshi Kovacs was painted all over my recent past like blood. It couldn’t have taken a lot of working out.

“Then come,” he said warmly. “We will get drunk together, maybe even go to Watanabe’s for old times’ sake. Old time’s sake, heheh? And a pipe. I need to look you in the eyes, my friend. To know that you have not changed.”

Out of nowhere, Lazlo’s face.

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her.

I glanced across to where Suzi Petkovski was lowering the canopy back over the turbine.

“Sorry, Rad. This is too important to juggle. You want your fish, send someone out to the inland harbour. Charter terminal, ramp seven. I’ll be here for an hour.”

“No valediction?”

I grimaced. “No valediction. I don’t have the time.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I think,” he said finally, “that I would like very much to look in your eyes right now, Takeshi Kovacs. Perhaps I will come myself.”

“Sure. Be good to see you. Just make it inside the hour.”

He hung up. I gritted my teeth and smashed a fist against the crate beside me.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

You look after her, right. You keep her safe.

Yeah, yeah. Alright.

I’m trusting you, Micky.

Alright, I fucking hear you.

The chime of a phone.

For a moment, I held the one I was using stupidly to my ear. Then it hit me that the sound came from the opened pack beside me. I leaned over and pushed aside three or four phones before I found the one with the lit display. It was one I’d used before, one with a broken seal.

“Yeah?”

Nothing. The line was open but there was no sound on it. Not even static. Perfect black silence yawned into my ear.

“Hello?”

And something whispered up out of the dark, just barely more audible than the tension I’d felt in the previous call.