“I doubt that, but let’s not quibble. I’m looking for Jack Soul Brasil. I’ll find him with or without you, but you can maybe save me some time. Question is, are you going to?”
He stared back at me, still angry, stance still aggressive. In the ten year old sleeve, it was less than impressive.
“Question is, sam, what’s it worth to help you?”
“Ah.”
Paid, Milan was forthcoming in grudging fragments designed to disguise and eke out the very limited nature of his knowledge. I bought him rum and coffee in a street café across from the shop he was tending—can’t just close it up, sam, be more than my job’s worth—and waited out the storytelling process. Most of what he told me was readily identifiable as well-worn beach legend, but from a couple of things he said I decided he really had met Brasil a few times, maybe even surfed with him. The last encounter seemed to have been a decade or so back. Side-by-side empty handed combat heroism in confrontation with a gang of encroaching Harlan Loyalist surfers a few klicks south from Kem Point. Facedown and general battery, Milan acquits himself with modestly understated savagery, collects a few wounds—you should have seen the fucking scars on that sleeve, man, sometimes I still miss it—but the highest praise is reserved for Brasil. Like a fucking swamp panther, sam. Fuckers ripped him in the chest, he didn’t even notice. He tore them all down. Just, like, nothing left when he was done.
Sent them back north in pieces. All followed by orgiastic celebration—bonfire glow and the cries of women in wild orgasm on a surf backdrop.
It was a standard picture, and I’d had it painted for me before by other Vchira enthusiasts in the past. Looking past the more obvious embellishments, I panned out a little useful detail. Brasil had money—all those years with the Little Blues, right. No way he has to scratch a living teaching wobblies, selling boards and training up some fucking Millsport aristo’s spare flesh five years ahead of time—but the man still didn’t hold with clone reincarnation. He’d be wearing good surfer flesh, but I wouldn’t know his face. Look for them fucking scars on his chest, sam. Yes, he still wore his hair long. Current rumour had him holed up in a sleepy beach hamlet somewhere south.
Apparently he was learning to play the saxophone. There was this jazzman, used to play with Csango Junior, who’d told Milan …
I paid for the drinks and got up to go. The sun was gone and the dirty gold sea all but tarnished through to base metal. Across the beach below us, lights were coming to firefly life. I wondered if I’d catch the bug-hire place before it shut.
“So this aristo,” I said idly. “You teach his body to surf for five years, hone the reflexes for him. What’s your end?”
Milan shrugged and sipped at what was left of his rum. He’d mellowed with the alcohol and the payment. “We trade sleeves. I get what he’s wearing in return for this, aged sixteen. So my end’s a thirty-plus aristo sleeve, cosmetic alterations and witnessed exchange, so I don’t try to pass myself off as him, otherwise catalogue intact. Top-of-the-range clone stock, all the peripherals fitted as standard. Sweet deal, huh?”
I nodded absently. “Yeah, if he looks after what he’s wearing, I guess. Aristo lifestyles I’ve seen can make for some pretty heavy wear and tear.”
“Nah, this guy’s in shape. Comes down here on and off to check on his investment, you know, swim and surf a bit. Would have been down this week but that Harlan limo thing put a lock on it. He’s running a little extra weight he could do without, can’t surf for shit of course. But that’ll sort out easy enough when I—”
“Harlan limo thing?” Envoy awareness slithered along my nerves.
“Yeah, you know. Seichi Harlan’s skimmer. This guy’s real close with that branch of the family, had to—”
“What happened to Seichi Harlan’s skimmer?”
“You didn’t hear about this?” Milan blinked and grinned. “Where you been, sam? Been all over the net since yesterday. Seichi Harlan, taking his sons and daughter-in-law across to Rila, the skimmer just wiped out there in the Reach.”
“Wiped out how?”
He shrugged. “They don’t know yet. Whole thing just exploded, footage they showed looks like from the inside. Sank in seconds, what was left of it. They’re still looking for the pieces.”
They’d be lucky. The maelstrom made itself felt a long way in at this time of year and the currents in the Reach were lethally unpredictable.
Sinking fragments of wreckage might get carried for kilometres before they settled. The broken remains of Seichi Harlan and his family could end up in any of a dozen resting places amidst the scattered islets and reefs of the Millsport archipelago. Stack recovery was going to be a nightmare.
My thoughts fled back to Belacotton Kohei and Plex’s take-soaked mutterings. I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. He’d said biological, but on his own admission his knowledge was incomplete. He’d been shut out by high level yakuza rank and the Harlan family retainer, Aiura. Aiura, who ran damage limitation and clean-up for the Harlan family.
Another wisp of detail settled into place in my mind. Drava wrapped in snow. Waiting in Kurumaya’s antechamber, staring disinterestedly through the global news scrolldown. Accidental death of some minor Harlan heirling in the Millsport wharf district.
It wasn’t a connection as such, but Envoy intuition doesn’t work that way. It just goes on piling up the data until you start to see the shape of something in the mass. Until the connections make themselves for you.
I couldn’t see anything yet, but the fragments were singing to me like windchimes in a storm.
That and the tiny insistent pulse of backbeat: hurry, hurry, there isn’t time.
I traded a badly-remembered Vchira handshake with Milan, and set off back up the hill, hurrying.
The bug-hire place was still lit, and staffed by a bored-looking receptionist with surfer physique. He woke up around the eyes for long enough to find out that I wasn’t a wave rider, aspiring or otherwise, and then settled into mechanical client-service mode. Dayjob shielding around the briefly glimpsed inner core that kept him at Vchira, the heat of enthusiasm wrapped carefully back up again for when he could share it with someone who understood. But he set me up competently enough with a garishly coloured single-seat speed bug and showed me the streetmap software with the return points I could use up and down the Strip. At request, he also provided me with a pre-moulded polalloy crash suit and helmet, though you could see his already low opinion of me go through the floor when I asked for it. It seemed there were still a lot of people on Vchira Beach who couldn’t tell risk and idiocy apart.
Yeah, maybe including you, Tak. Done anything safe yourself recently?
Ten minutes later, I was suited up and powering out of Kem Point behind a cone of headlamp glow in the gathering gloom of evening.
Somewhere south, listening for a badly played saxophone.
I’d had better sets of clues to follow, but there was one thing massively in my favour. I knew Brasil, and I knew that if he heard someone was looking for him, he wasn’t likely to hide. He’d come out to deal with it the way you paddled up to a big wave. The way you faced down a spread of Harlan Loyalists.
Make enough noise, and I wouldn’t have to find him.
He’d find me.
Three hours later, I pulled off the highway and into the cold bluish wash of bug-swarmed Angier lamps around an all-night diner and machine shop. Looking back a little wearily, I judged I’d made enough noise. My supply of low-value credit chips was depleted, I was lightly fogged from too much shared drink and smoke up and down the Strip, and the knuckles of my right hand still ached slightly from a badly thrown punch in a beachside tavern where strangers asking after local legends weren’t well regarded.