Altered Carbon

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia — after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked Trepp’s ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.

The flophouse room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current affairs both advertised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged, self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with Ortega was running out.

The window gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment’s debate, I pressed the last of Trepp’s hangover capsules out of the foil and swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part of eight metres to fall.

Go primitive. Well, you don’t get much more primitive than climbing out of hotel windows in the middle of the night.

Hoping the roof was as solid as it looked, I let go.

I hit the sloping surface in approved fashion, rolled to one side and abruptly found my legs hanging out into space once more. The surface was firm, but as slippery as fresh belaweed and I was slithering rapidly towards the edge. I ground my elbows down for purchase, found none and just managed to grab the sharp edge of the roof in one hand as I went over.

Ten metres to the street. With the roof edge slicing into my palm, I dangled by one arm for a moment, trying to identify possible obstacles to my fall, like trash bins or parked vehicles, then gave up and dropped anyway. The paving beneath came up and smacked me hard, but there was nothing sharp to compound the impact and when I rolled it was not into the feared assembly of trash bins. I got up and made for the nearest shadows.

Ten minutes and a random sampling of streets later, I came upon a rank of idling autocabs, stepped swiftly out from my current piece of overhead cover and got into the fifth in line. I recited Ortega’s discreet code as we lifted into the air.

“Coding noted. Approximate arrival time, thirty-five minutes.”

We headed out across the Bay, and then out to sea.

Too many edges.

The fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the currents of memory and sank again. Trepp jacked into the bar at Cable, Jimmy de Soto washing his blood-encrusted hands, Ryker’s face staring back at me from the spreadeagled star of mirror. Kawahara was in there somewhere, claiming Bancroft’s death as suicide but wanting an end to the investigation, just like Ortega and the Bay City police. Kawahara, who knew things about my contact with Miriam Bancroft, knew things about Laurens Bancroft, about Kadmin.

The tail end of my hangover twitched, scorpion-like, fighting the slow-gathering weight of Trepp’s painkillers. Trepp, the apologetic Zen killer whom I’d killed and who’d apparently come back with no hard feelings because she couldn’t remember it; because, in her terms, it hadn’t happened to her.

If anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you.

Trepp, jacked in at Cable.

Viral Strike. Recall that mother, do you?

Bancroft’s eyes boring into mine on the balcony at Suntouch House. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now.

And then, blindingly, I knew what I was going to do.

The cab started downward.

“Footing is unstable,” said the machine redundantly, as we touched down on a rolling deck. “Please take care.”

I fed currency to the slot and the hatch hinged up on Ortega’s safe location. A brief expanse of gunmetal landing pad, railings of cabled steel, and the sea beyond, all shifting black shoulders of water beneath a night sky clogged with cloud and hard drizzle. I climbed out warily and clung to the nearest railing while the cab lifted away and was quickly swallowed by the drifting veils of rain. As the navigation lights faded, I turned my attention to the vessel I was standing on.

The landing pad was situated at the stern, and from where I clung to the railing I could see the whole length of the ship laid out. She looked to be about twenty metres, something like two thirds the size of a Millsport trawler, but much leaner in the beam. The deck modules had the smooth, self-sealing configuration of storm survival design, but despite the general businesslike appearance, no one would ever take this for a working vessel. Delicate telescopic masts rose to what looked like only half height at two points along the deck and there was a sharp bowsprit stabbing ahead of the slimly tapered prow. This was a yacht. A rich man’s floating home.

Light spilled out of a hatchway on the rear deck and Ortega emerged far enough to beckon me down from the landing pad. Hooking my fingers firmly on the rail, I braced myself against the pitch and sway of the vessel and picked my way down a short flight of steps at one side of the pad, then across the rear deck to the hatch. Swirls of drizzle swept across the ship, hurrying me along against my will. In the well of light from the open hatch I saw another, steeper set of steps and handed my way down the narrow companionway into the offered warmth. Over my head, the hatch hummed smoothly shut.

“Where the fuck have you been?” snapped Ortega.

I took a moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a rich man’s floating home, the rich man in question hadn’t been home in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into, sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at either end of the room were open onto what seemed to be similarly mothballed spaces.

For all that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the bulkheads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet. The remainder of the décor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I didn’t have the cultural background to read.

Ortega stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.

“It’s a long story.” I moved past her to peer through the nearest door. “I could use a coffee, if the galley’s open.”

Bedroom. A big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she slapped me.

I reeled sideways. It wasn’t as hard a blow as I’d given Sullivan in the noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and painkillers didn’t help. I didn’t quite go down, but it was a near thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on each cheekbone.

“Look, I’m sorry if I woke you up, but—”

“You piece of shit,” she hissed at me. “You lying piece of shit.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“I should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for what you’ve done.”

I started to lose my temper. “Done what? Will you get a fucking grip, Ortega, and tell me what’s going on.”

“We accessed the Hendrix’s memory today,” Ortega said coldly. “Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Everything for the last week. I’ve been reviewing it.”

The rapidly flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her mouth. It was as if she’d emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.

“Oh.”

“Yes, there wasn’t much.” Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. “You’re the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your visitors.”

I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam Bancroft’s widespread thighs.

“There’s a remote on the chair,” said Ortega, herself remote. “Why don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.”

She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.

My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega’s cooperation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.

Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.

Embarrassment. Shame.

Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.

“You’re not watching.”

I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.

“Thanks.” I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.

“So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.” She jerked her head at the screen. “How many of them is that?”

“Ortega, this is nothing to do—”

“I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.” She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. “I don’t know, that doesn’t look like fear on your face, exactly.”

“Ortega—”

“‘I want you to stop,’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don’t rememb—”

I pulled the remote out of her reach. “I remember what she said.”

“Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple—”

“Ortega, you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—”

“Shut up.” Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. “You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—”

“If you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.” I tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have. “I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.”

“Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.”

“She’ll beat the rap. You know she will.”

“If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot’s on the other foot this time around.”

The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.

I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.

“And while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.”

“I was going to tell you about that.”

“No, you fucking weren’t,” Ortega snarled. “You weren’t going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.”

“Look, the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much to—”

“You arrogant motherfucker.” The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. “You’re just like him, you’re just fucking like him. You think we need the fucking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation—”

“Wait a minute.” I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. “Just like who, who am I just like?”

“What?”

“You just said I’m just—”

“Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?”

“The only thing I under—” Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.

“Give me that, turn that fucking thing—”

For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.

“—off.”

There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.

When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.

It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.

Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.

I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.

I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.

“Where’re we going?” I asked her gently.

A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. “Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.”

“And no one knows we’re out here?”

“Only the satellites.”

“Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?”

She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. “It’s Ryker’s.”

“Ooops.” I looked elaborately away. “Nice carpet in here.”

Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

“I told myself,” she murmured, “it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.”

“Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.”

Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. “I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.”

“Kristin Ortega.” I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. “You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?”

She shrugged again. “Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop. You know how it goes.”

“Not from experience.”

“No.” She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. “I guess not.”

I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.

This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.

We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.

In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.

As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.

What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When I awoke, she was gone.

There was sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The pitching of the boat had almost stopped but there was still enough roll to show me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them. What to tell Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink, absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.

The clinking of glasses from the door brought me round. Ortega was standing in the doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES in the same colour. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt as if they might conceivably go on for ever inside. Balanced in her hands was a large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.

So I told her everything.

“So what are you going to do?”

I shrugged and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan’s World. Up on deck, the immensity of it sank in and the yacht was suddenly a child’s toy. “I’m going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft wants. What you want. What apparently everyone fucking wants. I’m going to kill the case.”

“You think Kawahara torched Bancroft?”

“Seems likely. Or she’s shielding someone who did. Doesn’t matter anymore. She’s got Sarah, that’s all that counts now.”

“We could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of d.h. personality carries—”

“Fifty to a hundred, yeah.” I smiled faintly. “I was listening last night. But she won’t be holding directly, it’ll be some subsidiary.”

“We can get warrants that—”

“She’s a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?”

“Couple of days, if it’s UN-expedited.” The gloom crept across Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downwards.

“Exactly. That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy, she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I’m not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of—”

“OK.” Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. “OK. I’m sorry.”

I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual dungeons I couldn’t be sure.

“Forget it.”

“I’m a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That’s all.”

I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. “I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There are no ways.”

The smile she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.

“Look, Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to know.”

She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.

If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.

I grimaced. Compared to Kawahara, Death was a three-bout pushover.

I stopped at the prow and picked a point on the horizon to watch until Ortega made up her mind.

Suppose you know someone, a long time ago. You share things, drink deeply of each other. Then you drift apart, life takes you in different directions, the bonds are not strong enough. Or maybe you get torn apart by external circumstance. Years later, you meet that person again, in the same sleeve, and you go through it all over again. What’s the attraction? Is this the same person? They probably have the same name, the same approximate physical appearance, but does that make them the same? And if not, does that make the things that have changed unimportant or peripheral? People change, but how much? As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.

Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.

But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilisation, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. Some of you have served in Vacuum Command, and will no doubt think that out there you have confronted existence vertigo.

A thin smile.

I promise you that the Zen moments you may have enjoyed in hard space are not much more than the beginning of what you must learn here. All and anything you achieve as Envoys must be based on the understanding that there is nothing but flux. Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux.

I wish you all luck.

If you couldn’t even meet the same person twice in one lifetime, in one sleeve, what did that say about all the families and friends waiting in Download Central for someone they once knew to peer out through the eyes of a stranger. How could that even be close to the same person?

And where did that leave a woman consumed with passion for a stranger wearing a body she once loved. Was that closer, or further away?

Where, for that matter, did it leave the stranger who responded?

I heard her coming along the rail towards me. She stopped a couple of paces away and cleared her throat quietly. I quelled a smile, and turned round.

“I didn’t tell you how Ryker came to have all this, did I?”

“It didn’t seem the time to ask.”

“No.” A grin that faded as if swept away by the breeze. “He stole it. A few years back, while he was still working Sleeve Theft. Belonged to some big-time clone marketeer from Sydney. Ryker caught the case because this guy was moving broken-down merchandise through the West Coast clinics. He got co-opted into a local taskforce and they tried to take the guy down at his marina. Big firefight, lots of dead people.”

“And lots of spoils.”

She nodded. “They do things differently down there. Most of the police work gets picked up by private contractors. The local government handle it by tying payment to the assets of the criminals you bring down.”

“Interesting incentive,” I said reflectively. “Ought to make for a lot of rich people getting busted.”

“Yeah, they say it works that way. The yacht was Ryker’s piece. He did a lot of the groundwork on the case, and he was wounded in the firefight.” Her voice was curiously undefensive as she related these details, and for once I felt that Ryker was a long way away. “That’s where he got the scar under the eye, that stuff on his arm. Cable gun.”

“Nasty.” Despite myself, I felt a slight twinge in the scarred arm. I’d been up against cable fire before, and not enjoyed the encounter very much.

“Right. Most people reckoned Ryker earned every rivet of this boat. The point is, policy here in Bay City is that officers may not keep gifts, bonuses or anything else awarded for line-of-duty actions.”

“I can see the rationale for that.”

“Yeah, so can I. But Ryker couldn’t. He paid some cut-rate Dipper to lose the ship’s records and reregister her through discreet holding. Claimed he needed a safe house, if he ever had to stash someone.”

I grinned a little. “Thin. But I like his style. Would that be the same Dipper who ratted him out in Seattle?”

“Good memory you’ve got. Yeah, the very same. Nacho the Needle. Bautista tells a well-balanced story, doesn’t he?”

“Saw that too, huh?”

“Yeah. Ordinarily, I’d have ripped Bautista’s fucking head off for that paternal uncle shit. Like I need emotional sheltering. He’s been through two fucking divorces and he’s not even forty yet.” She stared reflectively out to sea. “I haven’t had the time to confront him yet. Too busy being fucked off with you. Look, Kovacs, reason I’m telling you all this is, Ryker stole the boat, he broke West Coast law. I knew.”

“And you didn’t do anything,” I guessed.

“Nothing.” She looked at her hands, palms upturned. “Oh, shit, Kovacs, who are we kidding? I’m no angel myself. I kicked the shit out of Kadmin in police custody. You saw me. I should have busted you for that fight outside Jerry’s and I let you walk.”

“You were too tired for the paperwork, as I recall.”

“Yeah, I remember.” She grimaced, then turned to look me in the eyes, searching Ryker’s face for a sign that she could trust me. “You say you’re going to break the law, but no one gets hurt. That’s right?”

“No one who matters,” I corrected gently.

She nodded slowly to herself, like someone weighing up a convincing argument that may just change their mind for good.

“So what do you need?”

I levered myself off the rail. “A list of whorehouses in the Bay City area, to start with. Places that run virtual stuff. After that, we’d better get back to town. I don’t want to call Kawahara from out here.”

She blinked. “Virtual whorehouses?”

“Yeah. And the mixed ones as well. In fact, make it every place on the West Coast that runs virtual porn. The lower grade the better. I’m going to sell Bancroft a package so filthy he won’t want to look at it close enough to check for cracks. So bad he won’t even want to think about it.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ortega’s list was over two thousand names long, each annotated with a brief surveillance report and any Organic Damage convictions tied to the operators or clientele. In hardcopy format it ran to about two hundred concertina’d sheets, which started to unravel like a long paper scarf as soon as I got past page one. I tried to scan the list in the cab back to Bay City, but gave up when it threatened to overwhelm us both on the back seat. I wasn’t in the mood anyway. Most of me wished I was still bedded down in the stern cabin of Ryker’s yacht, isolated from the rest of humanity and its problems by hundreds of kilometres of trackless blue.

Back at the Watchtower suite, I put Ortega in the kitchen while I called Kawahara at the number Trepp had given me. It was Trepp that came on screen first, features smeared with sleep. I wondered if she’d been up all night trying to track me.

“Morning.” She yawned and presumably checked an internal timechip. “Afternoon, I mean. Where’ve you been?”

“Out and about.”

Trepp rubbed inelegantly at one eye and yawned again. “Suit yourself. Just making conversation. How’s your head?”

“Better, thanks. I want to talk to Kawahara.”

“Sure.” She reached towards the screen. “Talk to you later.”

The screen dropped into neutral, an unwinding tricoloured helix accompanied by sickly sweet string arrangements. I gritted my teeth.

“Takeshi-san.” As always, Kawahara started in Japanese, as if it established some kind of common ground with me. “This is unlooked-for so early. Do you have good news for me?”

I stayed doggedly in Amanglic. “Is this a secure line?”

“As close as such a thing can be said to exist, yes.”

“I have a shopping list.”

“Go ahead.”

“To begin with, I need access to a military virus. Rawling 4851 for preference, or one of the Condomar variants.”

Kawahara’s intelligent features hardened abruptly. “The Innenin virus?”

“Yeah. It’s over a century out of date now, shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of. Then I need—”

“Kovacs, I think you’d better explain what you’re planning.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I understood this was my play, and you didn’t want to be involved.”

“If I secure you a copy of the Rawling virus, I’d say I’m already involved.” Kawahara offered me a measured smile. “Now what are you planning to do with it?”

“Bancroft killed himself, that’s the result you want, right?”

A slow nod.

“Then there has to be a reason,” I said, warming to the deceit structure I’d come up with, despite myself. I was doing what they’d trained me to do, and it felt good. “Bancroft has remote storage, it doesn’t make sense that he’d light himself up unless he had a very specific reason. A reason unrelated to the actual act of suicide. A reason like self preservation.”

Kawahara’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”

“Bancroft uses whorehouses on a regular basis, real and virtual. He told me that himself a couple of days ago. And he’s not too particular about the quality of establishment he uses either. Now, let’s assume that there’s an accident in one of these virtuals while he’s getting his itch scratched. Accidental bleedover from some grimed-up old programs that no one’s bothered to even open for a few decades. Go to a low enough grade of house, there’s no telling what might be lying around.”

“The Rawling virus.” Kawahara exhaled as if she had been holding her breath in anticipation.

“Rawling variant 4851 takes about a hundred minutes to go fully active, by which time it’s too late to do anything.” I forced images of Jimmy de Soto from my mind. “The target’s contaminated beyond redemption. Suppose Bancroft finds this out through some kind of systems warning. He must be wired internally for that kind of thing. He suddenly discovers the stack he’s wearing and the brain it’s wired to is burnt. That’s not a disaster, if you’ve got clone backup and remote storage, but—”

“Transmission.” Kawahara’s face lit up as she got it.

“Right. He’d have to do something to stop the virus being ’cast to the remote with the rest of his personality. With the next needlecast coming up that night, maybe in a few minutes’ time, there was only one way to ensure the remote stack didn’t get contaminated.”

I mimed a pistol at my head.

“Ingenious.”

“That’s why he made the call, the timecheck. He couldn’t trust his own internal chip, the virus might already have scrambled it.”

Solemnly, Kawahara lifted her hands into view and applauded. When she had finished, she clasped her hands together and looked at me over them.

“Very impressive. I will obtain the Rawling virus immediately. Have you selected a suitable virtual house for it to be downloaded into?”

“Not yet. The virus isn’t the only thing I need. I want you to arrange the parole and re-sleeving of Irene Elliott, currently held at Bay City Central on conviction of Dipping. I also want you to look into the possibility of acquiring her original sleeve back from its purchasers. Some corporate deal, there’ll be records.”

“You’re going to use this Elliott to download Rawling?”

“The evidence is she’s good.”

“The evidence is she got caught,” observed Kawahara tartly. “I’ve got plenty of people can do this for you. Top line intrusion specialists. You don’t need—”

“Kawahara.” I kept my temper with an effort, but heard some of it in the tightness in my voice. “This is my gig, remember. I don’t want your people climbing all over it. If you unstack Elliott, she’ll be loyal. Get her her own body back and she’ll be ours for life. That’s the way I want to do it, so that’s the way it’s going down.”

I waited. Kawahara stayed expressionless for a moment, then bestowed on me another carefully calibrated smile.

“Very well. We will do it your way. I’m sure you’re aware of the risks you are taking, and what will happen if you fail. I shall contact you at the Hendrix later today.”

“What’s the word on Kadmin?”

“Of Kadmin, there is no word.” Kawahara smiled once more, and the connection broke.

I sat staring at the standby screen for a moment, reviewing the scam as I’d laid it out. I had the uneasy feeling that I’d been telling the truth in the midst of all the deceit. Or, more, that my carefully spun lies were treading in the tracks of the truth, following the same path. A good lie should shadow the truth closely enough to draw substance from it, but this was something else, something altogether more unnerving. I felt like a hunter who has tracked a swamp panther a little too close for comfort, and expects at any moment to see it rear up out of the swamp in all its fanged and tendril-maned horror. The truth was here, somewhere.

It was a hard feeling to shake.

I got up and went into the kitchen, where Ortega was foraging through the almost empty fridge unit. Light from within cast her features in a way I hadn’t seen before and below one raised arm her right breast filled the slack of her T-shirt like fruit, like water. The desire to touch her was an itching in my hands.

She glanced up. “Don’t you cook?”

“Hotel does it all for you. Comes up in the hatch. What do you want?”

“I want to cook something.” She gave up looking through the fridge and closed the door of the unit. “Get what you wanted?”

“Think so. Give the hotel a list of ingredients. There are pans and things in that rack down there, I think. Anything else you need, ask the hotel. I’m going to go through the list. Oh, and Kristin.”

She looked round from the rack I’d indicated.

“Miller’s head isn’t in here. I put it next door.”

Her mouth tightened a little. “I know where you put Miller’s head,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for it.”

A couple of minutes later, seated on the window shelf with the hardcopy unfolding away to the floor, I heard the low tones of Ortega conversing with the Hendrix. There was some banging about, more muted conversation, and then the sound of oil frying gently. I fought off the urge for a cigarette and bent my head to the hardcopy.

I was looking for something that I’d seen every day of my young life in Newpest; the places I’d spent my teenage years, the narrow accessways of tiny properties sporting cheap holos that promised things like Better than the Real Thing, Wide Range of Scenarios and Dreams Come True. It didn’t take much to set up a virtual brothel. You just needed frontage and space for the client coffins stacked upright. The software varied in price, depending on how elaborate and original it was, but the machines to run it could usually be bought out of military surplus at basement rates.

If Bancroft could spend time and money in Jerry’s biocabins, he’d be at home in one of these.

I was two thirds of my way through the list, more and more of my attention sifting away to the aromas issuing from the kitchen, when my eyes fell on a familiar entry and I grew abruptly still.

I saw a woman with long, straight black hair and crimson lips

I heard Trepp’s voice

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

And the bar-coded chauffeur

No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight.

And the crimson-lipped woman

Head in the clouds. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here.

A choir in climax

from the Houses, from the Houses, from the Houses …

And the businesslike printout in my hands

Head in the Clouds: accredited West Coast House, real and virtual product, mobile aerial site outside coastal limit…

I scanned through the notes, head ringing as if it were crystal that had been delicately struck with a hammer.

Navigational beams and beaconing system locked to Bay City and Seattle. Discreet membership coding. Routine searches, NR. No convictions. Operated under licence from Third Eye Holdings Inc.

I sat still, thinking.

There were pieces missing. It was like the mirror, wedged into place on jagged edges, enough to hold an image, but not the whole. I was peering hard at the irregular limits of what I had, trying to see round the edges, to get the backdrop. Trepp had been taking me to see Ray — Reileen — at Head in the Clouds. Not Europe, Europe was a blind, the sombre weight of the basilica designed to numb me to what should have been obvious. If Kawahara was involved in this thing, she wouldn’t be overseeing it from half a globe away. Kawahara was on Head in the Clouds, and …

And what?

Envoy intuition was a form of subliminal recognition, an enhanced awareness of pattern that the real world too often abraded with its demand for detailed focus. Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge. Working from that model, you could fill in the bits later. But there was a certain minimum you needed to get airborne. Like old-style linear prop aircraft, you needed a run up, and I didn’t have it. I could feel myself bumping along the ground, clawing at the air and falling back. Not enough.

“Kovacs?”

I glanced up, and saw it. Like a head-up display coming on line, like airlock bolts slamming back in my head.

Ortega stood before me, a stirring implement in one hand, hair gathered back in a loose knot. Her T-shirt blazoned at me.

RESOLUTION 653. Yes or No, depending.

Oumou Prescott

Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court.

Jerry Sedaka

Old Anenome’s Catholic … We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.

My thoughts ran like a combustion fuse, flaming up the line of association.

Tennis court

Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court

Joseph Phiri, the Commission of Human Rights

My own words

You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.

An undeclared influence …

Miriam Bancroft

I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.

And Bancroft

The way he played today, I’m not surprised.

Resolution 653. Catholics.

My mind spewed the data back at me like a demented file search, scrolling down.

Sedaka, gloating

Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican.

Real convenient sometimes.

Ortega

Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals.

Mary Lou Hinchley.

Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean.

Not much left of the body, but they got the stack.

Barred by Reasons of Conscience.

Out of the ocean.

Coastals.

Mobile aerial site outside coastal limit …

Head in the Clouds.

It was a process that could not be braked, a kind of mental avalanche. Chunks of reality splintering away and tumbling downward, except that instead of chaos they were falling into something that had form, a kind of restructured whole whose final shape I still couldn’t make out.

Beaconing system locked to Bay City —

— and Seattle

Bautista.

See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle.

The intacts ditched in the Pacific.

Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up.

“What’re you looking at?”

The words hung in the air for a moment like a hinge in time, and suddenly time hinged back and in the doorway behind, Sarah was just waking up in the Millsport hotel bed, with the rolling thunder of an orbital discharge rattling the loose windows in their frames and behind that, rotorblades against the night, and our own deaths waiting just up around the bend.

“What’re you looking at?”

I blinked and I was still staring at Ortega’s T-shirt, at the soft mounds she made in it and the legend printed across the chest. There was a slight smile on her face, but it was beginning to bleach out with concern.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked again and tried to reel in the metres of mental spillage that the T-shirt had set off. The looming truth of Head in the Clouds.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to eat?”

“Ortega, what if—” I found I had to clear my throat, swallow and start again. I didn’t want to say this, my body didn’t want me to say it. “What if I can get Ryker off the stack? Permanently, I mean. Clear him of the charges, prove Seattle was a set-up. What’s that worth to you?”

For a moment, she looked at me as if I was speaking a language she didn’t understand. Then she moved to the window shelf and seated herself carefully on the edge, facing me. She was silent for a while, but I had already seen the answer in her eyes.

“Are you feeling guilty?” she asked me finally.

“About?”

“About us.”

I nearly laughed out loud, but there was just enough underlying pain to stop the reflex in my throat. The urge to touch her had not stopped. Over the last day it had ebbed and flowed in waves, but it had never wholly gone. When I looked at the curve of her hips and thighs on the window shelf, I could feel the way she had writhed back against me so clearly it was almost virtual. My palm recalled the weight and shape of her breast as if holding it had been this sleeve’s life’s work. As I looked at her, my fingers wanted to trace the geometry of her face. There was no room in me for guilt, no room for anything but this feeling.

“Envoys don’t feel guilt,” I said shortly. “I’m serious. It’s likely, no it’s almost certain in fact that Kawahara had Ryker set up because he was heating up the Mary Lou Hinchley case too much. Do you remember anything about her employment records?”

Ortega thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “She ran away from home to be with the boyfriend. Mostly unregistered stuff, anything to bring the rent in. Boyfriend was a piece of shit, got a record goes back to age fifteen. He dealt a little Stiff, crashed a few easy datastacks, mostly lived off his women.”

“Would he have let her work the Meat Rack? Or the cabins?”

“Oh, yeah.” Ortega nodded, face stony. “Soon as spit.”

“If someone was recruiting for a snuff house, Catholics would be the ideal candidates, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to tell any tales after the event, after all. By reasons of conscience.”

“Snuff.” If Ortega’s face had been stony before, it was weathered granite now. “Most of the snuff victims around here just get a bolt through the stack when it’s over. They don’t tell any tales.”

“Right. But what if something went wrong. Specifically, what if Mary Lou Hinchley was going to be used as a snuff whore, so she tried to escape and fell out of an aerial whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. That would make her Catholicism very convenient, wouldn’t it?”

“Head in the Clouds? Are you serious?”

“And it’d make the owners of Head in the Clouds very anxious to stop Resolution 653 dead in its tracks, wouldn’t it?”

“Kovacs.” Ortega was making slow-down gestures with both palms. “Kovacs, Head in the Clouds is one of the Houses. Class prostitution. I don’t like those places, they make me want to vomit just as bad as the cabins, but they’re clean. They cater for elevated society and they don’t run scams like snuff—”

“You don’t think the upper echelons go in for sadism and necrophilia, then. That’s strictly a lower-class thing, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Ortega evenly. “But if anyone with money wants to play at torturer, they can afford to do it in virtual. Some of the Houses run virtual snuff, but they run it because it’s legal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s the way they like it.”

I drew a deep breath. “Kristin, someone was taking me to see Kawahara on board Head in the Clouds. Someone from the Wei Clinic. And if Kawahara is involved in the West Coast Houses, then they will do anything that turns a profit, because she will do anything, anything at all. You wanted a big bad Meth to believe in? Forget Bancroft, he’s practically a priest in comparison. Kawahara grew up in Fission City, dealing anti-radiation drugs to the families of fuel rod workers. Do you know what a water carrier is?”

She shook her head.

“In Fission City it’s what they used to call the gang enforcers. See, if someone refused to pay protection, or informed to the police, or just didn’t jump fast enough when the local yakuza boss said frog, the standard punishment was to drink contaminated water. The enforcers used to carry it around in shielded flasks, siphoned off low-grade reactor cooling systems. They’d turn up at the offender’s house one night and tell him how much he had to drink. His family would be made to watch. If he didn’t drink, they’d start cutting his family one by one until he did. You want to know how I know that delightful piece of Earth history trivia?”

Ortega said nothing, but her mouth was tight with disgust.

“I know because Kawahara told me. That’s what she used to do when she was a kid. She was a water carrier. And she’s proud of it.”

The phone chimed.

I waved back Ortega out of range and went to answer it.

“Kovacs?” It was Rodrigo Bautista. “Is Ortega with you?”

“No.” I lied automatically. “Haven’t seen her for a couple of days. Is there a problem?”

“Ah, probably not. She’s vanished off the face of the planet again. Well, if you do see her, tell her she missed a squad assembly this afternoon and Captain Murawa wasn’t impressed.”

“Should I expect to see her?”

“With Ortega, who fucking knows?” Bautista spread his hands. “Look, I’ve got to go. See you around.”

“See you.” I watched as the screen blanked, and Ortega came back from her place by the wall. “Did you get that?”

“Yeah. I was supposed to turn the Hendrix memory discs over this morning. Murawa will probably want to know why I took them out of Fell Street in the first place.”

“It’s your case, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but there are norms.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. “I can’t stall them for long, Kovacs. I’m already getting a lot of funny looks for working with you. Pretty soon someone’s going to get seriously suspicious. You’ve got a few days to run this scam on Bancroft, but after that…”

She raised her hands eloquently.

“Can’t you say you were held up? That Kadmin took the discs off you?”

“They’ll polygraph me—”

“Not immediately.”

“Kovacs, this is my career we’re flushing down the toilet here, not yours. I don’t do this job for fun, it’s taken me—”

“Kristin, listen to me.” I went to her and took her hands in mine. “Do you want Ryker back, or not?”

She tried to turn away from me, but I held on.

“Kristin. Do you believe he was set up?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then why not believe it was Kawahara? The cruiser he tried to shoot down in Seattle was heading out over the ocean when it crashed. You extrapolate that heading and see where it takes you. You plot the point that the Coastals fished Mary Lou Hinchley out of the sea. Then put Head in the Clouds on the map and see if it all adds up to anything.”

Ortega pulled away from me with a strange look in her eyes.

“You want this to be true, don’t you? You want the excuse to go after Kawahara, no matter what. It’s just hate with you, isn’t it? Another score to settle. You don’t care about Ryker. You don’t even care about your friend, Sarah any—”

“Say that again,” I told her coldly, “and I’ll deck you. For your information, nothing that we’ve just discussed matters more to me than Sarah’s life. And nothing I’ve said means I have any option other than to do exactly what Kawahara wants.”

“Then what’s the fucking point?”

I wanted to reach out for her. Instead, I turned the yearning into a displacement gesture with both hands chopping gently at the air.

“I don’t know. Not yet. But if I can get Sarah clear, there might be a way to bring Kawahara down afterwards. And there might be a way to clear Ryker too. That’s all I’m saying.”

She stayed looking at me for a moment, then turned and swept up her jacket from the arm of the chair where she had draped it when we arrived.

“I’m going out for a while,” she said quietly.

“Fine.” I stayed equally quiet. This was not a moment for pressure. “I’ll be here, or I’ll leave a message for you if I have to go out.”

“Yes, do that.”

There was nothing in her voice to indicate whether she was really coming back or not.

After she had gone, I sat thinking for a while longer, trying to flesh out the glimpse of structure that the Envoy intuition had given me. When the phone chimed again, I had evidently given up, because the chime caught me staring out of the window, wondering where in Bay City Ortega had gone.

This time, it was Kawahara.

“I have what you want,” she said off-handedly. “A dormant version of the Rawling virus will be delivered to SilSet Holdings tomorrow morning after eight o’clock. Address 1187 Sacramento. They’ll know you’re coming.”

“And the activator codes?”

“Delivery under separate cover. Trepp will contact you.”

I nodded. UN law governing transfer and ownership of war viruses was clear to the point of bluntness. Inert viral forms could be owned as subjects for study, or even, as one bizarre test case had proved, private trophies. Ownership or sale of an active military virus, or the codes whereby a dormant virus could be activated, was a UN indictable offence, punishable with anything between a hundred and two hundred years’ storage. In the event of the virus actually being deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties were only applicable to private citizens, not military commanders or government executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys.

“Just make sure she contacts me soon,” I said briefly. “I don’t want to use up any more of my ten days than I have to.”

“I understand.” Kawahara made a sympathetic face, for all the world as if the threats against Sarah were being made by some malignant force of nature over which neither of us had control. “I will have Irene Elliott re-sleeved by tomorrow evening. Nominally, she is being bought out of storage by JacSol SA, one of my communications interface companies. You’ll be able to collect her from Bay City Central around ten o’clock. I have you temporarily accredited as a security consultant for JacSol Division West. Name, Martin Anderson.”

“Got it.” This was Kawahara’s way of telling me that if anything went wrong, I was tied to her and would go down first. “That’s going to clash with Ryker’s gene signature. He’ll be a live file at Bay City Central as long as the body’s decanted.”

Kawahara nodded. “Dealt with. Your accreditation will be routed through JacSol corporate channels before any individual genetic search. A punch-in code. Within JacSol, your gene print will be recorded as Anderson’s. Any other problems?”

“What if I bump into Sullivan?”

“Warden Sullivan has gone on extended leave. Some kind of psychological problem. He is spending some time in virtual. You will not be seeing him again.”

Despite myself, I felt a cold shiver as I looked at Kawahara’s composed features. I cleared my throat.

“And the sleeve repurchase?”

“No.” Kawahara smiled faintly. “I checked the specs. Irene Elliott’s sleeve has no biotech augmentation to justify the cost of retrieving it.”

“I didn’t say it had. This isn’t about technical capacity, it’s about motivation. She’ll be more loyal if—”

Kawahara leant forward in the screen. “I can be pushed so far, Kovacs. And then it stops. Elliott’s getting a compatible sleeve, she should be thankful for that. You wanted her, any loyalty problems you have with her are going to be your problems exclusively. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“She’ll take longer to adjust,” I said doggedly. “In a new sleeve, she’ll be slower, less resp—”

“Also your problem. I offered you the best intrusion experts money can buy, and you turned them down. You’ve got to learn to live with the consequences of your actions, Kovacs.” She paused and sat back with another faint smile. “I had a check run on Elliott. Who she is, who her family are, what the connection is. Why you wanted her off stack. It’s a nice thought, Kovacs, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to support your own Good Samaritan gestures without my help. I’m not running a charity here.”

“No,” I said flatly. “I suppose not.”

“No. And I think we can also suppose that this will be the last direct contact between us until this matter is resolved.”

“Yes.”

“Well, inappropriate though it may seem, good luck, Kovacs.”

The screen blanked, leaving the words hanging in the air. I sat for what seemed like a long time, hearing them, staring at an imagined afterimage on screen that my hate made almost real. When I spoke, Ryker’s voice sounded alien in my ears, as if someone or something else was speaking through me.

“Inappropriate is right,” it said into the quiet room. “Motherfucker.”

Ortega did not come back, but the aroma of what she had cooked curled through the apartment and my stomach flexed in sympathy. I waited some more, still trying to assemble all the jagged edges of the puzzle in my mind, but either my heart was not in it or there was still something major missing. Finally, I forced down the coppery taste of the hate and frustration, and went to eat.

Chapter Thirty

Kawahara’s groundwork was flawless.

An automated limo with JacSol insignia lightning-flashed onto its flanks turned up outside the Hendrix at eight the next morning. I went down to meet it and found the rear cabin stacked with Chinese designer-label boxes.

Opened back in my room, the boxes yielded a line of high quality corporate props that Serenity Carlyle would have gone wild for: two blocky, sand-coloured suits, cut to Ryker’s size, a half dozen handmade shirts with the JacSol logo embroidered on each wing collar, formal shoes in real leather, a midnight blue raincoat, a JacSol dedicated mobile phone and a small black disc with a thumbprint DNA encoding pad.

I showered and shaved, dressed and ran the disc. Kawahara blinked up on the screen, construct-perfect.

“Good morning, Takeshi-san, and welcome to JacSol Communications. The DNA coding on this disc is now webbed into a line of credit in the name Martin James Anderson. As I mentioned earlier, the punch-in corporate prefix for JacSol will negate any clash with Ryker’s genetic records or the account set up for you by Bancroft. Please note the coding below.”

I read off the string of digits in a single sweep, and went back to watching Kawahara’s face.

“The JacSol account will bear all reasonable expenses and is programmed to expire at the end of our ten-day agreement. Should you wish to dissolve the account earlier than this, double punch the code, apply the gene trace and double punch again.

“Trepp will contact you via the corporate mobile some time today, so keep the unit with you at all times. Irene Elliott will be downloaded at 21.45 West Coast time. Processing should take about forty-five minutes. And by the time you receive this message, SilSet Holdings will have your package. After consultation with my own experts, I have appended a list of the likely hardware Elliott will need, and a number of suppliers who can be trusted to acquire it discreetly. Charge everything through the JacSol account. The list will print out in hardcopy momentarily.

“Should you need any repetition of these details, the disc will remain playable for the next eighteen minutes, at which point it will self wipe. You are now on your own.”

Kawahara’s features arranged themselves in a PR smile and the image faded as the printer chittered out the hardware list. I scanned it briefly on my way down to the limo.

Ortega had not come back.

At SilSet Holdings I was treated like a Harlan Family heir. Polished human receptionists busied themselves with my comfort while a technician brought out a metal cylinder roughly the dimensions of a hallucinogen grenade.

Trepp was less impressed. I met her early that evening, as per her phoned instructions, in a bar in Oakland, and when she saw the JacSol image she laughed sourly.

“You look like a fucking programmer, Kovacs. Where’d you get that suit?”

“My name’s Anderson,” I reminded her. “And the suit goes with the name.”

She pulled a face.

“Well next time you go shopping, Anderson, take me with you. I’ll save you a lot of money, and you won’t come out looking like a guy takes the kids to Honolulu at weekends.”

I leaned across the tiny table. “You know Trepp, last time you gave me a hard time about my dress sense, I killed you.”

She shrugged. “Goes to show. Some people just can’t take the truth.”

“Did you bring the stuff?”

Trepp put her hand flat on the table, and when she removed it there was a nondescript grey disc sealed in impact plastic between us.

“There you go. As requested. Now I know you’re crazy.” There might have been something like admiration in her voice. “You know what they do to you on Earth for playing with this stuff?”

I covered the disc with my own hand and pocketed it. “Same as anywhere else, I guess. Federal offence, down the double barrel. You forget, I don’t have any choice.”

Trepp scratched an ear. “Double barrel, or the Big Wipe. I haven’t enjoyed carrying this around all day. You got the rest of it there?”

“Why? Worried about being seen in public with me?”

She smiled. “A bit. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I hoped so too. The bulky, grenade-sized package I’d collected from SilSet had been burning a hole in my expensive coat pocket all day.

I went back to the Hendrix and checked for messages. Ortega had not called. I killed time in the hotel room, thinking through the line I was going to feed Elliott. At nine I got back in the limo and took it down to Bay City Central.

I sat in a reception room while a young doctor completed the necessary paperwork and I initialled the forms where he indicated. There was an eerie familiarity to the process. Most of the clauses in the parole were on behalf of stipulations, which effectively made me responsible for Irene Elliott’s conduct during the release period. She had even less say in the matter than I’d had when I arrived the week before.

When Elliott finally emerged from the RESTRICTED ZONE doors beyond the reception rooms, it was with the halting step of someone recovering from a debilitating illness. The shock of the mirror was written into her new face. When you don’t do it for a living, it’s no easy thing to face the stranger for the first time and the face that Elliott now wore was almost as far from the big-boned blonde I remembered from her husband’s photocube as Ryker was from my own previous sleeve. Kawahara had described the new sleeve as compatible, and it fitted that bleak description perfectly. It was a female body, about the same age as Elliott’s original body had been, but there the resemblance ended. Where Irene Elliott had been big and fair-skinned, this sleeve had the sheen of a narrow vein of copper seen through falling water. Thick black hair framed a face with eyes like hot coals and lips the colour of plums, and the body was slim and delicate.

“Irene Elliott?”

She leaned unsteadily on the reception counter as she turned to look at me. “Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Martin Anderson. I represent JacSol Division West. We arranged for your parole.”

Her eyes narrowed a little, scanning me from head to foot and back again. “You don’t look like a programmer. Apart from the suit, I mean.”

“I’m a security consultant, attached to JacSol for certain projects. There is some work we would like you to do for us.”

“Yeah? Couldn’t get anyone else to do it cheaper than this?” She gestured around her. “What happened, did I get famous while I was in the store?”

“In a sense,” I said carefully. “Perhaps it would be better if we dealt with the formalities here and moved on. There is a limousine waiting.”

“A limo?” The incredulity in her voice put a genuine smile on my face for the first time that day. She signed the final release as if in a dream.

“Who are you really?” she asked when the limousine was in the air. It felt like a lot of people had been asking me that over the past few days. I was almost beginning to wonder myself.

I stared ahead over the navigation block of the limo. “A friend,” I said quietly. “That’s all you need to know for now.”

“Before we start anything, I want—”

“I know.” The limousine was banking in the sky as I said it. “We’ll be in Ember in about half an hour.”

I hadn’t turned but I could feel the heat of her stare on the side of my face.

“You’re not corporate,” she said definitely. “Corporates don’t do this stuff. Not like this.”

“The corporates do whatever turns a profit. Don’t let your prejudices blind you. Sure, they’ll burn down entire villages if it pays. But if having a human face is what cuts it, they’ll whip out a human face and put it on.”

“And you’re the human face?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s the work you want me to do? Something illegal?”

I pulled the cylindrical virus loader out of my pocket and passed it across to her. She took it in both hands and examined the decals with professional interest. As far as I was concerned, this was the first test. I’d pulled Elliott out of the store because that way she would be mine in a way no one supplied by Kawahara or skimmed off the street would ever be. But beyond that I had nothing to go on but instinct and Victor Elliott’s word that his wife was good, and I was feeling slightly queasy about the direction I’d let things go. Kawahara was right. Good Samaritan gestures can be expensive.

“So let’s see. You’ve got a first-generation Simultec virus here.” Scorn made her enunciate each syllable slowly. “Collector’s item, practically a relic. And you’ve got it in a state-of-the-art rapid deployment jacket with anti-locational casing. Why don’t you just cut the crap and tell me what’s really in here? You’re planning a run, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“What’s the target?”

“Virtual whorehouse. AI-managed.”

Elliott’s new lips parted in a soundless whistle. “Liberation run?”

“No. We’re installing.”

“Installing this?” She hefted the cylinder. “So what is it?”

“Rawling 4851.”

Elliott stopped hefting abruptly. “That’s not funny.”

“Wasn’t intended to be. That’s a dormant Rawling variant. Set for rapid deployment, as you so rightly observed. The activation codes are in my pocket. We are going to plant Rawling inside an AI whorehouse database, inject the codes and then weld the lid shut on it. There’s some peripheral stuff with monitoring systems, and some tidying up, but basically that’s the run.”

She gave me a curious look. “Are you some kind of religious nut?”

“No.” I smiled faintly. “It’s nothing like that. Can you do it?”

“Depends on the AI. Do you have the specs?”

“Not here.”

Elliott handed me back the deployment jacket. “I can’t tell you, then, can I?”

“That was what I was hoping you’d say.” I stowed the cylinder, satisfied. “How’s the new sleeve?”

“It’s OK. Any reason why I couldn’t have my own body back? I’ll be a lot faster in my own—”

“I know. Unfortunately it’s out of my hands. Did they tell you how long you’ve been in the store?”

“Four years, someone said.”

“Four and a half,” I said, glancing at the release forms I’d signed. “I’m afraid, in the meantime, someone took a shine to your sleeve and bought it.”

“Oh.” She was silent then. The shock of waking up inside someone else’s body for the first time is nothing compared to the sense of rage and betrayal you feel knowing that someone, somewhere, is walking around inside you. It’s like the discovery of infidelity, but at the intimacy range of rape. And like both those violations, there’s nothing you can do about it. You just get used to it.

When the silence stretched, I looked across at her still profile and cleared my throat.

“You sure you want to do this right now? Go home, I mean.”

She barely bothered to look at me. “Yes, I’m sure. I have a daughter and a husband that haven’t seen me in nearly five years. You think this —” she gestured down at herself “ — is going to stop me?”

“Fair enough.”

The lights of Ember appeared on the darkened mass of the coastline up ahead, and the limousine began its descent. I watched Elliott out of the corner of my eye and saw the nervousness setting in. Palms rubbing together in her lap, lower lip caught in her teeth at one corner of her new mouth. She released her breath with a small but perfectly audible noise.

“They don’t know I’m coming?” she asked.

“No.” I said shortly. I didn’t want to follow this line of conversation. “The contract is between you and JacSol West. It doesn’t concern your family.”

“But you arranged for me to see them. Why?”

“I’m a sucker for family reunions.” I fixed my gaze on the darkened bulk of the wrecked aircraft carrier below, and we landed in silence. The autolimo banked round to align itself with the local traffic systems and touched down a couple of hundred metres north of Elliott’s Data Linkage. We powered smoothly along the shore road under the successive holos of Anchana Salomao and parked immaculately opposite the narrow frontage. The dead monitor doorstop had been removed and the door was closed but there were lights burning in the glass-walled office at the back.

We climbed out and crossed the street. The closed door proved to be locked as well. Irene Elliott banged impatiently at it with the flat of one copper-skinned hand and someone sat up sluggishly in the back office. After a moment, a figure identifiable as Victor Elliott came down to the transmission floor, past the reception counter and towards us. His grey hair was untidy and his face swollen with sleep. He peered out at us with a lack of focus I’d seen before on datarats when they’d been cruising the stacks for too long. Jack-happy.

“Who the hell—” He stopped as he recognised me. “What the fuck do you want, grasshopper? And who’s this?”

“Vic?” Irene Elliott’s new throat sounded nine tenths closed. “Vic, it’s me.”

For a moment, Elliott’s eyes ran a volley between my face and the delicate Asian woman beside me, then what she had said smacked into him like a truck. He flinched visibly with the impact.

“Irene?” he whispered.

“Yes, it’s me,” she husked back. There were tears leaking down her cheeks. For moments they stared at each other through the glass, then Victor Elliott was fumbling with the locking mechanism of the door, shoving at the frame to get it out of the way, and the copper-skinned woman sagged across the threshold into his arms. They locked together in an embrace that looked set to break the new sleeve’s delicate bones. I took a mild interest in street lamps up and down the promenade.

Finally, Irene Elliott remembered me. She disengaged from her husband and twisted round, smearing the tears off her face with the heel of one hand and blinking bright-eyed at me.

“Can you—”

“Sure.” I said neutrally. “I’ll wait in the limo. See you in the morning.”

I caught one confused look from Victor Elliott as his wife bustled him inside, nodded good-naturedly at him and turned away to the parked limo and the beach. The door banged shut behind me. I felt in my pockets and came up with Ortega’s crumpled packet of cigarettes. Wandering past the limo to the iron railing, I kindled one of the bent and flattened cylinders and for once felt no sense that I was betraying something as the smoke curled into my lungs. Down on the beach, the surf was up, a chorus line of ghosts along the sand. I leaned on the railing and listened to the white noise of the waves as they broke, wondering why I could feel this much at peace with so much still unresolved. Ortega had not come back. Kadmin was still out there. Sarah was still under ransom, Kawahara still had me by the balls, and I still didn’t know why Bancroft had been killed.

And despite it all, there was space for this measure of quiet.

Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.

My gaze slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive bulk of the keeled-over Free Trade Enforcer was hard to make out. I imagined Mary Lou Hinchley hurtling down to her shattering impact with the unyielding water, then slipping broken beneath the swells to be cradled in wait for the sea’s predators. How long had she been out there before the currents contrived to carry what was left of her back to her own kind? How long had the darkness held her?

My thoughts skipped aimlessly, cushioned on the vague sense of acceptance and well-being. I saw Bancroft’s antique telescope, trained on the heavens and the tiny motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million pioneers and the deep-frozen embryo banks that might someday re-sleeve them on distant worlds, if the promise of the vaguely understood Martian astrogation charts bore fruit. If not they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

Raising an eyebrow at my own introspection, I heaved myself off the rail and glanced up at the holographic face above my head. Anchana Salomao had the night to herself. Her ghostly countenance gazed down at repeated intervals along the promenade, compassionate but uninvolved. Looking at the composed features, it was easy to see why Elizabeth Elliott had wanted so badly to attain those heights. I would have given a lot for that same detached composure. I shifted my attention to the windows above Elliott’s. The lights were on there, and as I watched a female form moved across one of them in naked silhouette. I sighed, spun the stub of my cigarette into the gutter and took refuge in the limo. Let Anchana keep the vigil. I called up channels at random on the entertainment deck and let the mindless barrage of images and sounds numb me into a kind of half-sleep. The night passed around the vehicle like cold mist and I suffered the vague sensation that I was drifting away from the lights of the Elliotts’ home, out to sea on snapped moorings with nothing between me and the horizon where there was a storm building …

A sharp rapping on the window beside my head shook me awake. I jerked round from the position I’d slumped into and saw Trepp standing patiently outside. She gestured at me to wind down the window, then leaned in with a grin.

“Kawahara was right about you. Sleeping in the car so this Dipper can get laid. You’ve got delusions of priesthood, Kovacs.”

“Shut up, Trepp,” I said irritably. “What time is it?”

“About five.” Her eyes swivelled up and left to consult the chip. “Five-sixteen. Be getting light soon.”

I struggled into a more upright position, tasting the residue of the single cigarette on my tongue. “What are you doing here?”

“Watching your back. We don’t want Kadmin taking you out before you can sell the goods to Bancroft, do we? Hey, is that the Wreckers?”

I followed her gaze forward to the entertainment deck, which was still screening some kind of sports coverage. Minuscule figures rushed backwards and forwards on a cross-hatched field, accompanied by a barely audible commentary. A brief collision between two players occasioned an insectile roar of cheering. I must have lowered the volume before I fell asleep. Switching the deck off, I saw in the ensuing dimness that Trepp had been right. The night had washed out to a soft blue gloom that was creeping over the buildings beside us like a bleach stain on the darkness.

“Not a fan, then?” Trepp nodded at the screen. “I didn’t use to be, but you live in New York long enough, you get the habit.”

“Trepp, how the fuck are you supposed to watch my back if your head is jammed in here watching screen?”

Trepp gave me a hurt look and withdrew her head. I climbed out of the limo and stretched in the chilly air. Overhead, Anchana Salomao was still resplendent, but the lights above Elliott’s were out.

“They stayed up until a couple of hours ago,” said Trepp helpfully. “I thought they might be running out on you, so I checked the back.”

I gazed up at the darkened windows. “Why are they going to run out on me? She hasn’t even heard what the terms of the deal are.”

“Well, involvement in an erasure offence tends to make most people nervous.”

“Not this woman,” I said, and wondered how much I believed myself.

Trepp shrugged. “Suit yourself. I still think you’re crazy, though. Kawahara’s got Dippers could do this stuff standing on their heads.”

Since my own reasons for not accepting Kawahara’s offer of technical support were almost entirely instinctive, I said nothing. The icy certainty of my revelations about Bancroft, Kawahara and Resolution 653 had faded with the previous day’s rush of set-up details for the run, and any sense of interlocking well-being had gone when Ortega left. All I had now was the gravity pull of mission time, the cold dawn and the sound of the waves on the shore. The taste of Ortega in my mouth and the warmth of her long-limbed body curled into mine was a tropical island in the chill, receding in my wake.

“You reckon there’s somewhere open this early that serves coffee,” I asked.

“Town this size?” Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. “Doubt it. But I saw a bank of dispensers on the way in. Got to be one that does coffee.”

“Machine coffee?” I curled my lip.

“Hey, what are you, a fucking connoisseur? You’re living in a hotel that’s just one big goddamned dispenser. Christ, Kovacs, this is the Machine Age. Didn’t anybody tell you that?”

“You got a point. How far is it?”

“Couple of klicks. We’ll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes up, she won’t look out the window and panic.”

“Sold.”

I followed Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of incense.

“This yours?”

“No, rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe. Why?”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”

Trepp started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Everything about the situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to Bancroft’s death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.

“You thought about what you’re going to do when this is over?”

“No,” I said morosely.

We found the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no better here than for Elliott’s Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups. She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.

“Want to drink it here?”

“Yeah, why not?”

We pulled the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn’t heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and watched the sea through the windscreen, immersed in a silence that was almost companionable.

“I tried for the Envoys once,” said Trepp suddenly.

I glanced sideways at her, curious. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they said. ”

I grunted. “Figures. You were never in the military, were you?”

“What do you think?” She was looking at me as if I’d just suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.

“Thought not. See, the thing is, they’re looking for borderline psychopathic tendencies. That’s why they do most of their recruiting from the military in the first place.”

Trepp looked put out. “I’ve got borderline psychopathic tendencies.”

“Yeah, I don’t doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those tendencies and a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They’re opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behaviour at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect Envoy material.”

“You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.”

For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.

“Yeah.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “Come on, let’s get back.”

As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.

When we pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.

“Better stay here,” I told Trepp as I climbed out. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Sure.”

“I guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.”

“I doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,” said Trepp cheerfully. “I’m better at this than you are.”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.” She raised her voice as I started to walk away. “And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that happen.”

She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.

“Who was that?” There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.

“Back-up,” I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. “Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a friend.”

“She may be your friend,” said Elliott bitterly. “She isn’t mine. None of you people are.”

I looked at her, then back out to sea. “Fair enough.”

Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.

“You know what’s happened to my daughter,” she said in a dead voice. “You knew all the time.”

I nodded.

“And you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.”

“Lots of men used her,” I said brutally. “She let herself be used. And I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.”

I heard Irene Elliott’s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. “She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.”

“You fuck.” She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.

I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. “I don’t work for Bancroft any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve swapped sides on that piece of shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice, you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that away.”

Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.

“You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?” she said finally. “You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?”

“Of course it does,” I said quietly.

“I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.”

I watched the waves. “That’s the deal,” I agreed.

More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. “Do you know how I feel?” she asked.

“No.”

“I slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.” A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. “I feel like I’ve been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.”

She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.

“I don’t know what I feel,” she said. “I don’t know what to feel.”

There was a lot I could have said. A lot that has been said, written, researched and disputed on the subject. Trite little magazine-length summings-up of the problems inherent in re-sleeving — How to make your partner love you again, in any body — trite, interminable psychological tracts — Some observations of secondary trauma in civil re-sleeving — even the sanctified manuals of the fucking Envoy Corps itself had something trite to say on the matter. Quotes, informed opinion, the ravings of the religious and the lunatic fringe. I could have thrown it all at her. I could have told her that what she was going through was quite normal for an unconditioned human. I could have told her that it would pass with time. That there were psychodynamic disciplines for dealing with it. That millions of other people survived it. I could even have told her that whichever God she owed nominal allegiance to was watching over her. I could have lied, I could have reasoned. It all would have meant about the same, because the reality was pain, and right now there was nothing anyone could do to take it away.

I said nothing.

The dawn gained on us, light strengthening on the closed-up frontages behind us. I glanced at the windows of Elliott’s Data Linkage.

“Victor?” I asked.

“Sleeping.” She wiped an arm across her face and snorted her tears back under control like badly cut amphetamine. “You say this is going to hurt Bancroft?”

“Yeah. In a subtle way, but yeah, it’ll hurt.”

“Installation run on an AI,” said Irene Elliott to me. “Installing an erasure penalty virus. Fucking over a known Meth. You know what the risks are? You know what you’re asking me to do?”

I turned to look her in the eye.

“Yes. I know.”

Her mouth clamped down on a tremor.

“Good. Then let’s do it.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The run took less than three days to set up. Irene Elliott turned stone-cold pro and made it happen that way.

In the limo back to Bay City, I laid it out for her. At first she was still crying inside, but as the detail mounted she clicked in, nodding, grunting, stopping me and backing me up on minor points I hadn’t made clear enough. I showed her Reileen Kawahara’s suggested hardware list and she OK’d about two thirds of it. The rest was just corporate padding and Kawahara’s advisors, in her opinion, didn’t know shit.

By the end of the journey she had it down. I could see the run already unfolding behind her eyes. The tears had dried on her face, forgotten, and her expression was clean purpose, locked-down hate for the man who had used her daughter, and an embodied will to revenge.

Irene Elliott was sold.

I rented an apartment in Oakland on the JacSol account. Elliott moved in and I left her there to catch up on some sleep. I stayed at the Hendrix, tried to do some sleeping of my own without much success and went back six hours later to find Elliott already prowling about the apartment.

I called the names and numbers Kawahara had given me and ordered the stuff Elliott had ticked. The crates arrived in hours. Elliott cracked them open and laid out the hardware across the floor of the apartment.

Together we went through Ortega’s list of virtual forums and worked it down to a shortlist of seven.

(Ortega had not turned up, or called me at the Hendrix.)

Mid afternoon on the second day, Elliott kicked on the primary modules and cruised each of the shortlist options. The list fell to three, and Elliott gave me a couple more items to go shopping for. Refinement software for the big kill.

By early evening the list was down to two, with Elliott writing up preliminary intrusion procedures for both. Whenever she hit a glitch, we backed up and compared relative merits.

By midnight we had our target. Elliott went to bed and slept eight solid hours. I went back to the Hendrix and brooded.

(Nothing from Ortega.)

I bought breakfast in the street and took it back to the apartment. Neither of us felt much like eating.

10.15 local time. Irene Elliott calibrated her equipment for the last time.

We did it.

Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.

A piece of piss, said Elliott.

I left her dismantling equipment and flew out to see Bancroft that afternoon.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“I find this exceptionally difficult to believe,” said Bancroft sharply. “Are you quite sure I went to this establishment?”

Below the balcony on the lawns of Suntouch House, Miriam Bancroft appeared to be constructing an enormous paper glider from instructions in a moving holoprojection. The white of the wings was so bright it hurt to look directly at them. As I leaned on the balcony rail, she shaded her eyes from the sun and looked up at me.

“The mall has security monitors,” I said, affecting disinterest. “Automated system, still operational after all these years. They’ve got footage of you walking right up to the door. You do know the name, don’t you?”

“Jack It Up? Of course, I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never actually used the place.”

I looked round without leaving the rail. “Really. You have something against virtual sex, then? You’re a reality purist?”

“No.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I have no problem with virtual formats, and as I believe I’ve told you already, I have used them on occasion. But this place Jack It Up is, how can I put it, hardly the elegant end of the market.”

“No,” I agreed. “And how would you classify Jerry’s Closed Quarters? An elegant whorehouse?”

“Hardly.”

“But that didn’t stop you going there to play cabin games with Elizabeth Elliott, did it? Or has it gone downhill recently, because—”

“All right.” The smile in the voice had turned to a grimace. “You’ve made your point. Don’t labour it.”

I stopped watching Miriam Bancroft and came back to my seat. My iced cocktail was still standing on the little table between us. I picked it up.

“I’m glad you take the point,” I said, stirring the drink. “Because it’s taken a lot of pain to sort through this mess. I’ve been abducted, tortured and nearly killed in the process. A woman called Louise, not much older than your precious daughter Naomi, was killed because she got in the way. So if you don’t like my conclusions, you can go fuck yourself.”

I raised my glass to him across the table.

“Spare me the melodrama, Kovacs, and sit down for God’s sake. I’m not rejecting what you say, I’m just questioning it.”

I sat and levelled a finger at him. “No. You’re squirming. This thing’s pointing up a part of your character you despise for its appetites. You’d rather not know what kind of software you were accessing that night over at Jack It Up, in case it’s even more grubby than you already imagine. You’re being forced to confront the part of yourself that wants to come in your wife’s face, and you don’t like it.”

“There will be no need to revisit that particular conversation,” said Bancroft stiffly. He steepled his fingers. “You are aware, I suppose, that the security camera footage you base your assumptions on could be faked very easily by anyone with access to newstape images of me.”

“Yes, I am.” I’d watched Irene Elliott do exactly that only forty-eight hours previously. Easy wasn’t the word. After the virus run, it had been like asking a concert total body dancer to encore with stretching exercises. I’d barely had time to smoke a cigarette while she did it. “But why would anyone bother? A distractor, to tinsel me off course, assuming of course that some wrong turn would have me sniffing around the ruins of a derelict Richmond mall in the first place. Come on, Bancroft, get real. The fact I was out there in the first place proves the validity of that footage. And in any case, those images aren’t the basis for anything. They just confirm what I’d already worked out, which is that you killed yourself to avoid viral contamination of your remote stack.”

“That is a quite remarkable leap of intuition to make after only a six-day investigation.”

“Blame Ortega,” I said lightly, though Bancroft’s enduring suspicion in the face of unpleasant facts was beginning to worry me. I hadn’t realised he would take so much wearing down. “She’s the one who put me onto the right track. She wouldn’t wear the murder theory from the start. She kept telling me you were too tough and smart a Meth motherfucker to let anyone kill you. Quote, unquote. And that brought me back to the conversation we had here a week ago. You told me I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I was, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Envoys have total recall, those were your exact words.”

I paused and set down my glass, searching for the fine edge of deceit that always lies right up against the truth.

“All this time, I’ve been working on the assumption you didn’t pull the trigger because you weren’t the type to commit suicide. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary because of that single assumption. The electron-tight security you’ve got here, the lack of any traces of intrusion, the handprint lock on the safe.”

“And Kadmin. And Ortega.”

“Yeah, that didn’t help. But we straightened out the Ortega angle, and Kadmin, well, I’m coming to Kadmin in a moment. The point is, as long as I equated pulling that trigger with suicide, I was jammed. But then, what if those two acts were not synonymous. What if you’d torched your own stack, not because you wanted to die but for some other reason. Once I let myself think that, the rest was easy. What were the possible reasons that you’d do it? It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon. No matter how much you might know intellectually that you’ll be re-sleeved with the bulk of your mind intact, the person you are at that moment is going to die. You had to have been desperate to pull that trigger. It had to have been something,” I smiled faintly, “life-threatening. Given that assumption, it didn’t take long to come up with the virus scenario. Then all I had to do was work out how and where you’d been infected.”

Bancroft shifted uncomfortably at the word, and I felt a stab of elation run through me. Virus! Even Meths were afraid of the invisible corroder, because even they, with their remote storage and their clones on ice, were not immune. Viral Strike! Stack down! Bancroft was off balance.

“Now, it’s virtually impossible to snug something as complex as a virus into a disconnected target, so you had to have been jacked in somewhere along the line. I thought of the PsychaSec facility, but they’re sewed up too tight. And it couldn’t have been before you went to Osaka for the same reasons; even dormant, the virus would have tripped every alarm at PsychaSec when they set up the ’cast. It had to have been some time in the last forty-eight hours, because your remote stack was uncontaminated. I knew from talking to your wife that the likelihood was you’d been out on the town when you got back from Osaka, and on your own admission that could quite possibly include some kind of virtual whorehouse. After that, it was just a matter of doing the rounds. I tried a half dozen places before I hit Jack It Up, and when I punched up their inquiries the viral contam siren nearly blew my phone out. That’s the thing about AIs — they write their own security and it’s second to none. Jack It Up is sealed off so tight it’ll take the police months to tunnel in and see what’s left of the core processors.”

I felt a vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We’d chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we’d planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environment so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on Ortega’s list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega’s lip as she read the software listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.

I missed Ortega.

“What about Kadmin?”

“It’s hard to know, but I’m betting whoever infected Jack It Up in the first place probably hired Kadmin to silence me and make sure the whole thing stayed covered up. After all, without me stirring things up, how long would it have been before anyone realised Jack had been iced? Can’t see any of its potential clients calling the police when they got refused entry, can you?”

Bancroft gave me a hard look, but I knew from his next words that the battle was almost over. The balance of belief was tipping towards me. Bancroft was going to buy the package. “You’re saying the virus was introduced deliberately. That someone murdered this machine?”

I shrugged. “It seems likely. Jack It Up operated on the margins of local law. A lot of its software appears to have been impounded by the Felony Transmission department at one time or another, which suggests that it had regular dealings with the criminal world in one form or another. It is possible that it made some enemies. On Harlan’s World the yakuza have been known to perform viral execution on machines judged to have betrayed them. I don’t know if that happens here, or who’d have the stack muscle to do it. But I do know that whoever hired Kadmin used an AI to pull him out of police storage. You can verify that with Fell Street, if you like.”

Bancroft was silent. I watched him for a moment, seeing the belief sink in. Watching the process as he convinced himself. I could almost see what he was seeing. Himself, hunched over in an autocab as the sordid guilt over what he had been doing at Jack It Up merged sickeningly with the horror of the contamination warnings sirening in his head. Infected! Himself, Laurens Bancroft, stumbling through the dark towards the lights of Suntouch House and the only surgery that could save him. Why had he left the cab so far from home? Why had he not wakened anybody for help? These were questions I no longer needed to answer for him. Bancroft believed. His guilt and self-disgust made him believe, and he would find his own answers to reinforce the horrific images in his head.

And by the time Transmission Felony cut a safe path through to Jack It Up’s core processors, Rawling 4851 would have eaten out every scrap of coherent intellect the machine ever had. There would be nothing left to dispute the carefully constructed lie I’d told for Kawahara.

I got up and went back to the balcony, wondering if I should allow myself a cigarette. It had been tough to lock down the need the last couple of days. Watching Irene Elliott at work had been nerve-racking. I forced my hand to relinquish the packet in my breast pocket, and gazed down at Miriam Bancroft, who by now was well on the way to completing her glider. When she looked up, I glanced away along the balcony rail and saw Bancroft’s telescope, still pointed seaward at the same shallow angle. Idle curiosity made me lean across and look at the figures for angle of elevation. The finger marks in the dust were still there.

Dust?

Bancroft’s unconsciously arrogant words came back to me. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago.

I stared at the finger marks, mesmerised by my own thoughts. Someone had been looking through this lens a lot more recently than two hundred years ago, but they hadn’t kept at it very long. From the minimal displacement of dust it looked as if the programming keys had only been used once. On a sudden impulse, I moved up to the telescope and followed the line of its barrel out over the sea to where visibility blurred in the haze. That far out, the angle of elevation would give you a view of empty air a couple of kilometres up. I bent to the eye-piece as if in a dream. A grey speck showed up in the centre of my field of vision, blurring in and out of focus as my eyes struggled with the surrounding expanses of blue. Lifting my head and checking the control pad again, I found a max amp key and thumbed it impatiently. When I looked again, the grey speck had sprung into hard focus, filling most of the lens. I breathed out slowly, feeling as if I’d had the cigarette after all.

The airship hung like a bottleback, gorged after feeding frenzy. It must have been several hundred metres long, with swellings along the lower half of the hull and protruding sections that looked like landing pads. I knew what I was looking at even before Ryker’s neurachem reeled in the last increments of magnification I needed to make out the sun-burnished lettering on the side that spelled it out; Head in the Clouds.

I stepped back from the telescope, breathing deeply, and as my eyes slid back to normal focus I saw Miriam Bancroft again. She was standing amidst the parts of her glider, staring up at me. I almost flinched as our eyes met. Dropping a hand to the telescope programme pad, I did what Bancroft should have done before he blew his own head off. I hit memory-wipe, and the digits that had held the airship available for viewing for the last seven weeks blinked out.

I had felt like many kinds of fool in my life, but never quite as completely as I did at that moment. A first-order clue had been waiting there in the lens for anyone to come along and pick it up. Missed by the police in their haste, disinterest and lack of close knowledge, missed by Bancroft because the telescope was so much a part of his world view it was too close to give a second glance to, but I had no such excuses. I had stood here a week ago and seen the two mismatched pieces of reality clash against each other. Bancroft claiming not to have used the telescope in centuries almost at the same moment that I saw the evidence of recent use in the disturbed dust. And Miriam Bancroft had hammered it home less than an hour later when she said, While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground. I’d thought of the telescope then, my mind had rebelled at the downloading-induced sluggishness and tried to tell me. Shaky and off balance, new to the planet and the flesh I was wearing, I had ignored it. The download dues had taken their toll.

Below on the lawn, Miriam Bancroft was still watching me. I backed away from the telescope, composed my features and returned to my seat. Absorbed by the images I had faked into his head, Bancroft seemed scarcely to know that I had moved.

But now my own mind was in overdrive, ripping along avenues of thought that had opened with Ortega’s list and the Resolution 653 T-shirt. The quiet resignation I had felt in Ember two days ago, the impatience to sell my lies to Bancroft, get Sarah out and be finished were all gone. Everything tied in to Head in the Clouds, ultimately even Bancroft. It was almost axiomatic that he had gone there the night he died. Whatever had happened to him there was the key to his reasons for dying here at Suntouch House a few hours later. And to the truth that Reileen Kawahara was so desperate to hide.

Which meant I had to go there myself.

I picked up my glass and swallowed some of the drink, not tasting it. The sound it made seemed to wake Bancroft from his daze. He looked up, almost as if he was surprised to see me still there.

“Please excuse me, Mr Kovacs. This is a lot to take in. After all the scenarios I had envisaged, this is one I had not even considered and it is so simple. So blindingly obvious.” His voice held a wealth of self-disgust. “The truth is that I did not need an Envoy investigator, I simply needed a mirror to hold up to myself.”

I set down my glass and got to my feet.

“You’re leaving?”

“Well, unless you have any further questions. Personally, I think you still need some time. I’ll be around. You can get me at the Hendrix.”

On my way out along the main hall, I came face to face with Miriam Bancroft. She was dressed in the same coveralls she’d been wearing in the garden, hair caught up in an expensive-looking static clip. In one hand she was carrying a trellised plant urn, held up like a lantern on a stormy night. Long strands of flowering martyrweed trailed from the trellis-work.

“Have you—” she started.

I stepped closer to her, inside the range of the martyrweed. “I’m through,” I said. “I’ve taken this as far as I can stomach. Your husband has an answer, but it isn’t the truth. I hope that satisfies you, as well as Reileen Kawahara.”

At the name, her mouth parted in shock. It was the only reaction that got through her control, but it was the confirmation I needed. I felt the need to be cruel come bubbling insistently up from the dark, rarely visited caverns of anger that served me as emotional reserves.

“I never figured Reileen for much of a lay, but maybe like attracts like. I hope she’s better between the legs than she is on a tennis court.”

Miriam Bancroft’s face whitened and I readied myself for the slap. But instead, she offered me a strained smile.

“You are mistaken, Mr Kovacs,” she said.

“Yeah. I often am.” I stepped around her. “Excuse me.” I walked away down the hall without looking back.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The building was a stripped shell, an entire floor of warehouse conversion with perfectly identical arched windows along each wall and white painted support pillars every ten metres in each direction. The ceiling was drab grey, the original building blocks exposed and cross-laced with heavy ferrocrete load-bearers. The floor was raw concrete, perfectly poured. Hard light fell in through the windows, unsoftened by any drifting motes of dust. The air was crisp and cold.

Roughly in the middle of the building, as near as I could judge, stood a simple steel table and two uncomfortable-looking chairs, arranged as if for a game of chess. On one of the chairs sat a tall man with a tanned, salon-handsome face. He was beating a rapid tattoo on the table top, as if listening to jazz on an internal receiver. Incongruously, he was dressed in a blue surgeon’s smock and surgery slippers.

I stepped out from behind one of the pillars and crossed the even concrete to the table. The man in the smock looked up at me and nodded, unsurprised.

“Hello, Miller,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”

“My lawyers are going to have me out of here an hour after you charge me,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “If that. You’ve made a big mistake here, pal.”

He went back to beating out the jazz rhythm on the table top. His gaze drifted out over my shoulder, as if he’d just seen something interesting through one of the arched windows. I smiled.

“A big mistake,” he repeated to himself.

Very gently, I reached out and flattened his hand onto the table top to stop the tapping. His gaze jerked back in as if caught on a hook.

“The fuck do you think—”

He pulled his hand free and surged to his feet, but shut up abruptly when I stiff-armed him back into his seat. For a moment, it looked as if he might try to charge me, but the table was in the way. He stayed seated, glaring murderously at me and no doubt remembering what his lawyers had told him about the laws of virtual holding.

“You’ve never been arrested, have you Miller?” I asked conversationally. When he made no reply, I took the chair opposite him, turned it around and seated myself astride it. I took out my cigarettes and shook one free. “Well, that statement is still grammatically valid. You’re not under arrest now. The police don’t have you.”

I saw the first flicker of fear on his face.

“Let’s recap events a little, shall we? You probably think that after you got shot, I lit out and the police came to pick up the pieces. That they found enough to rack the clinic up on, and now you’re waiting on due process. Well, it’s partially true. I did leave, and the police did come to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately there’s one piece that was no longer there to pick up, because I took it with me. Your head.” I lifted one hand to demonstrate graphically. “Burned off at the neck and carried out, stack intact, under my jacket.”

Miller swallowed. I bent my head and inhaled the cigarette to life.

“Now the police think that your head was disintegrated by an overcharged blaster on wide beam.” I blew smoke across the table at him. “I charred the neck and chest deliberately to give that impression. With a bit of time and a good forensic expert they might have decided otherwise, but unfortunately your still intact colleagues at the clinic threw them out before they could start a proper investigation. It’s understandable, given what they were likely to find. I’m sure you would have done the same. However, what this means is that not only are you not under arrest, you are in fact presumed Really Dead. The police aren’t looking for you and nor is anybody else.”

“What do you want?” Miller sounded abruptly hoarse.

“Good. I can see you appreciate the implications of your situation. Only natural for a man of your … Profession, I suppose. What I want is detailed information about Head in the Clouds.”

“What?”

My voice hardened. “You heard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I sighed. This was to be expected. I’d encountered it before, wherever Reileen Kawahara appeared in the equation. The terrified loyalty she inspired would have humbled her old yakuza bosses in Fission City.

“Miller, I don’t have time to fuck about with you. The Wei Clinic has ties to an airborne whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. You probably liaised mostly through an enforcer called Trepp, out of New York. The woman you’re dealing with ultimately is Reileen Kawahara. You will have been to Head in the Clouds, because I know Kawahara and she always invites her associates into the lair, first to demonstrate an attitude of invulnerability, and second to offer some messy object lesson in the value of loyalty. You ever see something like that?”

From his eyes, I could see that he had.

“OK, that’s what I know. Your cue. I want you to draw me a rough blueprint of Head in the Clouds. Include as much detail as you can remember. A surgeon like you ought to have a good eye for detail. I also want to know what the procedures are for visiting the place. Security coding, minimum reasons to justify you visiting, stuff like that. Plus some idea of what the security’s like inside the place.”

“You think I’ll just tell you.”

I shook my head. “No, I think I’m going to have to torture you first. But I’ll get it out of you, one way or the other. Your decision.”

“You won’t do it.”

“I will do it,” I said mildly. “You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am, or why we’re having this conversation. You see, the night before I turned up and blew your face open, your clinic put me through two days of virtual interrogation. Sharyan religious police routine. You’ve probably vetted the software, you know what it’s like. As far as I’m concerned, we’re still in payback time.”

There was a long pause in which I saw the belief creeping into his face. He looked away.

“If Kawahara found out that—”

“Forget Kawahara. By the time I’m finished with Kawahara, she’ll be a street memory. Kawahara is going down.”

He hesitated, brought to the brink, then shook his head. He looked up at me and I knew I was going to have to do it. I lowered my head and forced myself to remember Louise’s body, opened from throat to groin on the autosurgeon’s table with her internal organs arranged in dishes around her head like appetisers. I remembered the copper-skinned woman I had been in the stifling loft space, the grip of the tape as they pinned me to the naked wooden floor, the shrill dinning of agony behind my temples as they mutilated my flesh. The screaming and the two men who had drunk it in like perfume.

“Miller.” I found I had to clear my throat and start again. “You want to know something about Sharya?”

Miller said nothing. He was going into some kind of controlled breathing pattern. Steeling himself for the upcoming unpleasantness. This was no Warden Sullivan that could be punched around in a seedy corner and scared into spilling what he knew. Miller was tough, and probably conditioned too. You don’t work directorship in a place like Wei and not option some of the available tech for yourself.

“I was there, Miller. Winter of 217, Zihicce. Hundred and twenty years ago. You probably weren’t around then, but I reckon you’ve read about it in history books. After the bombardments, we went in as regime engineers.” As I talked, the tension began to ease out of my throat. I gestured with my cigarette. “That’s a Protectorate euphemism for crush all resistance and install a puppet government. Of course, to do that, you’ve got to do some interrogating, and we didn’t have much in the way of fancy software to do it with. So, we had to get inventive.”

I stubbed out my cigarette on the table and stood up.

“Someone I want you to meet,” I said, looking past him.

Miller turned to follow my gaze and froze. Coalescing in the shadow of the nearest support pillar was a tall figure in a blue surgical smock. As we both watched, the features became clear enough to recognise, though Miller must have guessed what was coming as soon as he saw the predominant colour of the clothing. He wheeled back to me, mouth open to say something, but instead his eyes fixed on something behind me and his face turned pale. I glanced over my shoulder to where the other figures were materialising, all with the same tall build and tanned complexion, all in blue surgical smocks. When I looked back again, Miller’s expression seemed to have collapsed.

“File overprint,” I confirmed. “Most places in the Protectorate this isn’t even illegal. Course, when it’s a Machine Error, it’s not usually so extreme, just a double-up probably, and the retrieval systems yank you out in a few hours anyway. Makes a good story. How I met myself, and what I learned. Good dating conversation, maybe something to tell your kids. You got kids, Miller?”

“Yes.” His throat worked. “Yes, I have.”

“Yeah? They know what you do for a living?”

He said nothing. I took a phone from my pocket and dumped it on the table. “When you’ve had enough, let me know. It’s a direct line. Just press send, and start talking into it. Head in the Clouds. Relevant detail.”

Miller looked at the phone and then back at me. Around us the doppelgängers had almost assumed full substance. I lifted a hand in farewell.

“Enjoy yourself.”

I surfaced in the Hendrix’s virtual recreation studio, cradled in one of the spacious participant racks. A digital time display on the far wall said I had been under less than a full minute, of which my real time in virtual probably only accounted for a couple of seconds. It was the processing in and out that took the time. I lay still for a while, thinking about what I had just done. Sharya was a long time ago, and a part of me I liked to think I’d left behind. Miller wasn’t the only person meeting himself today.

Personal, I reminded myself, but I knew it wasn’t this time. This time I wanted something. The grudge was just a convenience.

“The subject is showing signs of psychological stress,” said the Hendrix. “A preliminary model suggests the condition will extend into personality breakdown in less than six virtual days. At current ratios, this equates to approximately thirty-seven minutes real time.”

“Good.” Unpinning the trodes and snapping back the hypnophones, I climbed out of the angled rack. “Call me if he cracks. Did you lift that monitor footage I asked you for?”

“Yes. Do you wish to view it?”

I glanced at the clock again. “Not now. I’ll wait for Miller. Any problems with the security systems?”

“None. The data was not secured.”

“How very careless of Director Nyman. How much is there?”

“The relevant clinic footage is twenty-eight minutes, fifty-one seconds. To track the employee from departure as you suggested will take considerably longer.”

“How much longer?”

“It is impossible to give an estimate at this time. Sheryl Bostock departed the PsychaSec facility in a twenty-year-old military surplus microcopter. I do not believe that ancillary staff at the facility are well paid.”

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Possibly because—”

“Skip it. It was a figure of speech. What about the microcopter?”

“The navigation system has no traffic net access, and so is invisible in traffic control data. I shall have to rely on the vehicle’s appearance on visual monitors in its flight path.”

“You’re talking about satellite tracking?”

“As a last resort, yes. I’d would prefer to begin with lower level and ground-based systems. They are likely to be more accessible. Satellite security is usually of high resilience and breaching such systems is often both difficult and dangerous.”

“Whatever. Let me know when you’ve got something.”

I wandered around the studio, brooding. The place was deserted, most of the racks and other machines shrouded in protective plastic. In the dim light provided by the illuminum tiles on the walls, their ambiguous bulk could equally have belonged to a fitness centre or a torture chamber.

“Can we have some real lights in here?”

Brightness sprang out across the studio from high-intensity bulbs recessed into the low ceiling. I saw that the walls were postered with images drawn from some of the virtual environments on offer. Dizzying mountainscapes seen through racing goggles, impossibly beautiful men and women in smoky bars, huge savage animals leaping directly at sniperscope sights. The images had been cut directly from format into hologlass and when you stared at them they seemed to come alive. I found a low bench and sat on it, remembering wistfully the bite of smoke in my lungs from the format I had just left.

“Although the program I am running is not technically illegal,” said the Hendrix tentatively, “it is an offence to hold a digitised human personality against that person’s will.”

I glanced bleakly at the ceiling. “What’s the matter, you getting cold feet?”

“The police have already subpoenaed my memory once, and they may charge me with compliance at your request to freeze Felipe Miller’s head. They will also want to know what has happened to his stack.”

“Yeah, and there’s got to be some hotel charter somewhere says you don’t let people into your guests’ rooms without authorisation, but you did that, didn’t you?”

“It is not a criminal offence, unless criminality results from the breach of security. What resulted from Miriam Bancroft’s visit was not criminality.”

I jerked another glance upwards. “You trying to be funny?”

“Humour is not within the parameters I currently operate, though I can install it at request.”

“No, thanks. Listen, why can’t you just blank the areas of memory you don’t want anyone looking up later? Delete them?”

“I have a series of inbuilt blocks that prevent me from taking such action.”

“That’s too bad. I thought you were an independent entity.”

“Any synthetic intelligence can only be independent within the boundaries of the UN regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human.”

“You let me worry about the police,” I said, affecting a confidence that had been ebbing steadily since Ortega disappeared. “With a little luck, that evidence won’t even be presented. And if it is, well, you’re already in to the depth of compliance, so what have you got to lose?”

“What have I got to gain?” asked the machine soberly.

“Continued guest status. I’m staying here until this thing is finished, and depending on what data I get out of Miller, that could be quite a while.”

There was a quiet broken only by the humming of air conditioning systems before the Hendrix spoke again.

“If sufficiently serious charges accrue against me,” it said, “the UN regulatory charter may be invoked directly. Under section 14a, I can be punished with either Capacity Reduction or, in extreme cases, Shutdown.” There was another, briefer hesitation. “Once shut down, it is unlikely that I would be re-enabled by anybody.”

Machine idiolect. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the wall. “You want out, now’d be a good time to tell me.”

“I do not want out, Takeshi Kovacs. I merely wished to acquaint you with the considerations involved in this course of action.”

“OK. I’m acquainted.”

I glanced up at the digital display and watched the next full minute turn over. Another four hours for Miller. In the routine the Hendrix was running, he would not get hungry or thirsty, or have to attend to any other bodily functions. Sleep was possible, although the machine would not allow it to become a withdrawal coma. All Miller had to contend with, apart from the discomfort of his surroundings, was himself. In the end it was that which would drive him insane.

I hoped.

None of the Right Hand of God martyrs we put through the routine had lasted more than fifteen minutes real time, but they had been flesh and blood warriors, fanatically brave in their own arena but totally unversed in virtual techniques. They had also been endowed with a strong religious dogma that permitted them to commit numerous atrocities so long as it held, but when it went, it went like a dam wall and their own resultant self-loathing had eaten them alive. Miller’s mind would be nowhere near as simplistic, nor as initially self-righteous, and his conditioning would be good.

Outside, it would be getting dark. I watched the clock, and forced myself not to smoke. Tried, with less success, not to think about Ortega.

Ryker’s sleeve was getting to be a pain in the balls.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Miller cracked at twenty-one minutes. It didn’t need the Hendrix to tell me, the datalink terminal that I had jacked into the virtual phone suddenly sputtered to life and started chittering out hardcopy. I got up and went over to look at what was coming out. The program was supposed to tidy up what Miller was saying so it read sanely, but even after processing, the transcript was pretty incoherent. Miller had let himself slide close to the edge before he’d given in. I scanned the first few lines and saw the beginnings of what I wanted emerging from the gibberish.

“Wipe the file replicants,” I told the hotel, crossing rapidly back to the rack. “Give him a couple of hours to calm down, then jack me in.”

“Connection time will exceed one minute, which at current ratio is three hours fifty-six minutes. Do you wish a construct installed until you can be delivered to the format.”

“Yeah, that would be—” I stopped halfway through settling the hypnophones around my head. “Wait a minute, how good’s the construct?”

“I am an Emmerson series mainframe synthetic intelligence,” said the hotel reproachfully. “At maximum fidelity, my virtual constructs are indistinguishable from the projected consciousness they are based on. Subject has now been alone for one hour and twenty-seven minutes. Do you wish the construct installed?”

“Yes.” The words gave me an eerie feeling even as I was speaking them. “In fact, let it do the whole interrogation.”

“Installation complete.”

I snapped the phones back again and sat on the edge of the rack, thinking about the implications of a second me inside the Hendrix’s vast processing system. It was something that I had never — as far as I knew — been subject to in the Corps, and I had certainly never trusted any machine enough to do it once I was operating in a criminal context.

I cleared my throat. “This construct. Will it know what it is?”

“Initially, no. It will know everything that you knew when you exited from the format and no more, though, given your intelligence, it will deduce the facts eventually unless otherwise programmed. Do you wish a blocking subprogramme installed?”

“No,” I said quickly.

“Do you wish me to maintain the format indefinitely?”

“No. Close it down when I, I mean when he, when the construct decides we’ve got enough.” Another thought struck me. “Does the construct carry that virtual locator they wired into me?”

“At present, yes. I am running the same mirror code to mask the signal as I did with your own consciousness. However, since the construct is not directly connected to your cortical stack, I can subtract the signal if you wish.”

“Is it worth the trouble?”

“The mirror code is easier to administer,” the hotel admitted.

“Leave it, then.”

There was an uncomfortable bubble sitting in the pit of my stomach at the thought of editing my virtual self. It reflected far too closely on the arbitrary measures that the Kawaharas and Bancrofts took in the real world with real people. Raw power, unleashed.

“You have a virtual format call,” announced the Hendrix.

I looked up, surprised and hopeful.

“Ortega?”

“Kadmin,” said the hotel diffidently. “Will you accept the call?”

The format was a desert. Reddish dust and sandstone underfoot, sky nailed down from horizon to horizon, cloudless blue. Sun and a pale three-quarter moon hung high and sterile above a distant range of shelf-like mountains. The temperature was a jarring chill, making a mockery of the sun’s blinding glare.

The Patchwork Man stood waiting for me. In the empty landscape he looked like a graven image, a rendering of some savage desert spirit. He grinned when he saw me.

“What do you want, Kadmin? If you’re looking for influence with Kawahara I’m afraid you’re out of luck. She’s pissed off with you beyond repair.”

A flicker of amusement crossed Kadmin’s face and he shook his head slowly, as if to dismiss Kawahara from the proceedings completely. His voice was deep and melodic.

“You and I have unfinished business,” he said.

“Yeah, you fucked up twice in a row.” I ladled scorn into my voice. “What do you want, a third shot at it?”

Kadmin shrugged his massive shoulders. “Well, third time lucky, they say. Allow me to show you something.”

He gestured in the air beside him and a flap of the desert backdrop peeled away from a blackness beyond. The screen it formed sizzled and sprang to life. Close focus on sleeping features. Ortega’s. A fist snapped closed around my heart. Her face was grey and bruised-looking under the eyes. A thin thread of drool ran from one corner of her mouth.

Stunbolt at close range.

The last time I’d caught a full stun charge was courtesy of the Millsport Public Order police and, although the Envoy conditioning had forced me back to a kind of consciousness in about twenty minutes, I hadn’t been up to much more than shivering and twitching for the next couple of hours. There was no telling how long ago Ortega had been hit, but she looked bad.

“It’s a simple exchange,” said Kadmin. “You for her. I’m parked around the block on a street called Minna. I’ll be there for the next five minutes. Come alone, or I blow her stack out the back of her neck. Your choice.”

The desert fizzled out on the Patchwork Man smiling.

I made the two corners of the block and Minna in a minute flat. Two weeks without smoking was like a newly discovered compartment at the bottom of Ryker’s lungs.

It was a sad little street of sealed-up frontages and vacant lots. There was no one around. The only vehicle in sight was a matt grey cruiser waiting at the curb, lights on in the gathering gloom of early evening. I approached hesitantly, hand on the butt of the Nemex.

When I was five metres from the rear of the cruiser, a door opened and Ortega’s body was pitched out. She hit the street like a sack and stayed down, crumpled. I cleared the Nemex as she hit and circled warily round towards her, eyes fixed on the car.

A door cracked open on the far side and Kadmin climbed out. So soon after seeing him in virtual, it took a moment to click. Tall, dark-skinned, the hawk visage I had last seen dreaming in fluid behind the glass of the Panama Rose’s re-sleeving tank. The Right Hand of God martyr clone, and hiding beneath its flesh, the Patchwork Man.

I drew a bead on his throat with the Nemex. Across the width of the cruiser and very little more, whatever else happened afterwards, it would take his head off and probably rip the stack out of his spine.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Kovacs. This vehicle is armoured.”

I shook my head. “Only interested in you. Just stay exactly where you are.”

With the Nemex still extended, my eyes still fixed on the target area above his Adam’s apple, I lowered myself into a crouch beside Ortega and reached down to her face with the fingers of my free hand. Warm breath stirred around my fingertips. I felt blind towards the neck for a pulse and found it, weak but stable.

“The lieutenant is alive and well,” said Kadmin impatiently. “Which is more than we shall be able to say for either of you in two minutes’ time if you don’t put down that cannon and get into the car.”

Beneath my hand, Ortega’s face moved. Her head rolled and I caught her scent. Her half of the pheromonal match that had locked us both into this in the first place. Her voice was weak and slurred from the stun charge.

“Don’t do this, Kovacs. You don’t owe me.”

I stood up and lowered the Nemex slightly.

“Back off. Fifty metres up the street. She can’t walk and you could cut us both down before I can carry her two metres. You back off. I walk to the car.” I wagged the gun. “Ortega keeps the hardware. It’s all I’m carrying.”

I lifted my jacket to demonstrate. Kadmin nodded. He ducked back inside the cruiser and the vehicle rolled smoothly down the block. I watched it until it stopped, then knelt beside Ortega again. She struggled to sit up.

“Kovacs, don’t. They’re going to kill you.”

“Yes, they’re certainly going to try.” I took her hand and folded it around the butt of the Nemex. “Listen, I’m all finished here in any case. Bancroft’s sold, Kawahara will keep her word and freight Sarah back. I know her. What you’ve got to do is bust her for Mary Lou Hinchley and get Ryker off stack. Talk to the Hendrix. I left you a few loose ends there.”

From down the street, the cruiser sounded its collision alert impatiently. In the gathering gloom of the street, it sounded mournful and ancient, like the hoot of a dying elephant ray on Hirata’s Reef. Ortega looked up out of her stunblasted face as if she was drowning there.

“You—”

I smiled and rested a hand against her cheek.

“Got to get to the next screen, Kristin. That’s all.”

Then I stood up, locked my hands together on the nape of my neck, and walked towards the car.