Aiura glanced sideways at the other me. He shrugged. Maybe he nodded fractionally. Or maybe it was just the thought of facing Konrad Harlan with Mitzi’s bloodied corpse.
I saw the decision take root in her.
“Very well,” she said briskly. “You will be held to your promise, Kovacs-san. I don’t need to tell you what that means. When the reckoning comes, your conduct in this matter may be all that saves you from the full wrath of the Harlan family.”
I smeared her a brief smile. “Don’t threaten me, Aiura. When the reckoning comes, I’m going to be a long way from here. Which is a shame, because I’ll miss seeing you and your greasy little hierarch masters scrabbling to get your loot offworld before the general populace strings you up from a dockyard crane. Now where’s my fucking helicopter?”
They brought Sylvie Oshima up on a grav stretcher, and when I saw her at first I thought the Little Blue Bugs would have to execute Mitzi Harlan after all. The iron-haired figure beneath the stretcher blanket was a death white fake of the woman I remembered from Tekitomura, gaunt with weeks of sedation, pale features scorched with feverish colour across the cheeks, lips badly bitten, eyelids draped slackly closed over twitching eyeballs. There was a light sweat on her forehead that shone in the glow from the stretcher’s overhead examination lamp, and a long transparent bandage on the left side of her face, where a thin slash wound led down from cheekbone to jawline. When angelfire lit the stone garden around us, Sylvie Oshima might have been a corpse in the bluish snapshot light.
I sensed more than saw the outraged tension kick through Sierra Tres and Brasil. Thunder rolled across the sky.
“Is that her?” asked Tres tautly.
I lifted my free hand. “Just. Take it easy. Yes, it’s her. Aiura, what the fuck have you done to her?”
“I would advise against overreaction.” But you could hear the strain in the security exec’s voice. She knew how close to the edge we were.
“The wound is a result of self-injury, before we were able to stop her. A procedure was tried and she responded badly.”
My mind fled back to Innenin and Jimmy de Soto’s destruction of his own face when the Rawling virus hit. I knew what procedure they’d tried with Sylvie Oshima.
“Have you fed her?” I asked in a voice that grated in my own ears.
“Intravenously.” Aiura had put her sidearm away while we were waiting for her men to bring Sylvie to the stone garden. Now she moved forward, making damping motions with both hands. “You must understand that—”
“We understand perfectly,” said Brasil, “We understand what you and your kind are. And some day soon we are coming to cleanse this world of you.”
He must have moved, maybe twitched the barrel of the frag rifle.
Weapons came up around the garden with a panicky rattle. Aiura spun about.
“Stand down. All of you.”
I shot a glance at Brasil, muttering, “You too, Jack. Don’t blow this.”
A soft shuttering sound. Above the long angles of the citadel’s guest wing, a narrow, black Dracul swoopcopter raced towards us, nose dropped. It swerved wide of the stone garden, out over the sea, hesitated a moment as the sky ruptured blue, then came wagging back in with landing grabs extended. A shift in the engine pitch, and it settled with insect precision onto the parapet to the right. If whoever was flying it was worried by the orbital activity, it didn’t show in the handling.
I nodded at Sierra Tres. She bent under the soft storm of the rotors and ran crouched to the swoopcopter. I saw her lean in and converse briefly with the pilot, then she looked back at me and gestured an okay. I laid down my Sunjet and turned to Aiura.
“Right, you and junior there. Get her up, bring her over here to me. You’re going to help me load her. Everybody else stays back.”
It was awkward, but between the three of us we managed to manhandle Sylvie Oshima up from the stone garden and onto the parapet. Brasil skirted round to stand between us and the drop. I gathered the grey-maned woman under the arms while Aiura supported her back and the other Kovacs took her legs. Together we carried her limp form to the swoopcopter.
And at the door, in the chuntering of the rotors above us, Aiura Harlan leaned across the semi-conscious form we were both holding. The swoopcopter was a stealth machine, designed to run quiet, but this close in the rotors made enough noise that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I craned my neck closer
“You what?”
She leaned closer again. Spoke directly and sibilantly into my ear.
“I said, you send her back to me whole, Kovacs. These joke revolutionaries, that’s a fight we can have another time. But they harm any part of Mitzi Harlan’s mind or body and I’ll spend the rest of my existence hunting you down.”
I grinned back at her in the noise. I raised my voice as she drew back.
“You don’t frighten me, Aiura. I’ve been dealing with scum like you all my life. You’ll get Mitzi back because I said you would. But if you really care that much about her, you’d better start planning some lengthy holidays for her offworld. These guys aren’t nicking about.”
She looked down at Sylvie Oshima.
“It isn’t her, you know,” she shouted. “There’s no way for it to be her. Quellcrist Falconer is dead. Really dead.”
I nodded. “Okay. So if that’s the case, how come she’s got all you First Family fucks so bent out of shape?”
The security exec’s shout became genuinely agitated. “Why? Because, Kovacs, whoever this is—and it’s not Quell—whoever this is, she’s brought back a plague from the Uncleared. A whole new form of death. You ask her about the Qualcrist Protocol when she wakes up, and then ask yourself if what I’ve done here to stop her is so terrible.”
“Boy!” It was my younger self, elbows crooked under Sylvie’s knees, hands spread expressively wide beneath. “Are we going to load this bitch, or are you going to stand there talking about it all night?”
I held his gaze for a long moment, then lifted Sylvie’s head and shoulders carefully up to where Sierra Tres waited in the swoopcopter’s cramped cabin. The other Kovacs shoved hard and the rest of her body slid in after. The move brought him up close beside me.
“This isn’t over,” he yelled in my ear. “You and I have some unfinished business.”
I levered one arm under Sylvie Oshima’s knee, and elbowed him back, away from her. Gazes locked.
“Don’t fucking tempt me,” I shouted. “You bought-and-paid-for little shit.”
He bristled. Brasil surged up close. Aiura laid a hand on my younger self’s arm, and spoke intently into his ear. He backed off. Raised one pistol finger and stabbed it at me. What he said was lost in the wash of the rotors.
Then the Harlan security exec was shepherding him away, back along the parapet to a safe distance. I swung myself aboard the Dracul, made space beside me for Brasil and nodded at Sierra Tres. She spoke directly to the pilot and the swoopcopter loosened its hold on the parapet. I stared out at the other, younger Kovacs. Watched him stare back.
We lifted away.
Beside me, Brasil had a grin plastered across his face like the mask for some ceremony I hadn’t been invited to attend. I nodded back at him wearily. Suddenly, I was shattered, mind and body. The long swim, the unrelenting strain and near-death moments of the climb, the tightwired tension of the face-off—it all came crashing back down on me.
“We did it, Tak,” Brasil bellowed.
I shook my head. Mustered my voice
“So far, so good,” I countered.
“Ah, don’t be like that.”
I shook my head again. Braced in the doorway, I leaned out of the swoopcopter and stared down at the rapidly shrinking array of lights from the Rila citadel. With unaided vision, I couldn’t see any of the figures in the stone garden any more, and I was too tired to crank up the neurachem.