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 stood and watched for a few minutes, and finally a crewmember came down the forward gangplank towards me. His face wasn’t friendly.
“Something I can do for you?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Sing the hymn of dreams gone down from Alabardos’ sky. I’m Kovacs. The others are at the hotel. Tell your skipper. We’ll move as soon as it’s dark.”
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?”