Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
I was about to slap him when it hit me that this wasn’t some obscure insult. He was wired for internal tannoy, he just couldn’t be bothered to subvocalise. His eyes switched momentarily out to the middle distance as he listened to a response, then he looked at me again with fractionally more focus.
“Where you want to go?”
“Vchira Beach. One-way passage, you can leave me there.”
He smirked. “Yeah, Vchira Beach—it’s seven hundred klicks from end to end, sam. Where on Vchira Beach?”
“Southern reach. The Strip.”
“Sourcetown.” His gaze flickered doubtfully over me. “You a surfer?”
“Do I look like a surfer?”
Evidently there wasn’t a safe answer to that. He shrugged sullenly and looked away, eyes fluttering upward as he hit the internal wire again. A couple of moments after that a tough-looking blonde woman in weed-farm cutoffs and a faded T-shirt came in from the yard side of the terminal. She was in her fifties and life had frayed her around the eyes and mouth, but the cutoffs showed slim swimmer’s legs and she carried herself erect. The T-shirt declared Give me Mitzi Harlan’s job—I could do it lying down. There was a light sweat on her brow and traces of grease on her fingertips. Her handshake was dry and callused.
“Suzi Petkovski. This is my son, Mikhail. So you want me to run you out to the Strip?”
“Micky. Yeah, how soon can we leave?”
She shrugged. “I’m stripping down one of the turbines but it’s routine. Say an hour, half if you don’t care about security checks.”
“An hour is fine. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before I go anyway. How much is it going to cost me?”
She hissed through her teeth. Looked up and down the long hall of competing desks and the lack of custom. “Sourcetown’s a long haul. Bottom end of the Expanse and then some. You got baggage?”
“Just what you see.”
“Do it for two hundred and seventy-five. I know it’s one-way, but I got to come back even if you don’t. And it’s the whole day gone.”
The price was a high shot, just begging to be haggled down under the two-fifty mark. But two hundred wasn’t much more than I’d just paid for my priority cab ride across town. I shrugged.
“Sure. Seems very reasonable You want to show me my ride?”