hurry

And then there was only the silence again.

I lowered the phone and stared at it.

I’d made three calls in Tekitomura, used three phones from the pack. I’d called Lazlo, I’d called Yaroslav, I’d called Isa. It could have been any of the three that had just rung. To know for sure, I’d need to check the log to see who the phone had connected with before.

But I didn’t need to.

A whisper out of dark silence. A voice over distance you couldn’t measure. hurry

I knew which phone it was.

And I knew who was calling me.

TWENTY-TWO

Segesvar was as good as his word. Forty minutes after he hung up, a garish red and black open-top sports skimmer came howling off the Expanse and into the harbour at illegal speed. Every head on the wharf turned to watch it arrive. It was the kind of boatcraft that on the seaward side of Newpest would have occasioned an instant Port Authority override ‘cast and an ignominious stall in the water there and then. I don’t know whether the inland harbour was ill-equipped, if Segesvar had expensive counterjamming software installed in his rich-kid toy, or if the Weed Expanse gangs just had the Inland PA in their pocket. In any event, the Expansemobile didn’t stall out. Instead it banked about, raising spray, and made a fast line for the gap between ramps six and seven. A dozen metres out, it cut its motors and swept in on momentum. Behind the wheel, Segesvar spotted me. I nodded and raised one hand. He waved back.

I sighed.

This stuff trails out behind us across the decades, but it isn’t like the spray Radul Segesvar’s arrival was cutting from the water in the harbour. It doesn’t fall tracelessly back. It just hangs there instead, like the raised dust you get in the wake of a Sharyan desert cruiser, and if you turn about and head back into your own past, you find yourself coughing on it.

“Hey, Kovacs.”

It was a shout, maliciously loud and cheerful. Segesvar was standing up in the cockpit, still steering. Broad, gullwing-framed sunshades covered his eyes in conscious rejection of the Millsport fashion for ultra-engineered finger-width lenses. A paper-thin, hand-sanded iridescent swamp panther skin jacket draped his frame. He waved again and grinned. From the bow of the vessel a grapple line fired with a metallic bang. It was harpoon headed, unrelated to any of the sockets along the ramp edge and it chewed a hole in the evercrete facing of the wharf, half a metre below the point where I stood. The skimmer cranked itself in and Segesvar leapt out of the cockpit to stand on the bow, looking up at me.

“You want to bellow my name a couple more times,” I asked him evenly. “In case someone didn’t get it first time round.”

“Oops.” He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. “Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?”

“Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?”

“I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?”

I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The haiduci straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own—pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry.

It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties.

Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d re-sleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most haiduci and like me—he’d had his share of time in storage.

“Nice sleeve,” he said, pacing a circle around me. “Very nice. What happened to the other one?”

“Long story.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me.” He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. “Right?”

“Right.”

He sighed theatrically. “This is disappointing, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as close-mouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.”

I shrugged. “I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.”

“Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.”

He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one that got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.

“There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?”

“If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.”

“Some other time.”

“Yeah, you’re always so fucking driven, aren’t you? If it’s not the Envoys or the neoQuells, it’s some fucking private revenge scheme. You know, Tak, it isn’t really my business, but someone needs to tell you this and looks like I get the job. You need to stop and smell the weed, man. Remember that you’re living.” He put his sunlenses back on and jerked his head towards the terminal. “Alright, come on then. Machine coffee, why not. It’ll be a novelty.”

Back in the cool, we sat at a table near glass panels that gave a view out onto the harbour. Half a dozen other spectators sat in the same area with their associated baggage, waiting. A wasted-looking man in rags was doing the rounds among them, holding out a tray for credit chips and a hard luck story for anyone who was interested. Most weren’t. There was a faint odour of cheap antibacterial in the air that I hadn’t noticed before. The cleaning robots must have been by.

The coffee was grim.

“See,” said Segesvar, setting his aside with an exaggerated scowl. “I should have your legs broken just for making me drink that.”

“You could try.”

For a moment, our eyes locked. He shrugged.

“It was a joke, Tak. You’re losing your sense of humour.”

“Yeah, I’m putting a thirty per cent surcharge on it.” I sipped at my own coffee, expressionless. “Used to be my friends could get it for nothing, but times change.”

He let that lie for a moment, then cocked his head and looked me in the eye again.

“You think I’m treating you unfairly?”

“I think you’re conveniently forgetful of the real meaning behind the words you saved my ass back there, man.”

Segesvar nodded as if he’d expected no less. He looked down at the table between us.

“That is an old debt,” he said quietly. “And a questionable one.”

“You didn’t think so at the time.”

It was too far back to summon easily to mind. Back before the Envoy conditioning went in, back where things get blurred with the passing decades. Most of all, I remembered the stink in the alley. Alkaline precipitates from the belaweed processing plant and dumped oil from the hydraulic systems on the compression tanks. The meth dealer’s curses and the glint of the long bottleback gaff as he slashed it through the damp air towards me. The others were gone, their youthful thug enthusiasm for the robbery evaporating in swift terror as that honed steel hook came out and ripped open Radul Segesvar’s leg from kneecap to thigh. Gone yelling and sprinting away into the night like exorcised sprites, leaving Radul dragging himself one yelping metre at a time along the alley after them, leaving me, sixteen years old, facing the steel with empty hands.

Come ‘ere, you little fuck. The dealer was grinning at me in the gloom, almost crooning as he advanced, blocking my escape. Try to tumble me on my own patch, will you. I’m going open you up and feed you your own fucking guts, my lad.