Altered Carbon

Chapter Sixteen

It was quiet and sunny in the gardens at Suntouch House, and the air smelled of mown grass. From the tennis courts came the faint popping of a game in progress and once I heard Miriam Bancroft’s voice raised in excitement. Flash of tanned legs beneath a flaring white skirt and a puff of shell-pink dust where the driven ball buried itself in the back of her opponent’s court. There was a polite ripple of applause from the seated figures watching. I made my way down towards the courts, flanked by heavily armed security men with blank faces.

The players were taking a game break when I arrived, feet planted wide in front of their seats, heads down. As my feet crunched on the gravel surround, Miriam Bancroft looked up through tangled blonde hair and met my eye. She said nothing, but her hands worked at the handle of her racket and a smile split her lips. Her opponent, who also glanced up, was a slim young man with something about him that suggested he might genuinely be as young as his body. He looked vaguely familiar.

Bancroft was seated at the middle of a row of deck chairs, Oumou Prescott on his right and a man and woman I’d never met on his left. He didn’t get up when I reached him; in fact he barely looked at me. One hand gestured to the seat next to Prescott.

“Sit down, Kovacs. It’s the last game.”

I twitched a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded myself into the deck chair. Oumou Prescott leaned across to me and murmured behind her hand.

“Mr Bancroft has had some unwanted attention from the police today. You are being less subtle than we had hoped.”

“Just warming up,” I muttered back.

By some prior agreed time limit, Miriam Bancroft and her opponent shrugged off their towels and took up position. I settled back and watched the play, eyes mostly on the woman’s taut body as it surged and swung within the white cotton, remembering how it looked unclothed, how it had writhed against me. Once, just before a service, she caught me looking at her and her mouth bent in fractional amusement. She was still waiting for an answer from me, and now she thought she had it. When the match finished, in a flurry of hard-fought but visibly inevitable points, she came off court glowing.

She was talking to the man and woman I didn’t know when I approached to offer my congratulations. She saw me coming and turned to include me in the little group.

“Mr Kovacs.” Her eyes widened the slightest bit. “Did you enjoy watching?”

“Very much,” I said truthfully. “You’re quite merciless.”

She tipped her head on one side and began to towel her sweat-soaked hair with one hand. “Only when required,” she said. “You won’t know Nalan or Joseph, of course. Nalan, Joseph, this is Takeshi Kovacs, the Envoy Laurens hired to look into his murder. Mr Kovacs is from offworld. Mr Kovacs, this is Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court, and Joseph Phiri from the Commission of Human Rights.”

“Delighted.” I made a brief formal bow to both of them. “You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.”

The two officials exchanged a glance, then Phiri nodded. “You’re very well informed,” he said gravely. “I’ve heard a lot about the Envoy Corps, but still I’m impressed. How long have you been on Earth, exactly?”

“About a week.” I exaggerated, hoping to play down the usual paranoia elected officials exhibit around Envoys.

“A week, yes. Impressive indeed.” Phiri was a heavy-set black man, apparently in his fifties, with hair that was greying a little and careful brown eyes. Like Dennis Nyman, he affected external eye-wear, but where Nyman’s steely lenses had been designed to enhance the planes of his face, this man wore the glasses to deflect attention. They were heavy-framed and gave him the appearance of a forgetful cleric, but behind the lenses, the eyes missed nothing.

“And are you making progress with your investigation?” This was Ertekin, a handsome Arab woman a couple of decades younger than Phiri, and therefore likely to be on at least her second sleeve. I smiled at her.

“Progress is difficult to define, your honour. As Quell would have it, They come to me with progress reports, but all I see is change, and bodies burnt.”

“Ah, you are from Harlan’s World, then,” Ertekin said politely. “And do you consider yourself a Quellist, Mr Kovacs?”

I let the smile become a grin. “Sporadically. I’d say she had a point.”

“Mr Kovacs has been quite busy, in fact,” said Miriam Bancroft hurriedly. “I imagine he and Laurens have a lot to discuss. Perhaps it might be better if we left them to these matters.”

“Yes, of course.” Ertekin inclined her head. “Perhaps we’ll talk again later.”

The three of them drifted over to commiserate with Miriam’s opponent, who was ruefully stowing his racket and towels in a bag; but for all Miriam’s diplomatic steerage, Nalan Ertekin did not seem unduly concerned to make her escape. I felt a momentary glimmer of admiration for her. Telling a UN executive, in effect an officer of the Protectorate, that you’re a Quellist is a bit like confessing to ritual slaughter at a vegetarian dinner; it’s not really the done thing.

I turned to find Oumou Prescott at my shoulder.

“Shall we?” she said grimly, and pointed up towards the house. Bancroft was already striding ahead. We went after him at what I thought was an excessive pace.

“One question,” I managed, between breathing. “Who’s the kid? The one Mrs Bancroft crucified.”

Prescott flicked me an impatient glance.

“Big secret, huh?”

“No, Mr Kovacs, it is not a secret, large or otherwise. I merely think you might do better occupying your mind with other matters than the Bancrofts’ house guests. If you must know, the other player was Marco Kawahara.”

“Was it, indeed?” Accidentally, I’d slipped into Phiri’s speech patterns. Chalk up a double strike for personality. “So that’s where I’ve seen his face before. Takes after his mother, doesn’t he?”

“I really wouldn’t know,” said Prescott dismissively. “I have never met Ms Kawahara.”

“Lucky you.”

Bancroft was waiting for us in an exotic conservatory pinned to the seaward wing of the house. The glass walls were a riot of alien colours and forms, among which I picked out a young mirrorwood tree and numerous stands of martyrweed. Bancroft was standing next to one of the latter, spraying it carefully with a white metallic dust. I don’t know much about martyrweed beyond its obvious uses as a security device, so I had no idea what the powder was.

Bancroft turned as we came in. “Please keep your voices reasonably low.” His own voice was curiously flat in the sound absorbent environment. “Martyrweed is highly sensitive at this stage of development. Mr Kovacs, I assume you are familiar with it.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at the vaguely hand-shaped cups of the leaves, with the central crimson stains that had given the plant its name. “You sure these are mature?”

“Fully. On Adoracion, you’ll have seen them larger, but I had Nakamura tailor these for indoor use. This is as secure as a Nilvibe cabin and,” he gestured to a trio of steel frame chairs beside the martyrweed, “a great deal more comfortable.”

“You wanted to see me,” I said impatiently. “What about?”

For just a moment that black iron stare bent on me with the full force of Bancroft’s three and a half centuries, and it was like locking gazes with a demon. For that second, the Meth soul was looking out and I saw reflected in those eyes all the myriad ordinary single lives that they had watched die, like the pale flickerings of moths at a flame. It was an experience I’d only had once before, and that was when I’d taken issue with Reileen Kawahara. I could feel the heat on my wings.

Then it was gone, and there was only Bancroft, moving to seat himself and setting the powder spray aside on an adjacent table. He looked up and waited to see if I would sit down as well. When I did not, he steepled his fingers and frowned. Oumou Prescott hovered between us.

“Mr Kovacs, I am aware that by the terms of our contract I agreed to meet all reasonable expenses in this investigation, but when I said that, I did not expect to be paying for a trail of wilful organic damage from one side of Bay City to another. I have spent most of this morning buying off both the West Coast triads and the Bay City police, neither of whom were very well disposed towards me even before you started this carnage. I wonder if you realise how much it is costing me just to keep you alive and out of storage.”

I looked around at the conservatory and shrugged.

“I imagine you can afford it.”

Prescott flinched. Bancroft allowed himself the splinter of a smile.

“Perhaps, Mr Kovacs, I no longer wish to afford it.”

“Then pull the fucking plug.” The martyrweed trembled visibly at the sudden change in tone. I didn’t care. Abruptly, I was no longer in the mood for playing the Bancrofts’ elegant games. I was tired. Discounting the brief period of unconsciousness at the clinic, I had been awake for over thirty hours and my nerves were raw from the continual use of the neurachem system. I had been in a firefight. I had escaped from a moving aircar. I had been subjected to interrogation routines that would have traumatised most human beings for a lifetime. I had committed multiple combat murders. And I had been in the act of crawling into bed when the Hendrix let Bancroft’s curt summons through the call block I’d requested, quote, ‘in the interests of maintaining good client relations and so assuring continued guest status’. Someday, someone was going to have to overhaul the hotel’s antique service industry idiolect; I had weighed the idea of doing it myself with the Nemex when I got off the phone, but my irritation at the hotel’s enslaved responses to guest-holding was overridden by the anger I felt towards Bancroft himself. It was that anger that had stopped me ignoring the call and going to bed anyway, and propelled me out to Suntouch House dressed in the same rumpled clothes I had been wearing since the previous day.

“I beg your pardon, Mr Kovacs?” Oumou Prescott was staring at me. “Are you suggesting—”

“No, I’m not, Prescott. I’m threatening.” I switched my gaze back to Bancroft. “I didn’t ask to join this fucking No dance. You dragged me here, Bancroft. You pulled me out of the store on Harlan’s World and you jacked me into Elias Ryker’s sleeve just to piss Ortega off. You sent me out there with a few vague hints and watched me stumble around in the dark, cracking my shins on your past misdemeanours. Well, if you don’t want to play any more, now the current’s running a little hard, that’s fine with me. I’m through risking my stack for a piece of shit like you. You can just put me back in the box, and I’ll take my chances a hundred and seventeen years from now. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and whoever wants you toasted will have wiped you off the face of the planet by then.”

I’d had to check my weapons at the main gate, but I could feel the dangerous looseness of the Envoy combat mode stealing over me as I spoke. If the Meth demon came back and got out of hand, I was going to choke the life out of Bancroft there and then just for the satisfaction.

Curiously, what I said only seemed to make him thoughtful. He heard me out, inclined his head as if in agreement, then turned to Prescott.

“Ou, can you drop out for a while. There are some things that Mr Kovacs and I need to discuss in private.”

Prescott looked dubious. “Shall I post someone outside?” she queried, with a hard glance at me. Bancroft shook his head.

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

Prescott left, looking dubious, while I struggled not to admire Bancroft’s cool. He’d just heard me say I was happy to go back into storage, he’d been reading my body count all morning, and still he thought he had my specs down tight enough to know whether I was dangerous or not.

I took a seat. Maybe he was right.

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” I said evenly. “You can start with Ryker’s sleeve, and go on from there. Why’d you do it, and why conceal it from me?”

“Conceal it?” Bancroft’s brows arched. “We barely discussed it.”

“You told me you’d left the sleeve selection to your lawyers. You were at pains to stress that. But Prescott insists you made the selection yourself. You should have briefed her a bit better on the lies you were going to tell.”

“Well.” Bancroft made a gesture of acceptance. “A reflexive caution, then. One tells the truth to so few people in the end, it becomes a habit. But I had no idea it would matter to you so much. After your career in the Corps, and your time in storage, I mean. Do you usually exhibit this much interest in the past history of the sleeves you wear?”

“No, I don’t. But ever since I arrived, Ortega’s been all over me like anticontaminant plastic. I thought it was because she had something to hide. Turns out, she’s just trying to protect her boyfriend’s sleeve while he’s in the store. Incidentally, did you bother to find out why Ryker was on stack?”

This time Bancroft’s open-handed motion was dismissive. “A corruption charge. Unjustified organic damage, and attempted falsification of personality detail. I understand it wasn’t his first offence.”

“Yeah, that’s right. In fact he was well known for it. Well known and very unpopular, especially around places like Licktown, which is where I’ve been the last couple of days, following the trail of your dripping dick. But we’ll come back to that. I want to know why you did it. Why am I wearing Ryker’s sleeve?”

Bancroft’s eyes flared momentarily at the insult, but he really was too good a player to rise to it. Instead, he shot his right cuff in a displacement gesture I recognised from Diplomatic Basic, and smiled faintly.

“Really, I had no idea it would prove inconvenient. I was looking to provide you with suitable armour, and the sleeve carries—”

“Why Ryker?”

There was a beat of silence. Meths were not people you interrupted lightly, and Bancroft was having a hard time dealing with the lack of respect. I thought about the tree beyond the tennis courts. No doubt Ortega, had she been there, would have cheered.

“A move, Mr Kovacs. Merely a move.”

“A move? Against Ortega?”

“Just so.” Bancroft settled back into his seat. “Lieutenant Ortega made her prejudices quite clear the moment she stepped into this house. She was unhelpful in the extreme. She lacked respect. It was something that I remembered, an account to be adjusted. When the shortlist Oumou provided me with included Elias Ryker’s sleeve, and listed Ortega as paying the tank mortgage, I saw the move as almost karmic. It dictated itself.”

“A little childish for someone your age, don’t you think?”

Bancroft inclined his head. “Perhaps. But then, do you recall a General MacIntyre of Envoy Command, resident of Harlan’s World, who was found gutted and decapitated in his private jet a year after the Innenin massacre?”

“Vaguely.” I sat, cold, remembering. But if Bancroft could play the control game, so could I.

“Vaguely?” Bancroft raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought a veteran of Innenin could scarcely fail to recall the death of the commander who presided over the whole debacle, the man many claim was actually guilty by negligence of all those Real Deaths.”

“MacIntyre was exonerated of all blame by the Protectorate Court of Inquiry,” I said quietly. “Do you have a point to make?”

Bancroft shrugged. “Only that it seems his death was a revenge killing, despite the verdict handed down by the court, a pointless act, in fact, since it could not bring back those who died. Childishness is a common enough sin amongst humans. Perhaps we should not be so quick to judge.”

“Perhaps not.” I stood up and went to stand at the door of the conservatory, looking out. “Well, then don’t feel that I’m sitting in judgement, but why exactly didn’t you tell me you spent so much time in whorehouses?”

“Ah, the Elliott girl. Yes, Oumou has told me about this. Do you seriously think her father had something to do with my death?”

I turned back. “Not now, no. I seriously believe he had nothing to do with your death, in fact. But I’ve wasted a lot of time finding that out.”

Bancroft met my eye calmly. “I’m sorry if my briefing was inadequate, Mr Kovacs. It is true, I spend some of my leisure time in purchased sexual release, both real and virtual. Or, as you so elegantly put it, whorehouses. I’d not considered it especially important. Equally, I spend part of my time in small-scale gambling. And occasionally null-gravity knife fighting. All of these things could make me enemies, as indeed could most of my business interests. I didn’t feel that your first day in a new sleeve on a new world was the time for a line-by-line explanation of my life. Where would I expect to begin? Instead, I told you the background of the crime and suggested that you talk to Oumou. I didn’t expect you to take off after the first clue like a heatseeker. Nor did I expect you to lay waste everything that got in your way. I was told the Envoy Corps had a reputation for subtlety.”

Put like that, he had a point. Virginia Vidaura would have been furious, she probably would have been right behind Bancroft, waiting to deck me for gross lack of finesse. But then, neither she nor Bancroft had been looking into Victor Elliott’s face the night he told me about his family. I swallowed a sharp retort and marshalled what I knew, trying to decide how much to let go of.

“Laurens?”

Miriam Bancroft was standing just outside the conservatory, a towel draped around her neck and her racket under one arm.

“Miriam.” There was a genuine deference in Bancroft’s tone, but little else that I could determine.

“I’m taking Nalan and Joseph out to Hudson’s Raft for a scuba lunch. Joseph’s never done it before, and we’ve talked him into it.” She glanced from Bancroft to myself and back. “Will you be coming with us?”

“Maybe later,” said Bancroft. “Where will you be?”

Miriam shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Somewhere on the starboard decks. Benton’s, maybe?”

“Fine. I’ll catch you up. Spear me a kingfish if you see one.”

“Aye aye.” She touched the blade of one hand to the side of her head in a ludicrous salute that made both of us smile unexpectedly. Miriam’s gaze quivered and settled on me. “Do you like seafood, Mr Kovacs?”

“Probably. I’ve had very little time to exercise my tastes on Earth, Mrs Bancroft. So far I’ve only eaten what my hotel has to offer.”

“Well. Once you’ve developed a taste for it,” she said significantly, “maybe we’ll see you as well?”

“Thank you, but I doubt it.”

“Well,” she repeated brightly. “Try not to be too much longer, Laurens. I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.”

Bancroft grunted. “The way he played today, I’m not surprised. I thought for a while he was doing it deliberately.”

“Not the last game,” I said, to no one in particular.

The Bancrofts focused on me, he unreadably, she with her head tipped to one side and a sudden wide smile that made her look unexpectedly child-like. For a moment I met her gaze, and one hand rose to touch her hair with what seemed like fractional uncertainty.

“Curtis will be bringing the limousine round,” she said. “I’ll have to go. It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr Kovacs.”

We both watched her stride away across the lawn, her tennis skirt tilting back and forth. Even allowing for Bancroft’s apparent indifference to his wife as a sexual being, Miriam’s wordplay was steering fractionally too close to the wind for my liking. I had to plug the silence with something.

“Tell me something, Bancroft,” I said with my eyes still on the receding figure. “No disrespect intended, but why does someone who’s married to her, who’s chosen to stay married, spend his time in quote purchased sexual release?”

I turned casually back and found him watching me without expression. He said nothing for several seconds, and when he spoke his voice was carefully bland.

“Have you ever come in a woman’s face, Kovacs?”

Culture shock is something they teach you to lock down very early on in the Corps, but just occasionally a blast gets through the armour and the reality around you feels like a jigsaw that won’t quite fit together. I barely chopped off my stare before it got started. This man, older than the entire human history of my planet, was asking me this question. It was as if he’d asked me had I ever played with water pistols.

“Uh. Yes. It, uh, it happens if—”

“A woman you paid?”

“Well, sometimes. Not especially. I—” I remembered his wife’s abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. “I don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine, and—”

“Nor of mine,” snapped the man in front of me, with rather too much emphasis. “I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of us that are better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a civilised context.”

“I’d hardly counterpose civilisation with spilling semen.”

“You come from another place,” said Bancroft broodingly. “A brash, young colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The UN declarations fossilised into global conformity, there was a—” he gestured “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.”

“You talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t fight your way free?”

Bancroft smiled thinly. “Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her flesh with other men and women. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, Mr Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear. While all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?”

I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a centuries-old soul and Bancroft was in full flow.

“No,” he answered his own question. “How could you? Just as your culture is too shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience cannot possibly encompass what it is to love the same person for two hundred and fifty years. In the end, if you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration with the sordid desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time? I tell you, you cannot.”

“So instead you vent yourself on prostitutes?”

The thin smile returned. “I am not proud of myself, Mr Kovacs. But you do not live this long without accepting yourself in every facet, however distasteful. The women are there. They satisfy a market need, and are recompensed accordingly. And in this way I purge myself.”

“Does your wife know this?”

“Of course. And has done for a very considerable time. Oumou informs me that you are already aware of the facts regarding Leila Begin. Miriam has calmed down a lot since then. I’m sure she has adventures of her own.”

“How sure?”

Bancroft made an irritated gesture. “Is this relevant? I don’t have my wife monitored, if that’s what you mean, but I know her. She has her appetites to contend with just as I do.”

“And this doesn’t bother you?”

“Mr Kovacs, I am many things, but I am not a hypocrite. It is the flesh, nothing more. Miriam and I understand this. And now, since this line of questioning doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, can we please get back on track. In the absence of any guilt on the part of Elliott, what else do you have?”

I made a decision then that came up from levels of instinct way below conscious thought. I shook my head. “There’s nothing yet.”

“But there will be?”

“Yes. You can write Ortega off to this sleeve, but there’s still Kadmin. He wasn’t after Ryker. He knew me. Something’s going on.”

Bancroft nodded in satisfaction. “Are you going to speak to Kadmin?”

“If Ortega lets me.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the police will have run whatever satellite footage they’ve got over Oakland this morning, which means they can probably identify me leaving the clinic. There must have been something overhead at the time. I don’t suppose they’ll be at their most co-operative.”

Bancroft permitted himself another of his splintered smiles. “Very astute, Mr Kovacs. But you need have nothing to fear on that count. The Wei Clinic — what little you left of it — is reluctant to either release internal video footage or press charges against anyone. They have more to fear in any investigation than do you. Of course, whether they choose to seek more private reprisals is, shall we say, a more protracted question.”

“And Jerry’s?”

A shrug. “The same. With the proprietor dead, a managing interest has stepped in.”

“Very tidy.”

“I’m glad you appreciate it.” Bancroft got to his feet. “As I said, it has been a busy morning, and negotiations are by no means at an end. I would be grateful if you could limit your depredations somewhat in future. It has been costly.”

Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports … for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying … Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.

Someone else was paying.

Chapter Seventeen

The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way, as a police station, or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained-glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.

Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch of coloured light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding centre, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me — the subsonics were obviously getting to him as well.

“Lieutenant Ortega,” I told him. “Organic Damage.”

“Who shall I say it is?”

“Tell her it’s Elias Ryker.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened then turned back to me.

“She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?”

I nodded and reached under my jacket for the Nemex.

“Please surrender the weapon carefully,” he added with a gentle smile. “Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.”

I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.

“Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly towards me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers which the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.

“I wouldn’t,” I told them.

“Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,” said the desk sergeant pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.

It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.

Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missile-like from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment-formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.

The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-calibre Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.

“Sit down, Kovacs.”

I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window and hooked it up to the desk. The late afternoon light in the office was disorientating.

“You work the night shift?”

Her eyes flared. “What kind of crack is that?”

“Hey, nothing.” I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. “I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.”

“Oh, that.” Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—” She looked up abruptly. “What the fuck am I — Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?”

I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.

“About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”

“We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.”

I shrugged.

“And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and Real Death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.”

“Impound his vehicle did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?”

Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.

I nodded. “Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.”

“Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.”

“Admirable tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.”

“There is no fucking Bancroft case.”

Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.

“Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”

“Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?”

“We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.”

She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.

“You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,” I said coldly. “I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was fighting the Protectorate’s battles for them.”

“That was war.”

“Oh, please.”

She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.

“And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.” I gestured at my own face. “This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.”

She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my head with clenched determination.

“I quit.”

“Did you?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. “Good for you. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.”

She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.

“What do you want?” she asked flatly.

The holding racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.

“I don’t see that this is going to change anything,” said Ortega as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. “What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?”

“Look.” I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.

“I—” she said.

“3089b,” called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot. “This the one you wanted, lieutenant?”

Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. “That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual?”

“Sure.” Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. “You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take about five minutes.”

“The point is,” I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps, “you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you, he’s been dealing with you all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an unknown. If he’s never been extra-system, the chances are he’s never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the Corps most places I’ve been.”

Ortega gave me a sceptical look over her shoulder. “You’re going to frighten him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.”

“He’ll be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away. Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead. Someone who is scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may rub off on Kadmin.”

“And this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?”

“Ortega, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank asap, out of harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get written off in another firefight, do you?”

“Another firefight?” It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.

“Yeah, after the Hendrix,” I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face chemical interlock that had put me off balance. “I picked up some bad bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.”

She shot me another, longer glance over her shoulder.

The virtual interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automould couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they blinked on.

“Traffic,” he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust. “Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.” He glanced back at Ortega. “Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?”

“Yeah.” Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of our new co-operation. “Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack. Set it to spin and guess what?”

“Catholic?”

“In one. That Total Absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a case like that, but El—” She stopped. Restarted. “The detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his neighbourhood, he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but—” she shrugged “—he wouldn’t let it go.”

“Very tenacious. Elias Ryker?”

She nodded.

“He pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the Vow. The girl’s family are borderliners, nominally Christian, but mostly not Catholic. Quite rich as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they spin out for family births and marriages. The Department’s been in virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.”

“Roll on Resolution 653, huh?”

“Yeah.”

We both went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom of the line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfibre like chicle in a child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and re-attached with epoxy hinges afterwards. The curved grey ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.

“Tell me something, Ortega,” I said after a while. “That tail you had on me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than the others? A blind man could have spotted him.”

There was a pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly. “All we had. It was a snap thing, we had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.”

“The clothes.” I closed my eyes. “Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That simple?”

“Yep.”

I threw my mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward. I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing …

“Got it!” I snapped my fingers. “You hammered me on the shoulder when you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.”

“Enzyme bond bleeper,” said Ortega matter-of-factly. “Not much bigger than a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in you wouldn’t be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you offloaded it into that skip we thought you’d tipped us.”

“No. Nothing so bright.”

“That’s it,” announced Micky suddenly. “Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your spinal spiral, we are in the pipe.”

It was a rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation, but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull grey ceiling grew abruptly fascinating with fishtail swirls of light and meaning drained out of the universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was

Elsewhere.

It spread out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down from the gantry. Steel grey, stippled every few metres with a nipple-like swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same grey with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race memory of what an actual lock looked like.

In front of me softly shaped grey furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side, one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an existence separate to the floor.

Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks, I—” Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.

I looked up at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”

“Pretty much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”

Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.

“Again, lieutenant?” he said when the programme had rendered him complete. “There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”

“That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,” said Ortega. “Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”

“No thank you.”

“I said sit, motherfucker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.

“You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?”

We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.

He was the Patchwork Man.

Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.

The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, but the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

He would have made a fine Envoy.

“I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.

Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. “If you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality edited.”

“Do you know this man, Kadmin?” asked Ortega.

“Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”

“You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”

“I’m not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.”

“Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. “We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.”

Kadmin smiled. “Then what are you here for?”

“Who sent you?” I asked him softly.

I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.

I finished it for him.

“Have you come seeking blame, Mr Kovacs?”

“Among other things.”

“How disappointing.”

“You expected something else?”

“No,” said Kadmin with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.”

“Maybe.”

He shook his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”

“That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”

“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.” Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?”

“No. I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. “Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”

Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.

“I was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly, “unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”

Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.

Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.

“I hear you right?” she hissed. “You making threats, fuckhead?”

Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.

“Police brutal—”

“That’s right, motherfucker.” Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. “Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they? But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular tape.”

“Leave him alone, Ortega.”

She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back. Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.

“You too,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, sure.” There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. “Like I said, going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I’ll wait for you.”

“Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?” I wondered softly. “You going down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?”

For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.

“You through, Kovacs?” asked Ortega.

I tried to meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. “Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.”

Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

I shrugged. “I’m through.”

“Good,” said Ortega grimly. “Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.” She waggled her fingers in front of his eyes. “Be seeing you, fuckhead.”

At that, Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.

We left.

Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.

“So what did you learn from that?”

I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. “Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.”

“Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.”

I shook my head. “About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any sense.”

“The Corps? Unfinished business?” Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. “Maybe a grudge match?”

“No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there’s nothing I know about the Corps that isn’t in a low-wall datastack somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a fucking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.”

“Whoever had him killed?”

I tipped my head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. “You believe me, then.”

“Not entirely.”

“Oh, come on.”

But Ortega wasn’t listening. “What I want to know,” she brooded, “is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.”

“Even to his lawyers?”

“We don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.”

I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.

“Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin’s here in Bay City?”

“Physically, you mean? Yeah, they’ve got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.” Ortega’s lip curled. “Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.”

“What’s this suit’s name?”

There was a brief pause while she hung onto the name. “Kadmin’s a spinning item right now. I’m not sure we go this far.”

“Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I’m back to risking Elias’s fine features with some more maximal push investigation.”

She was silent for a while.

“Rutherford,” she said finally. “You want to talk to Rutherford?”

“Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn’t make things clear earlier. I’m working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin’s all I’ve got.”

“Keith Rutherford’s a handful of engine grease. You won’t get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He’d like to ask you a few questions. He’ll close up faster than an unpaid hooker’s hole.”

She had a point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.

“All right,” I said slowly. “All I need is a couple of minutes’ conversation. How about you tell him I’m Elias Ryker, your partner from Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.”

Ortega took off her lenses and stared at me.

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No. I’m trying to be practical. Rutherford’s sleeving in from Ulan Bator, right?”

“New York,” she said tightly.

“New York. Right. So he probably doesn’t know anything about you or Ryker.”

“Probably not.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, Kovacs, that I don’t like it.”

There was more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her. It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.

“Ortega,” I said gently. “I’m not him. I’m not trying to be hi—”

“You couldn’t even come close,” she snapped.

“All we’re talking about is a couple of hours’ make-believe.”

“Is that all?”

She said it in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque efficiency that I didn’t need to see the tears welling up in the eyes behind the mirror lenses.

“All right,” she said finally, clearing her throat. “I’ll get you in. I don’t see the point, but I’ll do it. Then what?”

“That’s a little difficult to say. I’ll have to improvise.”

“Like you did at the Wei Clinic?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can’t react to something until it happens.”

“I don’t want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city stats.”

“If there’s violence, it won’t be me that starts it.”

“That’s not much of a guarantee. Haven’t you got any idea what you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to talk.”

“Just talk?” She looked at me disbelievingly. “That’s all?”

I jammed my ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face.

“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” I said.

Chapter Eighteen

I met my first lawyer when I was fifteen. He was a harried-looking juvenile affray expert who defended me, not unhandily, in a minor organic damage suit involving a Newpest police officer. He bargained them down with a kind of myopic patience to Conditional Release and eleven minutes of virtual psychiatric counselling. In the hall outside the juvenile court, he looked into my probably infuriatingly smug face and nodded as if his worst fears about the meaning of his life were being confirmed. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. I forget his name.

My entry into the Newpest gang scene shortly afterwards precluded any more such legal encounters. The gangs were web-smart, wired up and already writing their own intrusion programmes or buying them from kids half their age in return for low-grade virtual porn ripped off the networks. They didn’t get caught easily, and in return for this favour the Newpest heat tended to leave them alone. Inter-gang violence was largely ritualised and excluded other players most of the time. On the odd occasion that it spilled over and affected civilians, there would be a rapid and brutal series of punitive raids that left a couple of lead gang heroes in the store and the rest of us with extensive bruising. Fortunately I never worked my way up the chain of command far enough to get put away, so the next time I saw the inside of a courtroom was the Innenin inquiry.

The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I’d been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

After that, straightforward criminality came as something of a relief.

“Something bothering you?” Ortega glanced sideways at me as she brought the unmarked cruiser down on a shelving pebble beach below the split-level, glass-fronted offices of Prendergast Sanchez, attorneys-at-law.

“Just thinking.”

“Try cold showers and alcohol. Works for me.”

I nodded and held up the minuscule bead of metal I had been rolling between my finger and thumb. “Is this legal?”

Ortega reached up and killed the primaries. “More or less. No one’s going to complain.”

“Good. Now, I’m going to need verbal cover to start with. You do the talking, I’ll just shut up and listen. Take it from there.”

“Fine. Ryker was like that, anyway. Never used two words if one would do it. Most of the time with the scumbags, he’d just look at them.”

“Sort of Micky Nozawa-type, huh?”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” The rattle of upthrown pebbles on the hull died away as Ortega cut the engines to idle. I stretched in my seat and threw open my side of the hatch. Climbing out, I saw an over-burly figure coming down the meandering set of wooden steps from the split level. Looked like grafting. A blunt-looking gun was slung over his shoulder and he wore gloves. Probably not a lawyer.

“Go easy,” said Ortega, suddenly at my shoulder. “We have jurisdiction here. He isn’t going to start anything.”

She flashed her badge as the muscle jumped the last step to the beach and landed on flexed legs. You could see the disappointment on his face as he saw it.

“Bay City police. We’re here to see Rutherford.”

“You can’t park that here.”

“I already have,” Ortega told him evenly. “Are we going to keep Mr Rutherford waiting?”

There was a prickly silence, but she’d gauged him correctly. Contenting himself with a grunt, the muscle gestured us up the staircase and followed at prudent shepherding distance. It took a while to get to the top, and I was pleased to see when we arrived that Ortega was considerably more out of breath than I was. We went across a modest sundeck made from the same wood as the stairs and through two sets of automatic plate glass doors into a reception area styled to look like someone’s lounge. There were rugs on the floor, knitted in the same patterns as my jacket, and Empathist prints on the walls. Five single armchairs provided parking.

“Can I help you?”

This was a lawyer, no question about it. A smoothly groomed blonde woman in a loose skirt and jacket tailored to fit the room, hands resting comfortably in her pockets.

“Bay City police. Where’s Rutherford?”

The woman flickered a glance sideways at our escort and having received the nod did not bother to demand identification.

“I’m afraid Keith is occupied at the moment. He’s in virtual with New York.”

“Well get him out of virtual then,” said Ortega with dangerous mildness. “And tell him the officer who arrested his client is here to see him. I’m sure he’ll be interested.”

“That may take some time, officer.”

“No, it won’t.”

The two women locked gazes for a moment, and then the lawyer looked away. She nodded to the muscle, who went back outside, still looking disappointed.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said glacially. “Please wait here.”

We waited, Ortega at the floor-to-ceiling window, staring down at the beach with her back to the room and myself prowling the artwork. Some of it was quite good. With the separately ingrained habits of working in monitored environments, neither of us said anything for the ten minutes it took to produce Rutherford from the inner sanctum.

“Lieutenant Ortega.” The modulated voice reminded me of Miller’s at the clinic, and when I looked up from a print over the fireplace, I saw much the same kind of sleeve. Maybe a little older, with slightly craggier patriarchal features designed to inspire instant respect in jurors and judges alike, but the same athletic frame and off-the-rack good looks. “To what do I owe this unexpected visit? Not more harassment, I hope.”

Ortega ignored the allegation. “Detective Sergeant Elias Ryker,” she said, nodding at me. “Your client just admitted to one count of abduction, and made a first degree organic damage threat under monitor. Care to see the footage?”

“Not particularly. Care to tell me why you’re here?”

Rutherford was good. He’d barely reacted; barely, but enough to catch it out of the corner of my eye. My mind went into overdrive.

Ortega leaned on the back of an armchair. “For a man defending a mandatory erasure case, you’re showing a real lack of imagination.”

Rutherford sighed theatrically. “You have called me away from an important link. I assume you do have something to say.”

“Do you know what third party retro-associative complicity is?” I asked the question without turning from the print, and when I did look up, I had Rutherford’s complete attention.

“I do not,” he said stiffly.

“That’s a pity, because you and the other partners of Prendergast Sanchez are right in the firing line if Kadmin rolls over. But of course, if that happens —” I spread my hands and shrugged “ — it’ll be open season. In fact, it may already be.”

“All right, that’s enough.” Rutherford’s hand rose decisively to a remote summons emitter pinned to his lapel. Our escort was on his way. “I don’t have time to play games with you. There is no statute by that name, and this is getting perilously close to harassment.”

I raised my voice. “Just wanted to know which side you want to be on when the program crashes, Rutherford. There is a statute. UN indictable offence, last handed down 4th May 2207. Look it up. I had to go back a long way to dig this one up, but it’ll take all of you down in the end. Kadmin knows it, that’s why he’s cracking.”

Rutherford smiled. “I don’t think so, detective.”

I repeated my shrug. “Shame. Like I said, look it up. Then decide which side you want to play for. We’re going to need inside corroboration, and we’re prepared to pay for it. If it isn’t you, Ulan Bator’s stuffed with lawyers who’ll give blow jobs for the chance.”

The smile wavered fractionally.

“That’s right, think about it.” I nodded at Ortega. “You can get me at Fell Street, same as the lieutenant here. Elias Ryker, offworld liaison. I’m promising you, this is going to go down, whatever happens, and when it does, I’ll be a good person to know.”

Ortega took the cue like she’d been doing it all her life. Like Sarah would have done. She unleaned herself from the chairback and made for the door.

“Be seeing you, Rutherford,” she said laconically, as we stepped back out onto the deck. The muscle was there, grinning widely and flexing his hands at his sides. “And you, don’t even think about it.”

I contented myself with the silent look that I had been told Ryker used to such great effect and followed my partner down the stairs.

Back in the cruiser, Ortega snapped on a screen and watched identity data from the bug scroll down.

“Where’d you put it?”

“Print over the fireplace. Corner of the frame.”

She grunted. “They’ll sweep it out of there in nothing flat, you know. And none of it’s admissible as evidence, anyway.”

“I know. You’ve told me that twice already. That’s not the point. If Rutherford’s rattled, he’ll jump first.”

“You think he’s rattled?”

“A little.”

“Yeah.” She glanced curiously at me. “So what the fuck is third party retro-associative complicity?”

“No idea. I made it up.”

Her eyebrow went up. “No shit?”

“Convinced you, huh? Know what, you could have given me a polygraph test while I was spinning it, and I would have convinced that too. Basic Envoy tricks. Course, Rutherford will know that as soon as he looks it up, but it’s already served its purpose.”

“Which is what?”

“Provide the arena. Tell lies, you keep your opponent off balance. It’s like fighting on unfamiliar ground. Rutherford was rattled, but he smiled when I told him this stuff was why Kadmin was acting up.” I looked up through the windscreen at the house above, formulating the scrapings of intuition into understanding. “He was fucking relieved when I said that. I don’t suppose normally he would have given that much away, but the bluff had him running scared, and him knowing better than me about something was that little ray of stability he needed. And that means he knows another reason why Kadmin changed behaviour. He knows the real reason.”

Ortega grunted approvingly. “Pretty good, Kovacs. You should have been a cop. You notice his reaction when I told him the good news about what Kadmin had done? He wasn’t surprised at all.”

“No. He was expecting it. Or something like it.”

“Yeah.” She paused. “This really what you used to do for a living?”

“Sometimes. Diplomatic missions, or deep-cover stuff. It wasn’t—”

I fell silent as she elbowed me in the ribs. On the screen, a series of coded sequences were unwinding like snakes of blue fire.

“Here we go. Simultaneous calls, he must be doing this in virtual to save time. One, two, three — that one’s New York, must be to update the senior partners, and oops.”

The screen flared and went abruptly dark.

“They found it,” I said.

“They did. The New York line probably has a sweeper attached, flushes out the call vicinity on connection.”

“Or one of the others does.”

“Yeah.” Ortega punched up the screen’s memory and stared at the call codes. “They’re all three routed through discreet clearing. Take us a while to locate them. You want to eat?”

Homesickness isn’t something a veteran Envoy should confess to. If the conditioning hasn’t already ironed it out of you, the years of sleeving back and forth across the Protectorate should have done. Envoys are citizens of that elusive state, Here-and-Now, a state that jealously admits of no dual nationalities. The past is relevant only as data.

Homesickness was what I felt as we stepped past the kitchen area of the Flying Fish and the aroma of sauces I had last tasted in Millsport hit me like a friendly tentacle. Teriyaki, frying tempura and the undercurrent of miso. I stood wrapped in it for a moment, remembering that time. A ramen bar Sarah and I had skulked in while the heat from the Gemini Biosys gig died down, eyes hooked to newsnet broadcasts and a corner videophone with a smashed screen that was supposed to ring, any time now. Steam on the windows and the company of taciturn Millsport skippers.

And back beyond that, I remembered the moth-battered paper lanterns outside Watanabe’s on a Newpest Friday night. My teenage skin slick with sweat from the jungle wind blowing out of the south and my eyes glittering with tetrameth in one of the big windchime mirrors. Talk, cheaper than the big bowls of ramen, about big scores and yakuza connections, tickets north and beyond, new sleeves and new worlds. Old Watanabe had sat out on the deck with us, listening to it all but never commenting, just smoking his pipes and glancing from time to time in the mirror at his own Caucasian features — always with mild surprise, it seemed to me.

He never told us how he’d got that sleeve, just as he never denied or confirmed the rumours about his escapades with the marine corps, the Quell Memorial Brigade, the Envoys, whatever. An older gang member once told us he’d seen Watanabe face down a roomful of Seven Per Cent Angels with nothing but his pipe in his hands, and some kid from the swamp towns once came up with a fuzzy slice of newsreel footage he claimed was from the Settlement wars. It was only two-d, hurriedly shot just before an assault team went over the top, but the sergeant being interviewed was subtitled Watanabe, Y and there was something about the way he tilted his head when questioned that had us all crowing recognition at the screen. But then Watanabe was a common enough name, and come to that, the guy who said he’d seen the Angels facedown was also fond of telling us how he’d slept with a Harlan family heiress when she came slumming, and none of us believed that.

Once, on a rare evening when I was both straight and alone at Watanabe’s, I swallowed enough of my adolescent pride to ask the old man for his advice. I’d been reading UN armed forces promotional literature for weeks, and I needed someone to push me one way or the other.

Watanabe just grinned at me around the stem of his pipe. “I should advise you?” he asked. “Share with you the wisdom that brought me to this?”

We both looked around the little bar and the fields beyond the deck.

“Well, uh, yes.”

“Well, uh, no,” he said firmly, and resumed his pipe.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked and found Ortega in front of me, looking curiously into my eyes.

“Something I need to know about?”

I smiled faintly and glanced around at the kitchen’s shining steel counters. “Not really.”

“It’s good food,” she said, misinterpreting the look.

“Well, let’s get some, then.”

She led me out of the steam and onto one of the restaurant’s gantries. The Flying Fish was, according to Ortega, a decommissioned aerial minesweeper that some oceanographic institute had bought up. The institute was now either defunct or had moved on and the bayward-facing facility had been gutted, but someone had stripped the Flying Fish, rerigged her as a restaurant and cabled her five hundred metres above the decaying facility buildings. Periodically the whole vessel was reeled gently back down to earth to disgorge its sated customers and take on fresh. There was a queue around two sides of the docking hangar when we arrived but Ortega jumped it with her badge, and when the airship came floating down through the open roof of the hangar, we were the first aboard.

I settled cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry itself was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the cushions to the sea a kilometre below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never been my strong point.

“Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff,” said Ortega, gesturing sideways at the hull. “Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. ’Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”

She paused. “I was born on Understanding Day,” she added inconsequentially.

“Really?”

“Yep. January 9th. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.”

“Nice.”

Who she was really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive. “When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be called Maria.”

“You come here often?”

“Not often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.”

“Good guess.”

A waiter arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something vegetarian.

“Good choice,” said Ortega. She nodded at the waiter. “I’ll have the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?”

“Water.”

Our selections flared briefly in pink and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked around her, seeking neutral conversation.

“So, uh — you got places like this in Millsport?”

“On the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.”

“No?” She raised her customary eyebrow. “Millsport’s an archipelago, isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—”

“An obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I think you’re forgetting something.” I flicked my eyes skywards. “We Are Not Alone.”

It clicked. “The orbitals? They’re hostile?”

“Mmm. Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get close enough to decommission one of them, or even get aboard, come to that, we have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.”

“Must make IP traffic tough.”

I nodded. “Well, yeah. ’Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and maintenance shuttles to the Platforms. Bit of exotic element mining, that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the equator towards evening and one crack of dawn slot up on the pole. It looks like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left holes in the net.” I paused. “Or maybe someone shot them down.”

“Someone? You mean someone, not the Martians?”

I spread my hands. “Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we even realised it was there. It’s the same on most of the Settled worlds. All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.”

“But the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.”

“Yeah, right.” I folded my arms and sat back. “The archaeologues say what the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilisation.”

Ortega looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.

“Do you mind if we talk about something else?” Ortega asked uncomfortably.

“Sure. Tell me about Ryker.”

The discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said eventually.

“Fair enough.” I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. “But I think you want to, really.”

“How very male of you.”

The food arrived and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced autochef breakfast, I discovered I was ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway through hers.

“Food OK?” she asked ironically as I sat back.

I nodded, trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning online and spoil the sated feeling in my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.

Ortega’s phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.

“Yeah? Uhuh. Uhuh, good. No, we’ll go.” Her eyes flickered briefly to mine. “That so? No, leave that one too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks Zak. Owe you one.”

She stowed the phone again and resumed eating.

“Good news?”

“Depends on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.”

“And the other call?”

Ortega looked up at me from her bowl, chewed and swallowed. “The other number was a residential discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of that?”

Chapter Nineteen

Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the Bay, alongside acres of abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometre long with six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange that I assumed was rust.

“Don’t let it fool you,” Ortega grunted as we circled. “They’ve polymered the hull a quarter-metre thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink it now.”

“Expensive.”

She shrugged. “They’ve got the backing.”

We landed on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomfited in equal parts by the pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realise what she was doing and pulled herself abruptly upright again.

“No one home,” she said awkwardly.

“So it seems. Shall we go and have a look?”

We got out into the customary blanket-snap of wind off the Bay and made for a tubular aluminium gangway that led onto the vessel near the stern. It was uncomfortably open ground, and I crossed it with an eye constantly sweeping the railed and craned lines of the ship’s deck and bridge tower. Nothing stirred. I squeezed my left arm lightly against my side to check the Fibregrip holster hadn’t slipped down, as the cheaper varieties often did after a couple of days’ wear. With the Nemex I was tolerably sure I could air out anyone shooting at us from the rail.

In the event it wasn’t necessary. We reached the end of the gangway without incident. A slim chain was fixed across the open entrance with a hand-lettered sign hung on it.

I lifted the rectangle of thin metal and looked at the crude lettering dubiously.

“Are you sure Rutherford called here?”

“Like I said before, don’t let it fool you.” Ortega was unhooking the chain. “Fighter chic. Crude’s the in thing. Last season it was neon signs, but even that’s not cool enough now. Place is fucking globally hyped. Only about three or four like it on the planet. There’s no coverage allowed in the arenas. No holos, not even televisuals. You coming, or what?”

“Weird.” I followed her down the tubular corridor, thinking of the freak fights I’d gone to when I was younger. On Harlan’s World, all fights were broadcast. They got the highest viewing figures of any transmitted entertainment online. “Don’t people like watching this sort of stuff?”

“Yeah, of course they do.” Even with the distortion of the echoing corridor, I could hear Ortega’s lip curling in the tone of her voice. “Never get enough of it. That’s how this scam works. See, first they set up the Creed—”

“Creed?”

“Yeah, Creed of Purity or some such shit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to interrupt? Creed goes, you want to see the fight, you go see it in the flesh. That’s better than watching it on the web. More classy. So, limited audience seating, sky-high demand. That makes the tickets very sexy, which makes them very expensive, which makes them even more sexy and whoever thought of it just rides that spiral up through the roof.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah, smart.”

We came to the end of the gangway, and stepped out again onto a wind-whipped deck. On either side of us the roofing of two of the cargo cells swelled smoothly to waist height like two enormous steel blisters on the ship’s skin. Beyond the rear swelling, the bridge towered blankly into the sky, seeming entirely unconnected with the hull we were standing on. The only motion came from the chains of a loading crane ahead of us that the wind had set swinging fractionally.

“The last time I was out here,” said Ortega, raising her voice to compete with the wind, “was because some dipshit newsprick from WorldWeb One got caught trying to walk recording implants into a title fight. They threw him into the Bay. After they’d removed the implants with a pair of pliers.”

“Nice.”

“Like I said, it’s a classy place.”

“Such flattery, lieutenant. I hardly know how to respond.”

The voice coughed from rusty-looking tannoy horns set on two-metre-high stalks along the rail. My hand flew to the Nemex butt, and my vision cycled out to peripheral scan with a rapidity that hurt. Ortega gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked up at the bridge. The two of us swept the superstructure for movement in opposite directions, coordinating unconsciously. Under the immediacy of the tension, I felt a warm shiver of pleasure at that unlooked-for symmetry.

“No, no. Over here,” said the metallic voice, this time relegated to the horns at the stern. As I watched, the chains on one of the rear loading cranes grated into motion and began to run, presumably hauling something up from the open cell in front of the bridge. I left my hand on the Nemex. Overhead, the sun was breaking through the cloud cover.

The chain ended in a massive iron hook, in the crook of which stood the speaker, one hand still holding a prehistoric tannoy microphone, the other gripped lightly around the rising chain. He was dressed in an inappropriate-looking grey suit that flapped in the wind, leaning out from the chain at a fastidious angle, hair glinting in a wandering shaft of sunlight. I narrowed my eyes to confirm. Synthetic. Cheap synthetic.

The crane swung out over the curved cover of the cargo cell and the synth alighted elegantly on the top, looking down on us.

“Elias Ryker,” he said, and his voice was not much smoother than the tannoy had been. Someone had done a real cut-rate job on the vocal cords. He shook his head. “We thought we’d seen the last of you. How short the legislature’s memory.”

“Carnage?” Ortega lifted a hand to shade against the sudden sunlight. “That you?”

The synthetic bowed faintly and stowed the tannoy mike inside his jacket. He began to pick his way down the sloping cell cover.

“Emcee Carnage, at your service, officers. And pray what have we done to offend today?”

I said nothing. From the sound of it, I was supposed to know this Carnage, and I didn’t have enough to work with at the moment. Remembering what Ortega had told me, I fixed the approaching synth with a blank stare, and hoped I was being sufficiently Ryker-like.

The synthetic reached the edge of the cell cover and jumped down. Up close, I saw that it wasn’t only the vocal cords that were crude. This body was so far from the one Trepp had been using when I torched her, it was barely deserving of the same name. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of antique. The black hair was coarse and enamelled-looking, the face slack silicoflesh, the pale blue eyes clearly logo’d across the white. The body looked solid, but a little too solid, and the arms were slightly wrong, reminiscent of snakes rather than limbs. The hands at the ends of the cuffs were smooth and lineless. The synth offered one featureless palm, as if for inspection.

“Well?” he asked gently.

“Routine check, Carnage,” said Ortega, helping me out. “Been some bomb threats on tonight’s fight. We’re here to have a look.”

Carnage laughed, jarringly. “As if you cared.”

“Well, like I said,” Ortega answered evenly, “it’s routine.”

“Oh well, you’d better come along then.” The synthetic sighed and nodded at me. “What’s the matter with him? Did they lose his speech functions in the stack?”

We followed him towards the back of the ship and found ourselves skirting the pit formed by the rolled-back cover of the rearmost cargo cell. I glanced down inside and saw a circular white fighting ring, walled on four sides by slopes of steel and plastic seating. Banks of lighting equipment were strung above but there were none of the spiky spherical units I associated with telemetry. In the centre of the ring, someone was knelt, painting a design on the mat by hand. He looked up as we passed.

“Thematic,” said Carnage, seeing where I was looking. “Means something in Arabic. This season’s fights are all themed around Protectorate police actions. Tonight it’s Sharya. Right Hand of God Martyrs versus Protec Marines. Hand to hand, no blades over ten centimetres.”

“Bloodbath, in other words,” said Ortega.

The synth shrugged. “What the public wants, the public pays for. I understand it is possible to inflict an outright mortal wound with a ten-centimetre blade. Just very difficult. A real test of skill, they say. This way.”

We went down a narrow companionway into the body of the ship, our own footsteps clanging around us in the tight confines.

“Arenas first, I presume,” Carnage shouted above the echoes.

“No, let’s see the tanks first,” suggested Ortega.

“Really?” It was hard to tell with the low-grade synthetic voice, but Carnage seemed to be amused. “Are you quite sure it’s a bomb you’re looking for, lieutenant? It seems to me the arena would be the obvious place to—”

“Got something to hide, Carnage?”

The synthetic turned back to look at me for a moment, quizzically. “No, not at all, detective Ryker. The tanks it is, then. Welcome to the conversation, by the way. Was it cold on stack? Of course, you probably never expected to be there yourself.”

“That’s enough.” Ortega interposed herself. “Just take us to the tanks and save the small talk for tonight.”

“But of course. We aim to co-operate with law enforcement. As a legally incorporated—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ortega waved the verbiage away with weary patience. “Just take us to the fucking tanks.”

I reverted to my dangerous stare.

We rode to the tank area in a dinky little electromag train that ran along one side of the hull, through two more converted cargo cells equipped with the same fighting rings and banks of seats but this time covered over with plastic sheeting. At the far end, we disembarked and stepped through the customary sonic cleansing lock. A great deal dirtier than PsychaSec’s facilities, ostensibly made of black iron, the heavy door swung outward to reveal a spotlessly white interior.

“At this point we dispense with image,” said Carnage carelessly. “Bare bones low-tech is all very well for the audience, but behind the scenes, well,” he gestured around at the gleaming facilities, “you can’t make an omelette without a little oil in the pan.”

The forward cargo section was huge and chilly, the lighting gloomy, the technology aggressively massive. Where Bancroft’s low-lit womb mausoleum at PsychaSec had spoken in soft, cultured tones of the trappings of wealth, where the re-sleeving room at the Bay City storage facility had groaned minimal funding for minimal deservers, the Panama Rose’s body bank was a brutal growl of power. The storage tubes were racked on heavy chains like torpedoes on either side of us, jacked into a central monitor system at one end of the hold via thick black cables that twisted across the floor like pythons. The monitor unit itself squatted heavily ahead of us like an altar to some unpleasant spider god. We approached it on a metal jetty raised a quarter-metre above the frozen writhings of the data cables. Behind it to left and right, set into the far wall, were the square glass sides of two spacious decanting tanks. The right-hand tank already held a sleeve, floating backlit and tethered cruciform by monitor lines.

It was like walking into the Andric cathedral in Newpest.

Carnage walked to the central monitor, turned and spread his arms rather like the sleeve above and behind him.

“Where would you like to start? I assume you’ve brought sophisticated bomb detection equipment with you.”

Ortega ignored him. She took a couple of steps closer to the decanting tank and looked up into the wash of cool green light it cast down into the gloom. “This one of tonight’s whores?” she asked.

Carnage sniffed. “In not so many words, it is. I do wish you’d understand the difference between what they peddle in those greasy little shops down the coast, and this.”

“So do I,” Ortega told him, eyes still upward on the body. “Where’d you get this one from, then?”

“How should I know?” Carnage made a show of studying the plastic nails on his right hand. “Oh, we have the bill of sale somewhere, if you must look. By the look of him, I’d say this one’s out of Nippon Organics, or one of the Pacific Rim combines. Does it really matter?”

I went to the wall and stared up at the floating sleeve. Slim, hard-looking and brown, with the delicately lifted Japanese eyes on the shelf of unscaleably high cheekbones, a thick, straight drift of impenetrably black hair like seaweed in the tank fluid. Gracefully flexible with the long hands of an artist, but muscled for speed combat. It was the body of a tech ninja, the body I’d dreamed about having at fifteen, on dreary rain-filled days in Newpest. It wasn’t far off the sleeve they’d given me to fight the Sharya war in. It was a variation on the sleeve I’d bought with my first big pay-off in Millsport, the sleeve I’d met Sarah in.

It was like looking at myself under glass. The self I’d built somewhere in the coils of memory that trail all the way back to childhood. Suddenly I stood, exiled into Caucasian flesh, on the wrong side of the mirror.

Carnage came up to me and slapped the glass. “You approve, detective Ryker?” When I said nothing, he went on. “I’m sure you do, someone with your appetite for, well, brawling. The specs are quite remarkable. Reinforced chassis, the bones are all culture-grown marrow alloy jointed with polybond ligamenting, carbon-reinforced tendons, Khumalo neurachem—”

“Got neurachem,” I said, for something to say.

“I know all about your neurachem, detective Ryker.” Even through the poor-quality voice, I thought I could hear a soft, sticky delight. “The fightdrome scanned your specs when you were on stack. There was some talk of buying you up, you know. Physically I mean. It was thought your sleeve could be used in a humiliation bout. Faked, of course, we would never dream of the actual thing here. That would be, well, criminal.” Carnage paused dramatically. “But then it was decided that humiliation fights were not the, uh, the spirit of the establishment. A lowering of tone, you understand. Not a real contest. Shame really, with all the friends you’ve made, it would have been a big crowd-puller.”

I wasn’t really listening to him, but it dawned on me that Ryker was being insulted and I pivoted away from the glass to fix Carnage with what seemed like an appropriate glare.

“But I digress,” the synthetic went on smoothly. “What I meant to say is that your neurachem is to this system as my voice is to that of Anchana Salomao. This,” he gestured once more at the tank, “is Khumalo neurachem, patented by Cape Neuronics only last year. A development of almost spiritual proportions. There are no synaptic chemical amplifiers, no servo chips or implanted wiring. The system is grown in, and it responds directly to thought. Consider that, detective. No one offworld has it yet, the UN are thought to be considering a ten-year colonial embargo, though myself I doubt the efficacy of such—”

“Carnage.” Ortega drifted in behind him, impatiently. “Why haven’t you decanted the other fighter yet?”

“But we are doing, lieutenant.” Carnage waved one hand at the rack of body tubes on the left. From behind them came the sound of prowling heavy machinery. I peered into the gloom and made out a big automated forklift unit rolling down the rows of containers. As we watched, it locked to a stop and bright, directed lighting sprang up on its frame. The forks reached and clamped on a tube, extracting it from the chained cradle while smaller servos disconnected the cabling from it. Separation complete, the machine withdrew slightly, swivelled about and trundled back along the rows towards the empty decanting tank.

“The system is entirely automated,” said Carnage superfluously.

Below the tank, I now noticed a line of three circular openings, like the forward discharge ports of an IP dreadnought. The forklift rose up a little on hydraulic pistons and loaded the tube it was carrying smoothly into the centre port. The tube fitted snugly, the visible end rotating through about ninety degrees before a steel baffle slammed down over it. Its task completed, the forklift sank back down on its hydraulics and its engines died.

I watched the tank.

It seemed like a while, but in fact probably took less than a minute. A hatch broke open in the floor of the tank and a silvery shoal of bubbles erupted upwards. Drifting after them came the body. It bobbed foetally for a moment, turning this way and that in the eddies caused by the air, then its arms and legs began to unfold, aided by the gently tugging monitor wires secured at wrist and ankle. It was bigger boned than the Khumalo sleeve, blocky and more heavily muscled but similar in colour. A strong-boned, hawk-nosed visage tipped lazily towards us as the thin wires pulled it upright.

“Sharyan Right Hand of God martyr,” said Carnage beamingly. “Not really, of course, but the race type’s accurate and it’s got an authentic Will of God enhanced response system.” He nodded at the other tank. “The marines on Sharya were multi-racial, but there were enough Jap-types there to make it believable.”

“Not much of a contest, is it?” I said. “State-of-the-art neurachem against century-old Sharyan biomech.”

Carnage grinned with his slack silicoflesh face. “Well, that will depend on the fighters. I’m told the Khumalo system takes a bit of getting used to, and to be honest it isn’t always the best sleeve that wins. It’s more about psychology. Endurance, pain tolerance…”

“Savagery,” added Ortega. “Lack of empathy.”

“Things like that,” agreed the synthetic. “That’s what makes it exciting, of course. If you’d care to come tonight, lieutenant, detective, I’m sure I can find you a couple of remaindered seats near the back.”

“You’ll be commentating,” I surmised, already hearing the specs-rich vocabulary that Carnage used come tumbling out over the tannoy, the killing ring drenched in focused white light, the roaring, surging crowd in the darkened seating, the smell of sweat and bloodlust.

“Of course I will.” Carnage’s logo’d eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been away so long, you know.”

“Are we going to look for these bombs?” said Ortega loudly.

It took us over an hour to go over the hold, looking for imaginary bombs, while Carnage looked on with poorly veiled amusement. Up above, the two sleeves destined for slaughter in the arena looked down on us from their green-lit glass-sided wombs, their presences weighing no less heavily for their closed eyes and dreaming visages.

Chapter Twenty

Ortega dropped me on Mission Street as evening was falling over the city. She’d been withdrawn and monosyllabic on the flight back from the fightdrome, and I guessed the strain of reminding herself I was not Ryker was beginning to take a toll. But when I made a production of brushing off my shoulders as I got out of the cruiser, she laughed impulsively.

“Stick around the Hendrix tomorrow,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to talk to, but it’ll take a while to set up.”

“Fair enough.” I turned to go.

“Kovacs.”

I turned back. She was leaning across to look up and out of the open door at me. I put an arm on the uplifted door wing of the cruiser and looked down. There was a longish pause during which I could feel my blood beginning to adrenalise gently.

“Yes?”

She hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Carnage was hiding something back there, right?”

“From the amount he talked, I’d say yes.”

“That’s what I thought.” She prodded hurriedly at the control console and the door began to slide back down. “See you tomorrow.”

I watched the cruiser into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn’t expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attraction between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists interviewed appeared to really understand the process, but there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting the effect had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.

Chemicals. I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft and I didn’t need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms, I didn’t need this.

Up ahead, over the heads of the evening’s scattered pedestrians, I saw the holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed again and started walking.

Halfway up the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the kerb. It looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport, so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in the machine’s image cast.

…from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses …

The voices groaned and murmured, male, female, overlaid. It was like a choir in the throes of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impressions.

Genuine …

Uncut …

Full sense repro …

Tailored …

As if to prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high-tech.

The flow ended with a phone number in glowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel her fingers.

Head in the Clouds, she breathed. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here, but you can certainly afford this.

Her head dipped, her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its cast radius.

I found I could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.

The sweat cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long, low limousine parked outside the Hendrix’s front doors.

Jangling nerves sent my hand leaping towards the holstered Nemex before I recognised the vehicle as Bancroft’s. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine and ascertained that the driver’s compartment was empty. I was still wondering what to do when the rear compartment hatch cracked open and Curtis unfolded himself from the seating inside.

“We need to talk, Kovacs,” he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. “Decision time.”

I looked him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanour that he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humour him.

“Sure. In the limo?”

“’S cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?”

My eyes narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur’s voice, and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I remembered distinctly that Bancroft’s limo had shielding against the street ’casts. This was something else.

I nodded at the hotel entrance.

“OK, let’s go.”

The doors parted to let us in and the Hendrix came to life.

“Good evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening—”

Curtis snorted. “Disappointed, hah, Kovacs?”

“—nor any calls since you left.” The hotel continued smoothly. “Do you wish this person admitted as a guest.”

“Yeah, sure. You got a bar we can go to?”

“I said your room,” growled Curtis, behind me, then yelped as he barked his shin on one of the lobby’s low metal-edged tables.

“The Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,” said the hotel doubtfully, “but has not been used for a considerable time.”

“I said—”

“Shut up, Curtis. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.”

Across the lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid grudgingly aside and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis making sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.

“This’ll do fine. Come on.”

Someone overliteral in imagination had done the interior decoration of the Midnight Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces showing either the declared hour or a few minutes to, interwoven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters. There was indented bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables and in the centre of the room a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial’s twelve mark.

It was all the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made our way towards the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis’s earlier mood quieten a little.

“What will it be, gentlemen?” said the machine unexpectedly, from no apparent vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analogue clock with spider-thin baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.

“Vodka,” he said shortly. “Subzero.”

“And a whisky. Whatever it is I’ve been drinking out of the cabinet in my room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.”

The clock face inclined slightly and one multi-jointed arm swung up to select glasses from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.

Curtis picked up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at my own glass a little more circumspectly, wondering how long it had been since liquid last flowed through the bar’s tubes and spigots. My fears proved unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whisky melt its way down into my stomach.

Curtis banged down his glass.

“Now you ready to talk?”

“All right, Curtis,” I said slowly, looking into my drink. “I imagine you have a message for me.”

“Sure have.” His voice was cranked to snapping point. “The lady says, you going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I’m supposed to give you time to make up your mind, so I’ll finish my drink.”

I fixed my gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis’s mood was beginning to make some sense.

“Muscling in on your territory, am I?”

“Don’t push your luck, Kovacs.” There was a desperate edge to the words. “You say the wrong thing here, and I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than half my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was maddening. I wanted to shake him. “You’ll what?”

Curtis gulped. “I was in the provincial marines.”

“What as, a pin-up?” I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand, then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. “Listen, Curtis. Don’t do this to us both.”

“You think you’re pretty fucking tough, don’t you?”

“This isn’t about tough, C — urtis.” I’d almost called him kid. It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. “This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis. It’s not the same.”

He came for me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while the following roundhouse kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly overdramatic. Maybe it was the chemicals he’d dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind throws kicks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick in the same movement and grabbed his foot. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped, staggered and landed spreadeagled on the bar top. I smashed his face against the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.

“See what I mean?”

He made muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar’s surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing stopped.

“Good. Now you keep still or I’ll break it. I’m not in the mood for this.” As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. “Aha. So what little delights have we got tubing round your system tonight? Hormone enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.” I held the tube up to the dim light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. “Military format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the marines, was it?” I recommenced my search and came up with the delivery system: a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a magnetic coil. Tip the crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from Sarah’s shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy, and consequently very popular, alternative to hyposprays.

I hauled Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet, clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.

“You want to tip your head back to stop that,” I told him. “Go ahead, I’m not going to hurt you again.”

“Botherfucker!”

I held up the crystals and the little gun. “Where did you get these?”

“Suck by prick, Kovacs.” Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself, trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse’s. “I’b dot tellig you a fuckig thig.”

“Fair enough.” I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for a couple of seconds. “Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.”

He stared back at me in silence.

“Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.”

The silence stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of power come true.

I shrugged. “In case you hadn’t guessed already, the answer to the lady’s question is no. I’m not interested. There, that should make you happy, and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn’t dosed yourself to the eyes it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you very much, the offer is appreciated, but there’s too much going on here to walk away from. Tell her I’m starting to enjoy it.”

There was a slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited, crimson-haired figure on the stairs.

“Am I interrupting something?” the mohican enquired. The voice was slow and relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.

I picked up my drink from the bar. “Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the party. What’ll you have?”

“Overproof rum,” said the cop, drifting over to us. “If they’ve got it. Small glass.”

I raised a finger at the clock face. The bartender produced a square-cut glass from somewhere and filled it with a deep red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis, sparing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long arm.

“Appreciated.” He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. “Not bad. I’d like a word with you, Kovacs. In private.”

We both glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.

“You do that?” he asked casually.

I nodded. “Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting someone.”

“Well, I’m glad he ain’t protecting me.”

“Like I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.”

“Hell, you don’t need to explain yourself to me.” The cop leaned on the bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay City storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. “He feels aggrieved enough, he can press charges and we’ll play back some more of this place’s memory.”

“Got your warrant, then?” I put the question with a lightness I didn’t feel.

“Almost. Always takes a while with the legal department. Fucking AIs. Look, I wanted to apologise for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they’re fundamentally OK.”

I waved my glass laterally. “Forget it.”

“Good. I’m Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Ortega’s partner most of the time.” He drained his glass and grinned at me. “Loosely attached, I should point out.”

“Noted.” I signalled the bartender for refills. “Tell me something. You guys all go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?”

“Same hairdresser.” Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. “Old guy up on Fulton. Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store. It’s the only goddamn style he knows, but he’s a nice old guy and he’s cheap. One of us started going there a few years back, he gave us discounts. You know how it is.”

“But not Ortega?”

“Ortega cuts her own hair.” Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. “Got a little holocast scanner, says it improves her spatial coordination or some such shit.”

“Different.”

“Yeah, she is.” Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. “It’s her I’m here about.”

“Oh-oh. Is this going to be a friendly warning?”

Bautista pulled a face. “Well, it’s going to be friendly, whatever you call it. I ain’t looking for a broken nose.”

I laughed despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.

“Thing is, it’s tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and Ryker were real close. She’s been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now, and on a lieutenant’s pay that ain’t an easy thing to do. Never figured on an overbid like that fucker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker ain’t exactly young and he never was a beauty.”

“Got neurachem,” I pointed out.

“Oh, sure. Got neurachem.” Bautista waved an arm with largesse. “You tried it yet?”

“Couple of times.”

“Like dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?”

“It’s a little rough,” I admitted.

This time we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His face grew serious.

“I ain’t trying to lean on you. All I’m saying is, go easy. This ain’t exactly what she needs right now.”

“Me neither,” I said feelingly. “This isn’t even my fucking planet.”

Bautista looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. “Harlan’s World’s a lot different to this, I guess.”

“You guess right. Look, I don’t mean to be unsubtle, but hasn’t anyone pointed out to Ortega that Ryker’s as gone for good as it gets without real death? She’s not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is she?”

The cop looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You heard about Ryker, huh?”

“I know he’s down for the double barrel. I know what he went down for.”

Bautista got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It can’t be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I regretted what I’d said.

Local colour. Soak it up.

“You want to sit down?” said the cop unhappily, casting around for bar stools that had evidently been removed at some stage. “Over in the booths, maybe? This’ll take a while to tell.”

We settled at one of the clock face tables and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like Ortega, he looked surprised.

“I quit.”

“In that sleeve?” Bautista’s eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil of fragrant blue smoke. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You were going to tell me about Ryker.”

“Ryker,” the cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back, “was working with the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They’re quite a sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain’t so easy to steal a whole sleeve intact and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There’s some crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.”

“Oh?” I said neutrally.

Bautista nodded. “Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare parts sale. But I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“Must have happened as I was walking out the door.”

“Yeah, well anyway. Back in the winter of ’09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High level corruption. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.”

“Nice.”

“In the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.”

“And did he? Make a difference, I mean?”

Bautista puffed out his cheeks. “He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgement went all to pieces.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Hey, what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.”

“Did she?” I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. “I thought she brought him in.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?”

“Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.”

“Ohhh.”

“Yeah, ain’t that a laser up the ass.” Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. “She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the IAD charges.”

“From what I heard, they had him cold.”

“Yeah, your source got that bit right.” The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. “Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up by some high ranking asshole who took a fall back in ’09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.”

“But you don’t buy it?”

“I’d like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.” Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. “I think Ryker got carried away.”

“Blam, blam, blam?”

“Something like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before, he’s right on the line most of the time. One slip.” There was an old terror in Bautista’s eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. “With some of these turds, it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what happened.”

“My source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty fucking careless.”

Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. “What Ortega says. But it won’t wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.

“Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle PD wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.”

“Or in a real hurry.”

Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was definitely a little drunk now. “There you go. The way IAD read it, Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a ‘do not disturb’ sign on their stacks. ’Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with a plasma gun.”

“Was it true?”

“About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?”

“What did Ryker say?”

“He said he didn’t do it.”

“Just that?”

“Nah, it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.” Bautista shrugged blearily. “They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn’t do it face to face. Virtual link.”

“Which can be faked. Easily.”

“Yeah.” Bautista looked pleased. “But then, this guy says he’s done work for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too. Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle PD didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said.”

“A hundred and twenty-four holes,” I muttered.

“Yep. That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.”

“It could have been a set-up.”

“Yeah, it could have been.” Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got angry. “Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you, shit, sorry, the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke there was no one there to catch him.”

“So Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down, and when they lose…” I nodded to myself. “When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?”

“Got it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc spinning.” Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. “Like I said, it’s tearing her up.”

We sat quietly for a while.

“You know,” said Bautista finally. “I think I’m going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.”

“Just part of living in the modern age,” I told him, knocking back my drink.

“Yeah, I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention the scumbags.”

“So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?”

Bautista frowned. “That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.”

“Sure. Sorry.” I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren’t supposed to slip like that. “I’m a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.”

“No thanks.” Bautista drained what was left in his glass. “Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.”

“Sounds like I should have been an old cop.” I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol. “You can see yourself out OK, I guess.”

“Sure.” Bautista got up to go and made about a half dozen paces before he turned back. He frowned with concentration. “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.”

I gestured him away. “You were never here,” I assured him.

He grinned bemusedly and his face looked suddenly very young. “Right. Good. See you round, probably.”

“See you.”

I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar, and went to talk to the Hendrix.

Chapter Twenty-One

“You know anything about synamorphesterone?”

“Heard of it.” Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was still damp from the tide’s retreat, and our footprints welled soggily behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

“Well, since we’re waiting, you want to fill me in?”

“Harem drug.” When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She was acting like someone who hadn’t slept well.

“I’m not from here.”

“You were on Sharya, you told me.”

“Yeah. In a military capacity. There wasn’t all that much time for cultural awareness. We were too busy killing people.”

This last wasn’t quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate. Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infiltrated and then crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process we’d learnt quite a lot about local culture.

I’d asked for an early transfer out.

Ortega shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She sighed. “It’s a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it Stallion, in the south it’s Toro. We don’t get much of it here, street mood’s more ambient. Which I’m glad about. From what I hear it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?”

“Sort of.” This was pretty much what I’d learnt from the Hendrix database last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis’s behaviour ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model. “Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick it up. Easily, I mean.”

Ortega gave me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand. “Like I said, we don’t get much of it here,” she said in time with her laboured, sinking footsteps. “You’d have to ask around. Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesised locally. But I don’t know. With designer hormones that’s likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south.”

She paused at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

“Where the hell is she?”

“Maybe she’s not coming,” I suggested morosely. I hadn’t slept all that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista’s departure had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega’s call. It was still obscenely early in the morning.

“She’ll come,” said Ortega. “The link’s booked through to her personal pick-up. Call’s probably delayed at incoming security. We’ve only been in here about ten seconds, real time.”

I shivered in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

“Got any cigarettes?”

I was seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega’s arm. The motion resolved itself into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface vehicle that was tearing round the curve of the beach towards us.

“Told you she’d come.”

“Or someone would,” I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in their constructs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my time here.

The vehicle was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approaching craft impassively at my side.

“Bit excessive for a phone call, isn’t it?” I said nastily.

Ortega shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. “Money doesn’t automatically mean taste,” she said.

The speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent pink. It was ploughing along through the shallow surf at the water’s edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred metres away the pilot must have seen us because the little craft veered out across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height towards us.

“Pink?”

Ortega shrugged again.

The ground jet beached about ten metres away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the form-fitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.

The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the colour of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose and a generously sculpted mouth.

The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.

“Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,” said Ortega formally. “Ms Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.”

The large eyes appraised me frankly.

“You’re from offworld?” she asked me.

“That’s correct. Harlan’s World.”

“Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.” There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. “I can only hope that means you have an open mind.”

“Open to what?”

“The truth.” Begin gave me a surprised look. “Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?”

Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

“What’s all this about the truth?” I asked, catching her up.

“You have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft,” she said intensely, without looking round. “You wish to know the truth of what transpired the night he died. Is this not so?”

“You don’t think it was suicide, then?”

“Do you?”

“I asked first.”

I saw a faint smile cross her lips. “No. I don’t.”

“Let me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.”

Leila Begin stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. “Are you mocking me, Mr Kovacs?”

There was something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the spot. I shook my head.

“No, I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Have you met Miriam Bancroft?”

“Briefly, yes.”

“You found her charming, no doubt.”

I shrugged evasively. “A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would do it.”

Begin looked me in the eyes. “She is a psychopath,” she said seriously.

She resumed walking. After a moment I followed her.

“Psychopath’s not a narrow term any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”

“Mr Kovacs.” There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. “Miriam Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant and murdered my unborn child. She was aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven months pregnant?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.”

“Kind of hard to legislate.”

Begin looked at me sidelong. “In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr Kovacs? Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are you acquainted with that?”

“I think so,” I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.

“Then you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical stacks are fitted after birth.”

“Where I come from too.”

“I lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.”

I couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.

“That doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.”

“Of course it does.” Begin favoured me with the sidelong glance again, and there was another bitter smile on her face. “I was not an isolated incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?”

“In Oakland, I heard.”

The smile blossomed into a hard laugh. “Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me in Oakland. He met me at what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr Kovacs. That’s what made him hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why he would have stopped afterwards.”

“So Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?”

“She’s capable of it.”

“I’m sure she is.” Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I knew to this woman. “You harbour no feelings about Bancroft himself, I suppose? Good or bad.”

The smile again. “I was a whore, Mr Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the client wants them to feel. There’s no room for anything else.”

“You telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?”

“You telling me you can’t?” she retorted.

“All right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?”

She stopped and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her face had gone mask-like with remembrance.

“Animal abandonment,” she said finally. “And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.”

“And what do you feel now?”

“Now?” Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. “Now I feel nothing, Mr Kovacs.”

“You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.”

Begin made a dismissive gesture. “The lieutenant asked me to.”

“Very public-spirited of you.”

The woman’s gaze came back to me. “You know what happened after my miscarriage?”

“I heard you were paid off.”

“Yes. Unpleasant-sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year, I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favours.”

“And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?”

“What revenge?” Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. “I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.”

“No one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.”

Begin looked at me sadly.

“You are not from here,” she said. “And it shows.”

Begin’s call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time rented out of a Chinatown forum provider. Cheap, Ortega told me on the way in, and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one’s listening.

It was also cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the pagoda’s middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square metres of fused sand flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a waiting area, natural light and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of the service cubicles. The trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp upright angle to economise on floor space and surrounded on all sides by blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, troded up and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

Returning from the wide open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momentary flashback to Harlan’s World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two pneumatically-breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a night-time cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the ratio and resolution went up, and the scenarios got more imaginative, but the thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the trodes on your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

“So what do you think?”

“I think she’s full of shit.” I raised my hands to forestall Ortega’s outburst. “No, listen, I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary. I’ve got no argument with that. But there are about half a hundred reasons why she doesn’t fit the bill. Ortega, you polygraphed her for fuck’s sake.”

“Yeah, I know.” Ortega followed me down the corridor. “But that’s what I’ve been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that test. I mean, it’s witness-mandatory anyway, but she was demanding it practically as soon as I got to the scene. No weeping partner shit, not even a tear, she just slammed into the incident cruiser and asked for the wires.”

“So?”

“So I’m thinking about that stuff you pulled with Rutherford. You said if they polygraphed you while you were doing that, you wouldn’t register, now—”

“Ortega, that’s Envoy conditioning. Pure mind discipline. It’s not physical. You can’t buy stuff like that off the rack at SleeveMart.”

“Miriam Bancroft wears state-of-the-art Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff—”

“Do Nakamura do something that’ll beat a police polygraph?”

“Not officially.”

“Well there you—”

“Don’t be so fucking obtuse. You never heard of custom biochem?”

I paused at the foot of the stairs up to reception and shook my head. “I don’t buy it. Torch her husband with a weapon only she and he have access to. No one’s that stupid.”

We went upstairs, Ortega at my heels.

“Think about it, Kovacs. I’m not saying it was premeditated—”

“And what about the remote storage? It was a pointless crime—”

“—not saying it was even rational, but you’ve got to—”

“—got to be someone who didn’t know—

“Fuck! Kovacs!”

Ortega’s voice, up a full octave.

We were into the reception zone by now. Still two clients waiting on the left, a man and a woman deep in discussion of a large paper-wrapped package. On the right a peripheral flicker of crimson where there should have been none. I was looking at blood.

The ancient Asian receptionist was dead, throat cut with something that glinted metallic deep within the wound around her neck. Her head rested in a shiny pool of her own blood on the desk in front of her.

My hand leapt for the Nemex. Beside me, I heard the snap as Ortega chambered the first slug in her Smith & Wesson. I swung towards the two waiting clients and their paper-wrapped package.

Time turned dreamlike. The neurachem made everything impossibly slow, separate images drifting to the floor of my vision like autumn leaves.

The package had fallen apart. The woman was holding a compact Sunjet, the man a machine pistol. I cleared the Nemex and started firing from the hip.

The door to the gantry burst open and another figure stood in the opening, brandishing a pistol in each fist.

Beside me, Ortega’s Smith & Wesson boomed and blew the new arrival back through the door like a reversed film sequence of his entrance.

My first shot ruptured the headrest of the woman’s seat, showering her with white padding. The Sunjet sizzled, the beam went wide. The second slug exploded her head and turned the drifting white flecks red.

Ortega yelled in fury. She was still firing, upward my peripheral sense told me. Somewhere above us, her shots splintered glass.

The machine gunner had struggled to his feet. I registered the bland features of a synth and put a pair of slugs into him. He staggered back against the wall, still raising the gun. I dived for the floor.

The dome above our heads smashed inward. Ortega yelled something and I rolled sideways. A body tumbled bonelessly head over feet onto the ground next to me.

The machine pistol cut loose, aimless. Ortega yelled again and flattened herself on the floor. I rolled upright on the lap of the dead woman and shot the synthetic again, three times in rapid succession. The gunfire choked off.

Silence.

I swung the Nemex left and right, covering the corners of the room and the front door. The jagged edges of the smashed dome above. Nothing.

“Ortega?”

“Yeah, fine.” She was sprawled on the other side of the room, propping herself up on one elbow. There was a tightness in her voice that belied her words. I swayed to my feet and made my way across to her, footsteps crunching on broken glass.

“Where’s it hurt?” I demanded, crouching to help her sit up.

“Shoulder. Fucking bitch got me with the Sunjet.”

I stowed the Nemex and looked at the wound. The beam had carved a long diagonal furrow across the back of Ortega’s jacket and clipped through the left shoulder pad at the top. The meat beneath the pad was cooked, seared down to the bone in a narrow line at the centre.

“Lucky,” I said with forced lightness. “You hadn’t ducked, it would have been your head.”

“I wasn’t ducking, I was fucking falling over.”

“Good enough. You want to stand up?”

“What do you think?” Ortega levered herself to her knees on her uninjured arm and then stood. She grimaced at the movement of her jacket against the wound. “Fuck, that stings.”

“I think that’s what the guy in the doorway said.”

Leaning on me, she turned to stare, eyes centimetres away. I deadpanned it, and the laughter broke across her face like a sunrise. She shook her head.

“Jesus, Kovacs, you are one sick motherfucker. They teach you to tell post-firefight jokes in the Corps or is it just you?”

I guided her towards the exit. “Just me. Come on, let’s get you some fresh air.”

Behind us, there was a sudden flailing sound. I jerked around and saw the synthetic sleeve staggering upright. Its head was smashed and disfigured where my last shot had torn the side of the skull off, and the gun hand was spasmed open at the end of a stiff, blood-streaked right arm, but the other arm was flexing, hand curling into a fist. The synth stumbled against the chair, righted itself and came towards us, dragging its right leg.

I drew the Nemex and pointed it.

“Fight’s over,” I advised.

The slack face grinned at me. Another halting step. I frowned.

“For Christ’s sake, Kovacs,” Ortega was fumbling for her own weapon. “Get it over with.”

I snapped off a shot and the shell punched the synth backwards onto the glass-strewn floor. It twisted a couple of times, then lay still but breathing sluggishly. As I watched it, fascinated, a gurgling laugh arose from its mouth.

“That’s fucking enough,” it coughed, and laughed again. “Eh, Kovacs? That’s fucking enough.”

The words held me in shock for the space of a heartbeat, then I wheeled and made for the door, dragging Ortega with me.

“Wha—”

“Out. Get the fuck out.” I thrust her through the door ahead of me and grabbed the railing outside. The dead pistoleer lay twisted on the walkway ahead. I shoved Ortega again and she vaulted the body awkwardly. Slamming the door after me, I followed her at a run.

We were almost to the end of the gantry when the dome behind us detonated in a geyser of glass and steel. I distinctly heard the door come off its hinges behind us, and then the blast picked us both up like discarded coats and threw us down the stairs into the street.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The police are more impressive by night.

First of all you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic colour into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. Then there’s the sound of the sirens on the night, like an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of dimly lit bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely nothing to see beyond this and people will still watch for hours.

Nine o’clock on a workday morning it’s a different matter. A couple of cruisers turned up in response to Ortega’s call in but their lights and sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The uniformed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and shepherded customers out of the neighbouring businesses, while Ortega persuaded the bank’s private security not to arrest me as a possible accessory to the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.

I sat the whole thing out on the kerb opposite, checking over the superficial injuries I’d acquired on my short flight down from the gantry to the street. Mostly, it was bruising and abrasions. The shape of the forum provider’s reception area had channelled most of the blast directly upwards through the roof and that was the route the bulk of the shrapnel had taken as well. We’d been very lucky.

Ortega left the clutch of uniformed officers gathered outside the bank and strode across to the street towards me. She had removed her jacket and there was a long white smear of tissue weld congealing over her shoulder wound. She held her discarded shoulder holster dangling in one hand and her breasts moved beneath the thin cotton of a white T-shirt that bore the legend You Have The Right To Remain Silent — Why Don’t You Try It For A While? She seated herself next to me on the kerb.

“Forensic wagon’s on the way,” she said inconsequentially. “You reckon we’ll get anything useful out of the wreckage?”

I looked at the smouldering ruin of the dome and shook my head.

“There’ll be bodies, maybe even stacks intact, but those guys were just local street muscle. All they’ll tell you is that the synth hired them, probably for half a dozen ampoules of tetrameth each.”

“Yeah, they were kind of sloppy, weren’t they?”

I felt a smile ghost across my lips. “Kind of. But then I don’t think they were even supposed to get us.”

“Just keep us busy till your pal blew up, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“The way I figure it, the detonator was wired into his vital signs, right? You snuff him and boom, he takes you with him. Me too. And the cheap hired help.”

“And wipes out his own stack and sleeve.” I nodded. “Tidy, isn’t it?”

“So what went wrong?”

I rubbed absently at the scar under my eye. “He overestimated me. I was supposed to kill him outright, but I missed. Probably would have killed himself at that stage, but I messed up his arm trying to stop the machine pistol.” In my mind’s eye the gun drops from splayed fingers and skitters across the floor. “Blew it way out of his reach as well. He must have been lying there, willing himself to die when he heard us leaving. Wonder what make of synth he was using.”

“Whoever it was, they can have an endorsement from me any day of the week,” said Ortega cheerfully. “Maybe there’ll be something left for forensics after all.”

“You know who it was, don’t you?”

“He called you Kov—”

“It was Kadmin.”

There was a short silence. I watched the smoke curling up from the ruined dome. Ortega breathed in, out.

“Kadmin’s in the store.”

“Not any more he isn’t.” I glanced sideways at her. “You got a cigarette?”

She passed me the packet wordlessly. I shook one out, fitted it into the corner of my mouth, touched the ignition patch to the end and drew deeply. The movements happened as one, reflex conditioned over years like a macro of need. I didn’t have to consciously do anything. The smoke curling into my lungs was like a breath of the perfume you remember an old lover wearing.

“He knew me.” I exhaled. “And he knew his Quellist history too. ‘That’s fucking enough’ is what a Quellist guerrilla called Iffy Deme said when she died under interrogation during the Unsettlement on Harlan’s World. She was wired with internal explosives and she brought the house down. Sound familiar? Now who do we know who can swap Quell quotes like a Millsport native?”

“He’s in the fucking store, Kovacs. You can’t get someone out of the store without—”

“Without an AI. With an AI, you can do it. I’ve seen it done. Core command on Adoracion did it with our prisoners of war, like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Like hooking elephant rays off a spawning reef.”

“As easy as that?” Ortega said ironically.

I sucked down some more smoke and ignored her. “You remember when we were in virtual with Kadmin, we got that lightning effect across the sky?”

“Didn’t see it. No, wait, yeah. I thought it was a glitch.”

“It wasn’t. It touched him. Reflected in the table. That’s when he promised to kill me.” I turned towards her and grinned queasily. The memory of Kadmin’s virtual entity was clear and monstrous. “You want to hear a genuine first generation Harlan’s World myth? An offworld fairy story?”

“Kovacs, even with an AI, they’d need—”

“Want to hear the story?”

Ortega shrugged, winced and nodded. “Sure. Can I have my cigarettes back?”

I tossed her the pack and waited while she kindled the cigarette. She plumed smoke out across the street. “Go on, then.”

“Right. Where I come from originally, Newpest, used to be a textile town. There’s a plant on Harlan’s World called belaweed, grows in the sea and on most shorelines too. Dry it out, treat it with chemicals and you can make something like cotton from it. During the Settlement Newpest was the belacotton capital of the World. Conditions in the mills were pretty bad even back then, and when the Quellists turned everything upside down it got worse. The belacotton industry went into decline and there was massive unemployment, unrelieved poverty and fuck all the Unsettlers could do about it. They were revolutionaries, not economists.”

“Same old song, huh?”

“Well, familiar tune anyway. Some pretty horrible stories came out of the textile slums around that time. Stuff like the Threshing Sprites, the Cannibal of Kitano Street.”

Ortega drew on her cigarette and widened her eyes. “Charming.”

“Yeah, well, bad times. So you get the story of Mad Ludmila the seamstress. This is one they used to tell to kids to make them do their chores and come home before dark. Mad Ludmila had a failing belacotton mill and three children who never helped her out. They used to stay out late, playing the arcades across town and sleep all day. So one day, the story goes, Ludmila flips out.”

“She wasn’t already mad, then?”

“No, just a bit stressed.”

“You called her Mad Ludmila.”

“That’s what the story’s called.”

“But if she wasn’t mad at the beginning—”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?”

Ortega’s mouth quirked at the corner. She waved me on with her cigarette.

“The story goes, one evening as her children were getting ready to go out, she spiked their coffee with something and when they were semi-conscious, but still aware, mind you, she drove them out to Mitcham’s Point and threw them into the threshing tanks one by one. They say you could hear the screams right across the swamp.”

“Mh-mmmm.”

“Of course, the police were suspicious—”

“Really?”

“—but they couldn’t prove anything. Couple of the kids had been into some nasty chemicals, they were jerking around with the local yakuza, no one was really surprised when they disappeared.”

“Is there a point to this story?”

“Yeah. See, Ludmila got rid of her fucking useless children, but it didn’t really help. She still needed someone to man the curing vats, to haul the belaweed up and down the mill stairs, and she was still broke. So what did she do?”

“Something gory, I imagine.”

I nodded. “What she did, she picked the bits of her mangled kids out of the thresher and stitched them into a huge three-metre-tall carcass. And then, on a night sacred to the dark powers, she invoked a Tengu to—”

“A what?”

“A Tengu. It’s a sort of mischief-maker, a demon I guess you’d call it. She invoked the Tengu to animate the carcass, and then she stitched it in.”

“What, when it wasn’t looking?”

“Ortega, it’s a fairy story. She stitched the soul of the Tengu inside, but she promised to release it if it served her will nine years. Nine’s a sacred number in the Harlanite pantheons, so she was as bound to the agreement as the Tengu. Unfortunately—”

“Ah.”

“—Tengu are not known for their patience, and I don’t suppose old Ludmila was the easiest person to work for either. One night, not a third of the way through the contract, the Tengu turned on her and tore her apart. Some say it was Kishimo-jin’s doing, that she whispered terrible incitements into the Tengu’s ear at—”

“Kishimo Gin?”

“Kishimo-jin, the divine protectress of children. It was her revenge on Ludmila for the death of the children. That’s one version, there’s another that—” I picked up Ortega’s mutinous expression out of the corner of my eye and hurried on. “Well, anyway, the Tengu tore her apart, but in so doing it locked itself into the spell and was condemned to remain imprisoned in the carcass. And now, with the original invoker of the spell dead, and worse still, betrayed, the carcass began to rot. A piece here, a piece there, but irreversibly. And so the Tengu was driven to prowling the streets and mills of the textile quarter, looking for fresh meat to replace the rotting portions of its body. It always killed children, because the parts it needed to replace were child-sized, but however many times it sewed new flesh to the carcass—”

“It’d learnt to sew, then?”

“Tengu are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.”

I fell silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.

“Your mother tell you that story?”

“Father. When I was five.”

She looked at the end of her cigarette. “Nice.”

“No. He wasn’t. But that’s another story.” I stood up and looked down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers. “Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was working for, he’s working for himself now.”

“How?” Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. “OK, an AI could tunnel into the Bay City PD stack. I’ll buy that. But we’re talking about microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to Sacramento.”

“Microsecond’s all it needed.”

“But Kadmin isn’t on stack. They’d need to know when he was being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need…”

She stopped as she saw it coming.

“Me.” I finished for her. “They’d need me.”

“But you—”

“I’m going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.” I spun my cigarette into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth. “Today, maybe tomorrow too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.”

Ortega pulled a sour face. “You telling me to go undercover in my own city?”

“Not telling you to do anything.” I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the half-spent magazine with actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been. The clip went into my jacket pocket. “I’m giving you the state of play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you can be traced to either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.” I nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. “Anybody down there with decent implants could have this conversation focused and amped.”

“Jesus.” She blew out her cheeks. “That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.”

“Don’t tell me that. I used to do this for a living.”

She thought about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the cigarette packet. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into the Nemex, eyes still scanning the crowd.

“There you go.” Ortega tossed me the packet. “That’s a discreet destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay area and it’ll take you there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back to business as usual.”

I caught the packet left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers and put it away in my jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and stuffed the pistol back into its holster.

“Tell me that when you’ve checked the stack,” I said, and started walking.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I walked south.

Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The weather above the traffic flow was on the change, grey cloud cover racing in from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I left the cabs alone. Go primitive, Virginia Vidaura would have said. With an AI gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic plane. Of course, on a battlefield that’s a lot more easily done. Plenty of mud and chaos to hide in. A modern city — unbombed — is a logistical nightmare for this kind of evasion. Every building, every vehicle, every street is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the datahounds.

I found a battered-looking currency dispenser and replenished my thinning sheaf of plastified notes from it. Then I backed up two blocks and went east until I found a public callbox. I searched through my pockets, came up with a card, settled the call trodes on my head and dialled.

There was no image. No sound of connection. This was an internal chip. The voice spoke brusquely out of a blank screen.

“Who is this?”

“You gave me your card,” I said, “in case of anything major. Well, now it seems there’s something pretty fucking major we need to talk about, doctor.”

There was an audible click as she swallowed, just once, and then her voice was there again, level and cool. “We should meet. I assume you don’t want to come to the facility.”

“You assume right. You know the red bridge?”

“The Golden Gate, it’s called,” she said dryly. “Yes, I’m familiar with it.”

“Be there at eleven. Northbound carriageway. Come alone.”

I cut the connection. Dialled again.

“Bancroft residence, with whom do you wish to speak?” A severely-suited woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of Angin Chandra’s pilot cuts arrived on the screen a fraction after she started speaking.

“Laurens Bancroft, please.”

“Mr Bancroft is in conference at present.”

That made it even easier. “Fine. When he’s available, can you tell him Takeshi Kovacs called.”

“Would you like to speak to Mrs Bancroft? She has left instructions that—”

“No,” I said rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. Please tell Mr Bancroft that I shall be out of contact for a few days, but that I will call him from Seattle. That’s all.”

I cut the connection, and checked my watch. There was about an hour and forty minutes left of the time I’d given myself to be on the bridge. I went looking for a bar.

The small coin of urchin rhyme gleamed up at me from the silted bed of my childhood.

But I was afraid.

The rain still hadn’t set in when we got onto the approach road to the bridge, but the clouds were massing sullenly above and the windscreen was splattered with heavy droplets too few to trigger the truck’s wipers. I watched the rust-coloured structure looming up ahead through the distortion of the exploded raindrops and knew I was going to get soaked.

There was no traffic on the bridge. The suspension towers rose like the bones of some incalculably huge dinosaur above deserted asphalt lanes and side gantries lined with unidentifiable detritus.

“Slow down,” I told my companion as we passed under the first tower, and the heavy vehicle braked with uncalled for force. I glanced sideways. “Take it easy. I told you, this is a no-risk gig. I’m just meeting someone.”

Graft Nicholson gave me a bleary look from the driver’s seat, and a breath of stale alcohol came with it.

“Yeah, sure. You hand out this much plastique on drivers every week, right? Just pick them out of Licktown bars for charity?”

I shrugged. “Believe what you want. Just keep your speed down. You can drive as fast as you like after you let me out.”

Nicholson shook his tangled head. “This is fucked, man—”

“There. Standing on the walkway. Drop me there.” There was a solitary figure leaning on the rail up ahead, apparently contemplating the view of the bay. Nicholson frowned with concentration and hunched the vastly outsized shoulders for which, presumably, he was named. The battered truck drifted sedately but not quite smoothly across two lanes and came to a bumpy halt beside the right-hand barrier.

I jumped down, glanced around for bystanders, saw none and pulled myself back up on the open door.

“All right now, listen. It’s going to be at least two days till I get to Seattle, maybe three, so you just hole up in the first hotel the city limits datastack has to offer, and you wait for me there. Pay cash, but book in under my name. I’ll contact you between ten and eleven in the morning, so be in the hotel at those times. The rest of the time, you can do what you like. I figure I gave you enough cash not to get bored.”

Graft Nicholson bared his teeth in a knowing leer that made me feel slightly sorry for anyone working in the Seattle leisure industry that week. “Don’t worry ’bout me, man. Old Graft knows how to grab a good time by the titties.”

“I’m glad. Just don’t get too comfortable. We may need to move it in a hurry.”

“Yeah, yeah. What about the rest of the plastique, man?”

“I told you. You’ll get paid when we’re done.”

“And what about if you don’t show up in three days?”

“In that case,” I said pleasantly, “I’ll be dead. That happens, it’d be better to drop out of sight for a few weeks. They’re not going to waste time looking for you. They find me, they’ll be happy.”

“Man, I don’t think I’m—”

“You’ll be fine. See you in three days.” I dropped back to the ground, slammed the truck door and banged on it twice. The engine rumbled into drive and Nicholson pulled the truck back out into the middle of the carriageway.

Watching him go, I wondered briefly if he’d actually go to Seattle at all. I’d given him a sizable chunk of credit, after all, and even with the promise of a second down payment if he followed instructions, the temptation would still be to double back somewhere up the coast and head straight back to the bar I’d picked him out of. Or he might get jumpy, sitting in the hotel waiting for a knock on the door, and skip before the three days were up. I couldn’t really blame him for these potential betrayals, since I had no intention of turning up myself. Whatever he did was fine by me.

In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, said Virginia in my ear. Run as much interference as you can without breaking pace.

“A friend of yours, Mr Kovacs?” The doctor had come to the barrier and was watching the car recede.

“Met him in a bar,” I said truthfully, climbing over to her side, and making for the rail. It was the same view I’d seen when Curtis brought me back from Suntouch House the day of my arrival. In the gloomy, pre-rain light the aerial traffic glimmered above the buildings across the Bay like a swarm of fireflies. Narrowing my eyes, I could make out detail on the island of Alcatraz, the grey-walled and orange-windowed bunker of PsychaSec SA. Beyond lay Oakland. At my back, the open sea and to north and south a solid kilometre of empty bridge. Reasonably sure that nothing short of tactical artillery could surprise me here, I turned back to look at the doctor.

She seemed to flinch as my gaze fell on her.

“What’s the matter?” I asked softly. “Medical ethics pinching a little?”

“It was not my idea—”

“I know that. You just signed the releases, turned a blind eye, that kind of thing. So who was it?”

“I don’t know,” she said not quite steadily. “Someone came to see Sullivan. An artificial sleeve. Asian, I think.”

I nodded. Trepp.

“What were Sullivan’s instructions?”

“Virtual net locater, fitted between the cortical stack and neural interface.” The clinical details seemed to give her strength. Her voice firmed up. “We did the surgery two days before you were freighted. Microscalpelled into the vertebrae along the line of the original stack incision, and plugged it with graft tissue. No show under any kind of sweep outside virtual. You’d have to run a full neuro-electrical to find it. How did you guess?”

“I didn’t have to guess. Someone used it to locate and lever a contract killer out of the Bay City police holding stack. That’s Aiding and Abetting. You and Sullivan are both going down for a couple of decades minimum.”

She looked pointedly up and down the empty bridge. “In that case, why aren’t the police here, Mr Kovacs?”

I thought about the rap sheet and military records that must have come to earth with me, and what it must feel like standing here alone with someone who had done all those things. What it must have taken to come out here alone. Slowly, a reluctant smile crept out of one corner of my mouth.

“All right, I’m impressed,” I said. “Now tell me how to neutralise the damn thing.”

She looked at me seriously, and the rain began to fall. Heavy drops, dampening the shoulders of her coat. I felt it in my hair. We both glanced up and I cursed. A moment later she stepped closer to me and touched a heavy brooch on one wing of her coat. The air above us shimmered and the rain stopped falling on me. Looking up again, I saw it exploding off the dome of the repulsion field over our heads. Around our feet, the paving darkened in splotches and then uniformly, but a magic circle around our feet stayed dry.

“To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement. It can be done, but not without a full micro-op theatre. Anything less, and you run the risk of damaging the neural interface, or even the spinal nerve canals.”

I shifted a little, uncomfortable at our proximity. “Yeah, I figured.”

“Well, then you’ve probably also figured,” she said, burlesquing my accent, “that you can enter either a scrambling signal or a mirror code into the stack receiver to neutralise the broadcast signature.”

“If you’ve got the original signature.”

“If, as you say, you have the original signature.” She reached into her pocket and produced a small, plastic-sheathed disc, weighed it in her palm for a moment and then held it out to me. “Well, now you have.”

I took the disc and looked at it speculatively.

“It’s genuine. Any neuro-electrical clinic will confirm that for you. If you have doubts, I can recommend—”

“Why are you doing this for me?”

She met my eye, without flinching this time. “I’m not doing it for you, Mr Kovacs. I am doing this for myself.”

I waited. She looked away for a moment, across the Bay. “I am not a stranger to corruption, Mr Kovacs. No one can work for long in a justice facility and fail to recognise a gangster. The synthetic was one of a type. Warden Sullivan has had dealings with these people as long as I have had tenure at Bay City. Police jurisdiction ends outside our doors, and Administration salaries are not high.”

She looked back at me. “I have never taken payment from these people, nor, until now, had I acted on their behalf. But equally, I have never stood against them. It has been very easy to bury myself in my work and pretend not to see what goes on.”

“‘The human eye is a wonderful device,’” I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. “‘With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.’”

“Very aptly put.”

“It’s not mine. So how come you did the surgery?”

She nodded. “As I said, until now I had managed to avoid actual contact with these people. Sullivan had me assigned to Offworld Sleeving because there wasn’t much of it, and the favours he did were all local. It made it easier for both of us. He’s a good manager in that respect.”

“Shame I came along then.”

“Yes, it presented a problem. He knew it’d look odd if I was taken off the procedure for one of his more compliant medics, and he didn’t want any waves. Apparently this was something big.” She placed the same derisive stress on the words as she had on my figured earlier. “These people were jacked in at high level, and everything had to be smooth. But he wasn’t stupid, he had a rationale all ready for me.”

“Which was?”

She gave me another candid look. “That you were a dangerous psychopath. A killing machine turned rabid. And that, whatever the reasons, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have you swimming the dataflows untagged. No telling where you could needlecast to once you’re out of the real world. And I bought it. He showed me the files they have on you. Oh, he wasn’t stupid. No. I was.”

I thought of Leila Begin and our talk of psychopaths on the virtual beach. Of my own flippant responses.

“Sullivan wouldn’t be the first person to call me a psychopath. And you wouldn’t be the first person to buy it either. The Envoys, well, it’s…” I shrugged and looked away. “It’s a label. Simplification for public consumption.”

“They say a lot of you turned. That twenty per cent of the serious crime in the Protectorate is caused by renegade Envoys. Is it true?”

“The percentage?” I stared away through the rain. “I wouldn’t know. There are a lot of us out there, yes. There’s not much else to do once you’ve been discharged from the Corps. They won’t let you into anything that might lead to a position of power or influence. On most worlds you’re barred from holding public office. Nobody trusts Envoys, and that means no promotion. No prospects. No loans, no credit.”

I turned back to her. “And the stuff we’ve been trained to do is so close to crime, there’s almost no difference. Except that crime is easier. Most criminals are stupid, you probably know that. Even the organised syndicates are like kid gangs compared to the Corps. It’s easy to get respect. And when you’ve spent the last decade of your life jacking in and out of sleeves, cooling out on stack and living virtual, the threats that law enforcement has to offer are pretty bland.”

We stood together in silence for a while.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“Don’t be. Anyone reading those files on me would have—”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“Oh.” I looked down at the disc in my hands. “Well, if you were looking to atone for something, I’d say you just have. And take it from me, no one stays totally clean. The only place you get to do that is on stack.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Yeah, well. There is just one more thing I’d like to know.”

“Yes?”

“Is Sullivan at Bay City Central right now?”

“He was when I went out.”

“And what time is he likely to leave this evening?”

“It’s usually around seven.” She compressed her lips. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to ask him some questions,” I said truthfully.

“And if he won’t answer them?”

“Like you said, he’s not stupid.” I put the disc into my jacket pocket. “Thank you for your help, doctor. I’d suggest you try not to be around the facility at seven tonight. And thank you.”

“As I said Mr Kovacs, I am doing this for myself.”

“That’s not what I meant, doctor.”

“Oh.”

I placed one hand lightly on her arm, then stepped away from her and so back out into the rain.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The wood of the bench had been worn by decades of occupants into a series of comfortable, buttock-shaped depressions, and the arms were similarly sculpted. I moulded myself lengthwise into the curves, cocked my boots on the bench end nearest the doors I was watching, and settled down to read the graffiti etched into the wood. I was soaked from the long walk back across town, but the hall was pleasantly heated and the rain rattled impotently on the long transparent panels of the tilted roof high above my head. After a while, one of the dog-sized cleaning robots came to wipe away my muddy footprints from the fused glass paving. I watched it idly until the job was done and the record of my arrival on the bench was totally erased.

It would have been nice to think my electronic traces could be wiped in the same way, but that kind of escape belonged to the legendary heroes of another age.

The cleaning robot trundled off and I went back to the graffiti. Most of it was Amanglic or Spanish, old jokes that I’d seen before in a hundred similar places; Cabron Modificado! and Absent without Sleeve! the old crack The Altered Native Was Here! but high on the bench’s backrest and chiselled upside down, like a tiny pool of inverted calm in all the rage and desperate pride, I found a curious haiku in Kanji:

The author must have been leaning over the back of the bench when he cut it into the wood, but still each character was executed with elegant care. I gazed at the calligraphy for what was probably a long time, while memories of Harlan’s World sang in my head like high-tension cables.

A sudden burst of crying over to my right jolted me out of the reverie. A young black woman and her two children, also black, were staring at the stooped, middle-aged white man standing before them in tattered UN surplus fatigues. Family reunion. The young woman’s face was a mask of shock, it hadn’t hit her properly yet, and the smaller child, probably no more than four, just didn’t get it at all. She was looking right through the white man, mouth forming the repeated question Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy? The man’s features were glistening in the rainy light from the roof — he looked like he’d been crying since they dragged him out of the tank.

I rolled my head to an empty quadrant of the hall. My own father had walked right past his waiting family and out of our lives when he was re-sleeved. We never even knew which one he was, although I sometimes wonder if my mother didn’t catch some splinter of recognition in an averted gaze, some echo of stance or gait as he passed. I don’t know if he was too ashamed to confront us, or more likely too set up with the luck of drawing a sleeve sounder than his own alcohol-wrecked body had been, and already plotting a new course for other cities and younger women. I was ten at the time. The first I knew about it was when the attendants ushered us out of the facility just short of locking up for the night. We’d been there since noon.

The chief attendant was an old man, conciliatory and very good with kids. He put his hand on my shoulder and spoke kindly to me before leading us out. To my mother, he made a short bow and murmured something formal that allowed her to keep the dam of her self-control intact.

He probably saw a few like us every week.

I memorised Ortega’s discreet destination code, for something to do with my mind, then shredded that panel of the cigarette packet and ate it.

My clothes were almost dried through by the time Sullivan came through the doors leading out of the facility and started down the steps. His thin frame was cloaked in a long grey raincoat, and he wore a brimmed hat, something I hadn’t seen so far in Bay City. Framed in the V between my propped feet and reeled into close-up with the neurachem, his face looked pale and tired. I shifted a little on the bench and brushed the holstered Philips gun with the tips of my fingers. Sullivan was coming straight towards me, but when he saw my form sprawled on the bench he pursed his mouth with disapproval and altered course to avoid what he presumably took for a derelict cluttering up the facility. He passed without giving me another glance.

I gave him a few metres start and then swung silently to my feet and went after him, slipping the Philips gun out of its holster under my coat. I caught up just as he reached the exit. As the doors parted for him, I shoved him rudely in the small of the back and stepped quickly outside in his wake. He was swinging back to face me, features contorted with anger, as the doors started to close.

“What do you think you’re—” The rest of it died on his lips as he saw who I was.

“Warden Sullivan,” I said affably, and showed him the Philips gun under my jacket. “This is a silent weapon, and I’m not in a good mood. Please do exactly as I tell you.”

He swallowed. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk about Trepp, among others. And I don’t want to do it in the rain. Let’s go.”

“My car is—”

“A really bad idea.” I nodded. “So let’s walk. And Warden Sullivan, if you so much as blink at the wrong person, I’ll shoot you in half. You won’t see the gun, no one will. But it’ll be there just the same.”

“You’re making a mistake, Kovacs.”

“I don’t think so.” I tipped my head towards the diminished ranks of parked vehicles in the lot. “Straight through, and left into the street. Keep going till I tell you to stop.”

Sullivan started to say something else, but I jerked the barrel of the Philips gun at him and he shut up. Sideways at first, he made his way down the steps to the parking lot and then, with occasional backward glances, across the uneven ground towards the sagging double gate that had rusted open on its runners what looked like centuries ago.

“Eyes front,” I called across the widening gap between us. “I’m still back here, you don’t need to worry about that.”

Out on the street, I let the gap grow to about a dozen metres and pretended complete dissociation from the figure ahead of me. It wasn’t a great neighbourhood and there weren’t many people out walking in the rain. Sullivan was an easy target for the Philips gun at double the distance.

Five blocks on, I spotted the steamed-up windows of the noodle house I was looking for. I quickened my pace and came up on Sullivan’s streetside shoulder.

“In here. Go to the booths at the back and sit down.”

I made a single sweep of the street, saw no one obvious, and followed Sullivan inside.

The place was almost empty, the daytime diners long departed and the evening not yet cranked up. Two ancient Chinese women sat in a corner with the withered elegance of dried bouquets, heads nodding together. On the other side of the restaurant four young men in pale silk suits lounged dangerously and toyed with expensive-looking chunks of hardware. At a table near one of the windows, a fat Caucasian was working his way through an enormous bowl of chow mein and simultaneously flicking over the pages of a holoporn comic. A video screen set high on one wall gave out coverage of some incomprehensible local sport.

“Tea,” I said to the young waiter who came to meet us, and seated myself opposite Sullivan in the booth.

“You aren’t going to get away with this,” he said unconvincingly. “Even if you kill me, really kill me, they’ll check the most recent re-sleevings and backtrack to you sooner or later.”

“Yeah, maybe they’ll even find out about the unofficial surgery this sleeve had before I arrived.”

“That bitch. She’s going to—”

“You’re in no position to be making threats,” I said mildly. “In fact you’re in no position to do anything except answer my questions and hope I believe you. Who told you to tag me?”

Silence, apart from the game coverage from the set on the wall. Sullivan stared sullenly at me.

“All right, I’ll make it easy for you. Simple yes or no. An artificial called Trepp came to see you. Was this the first time you’d had dealings with her?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

With measured anger, I backhanded him hard across the mouth. He collapsed sideways against the wall of the booth, losing his hat. The conversation of the young men in silk stopped abruptly, then resumed with great animation as I cut them a sideways glance. The two old women got stiffly to their feet and filed out through a back entrance. The Caucasian didn’t even look up from his holoporn. I leaned across the table.

“Warden Sullivan, you’re not taking this in the spirit it’s intended. I am very concerned to know who you sold me to. I’m not going to go away just because you have some residual scruples about client confidentiality. Believe me, they didn’t pay you enough to hold out on me.”

Sullivan sat back up, wiping at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. To his credit, he managed a bitter smile with the undamaged portion of his lips.

“You think I haven’t been threatened before, Kovacs?”

I examined the hand I’d hit him with. “I think you’ve had very little experience of personal violence, and that’s going to be a disadvantage. I’m going to give you the chance to tell me what I want to know here and now. After that we go somewhere with soundproofing. Now, who sent Trepp?”

“You’re a thug, Kovacs. Nothing but—”

I snapped folded knuckles across the table and into his left eye. It made less noise than the slap. Sullivan grunted in shock and reeled away from the blow, cowering into the seat. I watched impassively until he recovered. Something cold was rising in me, something born on the benches of the Newpest justice facility and tempered with the years of pointless unpleasantness I had been witness to. I hoped Sullivan wasn’t as tough as he was trying to appear, for both our sakes. I leaned close again.

“You said it, Sullivan. I’m a thug. Not a respectable criminal like you. I’m not a Meth, not a businessman. I have no vested interests, no social connections, no purchased respectability. It’s just me, and you’re in my way. So let’s start again. Who sent Trepp?”

“He doesn’t know, Kovacs. You’re wasting your time.”

The woman’s voice was light and cheerful, pitched a little loud to carry from the door where she stood, hands in the pockets of a long black coat. She was slim and pale with close-cropped dark hair and a poise to the way she stood that bespoke combat skills. Beneath the coat she wore a grey quilted tunic that looked impact resistant and matching work trousers tucked into ankle boots. A single silver earring in the shape of a discarded trode cable dangled from her left ear. She appeared to be alone.

I lowered the Philips gun slowly, and without acknowledging that it had ever been trained on her she took the cue to advance casually into the restaurant. The young men in silk watched her every step of the way, but if she was aware of their gazes, she gave no sign. When she was about five paces from our booth, she gave me a look of enquiry and began to lift her hands slowly out of her pockets. I nodded, and she completed the movement, revealing open palms and fingers set with rings of black glass.

“Trepp?”

“Good guess. You going to let me sit down?”

I waved the Philips gun at the seat opposite, where Sullivan was cupping both hands to his eye. “If you can persuade your associate here to move over. Just keep your hands above the table.”

The woman smiled and inclined her head. She glanced at Sullivan, who was already squeezing up to the wall to make space for her, and then, keeping her hands poised at her sides, she swung herself elegantly in beside him. The economy of motion was so tight that her pendant earring barely shifted. Once seated, she pressed both hands palm down on the table in front of her.

“That make you feel safer?”

“It’ll do,” I said, noticing that the black glass rings, like the earring, were a body joke. Each ring showed, X-ray like, a ghostly blue section of the bones in the fingers beneath. Trepp’s style, at least, I could get to like.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Sullivan blurted.

“You didn’t know anything worth a jack,” said Trepp disinterestedly. She hadn’t even turned to look at him. “Lucky for you I turned up, I’d say. Mr Kovacs doesn’t look like someone ready to take ‘don’t know’ for an answer. Am I right?”

“What do you want, Trepp?”

“Come to help out.” Trepp glanced up as something rattled in the restaurant. The waiter had arrived bearing a tray with a large teapot and two handleless cups. “You order this?”

“Yeah. Help yourself.”

“Thanks, I love this stuff.” Trepp waited while the waiter deposited everything, then busied herself with the teapot. “Sullivan, you want a cup too? Hey, bring him another cup, would you. Thanks. Now, where was I?”

“You’d come to help out,” I said pointedly.

“Yeah.” Trepp sipped at the green tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. “That’s right. I’m here to clarify things. See, you’re trying to hammer the information out of Sullivan here. And he doesn’t know fuck all. His contact was me, so here I am. Talk to me.”

I looked at her levelly. “I killed you last week, Trepp.”

“Yeah, so they tell me.” Trepp set down the tea cup and looked critically at her own fingerbones. “’Course, I don’t remember that. In fact, I don’t even know you, Kovacs. Last thing I remember was putting myself into the tank about a month back. Everything after that’s gone. The me you torched in that cruiser, she’s dead. That wasn’t me. So, no hard feelings, huh?”

“No remote storage, Trepp?”

She snorted. “Are you kidding? I make a living doing this, same as you, but not that much. Anyway, who needs that remote shit? The way I figure it, you fuck up, you’ve got to pay some kind of tab for it. I fucked up with you, right?”

I sipped my own tea and played back the fight in the aircar, considering the angles. “You were a little slow,” I conceded. “A little careless.”

“Yeah, careless. I got to watch that. Wearing artificials makes you that way. Very anti-Zen. I got a sensei in New York, it drives him up the fucking wall.”

“That’s too bad,” I said patiently. “You want to tell me who sent you now?”

“Hey, better than that. You’re invited to meet the Man.” She nodded at my expression. “Yeah, Ray wants to talk to you. Same as last time, except this is a voluntary ride. Seems coercion doesn’t work too well with you.”

“And Kadmin? He in on this as well?”

Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. “Kadmin’s, well, Kadmin’s a bit of a side issue right now. Bit of an embarrassment really. But I think we can deal on that as well. I really can’t tell you too much more now.” She shuttled her glance sideways at Sullivan, who was beginning to sit up and pay attention. “It’s better if we go someplace else.”

“All right.” I nodded. “I’ll follow you out. But let’s have a couple of ground rules before we go. One, no virtuals.”

“Way ahead of you there.” Trepp finished her tea and started to get up from the table. “My instructions are to convey you directly to Ray. In the flesh.”

I put a hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.

“Two. No surprises. You tell me exactly what’s going to happen well before it does. Anything unexpected, and you’re likely to be disappointing your sensei all over again.”

“Fine. No surprises.” Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she wasn’t accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. “We’re going to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?”

“Just so long as it’s empty.” I released her arm and she resumed motion, coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. “You stay here. If I see your face come through the door before we’re gone, I’ll put a hole in it. Tea’s on me.”

As I followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan’s tea cup and a big white handkerchief, presumably for the warden’s smashed lip. Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.

The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.

Outside, it was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. “Be a minute,” she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. “You know who that place belongs to?”

“I guessed.”

She shook her head. “Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living dangerously?”

I shrugged. “Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights. They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.”

“Not around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get involved in a brawl on some stranger’s behalf. The way they figure it, that’s what the police are for. You’re from Harlan’s World, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe it’s that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?”

“Maybe.”

An autocab came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty compartment within. I smiled thinly.

“After you.”

“Suit yourself.” She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was looking, she grinned and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the seat. The hatch hinged down, shedding rain in sliding sheets.

“Welcome to Urbline services,” said the cab smoothly. “Please state your destination.”

“Airport,” said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction. “Private carriers’ terminal.”

The cab lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. “Not a local trip, then,” I said tonelessly.

She brought her arms in again, hands held palm upward. “Well, we figured you wouldn’t go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital. Take about three hours.”

“Sub-orbital?” I drew a deep breath and touched the holstered Philips gun lightly. “You know, I’m going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this hardware before we fly.”

“Yeah, we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you like. OK?”

“Where are we going, Trepp?”

She smiled.

“Europe,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Wherever it was in Europe that we landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot’s time-check, it was still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.

“Should be a limo waiting for us,” Trepp said over her shoulder.

We passed, without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle generations were gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than I’d seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and schedule that govern most terminal buildings.

I adjusted the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and followed Trepp into the trees. It wasn’t quick enough to beat the gaze of two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn’t so easily bought — she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol out of my fingers and shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me in the back all the way along the aisle.

Outside again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale grey automould seating.

“Ten minutes,” she promised, as we rose into the air. “What did you think of the micro-climate?”

“Very nice.”

“Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?”

I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.

Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of those things.

Alone was fine with me.

The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.

Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first — strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.

It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather-stained with age. As the cruiser spiralled down towards its base and then beyond, I realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artefact.

Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.

The limo settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.

“This belong to the Catholics?” I hazarded.

“Used to.” Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. “Back when it was new. It’s private property now.”

“How come?”

“Ask Ray.” Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.

As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two metres between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.

Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man’s body emerged from the gloom as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the calibre as about the same as the Hendrix’s lobby defence system, and relinquished my weapons. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the automated killing units drew back and spidered up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.

“Come on.” Trepp’s voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. “You think if we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?”

I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted over the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.

I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high yield explosives.

At the end of the basilica, grey things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the grey things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.

“Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?”

The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was addressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn towards the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.

“Ray,” I said, in Amanglic. “I should have fucking seen this one on the launch pad.”

Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flawlessly.

“Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,” she mused. “But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?”

“Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.”

The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.

“Yes, well, I believe we’ve been over this ground before.”

My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara’s interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.

I stepped closer to one of the grey envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.

“Bullet-proof, right?”

“Mmm.” Kawahara tipped her head to one side. “Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.”

I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. “Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.”

She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer, a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petalled skirts cupping her lower body to mid-calf and a soft silk blouse settling over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modelled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.

“Power is habitually buried,” she said. “Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan’s World. Or the caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”

“Judging by the way I’ve been led around the last week, I’d say yes. Now do you want to get on with this pitch?”

“Very well.” Kawahara glanced aside at Trepp, who wandered away into the gloom, neck craned up at the ceiling like a tourist. I looked around for a seat and found none. “You are aware, no doubt, that I recommended you to Laurens Bancroft.”

“He mentioned it.”

“Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. We could have had this conversation a week ago, and saved everyone a lot of unnecessary pain. It was not my intention for Kadmin to harm you. His instructions were to bring you here alive.”

“There’s been a change of programme,” I said, walking along the curve of the end chamber. “Kadmin’s not following his instructions. He tried to kill me this morning.”

Kawahara made a gesture of irritation. “I know that. That’s why you’ve been brought here.”

“Did you spring him?”

“Yes, of course.”

“He was going to roll over on you?”

“He told Keith Rutherford that he felt he was not deployed to his best advantage in holding. That it would be hard to honour his contract with me in such a position.”

“Subtle.”

“Wasn’t it. I never can resist sophisticated negotiation. I feel he earnt the re-investment.”

“So you beaconed in on me, hooked him out and beamed him over to Carnage for re-sleeving, right?” I felt in my pockets and found Ortega’s cigarettes. In the grim twilight of the basilica, the familiar packet was like a postcard from another place. “No wonder the Panama Rose didn’t have his second fighter decanted when we got there. He’d probably only just finished sleeving Kadmin. That motherfucker walked out of there in a Right Hand of God martyr.”

“About the same time you were coming aboard,” agreed Kawahara. “In fact, I understand he was posing as a menial and you walked right past him. I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.”

“Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal haemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.” I touched my cigarette to the ignition patch and drew it to life, remembering. The man knelt in the ring. I played it back slowly. On the deck of the fightdrome ship, peering down at the design being painted onto the killing floor. The upturned face as we passed. Yes, he’d even smiled. I grimaced at the memory.

“You’re being a lot less courteous than befits a man in your situation.” I thought that, underneath the cool, I could detect a ragged edge in her voice. Despite her much vaunted self-control, Reileen Kawahara wasn’t much better at coping with disrespect than Bancroft, General MacIntyre or any other creature of power I’d had dealings with. “Your life is in danger and I am in a position to safeguard it.”

“My life’s been in danger before,” I told her. “Usually as a result of some piece of shit like you making large-scale decisions about how reality ought to be run. You’ve already let Kadmin get too close for my comfort. In fact, he probably used your fucking virtual locater to do it.”

“I sent him,” Kawahara gritted, “to collect you. Again he disobeyed me.”

“Didn’t he just.” I rubbed reflexively at the bruise on my shoulder. “So why should I believe you can do any better next time?”

“Because you know I can.” Kawahara came across the centre of the chamber, ducking her head to avoid the leathery grey clone sacs, and intercepting my path around the perimeter. Her face was taut with anger. “I am one of the seven most powerful human beings in this solar system. I have access to powers that the UN Field Commander General would kill for.”

“This architecture’s going to your head, Reileen. You wouldn’t even have found me if you hadn’t been keeping tabs on Sullivan. How the fuck are you going to find Kadmin?”

“Kovacs, Kovacs.” There was a definite trembling in her laugh, as if she was fighting an urge to put her thumbs through my eye sockets. “Do you have any idea what happens on the streets of any given city on Earth, if I put out a search on someone? Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snuff you out here and now?”

I drew deliberately on the cigarette and plumed the smoke out at her. “As your faithful retainer Trepp said, not ten minutes ago, why bring me here just to snuff me out? You want something from me. Now what is it?”

She breathed in through her nose, hard. A measure of calm seeped onto her face and she stepped back a couple of paces, turned away from the confrontation.

“You’re right, Kovacs. I want you alive. If you disappear now, Bancroft’s going to get the wrong message.”

“Or the right message.” I scuffed absently at engraved lettering on the stone beneath my feet. “Did you torch him?”

“No.” Kawahara looked almost amused. “He killed himself.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to me, Kovacs. What I want from you is an end to the investigation. A tidy end.”

“And how do you suggest I achieve that?”

“I don’t care. Make something up. You’re an Envoy, after all. Convince him. Tell him you think the police verdict was correct. Produce a culprit, if you must.” A thin smile. “I do not include myself in that category.”

“If you didn’t kill him, if he torched his own head off, why should you care what happens? What’s your interest in this?”

“That isn’t under discussion here.”

I nodded slowly. “And what do I get in return for this tidy ending?”

“Apart from the hundred thousand dollars?” Kawahara tilted her head quizzically. “Well, I understand you’ve been made a very generous recreational offer by other parties. And for my part, I will keep Kadmin off your back by whatever means necessary.”

I looked down at the lettering beneath my feet, and thought it through, link by link.

“Francisco Franco,” said Kawahara, mistaking the direction of my gaze for focused interest. “Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.”

“Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.”

Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”

I glanced around, ostensibly casual, scanning for robot security systems. “Yeah, looks like it. So let me get this straight. You want me to sell Bancroft a parabolic full of shit, in return for which you’ll call off Kadmin, who you set on me in the first place. That’s the deal?”

“That, as you put it, is the deal.”

I took one last lungful of smoke, savoured it and exhaled.

“You can go fuck yourself, Kawahara.” I dropped my cigarette on the engraved stonework and ground it out with my heel. “I’ll take my chances with Kadmin, and let Bancroft know you probably had him killed. So. Change your mind about letting me live now?”

My hands hung open at my sides, twitching to be filled with the rough woven bulk of handgun butts. I was going to put three Nemex shells through Kawahara’s throat, at stack height, then put the gun in my mouth and blow my own stack apart. Kawahara almost certainly had remote storage anyway, but fuck it, you’ve got to make a stand somewhere. And a man can only stave off his own death wish for so long.

It could have been worse. It could have been Innenin. Kawahara shook her head regretfully. She was smiling. “Always the same Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learnt anything since New Beijing?”

“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

“Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?” She was still smiling, poised like a total body theatre gymnast about to launch into her aria. For a moment I suffered the almost hallucinatory conviction that she was going to break into a little dance, choreographed to a junk rhythm beat from speakers hidden in the dome above us.

“Takeshi, where did you get this belief that everything can be resolved with such brute simplicity? Surely not from the Envoys? Was it the Newpest gangs? The thrashings your father gave you as a child? Did you really think I would allow you to force my hand? Did you really think I would have come to the table this empty-handed? Think about it. You know me. Did you really believe it would be this easy?”

The neurachem seethed within me. I bit it back, hung from the moment like a parachutist braced in the jump hatch.

“All right,” I said evenly. “Impress me.”

“Gladly.” Kawahara reached into the breast pocket of her liquid black blouse. She produced a tiny holofile and flicked it into active with a thumbnail. As the images evolved in the air above the unit, she passed it to me. “A lot of the detail is legalistic, but you will of course recognise the salient points.”

I took the little sphere of light as if it were a poisonous flower. The name hit me at once, leaping out of the print —

— Sarah Sachilowska —

— and then the contract terminology, like a building coming down on me in slow motion.

— released into private storage —

— provision for virtual custody —

— unlimited period —

— subject to review at UN discretion —

— under vested authority of the Bay City justice facility —

The knowledge coursed sickly through me. I should have killed Sullivan when I had the chance.

“Ten days.” Kawahara was watching my reactions closely. “That’s how long you have to convince Bancroft the investigation is over, and to walk away. After that, Sachilowska goes into virtual at one of my clinics. There’s a whole new generation of virtual interrogation software out there, and I will personally see to it that she pioneers the lot.”

The holofile hit the marble floor with a brittle crack. I lurched at Kawahara, lips peeling back from my teeth. There was a low growling coming up through my throat that had nothing to do with any combat training I had ever undergone and my hands crooked into talons. I knew what her blood was going to taste like.

The cold barrel of a gun touched down on my neck before I got halfway.

“I’d advise against that,” said Trepp in my ear.

Kawahara came and stood closer to me. “Bancroft isn’t the only one that can buy troublesome criminals off colonial stacks. The Kanagawa justice facility were overjoyed when I came to them two days later with a bid for Sachilowska. The way they see it, if you’re freighted offworld, the chances of you ever having enough money to buy a needlecast back again are pretty slim. And of course they get paid for the privilege of waving you goodbye. It must seem too good to be true. I imagine they’re hoping it’s the start of a trend.” She fingered the lapel of my jacket thoughtfully. “And in fact the way the virtuals market is at the moment, it might be a trend worth starting.”

The muscle under my eye jumped violently.

“I’ll kill you,” I whispered. “I’ll rip your fucking heart out and eat it. I’ll bring this place down around you—”

Kawahara leaned in until our faces were almost touching. Her breath smelt faintly of mint and oregano. “No, you won’t,” she said. “You’ll do exactly as I say, and you’ll do it within ten days. Because if you don’t, your friend Sachilowska will be starting her own private tour of hell without redemption.”

She stepped back and lifted her hands. “Kovacs, you should be thanking whatever deities they’ve got on Harlan’s World that I’m not some kind of sadist. I mean, I’ve given you an either/or. We could just as easily be negotiating exactly how much agony I put Sachilowska through. I mean, I could start now. That would give you an incentive to wrap things up speedily, wouldn’t it? Ten days in most virtuals adds up to about three or four years. You were in the Wei Clinic; do you think she could stand three years of that? I think she’d probably go insane, don’t you?”

The effort it cost me to contain my hate was like a rupture down behind my eyeballs and into my chest. I forced the words out.

“Terms. How do I know you’ll release her?”

“Because I give you my word.” Kawahara let her arms fall to her sides. “I believe you’ve had some experience of its validity in the past.”

I nodded slowly.

“Subsequent to Bancroft’s acceptance that the case is closed, and your own disappearance from view, I will freight Sachilowska back to Harlan’s World to complete her sentence.” Kawahara bent to pick up the holofile I’d dropped and held it up. She tipped it deftly a couple of times to flick through the pages. “I think you can see here that there is a reversal clause written into the contract. I will of course forfeit a large proportion of the original fee paid, but under the circumstances I’m prepared to do that.” She smiled faintly. “But please bear in mind that a reversal can work in both directions. What I return, I can always buy again. So if you were considering skulking in the undergrowth for a while and then running back to Bancroft, please abandon the idea now. This is a hand that you cannot win.”

The gun barrel lifted away from my neck and Trepp stepped back. The neurachem held me upright like a paraplegic’s mobility suit. I stared numbly at Kawahara.

“Why the fuck did you do all this?” I whispered. “Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?”

“Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.” Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. “Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavoured to bring you here once again.”

“I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.”

“Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.” She shrugged. “But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.”

“All right.” I noted vaguely that I was trembling. “I’ll do it.”

“Yes. Of course you will.”

I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.

“Oh, Kovacs…”

I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.

“If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.”

I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of Innenin. Vaguely, I felt Trepp clap me on the shoulder.

“Come on,” she said companionably. “Let’s get out of here.”

I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her grey-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were a solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.

But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.

Chapter Twenty-Six

That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would only give me fragments.

Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.

I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.

We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analogue fired through the whites of our eyes by needle-spray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographies outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barrelling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff…

There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.

“This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,” yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. “Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?”

I got drinks, quickly.

The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell — and heaven — on earth.

“Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,” shouted Trepp. “But I take your point.”

Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.

“Thing is,” Trepp was still yelling, “you’ve got ten days.”

Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—

Street scene:

Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splashed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.

There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.

Something impor—

“You can’t fucking believe something like that,” Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystallised what I—

Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.

Dancing, somewhere.

More meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.

“Fuck, hold still will you!”

“What’d she say?”

Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.

“Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.”

In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.

I had no idea how long I’d been there.

I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.

None of this seemed to matter because …

The mirror didn’t fit its frame — there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.

Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.

The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.

I left Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

“Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?”

“Fuck, yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”

“Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”

“Who said anything about need. The couple of bimbettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”

There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

“Why the fuck do you do it?”

“What?” Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”

“Work for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”

Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

“Listen.”

There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.

“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.

Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

Something. Wrong here.

Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …

“Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”

Not my sky.

It’s getting bad.

In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.

Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.

“All right, pal?”

“Not especially.” I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. “You?”

He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.

“Is this a dream?”

He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. “It’s the edge,” he says.

“The edge of what?”

“Everything.” His expression suggests that this much is obvious.

“I thought you only turned up in my dreams,” I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.

“Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.”

“Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

“Uhuh.” He shakes his head. “But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.”

The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.

“You’re saying—”

He shakes his head sadly. “Too fucking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

“Jimmy,” I make a helpless gesture, “what the fuck am I going to do?”

He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.

“Viral Strike,” he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. “Recall that mother, do you?”

And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.

“Look,” said Trepp reasonably, “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.”

“If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”

“No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.”

“Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”

“Yeah, well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”

There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket fucked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could have been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

I was alone.

Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

No time for—

Viral Strike!!!

— thinking.

Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.

The crimson-lipped woman who—

Maybe you can’t—

What? What???

Jack and socket.

Trying to tell you some—

No time for—

No time—

No—

And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink …

Gone again.

But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.

Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.

“Mutant,” said Trepp inconsequentially.

“Same to you.”

The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.

“Going to need painkillers?”

“Probably.” I felt around inside my head. “Yeah.”

She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.

“What you going to do?”

I shrugged. “Going to go back. Going to do what I’m told.”