THIRTY-SIX

The rayhunter Angelfire Flirt, like most vessels of its type, cut a mean and rakish figure at sea. Part warship, part oversized racing skiff, combining a razor sharp real-keel centre of gravity and ludicrous quantities of grav lift in twin outrigger pods, it was built above all for reckless speed and piracy. Elephant rays and their smaller relatives are swift in the water, but more importantly their flesh tends to spoil if left untreated for any length of time. Freeze the bodies and you can sell the meat well enough, but get it back fast enough to the big fresh-catch auctions in centres of affluence like Millsport, and you can make a real killing. For that you need a fast boat. Shipyards all over Harlan’s World understand this and build accordingly. Tacitly understood in the same yards is the fact that some of the best elephant ray stock lives and breeds in waters set aside for the exclusive use of the First Families. Poaching there is a serious offence, and if you’re going to get away with it your fast boat also needs to present a low, hard-to-spot profile both visually and on radar.

If you’re going to run from Harlan’s World law enforcement, there are worse ways to do it than aboard a rayhunter.

On the second day out, secure in the knowledge we were so far from the Millsport Archipelago that no aircraft had the range to overfly us, I went up on deck and stood on the left-hand outrigger gantry, watching the ocean rip past underneath me. Spray on the wind, and the sense of events rushing towards me too fast to assimilate. The past and its cargo of dead, falling behind in our wake, taking with them options and solutions it was too late to try.

Envoys are supposed to be good at this shit.

Out of nowhere, I saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin new face. But this time there was no voice in my head, no instilled trainer confidence. I wasn’t getting any more help from that particular ghost, it seemed.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

It was called out, over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, towards the centre deck and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver grey hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.

Another fucking ghost.

“Sure. Why not?”

She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream.

Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.

“You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?”

Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d got wrecked on take with a virtual whore in a—failed—attempt to break the system’s desire fulfillment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d got equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.

“Don’t read anything into it,” I told her. “I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”

She hesitated. “I’m remembering a lot of detail.”

I watched the sea. Said nothing.

“We fucked, didn’t we?”

The ocean, pouring past beneath me. “Yeah. A couple of times.”

“I remember—” Another hovering pause. She looked away from me.

“You held me. While I was sleeping.”

“Yes.” I made an impatient gesture. “This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?”

“It’s. Difficult.” She shivered. “There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.”

Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing, I felt like saying. It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.

“Do you remember someone called Plex?” I asked her instead.

“Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.”

“What do you remember about him?”

The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.

“That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.”

“Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

I shrugged. “Just putting you straight on the facts.”

“Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.”

I looked sideways at her. “You been talking to the others?”

“They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.”

I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. “I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction IV.”

“Yes, they said. ”

“Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalisation. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”

“I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?”

“Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.”

“You talk as if I had a choice.”

I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. “You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you. What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?”

The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. “Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?”

“Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.”

“Yes, well right now that’s not possible,” she snapped. “Is it?”

I stared back at her. “I don’t know. Is it?”

“You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.” She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. “I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic. She’s the one who sent me back up when you came for us.”

“Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come on!”

“No. She is grieving.”

That stopped me. “Grieving what?”

“What do you think? The fact that every member of her team died in Drava.”

“That’s crabshit. She wasn’t in contact with them when they died. The net was down.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” The woman in front of me drew a deep breath. Her voice lowered and paced out to explanatory calm. “The net was down, she couldn’t access it. She has told me this. But the receiving system stored every moment of their dying, and if she opens the wrong doors down there, it all comes screaming out. She’s in shock from the exposure to it. She knows that, and as long as it lasts she’s staying where it’s safe.”