Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
Before we landed, Ameli Vongsavath ran surveillance on the nanocolonies. We played it back in the conference room.
“Are those webs?” someone asked.
Sutjiadi dialled the magnifier up to full. He got grey cobwebbing, hundreds of metres long and tens wide, filling the hollows and creases beyond the reach of the remote UV batteries. Angular things like four-legged spiders crawled about in the mesh. There was the suggestion of more activity, deeper in.
“That is fast work,” said Luc Deprez, around a mouthful of apple. “But to me it looks defensive.”
“For the moment,” Hand agreed.
“Well, let’s keep it that way.” Cruickshank looked belligerently round the circle. “We’ve sat still long enough for this bullshit. I say we haul out one of our MAS mortars and drop a case of frag shells into the middle of that stuff right now.”
“They’ll just learn to deal with it, Yvette.” Hansen was staring into space as he said it. We appeared to have sold the powerpack leakage story successfully, but the drop to a single remaining buoy still seemed to have hit Hansen curiously hard. “They’ll learn and adapt on us again.”
Cruickshank made an angry gesture. “Let them learn. It buys us more time, doesn’t it?”
“That sounds like sense to me.” Sutjiadi stood up. “Hansen, Cruickshank. As soon as we’ve eaten. Plasma core, fragmentation load. I want to see that stuff burning from here.”
Sutjiadi got what he wanted.
After a hurried early-evening meal in the Nagini’s galley, everyone spilled out onto the beach to see the show. Hansen and Cruickshank set up one of the mobile artillery systems, fed Ameli Vongsavath’s aerial footage into the ranging processor and then stood back while the weapon lobbed plasma-cored shells up over the hills into the nanocolonies and whatever they were evolving beneath their webbed cocoons. The landward horizon caught fire.
I watched it from the deck of the trawler with Luc Deprez, leant on the rail and sharing a bottle of Sauberville whisky we’d found in a locker on the bridge.
“Very pretty,” said the assassin, gesturing at the glow in the sky with his glass.
“And very crude.”
“Well, it’s a war.”
He eyed me curiously. “Strange point of view for an Envoy.”
“Ex-Envoy.”
“Ex-Envoy, then. The Corps has a reputation for subtlety.”
“When it suits them. They can get pretty unsubtle when they want to. Look at Adoracion. Sharya.”
“Innenin.”
“Yeah, Innenin too.” I looked into the dregs of my drink.
“Crudity is the problem, man. This war could have been over a year ago with a little more subtlety.”
“You reckon?” I held up the bottle. He nodded and held out his glass.
“For sure. Put a wet team into Kempopolis, and ice that f*ck. War. Over.”
“That’s simplistic, Deprez.” I poured refills. “He’s got a wife, children. A couple of brothers. All good rallying points. What about them?”
“Them too, of course.” Deprez raised his glass. “Cheers. Probably, you’d have to kill most of his chiefs of staff as well, but so what. It’s a night’s work. Two or three squads, coordinated. At a total cost of. What?”
I knocked back the first of the new drink, and grimaced. “Do I look like an accountant?”
“All I know is that for what it costs to put a couple of wet-ops squads into the field, we could have finished this war a year ago. A few dozen people really dead, instead of this mess.”
“Yeah, sure. Or we could just deploy the smart systems on both sides and evacuate the planet until they fight themselves to a standstill. Machine damage, and no loss of human life at all. Somehow I don’t see them doing that either.”
“No,” said the assassin sombrely. “That would cost too much. Always cheaper to kill people than machines.”
“You sound kind of squeamish for a covert ops killer, Deprez. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
He shook his head.
“I know what I am,” he said. “But it is a decision I have taken, and something I’m good at. I saw the dead of both sides at Chatichai—there were boys and girls among them, not old enough to be legally conscripted. This was not their war, and they did not deserve to die in it.”
I thought briefly of the Wedge platoon I’d led into hostile fire a few hundred kilometres south west of here. Kwok Yuen Yee, hands and eyes ripped away by the same smart shrapnel blast that had taken Eddie Munharto’s limbs and Tony Loemanako’s face. Others, less lucky. Hardly innocents, any of them, but they hadn’t been asking to die either.
Out on the beach, the barrage of mortar fire stopped. I narrowed my eyes on the figures of Cruickshank and Hansen, indistinct now in the gathering gloom of evening, and saw that they were standing the weapon down. I drained my glass.
“Well, that’s that.”
“Do you think it will work?”
I shrugged. “Like Hansen says. For a while.”
“So they learn our explosive projectile capacity. Probably they also learn to resist beam weapons—the heat effects are very similar. And they are already learning our UV capacity from the sentries. What else do we have?”
“Sharp sticks?”
“Are we close to opening the gate?”
“Why ask me? Wardani’s the expert.”
“You seem. Close to her.”
I shrugged again and stared out over the rail in silence. Evening was creeping in across the bay, tarnishing the surface of the water as it came.
“Are you staying out here?”
I held the bottle up to the darkening sky and the banked red glow below. It was still more than half full.
“No reason to leave yet that I can see.”
He chuckled. “You do realise that we are drinking a collector’s item there. It may not taste like it, but that stuff will be worth money now. I mean,” He gestured over his shoulder at where Sauberville used to be. “They aren’t going to be making any more.”
“Yeah.” I rolled over on the rail and faced across the deck towards the murdered city. I poured another glass full and raised it to the sky. “So here’s to them. Let’s drink the f*cking bottle.”
We said very little after that. Conversation slurred and slowed down as the level in the bottle sank and night solidified around the trawler. The world closed down to the deck, the bulk of the bridge and a cloud-shrouded miser’s handful of stars. We left the rail and sat on the deck, propped against convenient points of superstructure.
At some point, out of nowhere, Deprez asked me:
“Were you grown in a tank, Kovacs?”
I lifted my head and focused on him. It was a common misconception about the Envoys, and ‘tankhead’ was an equally common term of abuse on half a dozen worlds I’d been needlecast to. Still, from someone in spec ops…
“No, of course not. Were you?”
“Of course I f*cking was not. But the Envoys—”
“Yeah, the Envoys. They push you to the wall, they unpick your psyche in virtual and they rebuild you with a whole lot of conditioned shit that in your saner moments you’d probably rather not have. But most of us are still real-world human. Growing up for real gives you a base flexibility that’s pretty much essential.”
“Not really.” Deprez wagged a finger. “They could generate a construct, give it a virtual life at speed and then download into a clone. Something like that wouldn’t even have to know it hadn’t had a real upbringing. You could be something like that for all you know.”
I yawned. “Yeah, yeah. So could you, for that matter. So could we all. It’s something you live with every time you get re-sleeved, every time you get DHF’d, and you know how I know they haven’t done that to me?”
“How?”
“Because there’s no way they’d programme an upbringing as f*cked up as mine. It made me sociopathic from an early age, sporadically and violently resistant to authority and emotionally unpredictable. Some f*cking clone warrior that makes me, Luc.”
He laughed and, after a moment, so did I.
“It brings you to think, though,” he said, laughter drying up.
“What does?”
He gestured around. “All this. This beach, so calm. This quiet. Maybe it’s all some military construct, man. Maybe it’s a place to shunt us while we’re dead, while they decide where to decant us next.”
I shrugged. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“You would be happy like that? In a construct?”
“Luc, after what I’ve seen in the last two years, I’d be happy in a waiting zone for the souls of the damned.”
“Very romantic. But I am talking about a military virtuality.”
“We differ over terms.”
“You consider yourself damned?”
I downed more Sauberville whisky and grimaced past the burn. “It was a joke, Luc. I’m being funny.”
“Ah. You should warn me.” He leaned forward suddenly. “When did you first kill someone, Kovacs?”
“If it’s not a personal question.”
“We may die on this beach. Really die.”
“Not if it’s a construct.”
“Then what if we are damned, as you say?”
“I don’t see that as a reason to unburden my soul to you.”
Deprez pulled a face. “We’ll talk about something else, then. Are you f*cking the archaeologue?”
“Sixteen.”
“What?”
“Sixteen. I was sixteen. That’s closer to eighteen, earth standard. Harlan’s World orbits slower.”
“Still very young.”
I considered. “Nah, it was about time. I’d been running with the gangs since I was fourteen. I’d come close a couple of times already.”
“It was a gang killing?”
“It was a mess. We tried to rip off a tetrameth dealer, and he was tougher than we’d expected. The others ran, I got caught up.” I looked at my hands. “Then I was tougher than he expected.”
“Did you take his stack?”
“No. Just got out of there. I hear he came looking for me when he got re-sleeved, but I’d joined up by then. He wasn’t connected enough to f*ck with the military.”
“And in the military they taught you how to inflict real death.”
“I’m sure I would have got around to it anyway. What about you? You have a similarly f*cked run-up at this stuff?”
“Oh no,” he said lightly. “It’s in my blood. Back on Latimer, my family name has historic links to the military. My mother was a colonel in the Latimer IP marines. Her father was a navy commodore. I have a brother and a sister, both in the military.” He smiled in the gloom, and his clone-new teeth gleamed. “You might say we were bred for it.”
“So how does covert ops sit with your historic military family history? They disappointed you didn’t end up with a command? If that’s not a personal question.”
Deprez shrugged. “Soldier’s a soldier. It is of little importance how you do your killing. At least, that is what my mother maintains.”
“And your first?”
“On Latimer.” He smiled again, remembering. “I wasn’t much older than you, I suppose. During the Soufriere Uprising, I was part of a reconnaissance squad across the swamplands. Walked around a tree and bam!” He brought fist and cupped hand together. “There he was. I shot him before I realised it. It blasted him back ten metres and cut him in two pieces. I saw it happen and in that moment I did not understand what had happened. I did not understand that I had shot this man.”
“Did you take his stack?”
“Oh, yes. We had been instructed. Recover all fatalities for interrogation, leave no evidence.”
“That must have been fun.”
Deprez shook his head.
“I was sick,” he admitted. “Very sick. The others in my squad laughed at me, but the sergeant helped me do the cutting. He also cleaned me up and told me not to worry about it too much. Later there were others, and I, well, I became accustomed.”
“And good at it.”
He met my gaze, and the confirmation of that shared experience sparked.
“After the Soufriere campaign, I was decorated. Recommended for covert duties.”
“You ever run into the Carrefour Brotherhood?”
“Carrefour?” He frowned. “They were active in the troubles further south. Bissou and the cape—do you know it?”
I shook my head.
“Bissou was always their home ground, but who they were fighting for was a mystery. There were Carrefour hougans running guns to the rebels on the cape—I know, I killed one or two myself—but we had some working for us as well. They supplied intelligence, drugs, sometimes religious services. A lot of the rank-and-file soldiers were strong believers, so getting a hougan blessing before battle was a good thing for any commander to do. Have you had dealings with them?”
“A couple of times in Latimer City. More by reputation than actual contact. But Hand is a hougan.”
“Indeed.” Deprez looked abruptly thoughtful. “That is very interesting. He does not behave like a man of religion.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“It will make him. Less predictable.”
“Hoy. Envoy guy.” The shout came from under the port rail, and in its wake I caught the murmur of motors. “You aboard?”
“Cruickshank?” I looked up from my musing. “That you, Cruickshank?”
Laughter.
I stumbled upright and went to the rail. Peering down, I made out Schneider, Hansen and Cruickshank, all crammed onto one grav bike and hovering. They were clutching bottles and other party apparatus, and from the erratic way the bike held station, the party had started a while ago back on the beach.
“You’d better come aboard before you drown,” I said.
The new crew came with music attached. They dumped the sound system on the deck and the night lit up with Limon Highland salsa. Schneider and Hansen put together a tower pipe and powered it up at base. The smoke fumed off fragrant amidst the hung nets and masting. Cruickshank passed out cigars with the ruin-and-scaffold label of Indigo City.
“These are banned,” observed Deprez, rolling one between his fingers.
“Spoils of war.” Cruickshank bit the end off her own cigar and lay back across the deck with it still in her mouth. She turned her head to light up from the glowing base of the tower pipe, and hinged back up from the waist without apparent effort. She grinned at me as she came upright. I pretended I hadn’t been staring with glazed fascination down the length of her outstretched Maori frame.
“Alright,” she said, commandeering the bottle from me. “Now we’re running interference.”
I found a crumpled pack of Landfall Lights in a pocket, and lit my cigar from the ignition patch.
“This was a quiet party until you turned up.”
“Yeah, right. Two old dogs comparing kills, was it?”
The cigar smoke bit. “So where did you steal these from, Cruickshank?”
“Armoury supply clerk at Mandrake, just before we left. And I didn’t steal anything, we have an arrangement. He’s meeting me in the gun room,” she shuttled her eyes ostentatiously up and aside, checking a retinal time display. “In about an hour from now. So. Were you two old dogs comparing kills?”
I glanced at Deprez. He quelled a grin.
“No.”
“That’s good.” She plumed smoke skyward. “I got enough of that shit in Rapid Deployment. Bunch of brainless a*sholes. I mean, Samedi’s sake, it’s not like killing people is hard. We’ve all got the capacity. Just a case of shedding the shakes.”
“And refining your technique, of course.”
“You taking the piss out of me, Kovacs?”
I shook my head and drained my glass. There was something sad about watching someone as young as Cruickshank take all the wrong turns you took a handful of subjective decades back.
“You’re from Limon, yes?” Deprez asked.
“Highlander, born and bred. Why?”
“You must have had some dealings with Carrefour then.”
Cruickshank spat. Quite an accurate shot, under the bottom of the rail and overboard. “Those f*ckers. Sure, they came around. Winter of ‘28. They were up and down the cable trails, converting and, when that didn’t work, burning villages.”
Deprez threw me a glance.
I said it. “Hand’s ex-Carrefour.”
“Doesn’t show.” She blew smoke. “F*ck, why should it? They look just like regular human beings ‘til it’s time for worship. You know for all the shit they pile on Kemp,” she hesitated and glanced around with reflexive caution. On Sanction IV, checking for a political officer was as ingrained as checking your dosage meter. “At least he won’t have the Faith on his side of the fence. Publicly expelled them from Indigo City, I read about that back in Limon, before the blockade came down.”
“Well, God,” said Deprez dryly. “You know, that’s a lot of competition for an ego the size of Kemp’s.”
“I heard all Quellism is like that. No religion allowed.”
I snorted.
“Hey.” Schneider pushed his way into the ring. “Come on, I heard that too. What was that Quell said? Spit on the tyrant God if the f*cker tries to call you to account? Something like that?”
“Kemp’s no f*cking Quellist,” said Ole Hansen from where he was slumped against the rail, pipe in one trailing hand. He handed the stem to me with a speculative look. “Right, Kovacs?”
“It’s questionable. He borrows from it.” I fielded the pipe and drew on it, balancing the cigar in my other hand. The pipe smoke slunk into my lungs, billowing over the internal surfaces like a cool sheet being spread. It was a subtler invasion than the cigar, though maybe not as subtle as the Guerlain Twenty had been. The rush came on like wings of ice unfurling through my ribcage. I coughed and stabbed the cigar in Schneider’s direction. “And that quote is bullshit. Neo-Quellist fabricated crap.”
That caused a minor storm.
“Oh, come on—”
“What?”
“It was her deathbed speech, for Samedi’s sake.”
“Schneider, she never died.”
“Now there,” said Deprez ironically, “is an article of faith.”
Laughter splashed around me. I hit the pipe again, then passed it across to the assassin.
“Alright, she never died that we know of. She just disappeared. But you don’t get to make a deathbed speech without a deathbed.”
“Maybe it was a valediction.”
“Maybe it was bullshit.” I stood up, unsteadily. “You want the quote, I’ll give you the quote.”
“Yeahhh!!!”
“Bright!!”
They scooted back to give me room.
I cleared my throat. “ ‘I have no excuses,’ she said. This is from the Campaign Diaries, not some bullshit invented deathbed speech. She was retreating from Millsport, f*cked over by their microbombers, and the Harlan’s World authorities were all over the airwaves, saying God would call her to account for the dead on both sides. She said I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. That’s exactly what she said.”
Applause, like startled birds across the deck.
I scanned faces as it died down, gauging the irony gradient. To Hansen, the speech seemed to have meant something. He sat with his gaze hooded, sipping thoughtfully at the pipe. At the other end of the scale, Schneider chased the applause with a long whistle and leaned on Cruickshank with painfully obvious sexual intent. The Limon Highlander glanced sideways and grinned. Opposite them, Luc Deprez was unreadable.
“Give us a poem,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” jeered Schneider. “A war poem.”
Out of nowhere, something short-circuited me back to the perimeter deck of the hospital ship. Loemanako, Kwok and Munharto, gathered round, wearing their wounds like badges. Unblaming. Wolf cubs to the slaughter. Looking for me to validate it all and lead them back out to start again.
Where were my excuses?
“I never learnt her poetry,” I lied, and walked away along the ship’s rail to the bow, where I leaned and breathed the air as if it was clean. Up on the landward skyline, the flames from the bombardment were already dying down. I stared at it for a while, gaze flipping focus from the glow of the fire to the embers at the end of the cigar in my hand.
“Guess that Quellist stuff goes deep.” It was Cruickshank, settling beside me against the rail. “No joke if you’re from the H World, huh?”
“It isn’t that.”
“No?”
“Nah. She was a f*cking psycho, Quell. Probably caused more real death single-handed than the whole Protectorate marine corps in a bad year.”
“Impressive.”
I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself smiling. I shook my head. “Oh, Cruickshank, Cruickshank.”
“What?”
“You’re going to remember this conversation one day, Cruickshank. Someday, about a hundred and fifty years from now, when you’re standing on my side of the interface.”
“Yeah, right, old man.”
I shook my head again, but couldn’t seem to shake the grin loose. “Suit yourself.”
“Well, yeah. Been doing that since I was eleven.”
“Gosh, almost a whole decade.”
“I’m twenty-two, Kovacs.” She was smiling as she said it, but only to herself, gazing down at the black and starlight dapple of the water below us. There was an edge on her voice that didn’t match the smile. “Got five years in, three of them in tactical reserve. Marine induction, I graded ninth in my class. That’s out of more than eighty inductees. I took seventh in combat proficiency. Corporal’s flashes at nineteen, squad sergeant at twenty-one.”
“Dead at twenty-two.” It came out harsher than I’d meant.
Cruickshank drew a slow breath. “Man, you are in a shitty mood. Yeah, dead at twenty-two. And now I’m back in the game, just like everybody else around here. I’m a big girl, Kovacs, so how ‘bout you cut out the little-sister crap for a while.”
I raised an eyebrow, more at the sudden realisation that she was right than anything else.
“Whatever you say. Big girl.”
“Yeah, I saw you looking.” She drew hard on her cigar and plumed the smoke out towards the beach. “So what do you say, old man? Are we going to get it on before the fallout takes us down? Seize the moment?”
Memories of another beach cascaded through my head, dinosaur-necked palms leaning up over white sand and Tanya Wardani moving in my lap.
“I don’t know, Cruickshank. I’m not convinced this is the time and place.”
“Gate got you spooked, huh?”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
She waved it away. “Whatever. You think Wardani can open that thing?”
“Well, she did before, by all accounts.”
“Yeah, but she looks like shit, man.”
“Well, I guess that’s military internment for you, Cruickshank. You should try it some time.”
“Back off, Kovacs.” There was a studied boredom to her voice that woke an updraft of anger inside me. “We don’t work the camps, man. That’s government levy. Strictly home-grown.”
Riding the updraft. “Cruickshank, you don’t know a f*cking thing.”
She blinked, missed a beat, and then came back balanced again, little wisps of hurt almost fanned away with heavy cool.
“Well, uh, I know what they say about Carrera’s Wedge. Ritual execution of prisoners is what I hear. Very messy, by all accounts. So maybe you want to make sure you’re clamped to the cable before you start throwing your weight about with me, huh?”
She turned back to the water. I stared at her profile for a while, feeling my way around the reasons I was losing control, and not liking them much. Then I leaned on the rail next to her.
“Sorry.”
“Skip it.” But she flinched away along the rail as she said it.
“No, really. I’m sorry. This place is killing me.”
An unwilling smile curled her lip.
“I mean it. I’ve been killed before, more times than you’d believe,” I shook my head. “It’s just, it never took this long before.”
“Yeah. Plus you’re abseiling after the archaeologue, right?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“It is now.” She examined her cigar, pinched the glowing end off and tucked the rest into a breast pocket. “I don’t blame you. She’s smart, she’s got her head wrapped around stuff that’s just ghost stories and math to the rest of us. Real mystic chick. I can see the appeal.”
She looked around.
“Surprise you, huh?”
“A little.”
“Yeah, well. I may be a grunt, but I know Once in a Lifetime when I see it. That thing we’ve got back there, it’s going to change the way we see things. You can feel that when you look at it. Know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Yeah.” She gestured out to where the beach glowed pale turquoise beyond the darkened water. “I know it. Whatever else we do after this, looking through that gate is going to be the thing that makes us who we are for the rest of our lives.”
She looked at me.
“Feels weird, you know. It’s like, I died. And now I’ve come back, and I have to face this moment. I don’t know if it should scare me. But it doesn’t. Man, I’m looking forward to it. I can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.”
There was an orb of something warm building in the space between us. Something that fed on what she was saying and the look on her face and a deeper sense of time rushing away around us like rapids.
She smiled once more, smeared across her face in a hurry, and then she turned away.
“See you there, Kovacs,” she murmured.
I watched her walk the length of the boat and rejoin the party without a backward glance.
Nice going, Kovacs. Could you be any more heavy-handed?
Extenuating circumstances. I’m dying.
You’re all, dying, Kovacs. All of you.
The trawler shifted in the water, and I heard netting creak overhead. My mind flickered back to the catch we’d hauled aboard. Death hung in the folds, like a Newpest geisha in a hammock. Set against the image, the little gathering at the other end of the deck seemed suddenly fragile, at risk.
Chemicals.
That old Altered Significance shuffle of too many chemicals tubing through the system. Oh, and that f*cking wolf splice again. Don’t forget that. Pack loyalty, just when you least need it.
No matter, I will have them all. The new harvest begins.
I closed my eyes. The nets whispered against each other.
I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but—
F*ck off.
I pitched my cigar over the rail, turned and walked rapidly to the main companion way.
“Hoy, Kovacs?” It was Schneider, looking glassily up from the pipe. “Where you going, man?”
“Call of nature,” I slurred back over my shoulder and braced my way down the companionway rails a wrist-jarring half metre at a time. At the bottom I collided with an idly swinging cabin door in the gloom, fought it off with a sodden ghost of the neurachem and lurched into the narrow space behind.
IIluminum tiles with badly-fitted cover plates let out thin right-angled lines of radiance along one wall. It was just enough to make out detail with natural vision. Frame bed, moulded up from the floor as part of the original structure. Storage racks opposite. Desk and work deck alcoved in at the far end. For no reason, I took the three steps required to reach the end of the cabin and leaned hard on the horizontal panel of the desk, head down. The datadisplay spiral awoke, bathing my lowered features in blue and indigo light. I closed my eyes; and let the light wash back and forth across the darkness behind my eyelids. Whatever had been in the pipe flexed its serpent coils inside me.
Do you see, Wedge Wolf? Do you see how the new harvest begins?
Get the f*ck out of my head, Semetaire.
You are mistaken. I am no charlatan, and Semetaire is only one of a hundred names…
Whoever you are, you’re looking for an antipersonnel round in the face.
But you brought me here.
I don’t think so.
I saw a skull, lolling at a rakish angle in the nets. Sardonic amusement grinning from blackened, eaten-back lips.
I have been busy in the streets of Sauberville, but I am finished there now. And there is work for me here.
Now you’re mistaken. When I want you, I’ll come looking for you.
Kovacs-vacs-vacs-vacs-vacs…
I blinked. The datadisplay ripped light across my open eyes. Someone moved behind me.
I straightened up and stared into the bulkhead above the desk. The dull metal threw back blue from the display. Light caught on a thousand tiny dents and abrasions.
The presence behind me shifted—
I drew breath.
—Closer—
And spun, murderous.
“Shit, Kovacs, you want to give me a heart attack?”
Cruickshank was a step away, hands on her hips. The datadisplay glow picked out the uncertain grin on her face and the unseamed shirt beneath her chameleochrome jacket.
The breath gusted out of me. My adrenalin surge collapsed.
“Cruickshank, what the f*ck are you doing down here?”
“Kovacs, what the f*ck are you doing here? You said a call of nature. What are you planning to do, piss on the datacoil there?”
“What did you follow me down here for?” I hissed. “You going to hold it for me?”
“I don’t know. That what you like, Kovacs? You a digital man? That your thing?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. Semetaire was gone, but the thing in my chest was still coiling languidly through me. I opened my eyes again, and she was still there.
“You going to talk like that, Cruickshank, you’d better be buying.”
She grinned. One hand brushed with apparent casualness at the unseamed opening of her shirt, thumb hooking in and slipping the fabric back to reveal the breast beneath. She looked down at her own recently acquired flesh as if entranced by it. Then she brought her fingers back to brush the nipple, flicking back and forth at it until it had stiffened.
“I look like I’m only looking, Envoy guy?” she asked lazily.
She looked up at me and it got pretty frantic after that. We closed and her thigh slid between mine, warm and hard through the soft cloth of the coveralls. I pushed her hand away from her breast and replaced it with my own. The closure became a clinch, both of us looking down at the exposed nipple squeezed between us, and what my fingers were doing to it. I could hear her breath starting to scrape as her own hand unclasped my waistband and slid inside. She cupped the end of my cock and kneaded at it with thumb and palm.
We fell sideways onto the bedshelf in a tangle of clothing and limbs. A salt damp and mustiness rose almost visibly around us on impact. Cruickshank threw out one booted foot and kicked the cabin door closed. It shut with a clang that must have been heard all the way back up to the party on deck. I grinned into Cruickshank’s hair.
“Poor old Jan.”
“Huh?” She turned from what she was doing to my prick for a moment.
“I think, ahhhh, I think this is going to piss him off. He’s been drifting after you since we left Landfall.”
“Listen, with legs like these, anyone with a male heterosex gene code is going to be drifting after me. I wouldn’t,” she started to stroke, paced a pair of seconds apart. “Read. Anything. Into it.”
I drew breath. “OK, I won’t.”
“Good. Anyway,” she lowered one breast towards the head of my prick and began to rub slow circles around the nipple with my glans. “He’s probably got his hands full with the archaeologue.”
“What?”
I tried to sit up. Cruickshank pushed me back down absently, most of her still focused on the rubbing friction of glans on breast.
“Nah, you just stay there till I’m finished with you. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but seeing as,” she gestured at what she was doing. “Well, I guess you can deal with it. Seen the two of them sloping off together a couple of times now. And Schneider always comes back with this big shit-eating grin, so I figure, you know.” She shrugged, and went back to the timed strokes. “Well, he’s not a. Bad looking. Guy for a Whiteboy and Wardani, well. She’d probably. Take whatever. She can get. You liking this, Kovacs?”
I groaned.
“Thought so. You guys.” She shook her head. “Standard porn-construct stuff. Never fails.”
“You come here, Cruickshank.”
“Ah-ah. No way. Later. I want to see your face when you want to come and I don’t let you.”
She had working against her the alcohol and the pipe, impending radiation poisoning, Semetaire rustling around in the back of my head and now the thought of Tanya Wardani in Schneider’s embrace—still Cruickshank had me there in less than ten minutes with the combination of hard strokes and soft brushstrokes across her breasts. And when she got me there, she pulled me back from the brink three times with pleased, excited sounds in her throat, before finally masturbating me rapidly and violently to a climax that spattered us both with semen.
The release was like something being unplugged in my head.
Wardani and Schneider, Semetaire and impending death all went with it, blown out of my skull through my eyes with the force of the orgasm. I went limp in the narrow bed-space and the cabin beyond spun away into distant irrelevance.
When I felt something again, it was the smooth brush of Cruickshank’s thigh as she swung herself astride my chest and seated herself there.
“Now, Envoy guy,” she said, reaching down for my head with both hands. “Let’s see you pay that off.”
Her fingers laced across the back of my head and she held me to the budding folds of flesh like a nursing mother, rocking gently. Her cunt was hot and wet on my mouth and the juices that pooled and slipped out of her tasted of bitter spice. There was a scent to her like delicately burnt wood and a sound in the back of her throat like a saw blade rubbing back and forth. I could feel the tension welling up in the long muscles of her thighs as her climax built, and towards the end she lifted fractionally from her seat on my chest and began tilting her pelvis back and forth in a blind echo of coitus. The cage of fingers nursing my head between her thighs made tiny flexing motions, as if she was losing her grip on the last handhold over an abyss. The noise in her throat became a tight and urgent panting, sawing towards a hoarse cry.
You don’t lose me that easily, Wedge Wolf
Cruickshank rose on her haunches, muscles locked up rigid, and yelled her orgasm into the damp air of the cabin.
Not that easily
She shuddered and sank back, crushing the air out of me. Her fingers let go and my head dropped back to the clammy sheets.
I am locked in and
“Now,” she said, reaching back along my body. “Let’s see what we… Oh.”
You couldn’t miss the surprise in her voice, but she hid the attendant disappointment well. I was semi-erect in her hand, an unreliable hard-on bleeding back to the muscles my body thought it needed to fight or run from the thing in my head.
Yes. Do you see how the new harvest begins. You can run, but—
Get the F*ck out of my head.
I propped myself up on my elbows, feeling the shutdown settling over my face in tight masking bands. The fire we’d lit in the cabin was guttering out. I tried for a smile and felt Semetaire take it away from me.
“Sorry about that. I guess. This dying thing’s getting to me sooner than I thought.”
She shrugged. “Hey, Kovacs. The words just physical were never truer than right here and now. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”
I winced.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” It was the same comically crestfallen expression I’d seen on her face in the construct interview. Somehow, on the Maori sleeve it was funnier still. I chuckled, grabbed at the glimmer of laughter offered. Grabbed and grinned harder.
“Ahhh,” she said, feeling the change. “Want to try anyway? Won’t take much, I’m all wet inside.”
She slid back and arched over me. In the faint glow from the datacoil, I fixed my gaze on the juncture of her thighs with a kind of desperation and she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.
The heat and pressure and the long, tensed body riding me were the fragments I used to keep going, but it still wasn’t what you’d call great sex. I slipped free a couple of times and my problems became hers as the obvious lack of abandonment braked her excitement back to not much more than methodical technical expertise and a determination to get this done.
Do you see how—
I flailed down the voice in the back of my head and brought some determination of my own to match that of the woman I was joined to. For a while it was work, attention to posture and tight smiles. Then I pushed a thumb into her mouth, let her moisten it and used it to find her *oris in the crux of her spread legs. She took my other hand and pressed it onto her breast, and not long after she found an orgasm of sorts.
I didn’t, but in the grinning, sweat-soaked kiss we shared after she had come, that didn’t seem to matter so much.
It wasn’t great sex, but it slammed the door on Semetaire for a while. And later, when Cruickshank pulled her clothes back together and went back up on deck, to cheers and applause from the rest of the party, I stayed in the gloom waiting for him, and he still chose not to show.
It was the closest thing to a victory that I ever enjoyed on Sanction IV.