Altered Carbon

Chapter Nine

I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.

“Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully. “You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”

She pulled a face. “Oh, please.”

“All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?”

“I really have no idea, Kovacs.”

“Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside, the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

“Here we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.”

Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.

“You got an image there?”

“Of Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a two-d. You want me to send it.”

“Please.”

The ancient carphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

“Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”

“Mariposa and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.”

“Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”

“You’re going there? Tonight?”

“Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

“It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”

This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.

“I’m sending the map,” she said stiffly.

Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

Miriam Bancroft.

There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ’caster and the image kept fizzling out.

I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests — you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.

I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.

“Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”

I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.

“Stiff?”

Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.

“Do you want cabins or bar?”

I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the bar?”

“Ha ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins,” I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.

I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.

“Do you want to see me see me see me …?”

Cheap echo box on the vocoder.

I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.

“Do you want to touch me touch me touch me …?”

Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.

“Tell me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

I cleared my own. “What’s your name?”

“Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?”

Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.

“You remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.

She was working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”

“She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”

Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.

“What the fuck is this? You the Sia?”

“The what?”

“Sia. The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We had this, man—”

“No.” I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”

Taut silence. She glared at me.

“Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”

“No.” I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t…”

She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly. “That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly. “You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?”

“It’s not parole.” The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down for?”

“Lizzie said mindbites, something—”

“Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?”

“No. Lizzie never talked much about—”

“Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”

The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”

I skinned her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”

“Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.” Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairytale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come you’re cross-sleeved?”

“There’s a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. “This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.”

“That so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.

“There’s a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”

She shook her head, face turned down.

“A lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.”

“Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”

She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

I made myself wince. “Anyone Important?”

“I don’t know. Look, Mrs Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and…” She paused, and added hurriedly, “Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.”

“Can I talk to them?”

Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.

“It’s better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us…”

I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you could ask for me…”

The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

“Sure. I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.”

I took her hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anenome.”

“My name’s not Anenome,” she said abruptly. “I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.”

“Thank you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing this—”

“Look, I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness. “Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.”

She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.

Lit in red.

Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.

I stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.

“You waiting for me?” I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.

Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. “Look, man,” he began weakly.

I sliced him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.

“I said—”

That was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.

The Mongol took off, running.

I vaulted the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I threw out my chest and sprinted.

Ahead of me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my chest. Rain slapped at my face.

Fucking cigarettes.

We came out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me. Cross now. Cross now. Cross now. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly up the street.

Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me upright.

The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us by another ten metres.

A wayward speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.

I spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could panic him into tripping.

That wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and followed. Finally, I had the advantage.

Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.

In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.

I hit hard, skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been. The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover that wasn’t there.

“LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”

A cluster of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street and flooded us with white fire. From where I lay, I screwed up my eyes and could just make out the police transport, a regulation crowd-control five metres off the street, lights flashing. The soft storm of its turbines swept flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings and pinned them there like dying moths.

“STAND WHERE YOU ARE!” the tannoy thundered again. “LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”

The Mongol brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the transport bucked as its pilot tried to avoid the beam. Sparks showered off one turbine where the weapon found its mark and the transport sideslipped badly. Machine-rifle fire answered from a mounting somewhere below the vessel’s nose, but by that time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone through the smoking gap.

Screams from somewhere within.

I picked myself slowly up off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilot’s window, a hatch whined up and Kristin Ortega stood framed in the opening.

Chapter Ten

The transport was a stripped-down version of the one that had given me the ride out to Suntouch House, and it was noisy in the cabin. Ortega had to shout to make herself heard above the engines.

“We’ll put in a sniffer squad, but if he’s connected he can get stuff that’ll change his body’s chemical signature before dawn. After that, we’re down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part of town…”

The transport banked and she gestured down at the warren of streets below. “Look at it. Licktown, they call it. Used to be called Potrero way back. They say it was a nice area.”

“So what happened?”

Ortega shrugged in her steel lattice seat. “Economic crisis. You know how it is. One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah, isn’t it,” said the detective dismissively. “Kovacs, what the fuck were you doing at Jerry’s?”

“Getting an itch scratched,” I growled. “Any laws against it?”

She looked at me. “You weren’t getting greased in Jerry’s. You were barely in there ten minutes.”

I lifted my own shoulders and made an apologetic face. “You ever been downloaded into a male body straight out of the tank, you’ll know what it’s like. Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Jerry’s, performance isn’t an issue.”

Ortega’s lips curved in something approximating a smile. She leaned forward across the space between us.

“Bullshit, Kovacs. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they’ve got on you at Millsport. Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so steep you’d need pitons and rope to get up it. Everything you do, performance is going to be an issue.”

“Well.” I fed myself a cigarette and ignited it as I spoke. “You know there’s a lot you can do for some women in ten minutes.”

Ortega rolled her eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around her face.

“Right. And you’re telling me with the credit you have from Bancroft, Jerry’s is the best you can afford?”

“It’s not about cost,” I said, and wondered if that was the truth of what brought people like Bancroft down to Licktown.

Ortega leaned her head against the window and looked out at the rain. She didn’t look at me. “You’re chasing leads, Kovacs. You went down to Jerry’s to follow up something Bancroft did there. Given time I can find out what that was, but it’d be easier if you just told me.”

“Why? You told me the Bancroft case was closed. What’s your interest?”

That brought her eyes back round to mine, and there was a light in them. “My interest is keeping the peace. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but every time we meet it’s to the sound of heavy-calibre gunfire.”

I spread my hands. “I’m unarmed. All I’m doing is asking questions. And speaking of questions … How come you were sitting on my shoulder when the fun started?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

I let that one go. Ortega was tailing me, that much was certain. And that in turn meant there had to be more to the Bancroft case than she was admitting.

“What’s going to happen to my car?” I asked.

“We’ll have it picked up. Notify the hire company. Someone can come and get it from the impound. Unless you want it.”

I shook my head.

“Tell me something, Kovacs. Why’d you hire a ground car? On what Bancroft’s paying you, you could have had one of these.” She slapped the bulkhead by her side.

“I like to go places on the ground,” I said. “You get a better sense of distance that way. And on Harlan’s World, we don’t go up in the air much.”

“Really?”

“Really. Listen, the guy who nearly torched you out of the sky back there — ”

“Excuse me?” She cranked up one eyebrow in what by now I was beginning to think of as her trademark expression. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we saved your sleeve back there. You were the one looking down the wrong end of the hardware.”

I gestured. “Whatever. He was waiting for me.”

“Waiting for you?” Whatever she really thought, Ortega’s face was disbelieving. “According to those Stiff dealers we loaded into the wagon, he was buying product. An old customer, they say.”

I shook my head. “He was waiting for me. I went to talk to him, he took off.”

“Maybe he didn’t like your face. One of the dealers, I think it was the one whose skull you cracked, said you were looking jacked up to kill someone.” She shrugged again. “They say you started it, and it certainly looks that way.”

“In that case, why aren’t you charging me?”

“Oh, with what?” She exhaled an imaginary plume of smoke. “Organic damage (surgery reparable) to a pair of Stiff peddlers? Endangering police property? Breach of the peace in Licktown. Give me a break, Kovacs. This sort of thing goes down every night outside Jerry’s. I’m too tired for the paperwork.”

The transport tipped and through the window I could see the dim form of the Hendrix’s tower. I’d accepted Ortega’s offer of a ride home in much the same spirit as I had the police lift out to Suntouch House — to see where it would take me. Envoy wisdom. Go with the flow, and see what it shows you. I’d no reason to suppose Ortega was lying to me about our destination, but still part of me was surprised to see that tower. Envoys aren’t big on trust.

After an initial wrangle with the Hendrix about landing permission, the pilot set us down on a grimy-looking drop pad atop the tower. I could feel the wind tugging at the transport’s lightweight body as we landed, and as the hatch unfolded upwards, the cold came battering aboard. I got up to go. Ortega stayed where she was, watching me go with a lopsided look that I still couldn’t work out. The charge I’d felt last night was back. I could feel the need to say something pressing on me like an impending sneeze.

“Hey, how’d the bust go down on Kadmin?”

She shifted in the seat and stuck out one long leg to rest her boot on the chair I had just vacated. A thin smile.

“Grinding through the machine,” she said. “We’ll get there.”

“Good.” I climbed out into the wind and rain, raising my voice. “Thanks for the lift.”

She nodded gravely, then tipped her head back to say something to the pilot behind her. The whine of the turbines built and I ducked hurriedly out from under the hatch as it began to close. As I stepped back, the transport unglued itself and lifted away, lights flashing. I caught a final glimpse of Ortega’s face through the rain-streaked cabin window, then the wind seemed to carry the little craft away like an autumn leaf, wheeling away and down towards the streets below. In seconds it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other flyers speckling the night sky. I turned and walked against the wind to the drop pad’s access staircase. My suit was sodden from the rain. What had possessed Bancroft to outfit me for summer with the scrambled weather systems that Bay City had so far exhibited was beyond me. On Harlan’s World, when it’s winter, it stays that way long enough for you to make decisions about your wardrobe.

The upper levels of the Hendrix were in darkness relieved only by the occasional glow of dying illuminum tiles, but the hotel obligingly lit my way with neon tubes that flickered on in my path and died out again behind me. It was a weird effect, making me feel as if I was carrying a candle or torch.

“You have a visitor,” the hotel said chattily as I got into the elevator and the doors whirred closed.

I slammed my hand against the emergency stop button, raw flesh stinging where I’d skinned my palm. “What?”

“You have a visi—”

“Yeah, I heard.” It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if the AI could take offence at my tone. “Who is it, and where are they?”

“She identifies herself as Miriam Bancroft. Subsequent search of the city archives has confirmed sleeve identity. I have allowed her to wait in your room, since she is unarmed and you left nothing of consequence there this morning. Aside from refreshment, she has touched nothing.”

Feeling my temper rising, I found focus on a small dent in the metal of the elevator door and made an attempt at calm.

“This is interesting. Do you make arbitrary decisions like this for all your guests?”

“Miriam Bancroft is the wife of Laurens Bancroft,” said the hotel reproachfully. “Who in turn is paying for your room. Under the circumstances, I thought it wise not to create unnecessary tensions.”

I looked up at the ceiling of the elevator.

“You been checking up on me?”

“A background check is part of the contract I operate under. Any information retained is wholly confidential, unless subpoenaed under UN directive 231.4.”

“Yeah? So what else you know?”

“Lieutenant Takeshi Lev Kovacs,” said the hotel. “Also known as Mamba Lev, One Hand Rending, the Icepick, born Newpest, Harlan’s World 35th May 187, colonial reckoning. Recruited to UN Protectorate forces 11th September 204, selected for Envoy Corps enhancement 31st June 211 during routine screening—”

“All right.” Inwardly I was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got. Most people’s records dry up as soon as the trace goes offworld. Interstellar needlecasts are expensive. Unless the Hendrix had just broken into Warden Sullivan’s records, which was illegal. Ortega’s comment about the hotel’s previous charge sheet drifted back to me. What kind of crimes did an AI commit anyway?

“It also occurred to me that Mrs Bancroft is probably here in connection with the matter of her husband’s death, which you are investigating. I thought you would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting in the lobby.”

I sighed, and unpinned my hand from the elevator’s stop button.

“No, I bet she wasn’t.”

She was seated in the window, nursing a tall, ice-filled glass and watching the lights of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard. She didn’t turn her head when I let myself in, so I advanced across the room into her field of vision.

“The hotel told me you were here,” I said. “In case you were wondering why I didn’t unsleeve myself in shock.”

She looked up at me and shook hair back from her face

“Very dry, Mr Kovacs. Should I applaud?”

I shrugged. “You might say thank you for the drink.”

She examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes up again.

“Thank you for the drink.”

“Don’t mention it.” I went to the cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there. A bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt suggested itself. I uncorked it, sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping my eyes on my hands as they poured, I said, “Have you been waiting long?”

“About an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?”

I held onto the first mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.

“Now why would you think that, Mrs Bancroft?”

She made an elegant gesture with one hand. “No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly.” I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.

“Well.” She cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk about?”

I waved my glass at her. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”

“I want to know what progress you’ve made.”

“You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.”

For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.

“I want you to stop,” she said.

I let the words sink into the darkened room.

“Why?”

I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.

“Why not?” she said.

“Well.” I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. “To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.”

“A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,” she said carefully. “And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.”

“Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.”

She sat forward over her drink. “Let’s not pretend, Mr Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.”

“I’m still curious.”

“Maybe I could satisfy that,” she said softly.

I swallowed more whisky. “Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs Bancroft?”

She made an impatient gesture. “I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are … curious about other things, are you not?”

“I’m sorry?” I looked at her over the rim of my glass.

Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.

“Do you know what Merge Nine is?” she asked, a little unsteadily.

“Empathin?” I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.

“Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve…” She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. “This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when … aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr Kovacs.”

And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.

Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.

I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.

Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.

Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.

For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed against the glass of the biocabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.

And then the motion.

The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.

Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”

I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.

“Is that a trick question?”

She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.

“No. I want to know.”

“Do you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.

“You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we don’t care about anything young?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.”

“Yes, it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. “Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?”

I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.

“Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.”

She staved off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”

“What kind of a question—”

“I’m serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.

“Yes,” I said simply. “I like you.”

Her voice lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”

“Yes, I like what we did.”

“Do you want more?”

“Yes, I want more.”

She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”

“I want more. Of you.”

She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.

“Out west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”

I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.

“What was that?” She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.

“How long?” I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. “Is this fun park invitation good for?”

She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery.

“Unlimited rides,” she said.

“But for a limited period only, right?”

She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.”

“That might take a long time.”

“No.” There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time and her gaze fell a little. “No it won’t.”

The pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak I could hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.

As the orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine and as I started to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.

Whiteout.

And when I came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was gone like a fever dream.

Chapter Eleven

When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs (Newpest chapter). Later on, I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military; brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was — the only thing the marine corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.

These days I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.

Bay City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.

A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop, back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it and come out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this approach, and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.

“Look,” she told me one day in a Millsport coffee house. “Shopping — actual, physical shopping — could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.”

“They who?”

“People. Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?”

At twenty-two years old, a marine corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.

“It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?”

I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.

“Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically fucking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.”

Enjoyment wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.

The boots were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far. Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a defiant red silk bandanna across my forehead, Newpest gang style. It wasn’t exactly assimilative, but it went with the vaguely mutinous irritation that had been rising in me since yesterday. I dumped Bancroft’s summer suit in a skip on the street outside and left the shoes beside it.

Before I left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards: the doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armourer.

Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitors blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner façade, extending less than a half dozen metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been annexed. I pushed through well-cared-for wooden doors into the cool, oil-smelling interior.

Inside, the place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space under the gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was carpeted.

A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”

“I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some hardware.”

“Of course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. “Mr Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”

The head disappeared and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, I realised I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than me.

The next case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These too were dated back into the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.

“Has sir found anything to his liking?”

I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick back-combed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend Mars Expo 2076.

“Just looking.” I said and gestured back at the guns. “Are these made of wood?”

The green photo-receptor gaze regarded me gravely. “That is correct, sir. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested in?”

I looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.

“They’re a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.”

“Certainly, sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?”

I grinned at the machine. “We can assume that.”

“Then perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have been.”

“Smith & Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn’t in this sleeve.”

The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light conversation with Envoys.

“And what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?”

I shrugged. “Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.”

The mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

The photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing’s posture unlocked. “If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right combination.”

I followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the décor of the back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibre-glass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practised hands. The mandroid led me to a small grey-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt-thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.

“Chip?” He nodded at the machine and ignored me.

“Clive, this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr Bancroft, looking for equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.”

Clive nodded again and set aside the electromag.

“This way,” he said.

The mandroid touched my arm lightly. “Should sir require anything further, I shall be in the showroom.”

It bowed fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.

“Second series Nemesis X,” he said, holding out the gun. “The Nemex. Manufactured under licence for Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Fires a jacketed slug with a customised propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a firefight. Feel the weight.”

I took the weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight. Clive waited beside me patiently.

“All right.” I handed it back. “And something subtle?”

“Philips squeeze gun.” Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. “A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty metres. No recoil, and you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.”

“Batteries?”

“Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.”

“Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?”

“Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it.”

“All right, fine.” Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through your skull. No telling when you might get re-sleeved, if at all. But by now the ache in my head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Maybe target practice wasn’t the thing right at that moment. I didn’t bother asking the price either. It wasn’t my money I was spending. “Ammunition?”

“Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?”

“Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.”

“Ten clips, each?” There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. “And you wanted a blade, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Sheila!” Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matt grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked round when she heard her name, remembered the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Clive waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.

“Sheila, this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?”

“Sure.” The woman reached out a lanky arm. “Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What kind of steel you looking for?”

I matched her grip. “Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.”

“All right,” she said amiably. “Want to come with me? You finished here?”

Clive nodded at me. “I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?”

“Carry out.”

“Thought so.”

Sheila’s end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.

“Tebbit knife,” she said inconsequentially. “Very nasty.”

And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette’s head. “Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them with the sharp end.”

I stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code I didn’t recognise. Light glinted dully off the grey metal.

“What’s this?”

“What?” Sheila moved to stand beside me. “Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with haemoglobin. Well away from the edges, so if you cut yourself there’s no problem, but if you sink it in anything with blood…”

“Charming.”

“Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.

“I’ll take it.”

Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was beginning to recede.

I was three blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.

It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.

The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.

The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Hendrix.

On my way down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller. Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more than they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view; heavy, rounded pendants nestling glans-like in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.

A tide of cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.

Betathanatine. The Reaper.

Final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.

It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.

The last time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.

“Got Stiff, man,” said a hoarse voice redundantly. I blinked away the broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against a shop front.

“Hey…”

“Don’t piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.”

I saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Retargetting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers …

And was face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres tall. Tentacles writhed at me and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.

“You want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,” I said tightly.

The mound of flesh vanished and I was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.

“All right, man, all right.” He held up his hands, palms out. “You don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a living here.”

I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.

“Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,” I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was obscene.

“I give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my face.”

I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.

I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.

Mid afternoon. My first of the day.

Chapter Twelve

As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.

Psychoentirety rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve-changer, but this was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments I was literally terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practised snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice discs had lived up to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.

I shifted behind his eyes.

Reluctantly, he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.

The weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.

A weapon — any weapon — is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.

In the ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for most of us. Ninety per cent of Envoy intake came up through the Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough.

Virginia Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.

“Mr de Soto. You do not agree.”

Jimmy shifted, a little abashed at how easily he had been picked out. “Well, ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.”

There was a faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it subsided.

“Indeed,” she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. “This … device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.”

Jimmy hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon. Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was centre stage before the assembled trainees and stripped off her Corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.

“You will see,” she said loudly, “that the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Mr de Soto, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.”

Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.

“On your call,” she repeated.

“Now,” he snapped.

It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.

The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.

“A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension — you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”

Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.

Got the frags, Virginia.

Breathe, she said. Move. Control.

And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.

He was beginning to annoy me.

The cab curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitors’ blurb panel.

“Welcome to Urbline services,” said a smooth female voice. “You are linked to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you require.”

“Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”

“The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,” said the datastack blandly. “However, Urbline services guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—”

“Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?”

There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

“Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—”

“That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?”

“Straight line distance is approximately one kilometre.”

“Got a map?”

The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.

“All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”

“As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.”

I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.

“Thanks.”

The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.

Where the streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green; canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.

The second cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.

“You looking for something, tourist?”

There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.

“Come slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.

The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.

Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.

“I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”

There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.

“Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”

The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimetre from his eyes.

“Don’t,” I said quietly

The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.

I backed away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.

The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.

Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.

I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”

“What’s the deal in the bar?”

“Ha ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins.”

“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.

“Louise?”

The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.

“Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”

A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.

“Right there, fucker,” said a tight voice. “This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.”

I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.

“That’s it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.”

I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His mouth was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.

“Now who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me.

I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. “Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.”

The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.

“You’re lying to me,” he said softly. “I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City justice facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.”

He kicked at the inert body on the floor and I peered down out of the corner of my nearest eye. In the harsh white light the marks of torture were livid on the girl’s flesh.

“Now I want you to think real carefully about your next answer, whoever you are. Why are you asking after Lizzie Elliott?”

I slid my eyes back over the barrel of the blaster to the clenched face beyond. It wasn’t the expression of someone who’d been dealt in. Too scared.

“Lizzie Elliott’s my daughter, you piece of shit, and if your friend up at the city store had any real access, you’d know why the record still says I’m on stack.”

The gun in my back shoved forward more sharply, but unexpectedly the blond seemed to relax. His mouth flexed in a rictus of resignation. He lowered the blaster.

“All right,” he said. “Deek, go and get Oktai.”

Someone at my back slipped out of the cabin. The blond waved his gun at me. “You. Sit down in the corner.” His tone was distracted, almost casual.

I felt the gun taken out of my back and moved to obey. As I settled onto the satin floor, I weighed the odds. With Deek gone, there were still three of them. The blond, a woman in what looked to me like a synthetic Asian-skinned sleeve, toting the second particle blaster whose imprint I could still feel in my spine, and a large black man whose only weapon appeared to be an iron pipe. Not a chance. These were not the street sharks I’d faced down on Nineteenth Street. There was a cold embodied purpose about them, a kind of cheap version of what Kadmin had had back at the Hendrix.

For a moment I looked at the synthetic woman and wondered, but it couldn’t be. Even if he’d somehow managed to slip the charges Kristin Ortega had talked about and got himself re-sleeved, Kadmin was on the inside. He knew who had hired him, and who I was. The faces peering at me from around the biocabin, on their own admission, knew nothing.

Let’s keep it that way.

My gaze crept across to Louise’s battered sleeve. It looked as if they had cut slits in the skin of her thighs and then forced the wounds apart until they tore. Simple, crude and very effective. They would have made her watch while they did it, compounding the pain with terror. It’s a gut-swooping experience seeing that happen to your body. On Sharya, the religious police used it a lot. She’d probably need psychosurgery to get over the trauma.

The blond saw where my eyes had gone and offered me a grim nod, as if I’d been an accomplice to the act.

“Want to know why her head’s still on, huh?”

I looked bleakly across the room at him. “No. You look like a busy man but I guess you’ll get round to it.”

“No need,” he said casually, enjoying his moment. “Old Anenome’s Catholic. Third or fourth generation, the girls tell me. Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican. We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.”

“You talk too much, Jerry,” said the woman.

The blond’s eyes flared whitely at her, but whatever retort he was mustering behind the curl of his lip quietened as two men, presumably Deek and Oktai, pushed into the tiny room on another wave of junk rhythm from the corridor. My eyes measured Deek and placed him in the same category — muscle — as the pipe-wielder, then switched to his companion, who was staring steadily at me. My heart twitched. Oktai was the Mongol.

Jerry jerked his head in my direction.

“This him?” he asked.

Oktai nodded slowly, a savage grin of triumph etched across his broad face. His massive hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was working through an extreme of hate so deep it was choking him. I could see the bump where someone had inexpertly repaired his broken nose with tissue weld, but that didn’t seem like enough to warrant the fury I was watching.

“All right, Ryker.” The blond leaned forward a little. “You want to change your story? You want to tell me why you’re breaking my balls down here?”

He was talking to me.

Deek spat into a corner of the room.

“I don’t know,” I said clearly, “what the fuck you are talking about. You turned my daughter into a prostitute, and then you killed her. And for that, I’m going to kill you.”

“I doubt you’ll get the chance for that,” said Jerry, crouching opposite me and looking at the floor. “Your daughter was a stupid, starstruck little cunt who thought she could put a lock on me and—”

He stopped and shook his head disbelievingly.

“The fuck am I talking to? I see you standing there, and still I’m buying this shit. You’re good, Ryker, I’ll give you that.” He sniffed. “Now, I’m going to ask you one more time, nicely. Maybe see if we can cut a deal. After that I’m going to send you to see some very sophisticated friends of mine. You understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded once, slowly.

“Good. So here it comes, Ryker. What are you doing in Licktown?”

I looked into his face. Small-time punk with delusions of connection. I wasn’t going to learn anything here.

“Who’s Ryker?”

The blond lowered his head again and looked at the floor between my feet. He seemed unhappy about what was going to happen next. Finally he licked his lips, nodded slightly to himself and made a brushing gesture across his knees as he stood up.

“All right, tough guy. But I want you to remember you had the choice.” He turned to the synthetic woman. “Get him out of here. I want no traces. And tell them, he’s n-wired to the eyes, they’ll get nothing out of him in this sleeve.”

The woman nodded and gestured me to my feet with her blaster. She prodded Louise’s corpse with the toe of one boot. “And this?”

“Get rid of it. Milo, Deek, go with her.”

The pipe-wielder shoved his weapon into his waistband and stooped to shoulder the corpse as if it were a bundle of kindling. Deek, close behind, slapped it affectionately on one bruised buttock.

The Mongol made a noise in his throat. Jerry glanced across at him with faint distaste. “No, not you. They’re going places I don’t want you to see. Don’t worry, there’ll be a disc.”

“Sure, man,” said Deek over his shoulder. “We’ll bring it right back across.”

“All right, that’s enough,” said the woman roughly, moving to face me. “Let’s have an understanding here, Ryker. You got neurachem, so do I. And this is a high-impact chassis. Lockheed-Mitoma test pilot specs. You can’t damage me worth a jack. And I’ll be happy to burn your guts out if you even look at me wrong. They don’t care what state you’re in where we’re going. That clear, Ryker?”

“My name’s not Ryker,” I said irritably.

“Right.”

We went through the frosted glass door, into a tiny space that held a make-up table and shower stall, and out onto a corridor parallel to the one at the front of the booths. Here the lighting was unambiguous, there was no music, and the corridor gave onto larger, partially curtained dressing rooms where young men and women slumped smoking or just staring into space like untenanted synthetics. If any of them saw the little procession go past, they gave no indication. Milo went ahead with the corpse. Deek took up position at my back and the synthetic woman brought up the rear, blaster held casually at her side. My last glimpse of Jerry was a proprietorial figure standing with hands on hips in the corridor behind us. Then Deek cuffed me across the side of the head and I turned to face the front again. Louise’s dangling, mutilated legs preceded me out into a gloomy covered parking area, where a pure black lozenge of aircar awaited us.

The synthetic cracked the vehicle’s boot open and waved the blaster at me.

“Plenty of room. Make yourself comfortable.”

I climbed into the boot space and discovered she was right. Then Milo tipped Louise’s corpse in with me and slammed the lid down, leaving the two of us in darkness together. I heard the dull clunk of other doors opening and closing elsewhere, and then the whispering of the car’s engines and the faint bump as we lifted from the ground.

The journey was quick, and smoother than a corresponding surface trip would have been. Jerry’s friends were driving carefully — you don’t want to be pulled down by a bored patrolman for unsignalled lane change when you’ve got passengers in the boot. It might almost have been pleasantly womb-like there in the dark, but for the faint stench of faeces from the corpse. Louise had voided her bowels during the torture.

I spent most of the journey feeling sorry for the girl, and worrying at the Catholic madness like a dog with a bone. This woman’s stack was utterly undamaged. Financial considerations aside, she could be brought back to life on the spin of a disc. On Harlan’s World she’d be temporarily re-sleeved for the court hearing, albeit probably in a synthetic, and once the verdict came down there’d be a Victim Support supplement from the state added to whatever policy her family already held. Nine cases out of ten that was enough money to ensure re-sleeving of some sort. Death, where is thy sting?

I didn’t know if they had VS supplements on earth. Kristin Ortega’s angry monologue two nights ago seemed to suggest not, but at least there was the potential to bring this girl back to life. Somewhere on this fucked-up planet, some guru had ordained otherwise, and Louise, alias Anenome, had queued up with how many others to ratify the insanity.

Human beings. Never figure them out.

The car tilted and the corpse rolled unpleasantly against me as we spiralled down. Something wet seeped through the leg of my trousers. I could feel myself starting to sweat with the fear. They were going to decant me into some flesh with none of the resistance to pain that my current sleeve had. And while I was imprisoned there, they could do whatever they liked to that sleeve, up to and including physically killing it.

And then they would start again, in a fresh body.

Or, if they were really sophisticated, they could jack my consciousness into a virtual matrix similar to the ones used in psychosurgery, and do the whole thing electronically. Subjectively, there’d be no difference, but there what might take days in the real world could be done in as many minutes.

I swallowed hard, using the neurachem while I still had it to stifle the fear. As gently as I could, I pushed Louise’s cold embrace away from my face and tried not to think about the reason she had died.

The car touched down and rolled along the ground for a few moments before it stopped. When the boot cracked open again, all I could see was the roof of another covered car park strung with illuminum bars.

They took me out with professional caution, the woman standing well back, Deek and Milo to the sides giving her a clear field of fire. I clambered awkwardly over Louise and out onto a floor of black concrete. Scanning the gloom covertly, I saw about a dozen other vehicles, nondescript, registration bar codes illegible at this distance. A short ramp at the far end led up to what must be the landing pad. Indistinguishable from a million other similar installations. I sighed and as I straightened up I felt the damp on my leg again. I glanced down at my clothes. There was a dark stain of something on my thigh.

“So where are we?” I asked.

“End of the line’s where you are,” grunted Milo, lifting Louise out. He looked at the woman. “This going to the usual place?”

She nodded, and he set off across the car park towards a set of double doors. I was moving to follow when a jerk of the woman’s blaster brought me up short.

“Not you. That’s the chute — the easy way out. We got people want to talk to you before you get to go down the chute. You go this way.”

Deek grinned and produced a small weapon from his back pocket. “That’s right, Mr Badass Cop. You go this way.”

They marched me through another set of doors into a commercial capacity elevator which, according to the flashing LED display on the wall, sank two dozen levels before we stopped. Throughout the ride, Deek and the woman stood in opposite corners of the car, guns levelled. I ignored them and watched the digit counter.

When the doors opened there was a medical team waiting for us with a strap-equipped gurney. My instincts screamed at me to try and jump them, but I held myself immobile while the two pale-blue-clad men came forward to hold my arms and the female medic shot me in the neck with a hypodermic spray. There was an icy sting, a brief rush of cold and then the corners of my vision disappeared in webbings of grey. The last thing I saw clearly was the incurious face of the medic as she watched me lose consciousness.

Chapter Thirteen

I awoke to the sound of the ezan being called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multiple throats of a mosque’s loudspeakers. It was a sound I’d last heard in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.

I sat up on the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They’d sleeved me in a woman’s body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.

I got up and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and humid.

My arms were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.

The ezan stopped.

Virtuality. They’d tapped into my memories and come up with this. I’d seen some of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya, they’d sleeved me in a woman.

Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.

That had its disadvantages.

In general, and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.

No neurachem. I checked.

No combat conditioning, no reflex of aggression.

Nothing.

Not even calluses on the young flesh.

The door banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.

The one with the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me, and tried to focus on him.

“So,” he said. “We begin.”

I lunged for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.

“Bitch cunt,” he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood on his fingers.

“Oh, please,” I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. “Do we have to have the script too? Just because I’m wearing this—”

I jammed to a halt. He looked pleased. “Not Irene Elliott, then,” he said. “We progress.”

This time he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creaking sound. I twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that wasn’t mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your strength.

The floor was hard and uncomfortable against the soft skin of my elbows. I heard a grating sound and turned my head. The second man was drawing up a pair of stools from the side of the room. While the one who had beaten me taped my legs apart, the spectator sat down on one of the stools, produced a packet of cigarettes and shook one out. Grinning broadly at me, he put it in his mouth and reached down for the blowtorch. When his companion stepped back to admire his handiwork, he offered him the packet. It was declined. The smoker shrugged, ignited the blowtorch and tilted his head to light up from it.

“You will tell us,” he said, gesturing with the cigarette and pluming smoke into the air above me, “everything you know about Jerry’s Closed Quarters and Elizabeth Elliott.”

The blowtorch hissed and chuckled softly to itself in the quiet room. Sunlight poured in through the high window and brought with it, infinitely faintly, the sounds of a city full of people.

They started with my feet.

The screaming runs on and on, higher and louder than I ever believed a human throat could render, shredding my hearing. Traceries of red streak across my vision.

Innenininennininennin …

Jimmy de Soto staggers into view, Sunjet gone, gory hands plastered to his face. The shrieks peel out from his stumbling figure, and for a moment I can almost believe it’s his contamination alarm that’s making the noise. I check my own shoulder meter reflexively, then the half-submerged edge of an intelligible word rises through the agony and I know it’s him.

He is standing almost upright, a clearcut sniper target even in the chaos of the bombardment. I throw myself across the open ground and knock him into the cover of a ruined wall. When I roll him onto his back to see what’s happened to his face, he’s still screaming. I pull his hands away from his face by main force and the raw socket of his left eye gapes up at me in the murk. I can still see fragments of the eye’s mucous casing on his fingers.

“Jimmy, JIMMY, what the fuck…”

The screaming sandpapers on and on. It’s taking all my strength to prevent him going back for the other undamaged eye as it wallows in its socket. My spine goes cold as I realise what’s happening.

Viral strike.

I stop yelling at Jimmy and bawl down the line.

“Medic! Medic! Stack down! Viral strike!”

And the world caves in as I hear my own cries echoed up and down the Innenin beachhead.

After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.

When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.

Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a planned development or did it grow organically, responding to centuries of differing demand? Is it or was it ever fortified? Does it have a seaboard? Look closer, and you can learn more. Where the major thoroughfares are likely to be, if there is an IP shuttle port, if the city has parks. You can maybe, if you’re a trained cartographer, even tell a little about the movements of the inhabitants. Where the desirable areas of town are, what the traffic problems are likely to be and if the city has suffered any serious bomb damage or riots recently.

But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is planning to tear down the old quarter, if the police are corrupt, or what strange things have been happening at Number Fifty-One, Angel Wharf. And the fact that you can break down the mosaic into boxes, move it around and reassemble it elsewhere makes no difference. Some things you will only ever learn by going into that city and talking to the inhabitants.

Digital Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.

What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.

There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.

Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.

A heated iron inserted into your vagina.

The pain. The humiliation.

The damage.

Psychodynamics/Integrity training.

Introduction.

The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.

The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—

“Some fucking game, eh pal?”

Jimmy grinning up at me from his death. Innenin is still around us, but that can’t be. He was still screaming when they took him away. In reality—

His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.

“You keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?”

I wince. “Her feet. She can’t walk.”

“Motherfuckers,” he says matter of factly. “Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?”

“We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.”

“Ryker, who the fuck’s he?”

“I don’t know.”

He shrugs. “So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?”

“I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.”

“You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.”

“That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.”

“Yeah.” Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. “See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?”

During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations.

Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—

You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—

As I was saying …

Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!

The explosion brought the entire building down.

That’s fucking enough!

I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.

Back to start.

Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.

“Aha, the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.

I looked over the side at the blue water.

“What is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the sharks?”

She laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.”

I stood loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”

“Very well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. “You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”

“My interest is in seeing you die.”

A small smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.”

She extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.

“Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.

“Good. Then tell us who you are.”

I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. “I thought I had.”

“What you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”

“I bet it isn’t,” I muttered.

“We do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.”

“You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.”

It was a colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.

“It was my understanding,” said the woman quietly, “that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”

Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.

“Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.

The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally, she said, “You are aware we could erase your stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”

“They’d find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. “You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.”

“What deal?” she asked woodenly.

In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.

“There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.”

“And they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”

“I’m not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out of ten, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it — and I mean at UN Praesidium level — so they call us in.”

The woman frowned. “And the deal?”

“Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.”

“As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”

I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t fuck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”

Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.

“We will consider this,” said the woman.

Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat. I was.

Not.

Chapter Fourteen

I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.

They’d put me back.

Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.

I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.

“Clothes.” She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”

One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”

“Yeah,” the woman sneered. “Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving our business through someone else.”

“He’s not talking about the re-sleeve,” I observed, pulling on my trousers. “He wants to check for interrogation trauma.”

“Who asked you?”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Where are we going?”

“To talk to someone,” she said shortly and turned back to the medics. “If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.”

I continued dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover tunic and jacket were intact but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either. Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.

“So who are we going to see?”

The woman gave me a sour look. “Someone who knows enough to check out your shit. And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly dispersal.”

“When this is over,” I said evenly, “maybe I can persuade one of our squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to thank you for your support.”

The blaster came out of its sheath with a soft strop, and was under my chin. I barely saw it happen. My recently re-sleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, aeons too late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.

“Don’t you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,” she said softly. “You got these clowns scared, they’re anchored in place and they think you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me. Got it?”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up by the gun.

“Got it,” I said.

“Good,” she breathed, and removed the blaster. “You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologise with everybody else. But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.”

At a rapid pace, we went down corridors that I tried to memorise and into a lift identical to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again, and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during the torture were hazy — the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining off the experience to avert the trauma — but even if it had gone on a couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.

“Get in the car,” said the woman laconically.

This time my ride was a larger, more elegant machine, reminiscent of Bancroft’s limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and shaven-headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear. I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the military would be seen dead with authorisation stripes. It was too close to the serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.

A second man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling negligently from his hand. He too had the shaven skull and the bar code. I looked hard at it as I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur and I cranked up the neurachem to eavesdrop.

“…head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.”

“No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—”

One of the medics slammed the door shut on me and the solid clunk at max amplification nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the machine pistoleer opened the doors on the other side and climbed in next to me.

“Close your eyes,” the woman said, producing my bandanna. “I’m going blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t going to want you knowing where to find them.”

I looked around at the windows. “These look polarised to me anyway.”

“Yeah, but no telling how good that neurachem is, huh? Now hold still.”

She knotted the red cloth with practised efficiency and spread it a little to cover my whole field of vision. I settled back in the seat.

“Couple of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when.”

The car boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat the odour of faeces on the inbound journey, and the seat I was in moulded itself supportively to my form. I seemed to have moved up in the order of things.

Strictly temporary, man. I smiled faintly as Jimmy’s voice echoed in the back of my skull. He was right. A couple of things were clear about whoever we were going to see. This was someone who didn’t want to come to the clinic, who didn’t even want to be seen near it. That bespoke respectability, and with it power, the power to access offworld data. Pretty soon they were going to know that the Envoy Corps was an empty threat, and very shortly after that I was going to be dead. Really dead.

That kind of dictates the action, pal.

Thanks, Jimmy.

After a few minutes the woman told me to take off the blindfold. I pushed it up onto my forehead and retied it there in its customary position. At my side, the muscle with the machine pistol smirked. I gave him a curious look.

“Something funny?”

“Yeah.” The woman spoke without turning her gaze from the city lights beyond the window. “You look like a fucking idiot.”

“Not where I come from.”

She turned to look at me pityingly. “You aren’t where you come from. You’re on Earth. Try behaving like it.”

I looked from one to the other of them, the pistoleer still smirking, the synthetic with the expression of polite contempt, then shrugged and reached up with both hands to untie the bandanna. The woman went back to watching the lights of the city sink below us. The rain seemed to have stopped.

I chopped down savagely from head height, left and right. My left fist jarred into the pistoleer’s temple with enough force to break the bone and he slumped sideways with a single grunt. He never even saw the blow coming. My right arm was still in motion.

The synthetic whipped around, probably faster than I could have struck, but she misread me. Her arm was raised to block and cover her head, and I was under the guard, reaching. My hand closed on the blaster at her belt, knocked out the safety and triggered it. The beam seethed into life, cutting downwards, and a large quantity of the woman’s right leg burst open in wet ropes of flesh before the blowback circuits cut the blast. She howled, a cry more of rage than of pain, and then I dragged the muzzle of the weapon up, triggering another blast diagonally across her body. The blaster carved a channel a handsbreadth wide right through her and into the seat behind. Blood exploded across the cabin.

The blaster cut out again and the cabin went suddenly dim as the flaring of the beam weapon stopped. Beside me, the synthetic woman bubbled and sighed, and then the section of her torso that the head was attached to sagged away from the left side of the body. Her forehead came to rest against the window she had been looking out of. It looked oddly as if she was cooling her brow on the rain-streaked glass. The rest of the body sat stiffly upright, the massive sloping wound cauterised clean by the beam. The mingled stink of cooked meat and fried synthetic components was everywhere.

“Trepp? Trepp?” It was the chauffeur’s intercom squawking. I wiped blood out of my eyes and looked at the screen set in the forward bulkhead.

“She’s dead,” I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster. “They’re both dead. And you’re next, if you don’t get us on the ground right now.”

The chauffeur rallied. “We’re five hundred metres above the Bay, friend, and I’m flying this car. What do you propose doing about that?”

I selected a mid-point on the wall between the two cabins, knocked out the blowback cutout on the blaster and shielded my face with one hand.

“Hey, what are you—”

I fired through into the driver’s compartment on tight focus. The beam punched a molten hole about a centimetre wide and for a moment it rained sparks backwards into the cabin as the armouring beneath the plastic resisted. Then the sparks died as the beam broke through and I heard something electrical short out in the forward compartment. I stopped firing.

“The next one goes right through your seat,” I promised. “I’ve got friends who’ll re-sleeve me when they fish us out of the Bay. You I’ll carve into steaks right through this fucking wall, and even if I miss your stack, they’ll have a hard time finding which part of you it’s inside, now fucking get me on the ground.”

The limousine banked abruptly to one side, losing altitude. I sat back a little amidst the carnage and cleaned more blood off my face with one sleeve.

“That’s good,” I said more calmly. “Now set me down near Mission Street. And if you’re thinking about signalling for help, think about this. If there’s a firefight, you die first. Got it? You die first. I’m talking about real death. I’ll make sure I burn out your stack if it’s the last thing I do before they take me down.”

His face looked back at me on the screen, pale. Scared, but not scared enough. Or maybe scared of someone else. Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of longheld obedience through hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s how you fight wars, after all — with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

I used to be like that myself.

“How about this?” I offered rapidly. “You violate traffic protocol putting us down. The Sia turn up, bust you and hold you. You say nothing. I’m gone and they’ve got nothing on you outside of a traffic misdemeanour. Your story is you’re just the driver, your passengers had a little disagreement in the back seat and then I hijacked you to the ground. Meanwhile, whoever you work for bails you out rapido and you pick up a bonus for not cracking in virtual holding.”

I watched the screen. His expression wavered, and he swallowed hard. Enough carrot, time for the stick. I locked the blowback circuit on again, lifted the blaster so he could see it and fitted it to the nape of Trepp’s neck.

“I’d say you’re getting a bargain.”

At point-blank range, the blaster beam vaporised spine, stack and everything around it. I turned back to the screen.

“Your call.”

The driver’s face convulsed, and the limo started to lose height raggedly. I watched the flow of traffic through the window, then leaned forward and tapped on the screen.

“Don’t forget that violation, will you?”

He gulped and nodded. The limo dropped vertically through stacked lanes of traffic and bumped hard along the ground, to a chorus of furious collision alert screeches from the vehicles around us. Through the window I recognised the street I’d cruised with Curtis the night before. Our pace slowed somewhat.

“Crack the nearside door,” I said, tucking the blaster under my jacket. Another jerky nod and the door in question clunked open, then hung ajar. I swivelled, kicked it wide and heard police sirens wailing somewhere above us. My eyes met the driver’s on the screen for a moment and I grinned.

“Wise man,” I said, and threw myself out of the coasting vehicle.

The pavement hit me in the shoulder and back as I rolled amidst startled cries from passing pedestrians. I rolled twice, hit hard against a stone frontage and climbed cautiously to my feet. A passing couple stared at me and I skinned my teeth in a smile that made them hurry on, finding interest in other shop fronts.

A stale blast of displaced air washed over me as a traffic cop’s cruiser dropped in the wake of the offending limo. I stayed where I was, giving back the diminishing handful of curious looks from passers-by who had seen my unorthodox arrival. Interest in me was waning, in any case. One by one the stares slipped away, drawn by the flashing lights of the police cruiser, now hovering menacingly above and behind the stationary limo.

“Turn off your engines and remain where you are,” crackled the airborne speaker system.

A crowd started to knot up as people hurried past me, jostling and trying to see what was going on. I leaned back on the frontage, checking myself for damage from the jump. By the feel of the fading numbness in my shoulder and across my back, I’d done it right this time.

“Raise your hands above your head and step away from your vehicle,” came the metallic voice of the traffic cop.

Over the bobbing heads of the spectators, I made out the driver, easing himself out of the limo in the recommended posture. He looked relieved to be alive. For a moment I caught myself wondering why that kind of stand-off wasn’t more popular in the circles I moved in.

Just too many death wishes all round, I guess.

I backstepped a few metres in the mix of the crowd, then turned and slipped away into the brightly lit anonymity of the Bay City night.

Chapter Fifteen

There was a cold blue dawn over the city by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen of recent rain. I stood in the shadow of the expressway pillars and watched the gutted street for any hint of movement. There was a feeling I needed, but it wasn’t easy to come by in the cold light of the rising day. My head was buzzing with rapid data assimilation and Jimmy de Soto floated around in the back of my mind like a restless demon familiar.

Where are you going, Tak?

To do some damage.

The Hendrix hadn’t been able to give me anything on the clinic I’d been taken to. From Deek’s promise to the Mongolian to bring a disc of my torture right back across, I supposed that the place had to be on the other side of the Bay, probably in Oakland, but that in itself wasn’t much help, even for an AI. The whole Bay area appeared to be suffused with illegal biotech activity. I was going to have to retrace my steps the hard way.

Jerry’s Closed Quarters.

Here the Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife, and went out to do some interrogating of my own.

I’d seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.

Jerry’s Closed Quarters by dawn light.

What little cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her religion would not let her come back from.

Make it personal.

The Nemex was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.

The door robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.

“We’re closed, friend,” the synth voice said.

I levelled the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled from the shattered lintel housing.

Cautiously, I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as he saw me.

“You. What—”

I shot him through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me, took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his fingers touched the weapon.

At the bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spiderweb holo with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security presence for the cabins — three at most, more likely down to two at this time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.

Jerry the cheapskate.

I listened, cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the floor.

The doors to the bar remained closed.

I eased my head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her forehead.

“You work security for Jerry?”

She nodded, eyes flaring white around her irises.

“One chance. Where is he?”

“Bar,” she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. “Table. Back corner.”

I nodded, stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.

“Wait, you—”

The Philips gun sighed.

Damage.

I was in the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him in, still firing.

It was a wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deek, reeling backwards with his hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a speed that was truly semi-divine.

I heard the dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim, bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward, clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar — no time to turn and aim — and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun, half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched him back onto the dance platform.

The Nemex echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.

By now I had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.

“Wise man.” The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. “Leave your hands right there, and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at the wrist.”

He sank back into his seat, face working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing. Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.

At this, Jerry erupted.

“Are you fucking crazy, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—”

I jerked the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up. Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then straddled it, facing him.

“You, Jerry,” I said evenly, “need to listen to people occasionally. I’ve told you, my name is not Ryker.”

“Whoever the fuck you are, I’m connected.” There was so much venom on the face before me it was a wonder Jerry didn’t choke on it. “I’m jacked into the fucking machine, you get me? This. All this. You’re going to fucking pay. You’re going to wish—”

“I’d never met you,” I finished for him. I stowed the empty Philips gun back in its Fibregrip holster. “Jerry, I already wish I’d never met you. Your sophisticated friends were sophisticated enough for that. But I notice they didn’t tell you I was back on the street. Not so tight with Ray these days, is that it?”

I was watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried again.

“Trepp’s dead,” I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. “Trepp, and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?”

His mouth tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel of the Nemex up against his left eye.

“I asked you a question.”

“Fuck you.”

I nodded and settled back onto my seat. “Hard man, huh? So I’ll tell you. I need some answers, Jerry. You can start by telling me what happened to Elizabeth Elliott. That should be easy, I figure you carved her up yourself. Then I want to know who Elias Ryker is, who Trepp works for, and where the clinic is that you sent me to.”

“Fuck you.”

“You don’t think I’m serious? Or are you just hoping the cops are going to show up and save your stack?” I fished the commandeered blaster out of my pocket left-handed and drew a careful bead on the dead security guard on the runway. The range was short and the beam torched his head off in a single explosion. The stench of charred flesh rolled across the room to us. Keeping one eye on Jerry, I played the beam around a little until I was sure I’d destroyed everything from the shoulders up, then snapped the weapon off and lowered it. Jerry stared at me over the table.

“You piece of shit, he only worked security for me!”

“That’s just become a proscribed profession, as far as I’m concerned. Deek and the rest are going the same way. And so are you, unless you tell me what I want to know.” I lifted the beam weapon. “One chance.”

“All right.” The crack was audible in his voice. “All right, all right. Elliott tried to put a lock on a customer, she got some big name Meth come slumming down here, reckoned she’d got enough shit to twist him. Stupid cunt tried to make me a partnership deal, she figured I could lean on this Meth guy. No fucking clue what she was dealing with.”

“No.” I looked stonily at him across the table. “I guess not.”

He caught the look. “Hey, man, I know what you’re thinking, but it ain’t like that. I tried to warn her off, so she went direct. Direct to a fucking Meth. You think I wanted this place ripped down and me buried under it. I had to deal with her, man. Had to.”

“You iced her?”

He shook his head. “I made a call,” he said in a subdued voice. “That’s how it works around here.”

“Who’s Ryker?”

“Ryker’s a—,” he swallowed. “—a cop. Used to work Sleeve Theft, then they upped him to the Organic Damage Division. He was fucking that Sia cunt, the one came out here the night you crocked Oktai.”

“Ortega?”

“Yeah, Ortega. Everybody knew it, they say that’s how he got the transfer. That’s why we figured you were — he was — back on the street. When Deek saw you talking to Ortega we figured she’d accessed someone, done a deal.”

“Back on the street? Back from where?”

“Ryker was dirty, man.” Now the flow had started, it was coming in full flood. “He RD’d a couple of sleevedealers, up in Seattle—”

“RD?”

“Yeah, RD’d.” Jerry looked momentarily nonplussed, as if I’d just queried the colour of the sky.

“I’m not from here,” I said patiently.

“RD. Real Death. He pulped them, man. Couple of other guys went down stack intact so Ryker paid off some Dipper to register the lot of them Catholic. Either the input didn’t take, or someone at OrgDam found out. He got the double barrel. Two hundred years, no remission. Word is, Ortega headed up the squad that took him down.”

Well, well. I waved the Nemex encouragingly.

“That’s it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I never even met the guy.”

“And Oktai?”

Jerry nodded vigorously. “That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare part deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back.”

“So Oktai comes running to you—”

“That’s it. He’s like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here. So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—”

Jerry dried up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.

“That’s fucking it.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice.

“All right.” I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes, remembered I had none. “You smoke?”

“Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?”

I sighed. “Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your cred. Who’d you borrow her from?”

“Trepp’s an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favours sometimes.”

“Not any more. You ever see her real sleeve?”

“No. Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.”

“That far from here?”

“’Bout an hour, suborbital.”

By my reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe Interplanetary too. The Senior Fleet.

“So who’s the wire say she’s working for now?”

“I don’t know.”

I studied the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. “Yeah, you do.” I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. “Trepp’s gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her out. You need to worry about me.”

He stared defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.

“I heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.”

“Good. Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.”

The Envoy training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.

“Listen, those are dangerous people. You got away, you’d better just leave it at that. You got no idea what they—”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.” I pointed the blaster into his face. “The clinic.”

“Christ, they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use the spare parts, sometimes, and I—” He changed tack abruptly as he saw my face. “They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.”

I thought of Louise, alias Anenome, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a machine than the door robot had.

“We’re going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates. And don’t fuck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over the other side of the Bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?”

From his face I judged that he did.

But just to make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of rage.

There’s a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about half a kilometre from shore, spit into the ocean beyond and return. Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It always sounded like macho bullshit to me.

Now, marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water. I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the lift for the second time, Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could happen.

Again and again.

They were rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.

“We thought—”

“Never mind that,” snapped Jerry. “Open the fucking door. We’ve got to get this piece of shit off the street.”

The clinic was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in neo-industrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons, façades draped in scaffolding and balconies hung with fake cabling and hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry thrust me inside.

The entrance hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls and patches of exposed brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.

“I don’t need any fucking help. You’re the wipeouts that let this motherfucker go in the first place.”

The two guards exchanged a glance and the extended grasp turned into a placatory gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the car park on the roof last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team were waiting, sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again. He had it down to perfection.

“Never fucking mind that.” He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck. “He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.”

“He’s in surgery.”

“Surgery?” Jerry barked a laugh. “You mean he’s watching the machine make pick and mix. All right, Chung, then.”

The team hesitated.

“What? Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this morning.”

“No, it’s…” The man nearest me gestured. ”It’s not procedure, taking him in awake.”

“Don’t fucking tell me about procedure.” Jerry did a good impression of a man about to explode with fury. “Was it procedure to let this piece of shit get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that fucking procedure? Was it?”

There was silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with a kind of gritted calm.

“He ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are going to see Chung. Now, move.”

They bought it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the operating theatre I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the corridor behind us.

“Just a moment.” The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask which he now unpinned with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly handsome, blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.

“Miller,” said Jerry.

“What exactly is going on here? Courault,” the tall man turned to the female medic, “you know better than to bring subjects through here unsedated.”

“Yes, sir. Mr Sedaka insisted that there was no risk involved. He said he was in a hurry. To see director Chung.”

“I don’t care how much of a hurry he’s in.” Miller swung on Jerry, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you insane, Sedaka? What do you think this is, the visitors’ gallery? I’ve got clients in there. Recognisable faces. Courault, sedate this man immediately.”

Oh, well. No one’s lucky for ever.

I was already moving. Before Courault could lift the hypospray from her hip sack, I yanked both the Nemex and the blaster from Jerry’s waistband and spun, firing. Courault and her two colleagues went down, multiply injured. Blood splattered on antiseptic white behind them. Miller had time for one outraged yell and then I shot him in the mouth with the Nemex. Jerry was just backing away from me, the unloaded Philips gun still dangling from his hand. I threw up the blaster.

“Look, I did my fucking best, I—”

The beam cut loose and his head exploded.

In the sudden quiet that followed, I retraced my steps to the doors of the surgery and pushed through them. The little knot of figures, immaculately suited to a man and woman, had left the table on which a young female sleeve was laid out, and were gaping at me behind forgotten surgical masks. Only the autosurgeon continued working unperturbed, making smooth incisions and cauterising wounds with abrupt little sizzlings. Indistinct lumps of raw red poked out of an array of small metal dishes collected at the subject’s head. It looked unnervingly like the start of some arcane banquet.

The woman on the table was Louise.

There were five men and women in the theatre, and I killed them all while they stared at me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster, and raked the beam over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went round and inflicted Real Death on everyone there.

Outside, there were more alarms and two of the medical crew were still alive. Courault had succeeded in crawling a dozen metres down the corridor in a broad trail of her own blood, and one of her male colleagues, too weak to escape, was trying to prop himself up against the wall. The floor was slippery under him and he kept sliding back down. I ignored him and went after the woman. She stopped when she heard my footsteps, twisted her head to look round and then began to crawl again, frantically. I stamped a foot down between her shoulders to make her stop and then kicked her onto her back.

We looked at each other for a long moment while I remembered her impassive face as she had put me under the night before. I lifted the blaster for her to see.

“Real Death,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

I walked back to the remaining medic who had seen and was now scrabbling desperately backwards away from me. I crouched down in front of him. The screaming of the alarms rose and fell over our heads like lost souls.

“Jesus Christ,” he moaned as I pointed the blaster at his face. “Jesus Christ, I only work here.”

“Good enough,” I told him.

The blaster was almost inaudible against the alarms.

Working rapidly, I took care of the third medic in similar fashion, dealt with Miller a little more at length, stripped Jerry’s headless corpse of its jacket and tucked the garment under my arm. Then I scooped up the Philips gun, tucked it into my waistband and left. On my way out along the screaming corridors of the clinic, I killed every person that I met, and melted their stacks to slag.

Personal.

The police were landing on the roof as I let myself out of the front door and walked unhurriedly down the street. Under my arm, Miller’s severed head was beginning to seep blood through the lining of Jerry’s jacket.