THIRTY-TWO

Figures, armed and armoured, stepped out of the cloistering. At least a dozen of them. Here and there, I could see a pale face, but most wore bulky enhanced-vision masks, and tactical marine-style helmets. Combat armour hugged their chests and limbs like extra muscle. The weaponry was equally heavy-duty. Shard blasters with gape-mouthed dispersal fittings, frag rifles about a century newer than the one Jack Soul Brasil had brought to the party. A couple of hip-mounted plasmaguns. No one up in the Harlan eyrie was taking any chances.

I lowered the barrel of the Sunjet gently to point at the stone parapet.

Kept a loose grip on the butt. Peripheral vision told me Brasil had done the same with the frag rifle, and that Sierra Tres had her arms at her sides.

“Yes, I really meant relinquish your weapons,” said the same woman urbanely. “As in put them down altogether. Perhaps my Amanglic is not as idiomatic as it could be.”

I turned in the direction the voice came from.

“That you, Aiura?”

There was a long pause, and then she stepped out of the archway at the end of the ornamental space. Another orbital discharge lit her for a moment, then the gloom sank back and I had to use neurachem to keep the detail. The Harlan security executive was the epitome of First Family beauty—elegant, almost ageless Eurasian features, jet-black hair sculpted back in a static field that seemed to both crown and frame the pale of her face. A mobile intelligence of lips and gaze, the faintest of lines at the corners of her eyes to denote a life lived. A tall, slim frame wrapped in a simple quilted jacket in black and dark red with the high collar of office, matching slacks loose enough to appear a full-length court gown when she stood still. Flat-heeled shoes that she could run or fight in if she had to. A shard pistol. Not aimed, not quite lowered.

She smiled in the dim light.

“I am Aiura, yes.”

“Got my fuckhead younger self there with you?”

Another smile. A flicker of eyebrows as she glanced sideways, back the way she’d come. He stepped out of the shadowed archway. There was a grin on his face, but it didn’t look very firmly anchored.

“Here I am, old man. Got something to say to me?”

I eyed the tanned combat frame, the gathered stance and the bound back hair. Like some fucking bad guy from a cut-rate samurai flic.

“Nothing you’d listen to,” I told him. “I’m just trying to sort out the idiot count here.”

“Yeah? Well I’m not the one who just climbed two hundred metres so he could walk into an ambush.”

I ignored the jibe, and looked back at Aiura, who was watching me with amused curiosity.

“I’m here for Sylvie Oshima,” I said quietly.

My younger self coughed laughter. Some of the armoured men and women took it up, but it didn’t last. They were too nervous, there were still too many guns in play. Aiura waited for the last guffaws to skitter out.

“I think we’re all aware of that, Kovacs-san. But I fail to see how you’re going to accomplish your goal.”

“Well, I’d like you to go and fetch her for me.”

More grating laughter. But the security exec’s smile had paled out and she gestured sharply for quiet.

“Be serious, Kovacs-san. I don’t have unlimited patience.”

“Believe me, nor do I. And I’m tired. So you’d better send a couple of our men down to get Sylvie Oshima from whatever interrogation chamber you’re holding her in, and you’d better hope she’s not been harmed in any way, because if she has, this negotiation is over.”

Now it had grown quiet again in the stone garden. There was no more laughter. Envoy conviction, the tone in my voice, the choice of words, the ease in my stance—these things told them to believe.

“With what exactly are you negotiating, Kovacs-san?”

“With the head of Mitzi Harlan,” I said simply.

The quiet cranked tight. Aiura’s face might have been graven from stone for all the reaction it showed. But something in the way she stood changed and I knew I had her.

“Aiura-san, I am not bluffing. Konrad Harlan’s favourite granddaughter was taken by a Quellist assault team in Danchi two minutes ago. Her Secret Service detachment is dead, as is anyone else who mistakenly tried to come to her aid. You have been focused in the wrong place. And you now have less than thirty minutes to render me Sylvie Oshima unharmed—after that, I have no influence over the outcomes. Kill us, take us prisoner. It won’t matter. None of it will make any difference. Mitzi Harlan will die in great pain.”

The moment pivoted. Up on the parapet, it was cool and quiet and I could hear the maelstrom faintly. It was a solid, carefully-engineered plan, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t get me killed. I wondered what would happen if someone shot me off the edge. If I’d be dead before I hit.

“Crabshit!” It was me. He’d stepped towards the parapet, controlled violence raging off the way he held himself. “You’re bluffing. There’s no way you’d—”

I locked gazes with him, and he shut up. I sympathised—the same freezing disbelief was in me as I stared back into his eyes and truly understood for the first time who was behind them. I’d been double-sleeved before, but that had been a carbon copy of who I was at the time, not this echo from another time and place in my own lifeline. Not this ghost.

“Wouldn’t I?” I gestured, “You’re forgetting there’s a hundred-odd years of my lifeline that you haven’t lived yet. And that isn’t even the issue here. This isn’t me we’re talking about. This is a squad of Quellists, with three centuries of grudge backed up in their throats and a useless fucking aristo trollop standing between them and their beloved leader. You know this, Aiura-san, even if my idiot youth here doesn’t. Whatever’s required down there—they will do. And nothing I do or say will change that, unless you give me Sylvie Oshima.”

Aiura muttered something to my younger self. Then she took a phone from her jacket and glanced up at me.

“You’ll forgive me,” she said politely, “if I don’t take this on trust.”

I nodded. “Please confirm anything you need to. But please hurry.”

It didn’t take long for the security exec to get the answers she needed.

She’d barely spoken two words into the phone when a torrent of panicked gibbering washed back out at her. Even without neurachem, I could hear the voice at the other end. Her face hardened. She snapped a handful of orders in Japanese, cut off the speaker, then killed the line and replaced the phone in her jacket.

“How do you plan to leave?” she asked me.

“Oh, we’ll need a helicopter. I understand you maintain a half dozen or so here. Nothing fancy, a single pilot. If he behaves, we’ll send him back to you unharmed.”

“Yeah, if you’re not shot out of the sky by a twitchy orbital,” drawled Kovacs. “Not a good time to be flying, tonight.”

I stared back at him with dislike. “I’ll take the risk. It won’t be the most stupid thing I’ve ever done.”

“And Mitzi Harlan?” The Harlan security exec was watching me like a predator now. “What assurances do I have of her safety?”

Brasil stirred at my side, for the first time since the confrontation began.

“We are not murderers.”

“No?” Aiura switched her gaze across to him like an audio-response sentry gun. “Then this must be some new breed of Quellism I was unaware of.”

For the first time, I thought I detected a crack in Brasil’s voice. “Fuck you, enforcer. With the blood of generations on your hands, you want to point a moral finger at us? The First Families have—”

“I think we’ll have this discussion some other time,” I said loudly. “Aiura-san, your thirty minutes are burning up. Slaughtering Mitzi Harlan can only make the Quellists unpopular, and I think you know they’ll avoid that if they can. If that’s insufficient, I give you a personal undertaking. Comply with our demands, I will see Harlan’s granddaughter returned unharmed.”