All the way out, I worried at it, like a wolf at a limb caught in a trap. All the way out. Past the stoned and strobe-lit dancers, the recorded hallucinations and the chemical smiles. Past the throbbing translucent panels where a woman stripped to the waist met my eyes and smeared herself against the glass for me to look at. Past the cheap door muscle and detectors, the last tendrils of club warmth and reef dive rhythm, and out into the chill of the warehouse district night, where it was starting to snow.

PART 3

THAT WAS A WHILE AGO

“That Quell, sure, man, she got something going on, something you gotta think about. Thing is, some things last, some things don’t, but sometimes you got something don’t last won’t be because it’s gone, be because it’s waiting for its time to come again, maybe waiting on a change. Music’s like that, and so is life, man, so is life.”

Dizzy Csango in an interview for New Sky Blue magazine

TWENTY

There were storm warnings all the way south.

On some planets I’ve been to, they manage their hurricanes. Satellite tracking maps and models the storm system to see where it’s going and, if necessary, associated precision beam weaponry can be used to rip its heart out before it does any damage. This is not an option we have on Harlan’s World, and either the Martians didn’t think it was worth programming that kind of thing into their own orbitals way back when, or the orbitals themselves have just stopped bothering since. Maybe they’re sulking obscurely at being left behind. In any case, it leaves us back in the Dark Ages with surface-based monitoring and the odd low-level helicopter scout.

Meteorological AIs help with prediction, but three moons and 0.8G home gravity make for some seriously tumbled weather systems and storms have been known to do some very odd things. When a Harlan’s World hurricane gets into its stride there’s really very little you can do but get well out of the way and stay there.

This one had been building for a while—I remembered newscasts about it the night we slipped out of Drava—and those who could move were moving. All across the Gulf of Kossuth, the urbrafts and seafactories were hauling keels west at whatever speed they could manage. Trawlers and rayhunters caught too far east sought anchorage in the relatively protected harbours among the Irezumi Shallows. Hoverloader traffic coming down from the Saffron Archipelago was rerouted out around the western cup of the gulf. It put an extra day on the trip.

The skipper of the Haiduci’s Daughter took it philosophically.

“Seen worse,” he rumbled, peering into hooded displays on the bridge.

“Back in the nineties, storm season got so bad we had to lay up in Newpest for more than a month. No safe traffic north at all.”