Altered Carbon

Chapter Thirty-Five

In the cruiser, I was sandwiched between two impressive musclemen who, with a bit of cosmetic surgery to mess up their clone good looks, could have hired out as freak fighters on bulk alone. We climbed sedately away from the street and banked around. I tipped a glance out of the side window and saw Ortega below, trying to prop herself upright.

“I cream the Sia cunt?” the driver wanted to know. I tensed myself for a forward leap.

“No.” Kadmin turned in his seat to look at me. “No, I gave Mr Kovacs my word. I believe the lieutenant and I will cross paths again in the not too distant future.”

“Too bad for you,” I told him unconvincingly, and then they shot me with the stunner.

When I woke up, there was a face watching me from close up. The features were vague, pale and blurred, like some kind of theatrical mask. I blinked, shivered and hauled in focus. The face drew back, still doll-like in its lack of resolution. I coughed.

“Hello, Carnage.”

The crude features sketched a smile. “Welcome back to the Panama Rose, Mr Kovacs.”

I sat up shakily on a narrow metal bunk. Carnage stepped back to give me space, or just to stay out of grabbing range. Smeared vision gave me a cramped cabin in grey steel behind him. I swung my feet to the floor and stopped abruptly. The nerves in my arms and legs were still jangling from the stunbolt and there was a sick, trembling feeling in the pit of my stomach. All things considered, it felt like the results of a very dilute beam. Or maybe a series. I glanced down at myself and saw that I was dressed in a heavy canvas gi the colour of quarried granite. On the floor beside the bunk were a pair of matching spacedeck slippers and a belt. I began to get an unpleasant inkling of what Kadmin had planned.

Behind Carnage, the door of the cabin opened. A tall, blonde woman, apparently in her early forties, stepped in, followed by another synthetic, this one smoothly modern-looking apart from a gleaming steel direct interface tool in place of a left hand.

Carnage busied himself with introductions.

“Mr Kovacs, may I present Pernilla Grip of Combat Broadcast Distributors, and her technical assistant Miles Mech. Pernilla, Miles, I’d like to present Takeshi Kovacs, our surrogate Ryker for tonight. Congratulations, by the way, Kovacs. At the time I was utterly convinced, despite the unlikelihood of Ryker making it off stack for the next two hundred years. All part of the Envoy technique, I understand.”

“Not really. Ortega was the convincing factor. All I did was let you talk. You’re good at that.” I nodded at Carnage’s companions. “Did I hear the word broadcasting? I thought that went against the creed. Didn’t you perform radical surgery on a journalist for that particular crime?”

“Different products, Mr Kovacs. Different products. To broadcast a scheduled fight would indeed be a breach of our creed. But this is not a scheduled fight, this is a humiliation bout.” Carnage’s surface charm froze over on the phrase. “With a different and necessarily very limited live audience, we are forced to make up for the loss in revenue somehow. There are a great many networks who are anxious to get their hands on anything that comes out of the Panama Rose. This is the effect our reputation has, but unfortunately it is that same reputation that precludes us doing any such business directly. Ms Grip handles this market dilemma for us.”

“Nice of her.” My own voice grew cold. “Where’s Kadmin?”

“In due time, Mr Kovacs. In due time. You know, when I was told you would react this way and give yourself up for the lieutenant, I confess I doubted it at the time. But you fulfill expectations like a machine. Was it that that the Envoy Corps took away from you in return for all your other powers? Your unpredictability? Your soul?”

“Don’t get poetic on me, Carnage. Where is he?”

“Oh, very well. This way.”

There was a brace of large sentries outside the cabin door that might have been the two from the cruiser. I was too jangled to remember clearly. They bracketed me as we followed Carnage along claustrophobic corridors and down listing companionways, all rust-spotted and polymer-varnished metal. I tried vaguely to memorise the path but most of me was thinking about what Carnage had said. Who had predicted my actions to him? Kadmin? Unlikely. The Patchwork Man, for all his fury and death threats, knew next to nothing about me. The only real candidate for that kind of prediction was Reileen Kawahara. Which also helped to explain why Carnage wasn’t quaking in his synthetic flesh at the thought of what Kawahara might do to him for co-operating with Kadmin. Kawahara had sold me out. Bancroft was convinced, the crisis — whatever it had been — was over, and the same day Ortega was snatched as bait. The scenario I had sold to Bancroft left Kadmin out there as a private contractor with a grudge, so there was no reason why he couldn’t be seen to take me down. And under the circumstances, I was safer disposed of than left alive.

For that matter, so was Kadmin so maybe it hadn’t been that blatant. Maybe the word had gone out to bring Kadmin down, but only for as long as I was needed. With Bancroft convinced, I was once more expendable and the word had gone out again, to let Kadmin be. He could kill me, or I could kill him, whichever way the luck turned. Leaving Kawahara to clean up whoever was left.

I had no doubt that Kawahara would keep her word as far as releasing Sarah was concerned. The old-style yakuza were funny about that sort of thing. But she had made no such binding promises about me.

We clambered down a final staircase, a little wider than the rest, and came out onto a glassed-in gantry over a converted cargo cell. Looking down, I saw one of the arenas Ortega and I had passed in the electromag train last week, but now the plastic coverings were off the killing ring, and a modest crowd had assembled in the forward rows of each bank of plastic seating. Through the glass I could hear the sustained buzz of excitement and anticipation that had always preceded the freak fights I’d attended in my youth.

“Ah, your public awaits you.” Carnage was standing at my shoulder. “Well, more correctly, Ryker’s public. Though I have no doubt you’ll be able to dissemble for them with the same skill that convinced me.”

“And if I choose not to?”

Carnage’s crude features formed a simulacrum of distaste. He gestured out at the crowd. “Well, I suppose you could try explaining it to them in mid bout. But to be honest, the acoustics aren’t of the best and anyway…” He smiled unpleasantly. “I doubt you’ll have the time.”

“Foregone conclusion, huh?”

Carnage maintained his smile. Behind him, Pernilla Grip and the other synthetic were watching me with the predatory interest of cats in front of a birdcage. Below, the crowd were becoming noisy with expectation.

“It has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more than Kadmin’s assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his transgressions and it would be quite hazardous not to fulfill their expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came here expecting to survive, did you Mr Kovacs?”

I remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.

“No, I suppose I didn’t.”

Quiet footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance towards the sound and found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.

I smiled grimly. “If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.”

“But she was younger in those days.” Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth against the tanned skin. “Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to my copy of Furies got it right.”

“Harlan’s World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we get on with this, please?”

Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Out on the killing floor, the noise was less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still couldn’t pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down at me:

“Remember my brother, you motherfucker!!!”

I glanced up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was building like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had screamed like this at the Newpest freak fights, and guessed that we probably had. And we hadn’t even known the combatants that flailed and clawed at each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.

On the other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn’t render the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn’t really worried about the knuckles, it was Kadmin’s Will of God enhanced response wiring that concerned me most. A little over a century ago, I’d been up against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on Sharya, and they’d been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was heavy-duty military biomech, and against that Ryker’s neurachem, recently fried by stunbolt, was going to look pretty sick.

I took my place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the crowd quietened down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip’s cameras, he looked like a malignant doll out of a child’s nightmare. A fitting consort to the Patchwork Man. He raised his hands and directional speakers in the walls of the converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.

“Welcome to the Panama Rose!”

There was a vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting. Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.

“To a very special, and very exclusive, Panama Rose event, welcome. Welcome, I bid you welcome, to the most final and bloody humiliation of Elias Ryker.”

They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilisation stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.

Carnage’s amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quietening gestures with both arms.

“Most of you will remember detective Ryker from some encounter or other. For some of you it will be a name that you associate with blood spilled, maybe even bones broken.

“Those memories. Those memories are painful; and some of you might think you can never lose them.”

He had them damped down now, and his voice dropped accordingly.

“My friends, I cannot hope to erase those memories for you, for that is not what we offer aboard the Panama Rose. Here we deal not in soft forgetfulness, but in remembrance, no matter how bitter that remembrance might be. Not in dreams, my friends, but in reality.” He threw out a hand to indicate me. “My friends, this is reality.”

Another round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn’t expected to be bored to death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage’s theatricals were just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.

“This is reality,” Emcee Carnage repeated. “Tonight is reality. Tonight you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.”

The crowd erupted.

I wondered briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry’s Closed Quarters, the way Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker’s face. Jerry himself telling me about the Mongol’s run-in with the cop whose body I was wearing: Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back. And then there was Bautista on Ryker’s interrogation techniques: He’s right on the line most of the time. How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?

What would Ortega have said?

I thought about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I’d left her at the Hendrix, she’d take Kawahara down for me.

Knowing it was enough.

Carnage drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A relative quiet descended on the chamber.

“The coup de grâce,” he proclaimed. “When our matador has put Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is no more.”

He released the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theatre. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.

“Let us begin,” said Carnage, withdrawing.

There was a magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass round a whisky flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden script we were being forced to play out.

We began to circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin’s body language for clues.

The Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on that account, they had told us prior to the Sharya landings. The imperatives for the builders were strength and speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness it is that their combat patterning has no random select sub-routine. Right Hand of God martyrs will therefore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very narrow band of techniques.

On Sharya, our own enhanced combat systems had been state of the art, with both random response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker’s neurachem had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long enough for my conditioning to analyse the Will of God’s fighting pattern and—

Kadmin struck.

The distance was nearly ten metres of clear ground; he covered it in the time it took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.

The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counter-attack was out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to block low and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head and I reeled backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand sidestrike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost casually. A low level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.

It was like someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was left far behind on the surface of my skin and a sickening numbness raged through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it was crippling. I staggered back three steps and crashed onto the mat, twisting like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.

Turning my head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.

I understood.

Round One.

Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight, it’s a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down, but this wasn’t a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where the suffering was to be maximised for the benefit of the audience.

The crowd.

I got up and looked around the dimly-seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my guts, spat on the killing floor and summoned a guard stance. Kadmin inclined his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks and instead of giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin’s path. It took him the shreds of a second to realise what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every member of the chanting crowd.

The hawk nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed round, looking for neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head against the mat. I tasted blood.

I rolled upright and saw Kadmin backed off and wiping some blood of his own from his broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenalin surge that seeing his blood spilt had given me, and raised both my own hands in an expectant gesture.

“Come on, you asshole.” It croaked out of my damaged mouth. “Put me away.”

He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.

On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin’s grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.

I came down on the injured ribs and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a foetal ball and saw Kadmin’s borrowed features a thousand metres above me.

“Get up,” he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance. “We’re not finished yet.”

I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicoloured lights and then everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought to keep me conscious. The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the damage that had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied. Consciousness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with Jimmy de Soto.

“Earth?” His grinning blackout striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside the tank. “It’s a shithole, man. Fucking frozen society, like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there, historical events aren’t allowed.”

“Bullshit.” My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion track. In a rare moment when the Sharyan jamming went down, we’ve heard that Admiral Cursitor’s IP fleet is still light seconds out, fighting the Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn’t over, the locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not looking good.

At least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my temperature beginning to climb back towards normal. The surrounding air no longer feels like hot soup and breathing is ceasing to be the major effort it was when our heart rates were down near flatline.

The robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters.

“Bullshit, is it?” Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider tank’s hull. “Hey, you’re not from there. I am, and I’m telling you if they gave me the choice of life on earth or fucking storage, I’d have to give it some thought. You get the chance to visit, don’t.”

I blinked the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the roof.

“Told you not to go there, didn’t I pal. Now look at you. Earth.” He spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. “It’s a shithole. Got to get to the next screen.”

The crowd noise had settled down to a steady chanting.

The anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled with laughter.

Get to the next screen.

I lurched to my feet.

You don’t do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night.

The voice jumped into my head, a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly a century and a half of objective time. A man I hadn’t soiled my memory with for most of my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn up now, when I really needed the shit.

The Patchwork Man will come for you.

Well, you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man’s standing right over there, waiting. He’s not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything.

I summoned what was left from cellular levels in Ryker’s body and stalked forward.

Glass shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space between Kadmin and myself.

“Kadmin!”

I saw his eyes raised to the gantry above and then his entire chest seemed to explode. His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly off balance and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was torn off and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted and fell in ropes.

I whipped round, staring upwards, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted except for the remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit. Trepp was firing into the audience.

Down on the floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming. I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, towards the sound. Carnage was on fire.

Braced in the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a long-barrelled blaster. Carnage was in flames from the waist up, beating at himself with arms that had themselves grown wings of fire. The shrieking he made was more the sound of fury than of pain. Pernilla Grip lay dead at his feet, chest scorched through. As I watched, Carnage pitched forward over her like a figure made of melting wax and his shrieks modulated down through groans to a weird electronic bubbling and then to nothing.

“Kovacs?”

Trepp’s frag gun had fallen silent, and against the ensuing background of groaning and cries from the injured, Bautista’s raised voice was unnaturally loud. He detoured around the burning synthetic and climbed up into the ring. His face was streaked with blood.

“You OK, Kovacs?”

I chuckled weakly, then clutched abruptly at the stabbing pain in my side.

“Great, just great. How’s Ortega?”

“She’s OK. Got her dosed up on lethinol for the shock. Sorry we got here so late.” He gestured up at Trepp. “Took your friend there a while to get through to me at Fell Street. She refused to go through official channels. Said it wouldn’t scan right. The mess we made coming in here, she ain’t far wrong.”

I glanced around at the manifest organic damage.

“Yeah. That going to be a problem?”

Bautista barked a laugh. “Are you ragging me? Entry without a warrant. Organic damage to unarmed suspects. What the fuck do you think?”

“Sorry about that.” I started to move off the killing floor. “Maybe we can work something out.”

“Hey.” Bautista caught my arm. “They took off a Bay City cop. No one does that around here. Someone should have told Kadmin before he made the fucking mistake.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ortega or me in my Ryker sleeve, so I said nothing. Instead, I tipped my head back gingerly, testing for damage, and looked up at Trepp. She was reloading the frag gun.

“Hey, are you going to stay up there all night?”

“Be right down.”

She jacked the last shell into the frag gun, then executed a neat somersault over the gantry rail and fell outwards. About a metre into the fall, the grav harness on her back spread its wings and she fetched up hanging over us at head height with the gun slung across her shoulder. In her long black coat, she looked like an off-duty dark angel.

Adjusting a dial on the harness, she drifted closer to the floor and finally touched down next to Kadmin. I limped up to join her. We both looked at the ripped-open corpse in silence for a moment.

“Thanks,” I said softly.

“Forget it. All part of the service. Sorry I had to bring in these guys, but I needed the backup, and fast. You know what they say about the Sia around here. Biggest fucking gang on the block, right?” She nodded at Kadmin. “You going to leave him like that?”

I stared at the Right Hand of God martyr with his face shocked into abrupt death, and tried to see the Patchwork Man inside him.

“No,” I said, and turned the corpse over with my foot so that the nape of the neck was exposed. “Bautista, you want to lend me that firecracker?”

Wordlessly, the cop handed me his blaster. I set the muzzle against the base of the Patchwork Man’s skull, rested it there and waited to feel something.

“Anyone want to say anything?” cracked Trepp, deadpan. Bautista turned away. “Just do it.”

If my father had any comments, he kept them to himself. The only voices were the cries of the injured spectators, and those I ignored.

Feeling nothing, I pulled the trigger.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I was still feeling nothing an hour later when Ortega came and found me in the sleeving hall, seated on one of the automated forklifts and staring up into the green glow from the empty decanting chambers. The airlock made a smooth thump and then a sustained humming sound as it opened, but I didn’t react. Even when I recognised her footfalls and a short curse as she picked her way between the coiled cabling on the floor, I didn’t look round. Like the machine I was seated on, I was powered down.

“How you feeling?”

I looked down to where she stood beside the forklift. “Like I look, probably.”

“Well, you look like shit.” She reached up to where I was seated and grasped a convenient grill cover. “You mind if I join you?”

“Go ahead. Want a hand up?”

“Nope.” Ortega strained to lift herself by her arms, turned grey with the effort and hung there with a lopsided grin. “Possibly.”

I lent her the least bruised of my arms and she came aboard the forklift with a grunt. She squatted awkwardly for a moment, then seated herself next to me and rubbed at her shoulders.

“Christ, it’s cold in here. How long have you been sitting on this thing?”

“’Bout an hour.”

She looked up at the empty tanks. “Seen anything interesting?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Oh.” She paused again. “You know, this fucking lethinol is worse than a stungun. At least when you’ve been stunned, you know you’re damaged. Lethinol tells you that, whatever you’ve been through, everything’s just fine and just go ahead and relax. And then you fall ass over tit on the first five-centimetre cable you try to step over.”

“I think you’re supposed to be lying down,” I said mildly.

“Yeah, well, probably so are you. You’re going to have some nice facial bruises by tomorrow. Mercer give you a shot for the pain?”

“Didn’t need it.”

“Oh, hard man. I thought we agreed you were going to look after that sleeve.”

I smiled reflexively. “You should see the other guy.”

“I did see the other guy. Ripped him apart with your bare hands, huh?”

I kept the smile. “Where’s Trepp?”

“Your wirehead friend? She’s gone. Said something to Bautista about a conflict of interest, and disappeared into the night. Bautista’s tearing his hair out, trying to think of a way to cover this mess. Want to come and talk to him?”

“All right.” I shifted unwillingly. There was something hypnotic about the green light from the decanting tanks, and beneath my numbness, ideas were beginning to circle restlessly, snapping at each other like bottlebacks in a feeding spiral. The death of Kadmin, far from relieving me, had only touched off a slow-burning fuse of destructive urges in the pit of my stomach. Someone was going to pay for all this.

Personal.

But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anenome, cut up on a surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be re-sleeved; Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months; Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung-heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.

A little dizzily, I climbed down from the forklift and helped Ortega down after me. It hurt my arms to take her weight, but nowhere near as much as the sudden, freezing knowledge that these were our last hours together. I didn’t know where the realisation came from but it came with the solid, settling sensation in the bedrock of my mind that I had long ago learnt to trust more than rational thought. We left the re-sleeving chamber hand in hand, neither of us really noticing the fact until we came face to face with Bautista in the corridor outside and pulled instinctively apart again.

“Been looking for you, Kovacs.” If Bautista had any feelings about the hand holding, nothing showed on his face. “Your mercenary friend skipped and left us to do the cleaning up.”

“Yeah, Kristi—” I stopped and nodded sideways at Ortega. “I’ve been told. Did she take the frag gun?”

Bautista nodded.

“So you’ve got a perfect story. Someone called in gunfire from the Panama Rose, you came out to look and found the audience massacred, Kadmin and Carnage dead, me and Ortega halfway there. Must have been someone Carnage upset, working off a grudge.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ortega shake her head.

“Ain’t going to scan,” Bautista said. “All calls into Fell Street get recorded. Same goes for the phones in the cruisers.”

I shrugged, feeling the Envoy waking within me. “So what? You, or Ortega, you’ve got snitches out here in Richmond. People whose names you can’t disclose. Call came in on a personal phone, which just happened to get smashed when you had to shoot your way past the remains of Carnage’s security guards. No trace. And nothing on the monitors because the mysterious someone, whoever did all the shooting, wiped the whole automated security system clean. That can be arranged, I take it.”

Bautista looked dubious. “I suppose. We’d need a datarat to do it. Davidson’s good with a deck, but he ain’t that good.”

“I can get you a datarat. Anything else?”

“Some of the audience are still alive. Not in any fit state to do anything, but they’re still breathing.”

“Forget them. If they saw anything, it was Trepp. Probably not even that, not clearly. Whole thing was over in a couple of seconds. The only thing we’ve got to decide is when to call the meatwagons.”

“Some time soon,” said Ortega. “Or it’s going to look suspicious.”

Bautista snorted. “This whole fucking thing looks suspicious. Anyone at Fell Street’s going to know what went down here tonight.”

“Do this sort of thing a lot, do you?”

“That ain’t funny, Kovacs. Carnage went over the line, he knew what he was calling down.”

“Carnage,” Ortega muttered. “That motherfucker’s got himself stored somewhere. As soon as he gets re-sleeved, he’s going to be screaming for an investigation.”

“Maybe not,” said Bautista. “How long ago you reckon he was copied into that synth?”

Ortega shrugged. “Who knows? He was wearing it last week. At least that long, unless he had the store copy updated. And that’s fucking expensive.”

“If I were someone like Carnage,” I said thoughtfully, “I’d get myself updated whenever something major went down. No matter what it cost. I wouldn’t want to wake up not knowing what the fuck I’d been doing the week before I got torched.”

“That depends on what you were doing,” Bautista pointed out. “If it was some seriously illegal shit, you might prefer to wake up not knowing about it. That way, you polygraph your way right out of police interrogation with a smile.”

“Better than that. You wouldn’t even…”

I trailed off, thinking about it. Bautista made an impatient gesture.

“Whatever. If Carnage wakes up not knowing, he might make some private enquiries but he ain’t going to be in too much of a hurry to let the police department in on it. And if he wakes up knowing,” he spread his hands, “he’ll make less noise than a Catholic orgasm. I think we’re in the clear here.”

“Get the ambulances, then. And maybe call Murawa in to…” But Ortega’s voice was fading out, as the last part of the puzzle sank snugly into its resting place. The conversation between the two cops grew as remote as star static over a suit comlink. I gazed at a tiny dent on the metal wall beside me, hammering at the idea with every logic test I could muster.

Bautista gave me a curious glance, and left to call the ambulances. As he disappeared, Ortega touched me lightly on the arm.

“Hey, Kovacs. You OK?”

I blinked.

“Kovacs?”

I put out a hand and touched the wall, as if to assure myself of its solidity. Compared to the certainty of concept I was experiencing, my surroundings seemed suddenly intangible.

“Kristin,” I said slowly, “I have to get aboard Head in the Clouds. I know what they did to Bancroft. I can bring Kawahara down, and get Resolution 653 pushed through. And I can spring Ryker.”

Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, we’ve been through—”

“No.” The savagery in my voice was so abrupt it even shocked me. I could feel the bruising in Ryker’s face hurt as his features tensed. “This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a cast in the dark. This is fact. And I am going aboard Head in the Clouds. With or without your help, but I’m going.”

“Kovacs.” Ortega shook her head. “Look at yourself. You’re a mess. Right now you couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp, and you’re talking about covert assault on one of the West Coast Houses. You think you’re going to crash Kawahara’s security with broken ribs and that face? Forget it.”

“I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

“Kovacs, it isn’t going to be. I sat on the Hendrix tapes long enough for you to pull that shit with Bancroft, but that’s as far as it goes. The game’s over, your friend Sarah gets to go home and so do you. But that’s it. I’m not interested in grudge matches.”

“Do you really want Ryker back?” I asked softly.

For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. Her nostrils flared white and her right shoulder actually dropped for the punch. I never knew whether it was the stungun hangover or just self control that stopped her.

“I ought to deck you for that, Kovacs,” she said evenly.

I raised my hands. “Go ahead, right now I couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp. Remember?”

Ortega made a disgusted sound in her throat and started to turn away. I put out my hand and touched her.

“Kristin…” I hesitated. “I’m sorry. That was a bitchy crack, about Ryker. Will you at least hear me through, once?”

She came back to me, mouth clamped tight over whatever she was feeling, head down. She swallowed.

“I won’t. There’s been too much.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t want you hurt any more, Kovacs. I don’t want any more damage, that’s all.”

“Damage to Ryker’s sleeve, you mean?”

She looked at me.

“No,” she said quietly. “No, I don’t mean that.”

Then she was pressed up against me, there in that grim metal corridor, arms wrapped hard around me and face buried in my chest, all without apparent transition. I did some swallowing of my own and held her tightly while the last of what time we had trickled away like grains of sand through my fingers. And at that moment I would have given almost anything not to have had a plan for her to hear, not to have had any way to dissolve what was growing between us, and not to have hated Reileen Kawahara quite so much.

I would have given almost anything.

Two a.m.

I called Irene Elliott at the JacSol apartment, and got her out of bed. I told her we had a problem we’d pay heavily to unkink. She nodded sleepily. Bautista went to get her in an unmarked cruiser.

By the time she arrived, the Panama Rose was lit as if for a deck party. Vertical searchlights along her sides made it look as if she was being lowered from the night sky on ropes of luminescence. Illuminum cable incident barriers crisscrossed the superstructure and the dock moorings. The roof of the cargo cell where the humiliation bout had gone down was cranked back to allow the ambulances direct access and the blast of crime scene lighting from within rose into the night like the glow from a foundry. Police cruisers held the sky and parked across the dock flashing red and blue.

I met her at the gangway.

“I want my body back,” she shouted over the whine and roar of airborne engines. The searchlights frosted her sleeve’s black hair almost back to blonde.

“I can’t swing that for you right now,” I yelled back. “But it’s in the pipeline. First, you’ve got to do this. Earn some credit. Now let’s get you out of sight before fucking Sandy Kim spots you.”

Local law were keeping the press copters at bay. Ortega, still sick and shaking, wrapped herself in a police greatcoat and kept the local law out with the same glitter-eyed intensity that kept her upright and conscious. Organic Damage division, shouting, pulling rank, bullying and bluffing, held the fort while Elliott went to work faking in the monitor footage they needed. They were indeed, as Trepp had recognised, the biggest gang on the block.

“I’m checking out of the apartment tomorrow,” Elliott told me as she worked. “You won’t be able to reach me there.”

She was silent for a couple of moments, whistling through her teeth at odd moments as she keyed in the images she had constructed. Then she cast a glance at me over her shoulder.

“You say I’m earning juice from these guys, doing this. They’re going to owe me?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“Then I’ll contact them. Get me the officer in charge, I’ll talk to whoever that is. And don’t try to call me at Ember, I won’t be there either.”

I said nothing, just looked at her. She turned back to her work.

“I need some time alone,” she muttered.

Just the words sounded like a luxury to me.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I watched him pour a drink from the bottle of fifteen-year-old malt, take it to the phone and seat himself carefully. The broken ribs had been welded back together in one of the ambulances, but the whole of that side was still one huge ache, with occasional, flinty stabs of agony. He sipped at the whisky, gathered himself visibly and punched out the call.

“Bancroft residence. With whom do you wish to speak?” It was the severely-suited woman who had answered last time I called Suntouch House. The same suit, the same hair, even the same make-up. Maybe she was a phone construct.

“Miriam Bancroft,” he said.

Once again, it was the sensation of being a passive observer, the same sensation of disconnection that I had felt that night in front of the mirror while Ryker’s sleeve put on its weapons. The frags. Only this time it was much worse.

“One moment, please.”

The woman disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the image of a windblown match flame in synch with piano music that sounded like autumn leaves being blown along a cracked and worn pavement. A minute passed, then Miriam Bancroft appeared, immaculately attired in a formal-looking jacket and blouse. She raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Mr Kovacs. This is a surprise.”

“Yeah, well.” He gestured uncomfortably. Even across the comlink, Miriam Bancroft radiated a sensuality that unbalanced him. “Is this a secure line?”

“Reasonably so, yes. What do you want?”

He cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking. There are some things I’d like to discuss with you. I, uh, I may owe you an apology.”

“Indeed?” This time it was both eyebrows. “When exactly did you have in mind?”

He shrugged. “I’m not doing anything right now.”

“Yes. I, however, am doing something right now, Mr Kovacs. I am en route to a meeting in Chicago and will not be back on the coast until tomorrow evening.” The faintest hint of a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Will you wait?”

“Sure.”

She leaned towards the screen, eyes narrowing. “What happened to your face?”

He raised a hand to one of the emerging facial bruises. In the low light of the room, he had not expected it to be so noticeable. Nor had he expected Miriam Bancroft to be so attentive.

“Long story. Tell you when I see you.”

“Well, that I can hardly resist,” she said ironically. “I shall send a limousine to collect you from the Hendrix tomorrow afternoon. Shall we say about four o’clock? Good. Until then.”

The screen cleared. He sat, staring at it for a moment, then switched off the phone and swivelled the chair round to face the window shelf.

“She makes me nervous,” he said.

“Yeah, me too. Well, obviously.”

“Very funny.”

“I try.”

I got up to fetch the whisky bottle. As I crossed the room, I caught my reflection in the mirror beside the bed.

Where Ryker’s sleeve had the air of a man who had battered his way head first through life’s trials, the man in the mirror looked as if he would be able to slip neatly aside at every crisis and watch fate fall clumsily on its fat face. The body was cat-like in its movements, a smooth and effortless economy of motion that would have looked good on Anchana Salomao. The thick, almost blue-black hair fell in a soft cascade to the deceptively slim shoulders, and the elegantly tilted eyes had a gentle, unconcerned expression that suggested the universe was a good place to live in.

I had only been in the tech ninja sleeve a few hours — seven, and forty-two minutes according to the time display chipped into my upper left field of vision — but there were none of the usual download side effects. I collected the whisky bottle with one of the slim brown artist’s hands and the simple play of muscle and bone was a joy that glowed through me. The Khumalo neurachem system thrummed continually at the limit of perception, as if it were singing faintly the myriad possible things the body could do at any given moment. Never, even during my time with the Envoy Corps, had I worn anything like it.

I remembered Carnage’s words and mentally shook my head. If the UN thought they’d be able to impose a ten-year colonial embargo on this, they were living in another world.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but this feels fucking weird.”

“Tell me about it.” I filled my own tumbler and proffered the bottle. He shook his head. I went back to the window shelf and sat back against the glass.

“How the fuck did Kadmin stand it? Ortega says he used to work with himself all the time.”

“Get used to anything in time, I suppose. Besides, Kadmin was fucking crazy.”

“Oh, and we’re not?”

I shrugged. “We didn’t have a choice. Apart from walking away, I mean. Would that have been better?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who’s going up against Kawahara. I’m just the whore around here. Incidentally, I don’t reckon Ortega’s exactly overjoyed about that part of the deal. I mean, she was confused before, but now—”

“She’s confused! How do you think I feel?”

“I know how you feel, idiot. I am you.”

“Are you?” I sipped at my drink and gestured with the glass. “How long do you think it takes before we stop being exactly the same person?”

He shrugged. “You are what you remember. Right now we only have about seven or eight hours of separate perceptions. Can’t have made much of a dent yet, can it?”

“On forty-odd years of memory? I suppose not. And it’s the early stuff that builds personality.”

“Yeah, they say. And while we’re on the subject, tell me something. How do you feel, I mean how do we feel about the Patchwork Man being dead?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Do we need to talk about this?”

“We need to talk about something. We’re stuck here with each other until tomorrow evening—”

“You can go out, if you want. Come to that,” I jerked a thumb upward towards the roof, “I can get out of here the way I came in.”

“You really don’t want to talk about it that badly, huh?”

“Wasn’t that tough.”

That, at least, was true. The original draft of the plan had called for the ninja copy of me to stay at Ortega’s apartment until the Ryker copy had disappeared with Miriam Bancroft. Then it occurred to me that we’d need a working relationship with the Hendrix to bring off the assault on Head in the Clouds, and that there was no way for the ninja copy of myself to prove its identity to the hotel, short of submission to a storage scan. It seemed a better idea for the Ryker copy to introduce the ninja before departing with Miriam Bancroft. Since the Ryker copy was undoubtedly still under surveillance, at the very least, by Trepp, walking in through the front door of the Hendrix together looked like a very bad idea. I borrowed a grav harness and a stealth suit from Bautista, and just before it started to get light I skimmed in between the patchy high-level traffic and down onto a sheltered flange on the forty-second floor. The Hendrix had by this time been advised of my arrival by the Ryker copy and let me in through a ventilation duct.

With the Khumalo neurachem, it had been almost as easy as walking in through the front door.

“Look,” the Ryker copy said. “I’m you. I know everything you know. What’s the harm in talking about this stuff?”

“If you know everything I know, what’s the point of talking about it?”

“Sometimes, it helps to externalise things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.”

I sighed. “I don’t know. I buried all that shit about Dad a long time ago, it’s a long time dead.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

“No.” He flicked a finger at me the way I had pointed at Bancroft when he didn’t want to face my facts on the balcony of Suntouch House. “You’re lying to yourself. Remember that pimp we met in Lazlo’s pipe house the year we joined Shonagon’s Eleven. The one we nearly killed before they pulled us off him.”

“That was just chemicals. We were off our head on tetrameth, showing off because of the Eleven stuff. Fuck, we were only sixteen.”

“Bullshit. We did it because he looked like Dad.”

“Maybe.”

“Fact. And we spent the next decade and a half killing authority figures for the same reason.”

“Oh, give me a fucking break! We spent that decade and a half killing anyone who got in the way. It was the military, that’s what we did for a living. And, anyway, since when is a pimp an authority figure?”

“OK, maybe it was pimps we spent fifteen years killing. Users. Maybe that’s what we were paying back.”

“He never pimped Mum out.”

“Are you sure? Why were we so hot to hit the Elizabeth Elliott angle like a fucking tactical nuke? Why the accent on whorehouses in this investigation?”

“Because,” I said, sinking a finger of whisky, “that is what this investigation has been about from the beginning. We went after the Elliott angle because it felt right. Envoy intuition. The way Bancroft treated his wife—”

“Oh, Miriam Bancroft. Now there’s another whole disc we could spin.”

“Shut up. Elliott was a pretty fucking good sounding shot. We wouldn’t have got to Head in the Clouds without that trip to Jerry’s biocabins.”

“Ahhh.” He made a disgusted gesture and tipped his own glass back. “You believe what you want. I say the Patchwork Man’s been a metaphor for Dad because we couldn’t bear to look too closely at the truth and that’s why we freaked the first time we saw a composite construct in virtual. Remember that, do you? That rec house on Adoracion. We had rage dreams for a week after that little show. Waking up with shreds of pillow on your hands. They sent us to the psychs for that.”

I gestured irritably. “Yeah, I remember. I remember being shit scared of the Patchwork Man, not Dad. I remember feeling the same when we met Kadmin in virtual too.”

“And now he’s dead? How do we feel now?”

“I don’t feel anything.”

He pointed at me again. “That’s a cover.”

“It is not a cover. The motherfucker got in my way, he threatened me and now he’s dead. Transmission ends.”

“Remember anyone else threatening you, do you? When you were small, maybe?”

“I am not going to talk about this any more.” I reached for the bottle and filled my glass again. “Pick another subject. What about Ortega? What are our feelings on that score?”

“Are you planning to drink that whole bottle?”

“You want some?”

“No.”

I spread my hands. “So what’s it to you?”

“Are you trying to get drunk?”

“Of course I am. If I’ve got to talk to myself, I don’t see why I should do it sober. So tell me about Ortega.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Why not?” I asked reasonably. “Got to talk about something, remember. What’s wrong with Ortega?”

“What’s wrong is that we don’t feel the same about her. You aren’t wearing Ryker’s sleeve any more.”

“That doesn’t—”

“Yes, it does. What’s between us and Ortega is completely physical. There hasn’t been time for anything else. That’s why you’re so happy to talk about her now. In that sleeve, all you’ve got is some vague nostalgia about that yacht and a bundle of snapshot memories to back it up. There’s nothing chemical happening to you any more.”

I reached for something to say, and abruptly found nothing. The suddenly discovered difference sat between us like a third, unwanted occupant of the room.

The Ryker copy dug into his pockets and came up with Ortega’s cigarettes. The packet was crushed almost flat. He extracted a cigarette, looked ruefully at it and fitted it into his mouth. I tried not to look disapproving.

“Last one,” he said, touching the ignition patch to it.

“The hotel probably has more.”

“Yeah.” He plumed out smoke, and I found myself almost envying him the addiction. “You know, there is one thing we should be discussing right now.”

“What’s that?”

But I knew already. We both knew.

“You want me to spell it out? All right.” He drew on the cigarette again and shrugged, not easily. “We have to decide which of us gets obliterated when this is all over. And since our individual instinct for survival is getting stronger by the minute, we need to decide soon.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Which would you prefer to remember? Taking down Kawahara? Or going down on Miriam Bancroft?” He smiled sourly. “No competition, I suppose.”

“Hey, this isn’t just a roll on the beach you’re talking about. This is multiple copy sex. It’s about the only genuinely illicit pleasure left. Anyway, Irene Elliott said we could do a memory graft and keep both sets of experience.”

“Probably. She said we could probably do a memory graft. And that still leaves one of us to be cancelled out. It’s not a meld, it’s a graft, from one of us to the other. Editing. You want to do that to yourself? To the one that survives. We couldn’t even face editing that construct the Hendrix built. How are we going to live with this? No way, it’s got to be a clean cut. One or the other. And we’ve got to decide which.”

“Yeah.” I picked up the whisky bottle and stared gloomily at the label. “So what do we do? Gamble for it? Paper, scissors, stone, say the best of five?”

“I was thinking along slightly more rational lines. We tell each other our memories from this point on and then decide which we want to keep. Which ones are worth more.”

“How the hell are we going to measure something like that?”

“We’ll know. You know we will.”

“What if one of us lies. Embroiders the truth to make it sound like a more appealing memory. Or lies about which one they like better.”

His eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”

“A lot can happen in a few days. Like you said, we’re both going to want to survive.”

“Ortega can polygraph us if it comes to that.”

“I think I’d rather gamble.”

“Give me that fucking bottle. If you’re not going to take this seriously, nor am I. Fuck it, you might even get torched out there and solve the problem for us.”

“Thanks.”

I passed him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended. I had a feeling that we were going to profane that particular article of faith tonight.

I raised my glass.

“To unity of purpose.”

“Yeah, and an end to drinking alone.”

The hangover was still with me nearly a full day later as I watched him leave on one of the hotel monitors. He stepped out onto the pavement and waited while the long, polished limousine settled to the kerb. As the kerbside door hinged up, I caught a brief glimpse of Miriam Bancroft’s profile within. Then he was climbing in and the door swung smoothly back down to cover them both. The limousine trembled along its length and lifted away.

I dry-swallowed more painkillers, gave it ten minutes and then went up to the roof to wait for Ortega.

It was cold.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Ortega had a variety of news.

Irene Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had ever seen and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.

Meanwhile, the Panama Rose patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any hurry to tackle it any more. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting started. In view of the assumed AI involvement, the Hendrix would come under scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through and Ortega had sold Murawa a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.

A couple of IA detectives were sniffing around the Panama Rose, but Organic Damage had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. IA were getting nothing so far.

We had a couple of weeks.

Ortega flew north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.

“You know this place?”

“Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.”

“They never get busted?”

“Depends.” Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”

I climbed out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ’fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.

Camp security met us inside the first ring of ’fabs. He stood over two metres tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.

He nodded at me.

“You Anderson?”

“Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.

That, and my memories.

I wondered if she was feeling the same.

“Cop, huh?” The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile either.

“Not at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”

“Yeah.” He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ’fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.”

As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.

“Your visitors,” said the horned man. “You OK with this?”

Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.

“You’d better come inside,” she said.

Inside the bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her movements were smoothly unselfconscious. I’d noticed the improvement on board the Panama Rose in the early hours of the morning, but here it was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked speculatively up at me.

“That’s you inside there, Anderson, I presume?”

I inclined my head.

“You going to tell me why?”

I seated myself opposite her. “That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or out?”

“You guarantee I get my own body back.” She was trying hard to sound casual, but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. “That’s the deal?”

I glanced up at Ortega, who nodded. “That’s correct. If this comes off successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate. But it has to be successful. If we fuck up, we’ll probably all go down the double barrel.”

“You are operating under a federal brief, lieutenant?”

Ortega smiled tightly. “Not exactly. But under the UN charter, we’ll be able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are successful.”

“A retrospective federal brief.” Elliott looked back to me, brows raised. “That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something gigantic.”

“It is,” I said.

Elliott’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not with JacSol any more, are you? Who the fuck are you, Anderson?”

“I’m your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?”

Irene Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.

“Tell me,” she said.

I told her.

It took about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong, offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offences for all concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.

Or maybe I just tell myself that.

Irene Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time. Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.

“You’re insane,” said Elliott finally.

“Can you do it?”

She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was reviewing a previous Dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even downloading into that AI core. This makes what we did to the AI look like a systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a virtual forum.”

“That’s not a problem. Anything else?”

“That depends on what counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.” Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants. “You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”

“Very,” said Ortega.

Elliott’s feelings went back underground. “Then I’ll have to run some checks. That’ll take time.”

“How much time?” Ortega wanted to know.

“Well, I can do it two ways.” Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring over the emotion that had been there before. “I can do a fast scan and maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right, which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your clock.”

“Take your time,” I suggested, with a warning glance at Ortega. “Now what about wiring me for sight and sound. You know anyone who can do that discreetly?”

“Yeah, we got people here can do that. But you can forget a telemetry system. You try and transmit out of there, you will bring the house down. No pun intended.” She moved to the arm-mounted terminal and punched up a general access screen. “I’ll see if Reese can dig you up a grab-and-stash mike. Shielded microstack, you’ll be able to record a couple of hundred hours high res and we can retrieve it here later.”

“Good enough. This going to be expensive?”

Elliott turned back to us, eyebrows hoisted. “Talk to Reese. She’ll probably have to buy the parts in, but maybe you can get her to do the surgery on a retrospective federal basis. She could use the juice at UN level.”

I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged exasperatedly.

“I guess,” she said ungraciously, as Elliott busied herself with the screen. I stood up and turned to the policewoman.

“Ortega,” I muttered into her ear, abruptly aware that in the new sleeve I was completely unmoved by her scent. “It isn’t my fault we’re short of funds. The JacSol account’s gone, evaporated, and if I start drawing on Bancroft’s credit for stuff like this, it’s going to look fucking odd. Now get a grip.”

“It isn’t that,” she hissed back.

“Then what is it?”

She looked at me, at our brutally casual proximity. “You know goddamn well what it is.”

I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes to avoid having to meet her gaze. “Did you sort out that hardware for me?”

“Yeah.” She stepped back, voice returning to normal volume and empty of tone. “The stungun from the Fell Street tackle room, no one’ll miss it. The rest is coming out of NYPD confiscated weapon stocks. I’m flying out to pick it up tomorrow personally. Material transaction, no records. I called in a couple of favours.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Her tone was savagely ironic. “Oh, by the way, they had a hell of a time getting hold of the spider venom load. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that’s all about, would you?”

“It’s a personal thing.”

Elliott got someone on the screen. A serious-looking woman in a late fifties African sleeve.

“Hey, Reese,” she said cheerfully. “Got a customer for you.”

Despite the pessimistic estimate, Irene Elliott finished her preliminary scan a day later. I was down by the lake, recovering from Reese’s simple microsurgery and skimming stones with a girl of about six who seemed to have adopted me. Ortega was still in New York, the chill between us not really resolved.

Elliott emerged from the encampment and yelled out the news of her successful covert scan without bothering to come down to the water’s edge. I winced as the echoes floated out across the water. The open atmosphere of the little settlement took some getting used to, and how it fitted in with successful data piracy I still couldn’t see. I handed my stone to the girl and rubbed reflexively at the tiny soreness under one eye where Reese had gone in and implanted the recording system.

“Here. See if you can do it with this one.”

“Your stones are heavy,” she said plaintively.

“Well, try anyway. I got nine skips out of the last one.”

She squinted up at me. “You’re wired for it. I’m only six.”

“True. On both counts.” I placed a hand on her head. “But you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.”

“When I’m big I’m going to be wired like Auntie Reese.”

I felt a small sadness well up on the cleanly swept floor of my Khumalo neurachem brain. “Good for you. Look, I’ve got to go. Don’t go too close to the water, right?”

She looked at me exasperatedly. “I can swim.”

“So can I, but it looks cold, don’t you think?”

“Ye-e-es…”

“There you are then.” I ruffled her hair and set off up the beach. At the first bubblefab I looked back. She was hefting the big flat stone at the lake as if the water were an enemy.

Elliott was in the expansive, post-mission mood that most datarats seem to hit after a long spell cruising the stacks.

“I’ve been doing a little historical digging,” she said, swinging the terminal arm outward from its resting place. Her hands danced across the terminal deck and the screen flared into life, shedding colours on her face. “How’s the implant?”

I touched my lower eyelid again. “Fine. Tapped straight into the same system that runs the timechip. Reese could have made a living doing this.”

“She used to,” said Elliott shortly. “Till they busted her for anti-Protectorate literature. When this is all over, you make sure that someone puts in a word for her at federal level, because she sure as shit needs it.”

“Yeah, she said.” I peered over her shoulder at the screen. “What have you got there?”

“Head in the Clouds. Tampa aeroyard blueprints. Hull specs, the works. This stuff is centuries old. I’m amazed they still keep it on stack at all. Anyway, seems she was originally commissioned as part of the Caribbean storm management flotilla, back before SkySystems orbital weather net put them all out of business. A lot of the long-range scanning equipment got ripped out when they refitted, but they left the local sensors in and that’s what provides basic skin security. Temperature pick-ups, infrared, that sort of thing. Anything with body heat lands anywhere on the hull, they’ll know it’s there.”

I nodded, unsurprised. “Ways in?”

She shrugged. “Hundreds. Ventilation ducts, maintenance crawlways. Take your pick.”

“I’ll need to have another look at what Miller told my construct. But assume I’m going in from the top. Body heat’s the only real problem?”

“Yeah, but those sensors are looking for anything over a square millimetre of temperature differential. A stealth suit won’t cover you. Christ, even the breath coming out of your lungs will probably trip them. And it doesn’t stop there.” Elliott nodded sombrely at the screen. “They must have liked the system a lot, because when they refitted they ran it through the whole ship. Room temperature monitors on every corridor and walkway.”

“Yeah, Miller said something about a heat signature tag.”

“That’s it. Incoming guests get it on boarding and their codes are incorporated into the system. Anyone else walks down a corridor uninvited, or goes somewhere their tag says they can’t, they set off every alarm in the hull. Simple, and very effective. And I don’t think I can cut in there and write you a welcome code. Too much security.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”

“You what?” Ortega looked at me with fury and disbelief spreading across her face like a storm front. She stood away from me as if I might be contagious.

“It was just a suggestion. If you don’t—”

“No.” She said the word as if it was new to her and she liked the taste. “No. No fucking way. I’ve connived at viral crime for you, I’ve hidden evidence for you, I’ve assisted you in multiple sleeving—”

“Hardly multiple.”

“It’s a fucking crime,” she said through her teeth. “I am not going to steal confiscated drugs out of police holding for you.”

“OK, forget it.” I hesitated, put my tongue in my cheek for a moment. “Want to help me confiscate some more, then?”

Something inside me cheered as the unwilling smile broke cover on her face.

The dealer was in the same place he had been when I walked into his ’cast radius two weeks ago. This time I saw him twenty metres away, skulking in an alcove with the bat-eyed broadcast unit on his shoulder like a familiar. There were very few people on the street in any direction. I nodded to Ortega who was stationed across the street and walked on. The sales ’cast had not changed, the street of ridiculously ferocious women and the sudden cool of the betathanatine hit, but this time I was expecting it and in any case the Khumalo neurachem had a definite damping effect on the intrusion. I stepped up to the dealer with an eager smile.

“Got Stiff, man.”

“Good, that’s what I’m looking for. How much have you got?”

He started a little, expression coiling between greed and suspicion. His hand slipped down towards the horrorbox at his belt just in case.

“How much you want, man?”

“All of it,” I said cheerfully. “Everything you’ve got.”

He read me, but by then it was too late. I had the lock on two of his fingers as they stabbed at the horrorbox controls.

“Ah-ah.”

He took a swipe at me with the other arm. I broke the fingers. He howled and collapsed around the pain. I kicked him in the stomach and took the horrorbox away from him. Behind me, Ortega arrived and flashed her badge in his sweat-beaded face.

“Bay City police,” she said laconically. “You’re busted. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we.”

The betathanatine was in a series of dermal pads with tiny glass decanters folded in cotton. I held one of the vials up to the light and shook it. The liquid within was a pale red.

“What do you reckon?” I asked Ortega. “About eight per cent?”

“Looks like. Maybe less.” Ortega put a knee into the dealer’s neck, grinding his face into the pavement. “Where do you cut this stuff, pal?”

“This is good merchandise,” the dealer squealed. “I buy direct. This is—”

Ortega rapped hard on his skull with her knuckles and he shut up.

“This is shit,” she said patiently. “This has been stepped on so hard it wouldn’t give you a cold. We don’t want it. So you can have your whole stash back and walk, if you like. All we want to know is where you cut it. An address.”

“I don’t know any—”

“Do you want to be shot while escaping?” Ortega asked him pleasantly, and he grew suddenly very quiet.

“Place in Oakland,” he said sullenly.

Ortega gave him a pencil and paper. “Write it down. No names, just the address. And so help me, if you’re tinselling me I’ll come back here with fifty ccs of real Stiff and feed you the lot, unstepped.”

She took back the scrawled paper and glanced at it, removed her knee from the dealer’s neck and patted him on the shoulder.

“Good. Now get up and get the fuck off the street. You can go back to work tomorrow, if this is the right place. And if it’s not, remember, I know your patch.”

We watched him lurch off and Ortega tapped the paper.

“I know this place. Controlled Substances busted them a couple of times last year, but some slick lawyer gets the important guys off every time. We’ll make a lot of noise, let them think they’re buying us off with a bag of uncut.”

“Fair enough.” I looked after the retreating figure of the dealer. “Would you really have shot him?”

“Nah.” Ortega grinned. “But he doesn’t know that. ConSub do it sometimes, just to get major dealers off the street when there’s something big going down. Official reprimand for the officer involved and compensation pays out for a new sleeve, but it takes time, and the scumbag does that time in the store. Plus it hurts to get shot. I was convincing, huh?”

“Convinced the fuck out of me.”

“Maybe I should have been an Envoy.”

I shook my head. “Maybe you should spend less time around me.”

I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the hypnophone sonocodes to lull me away from reality. On either side of me, Davidson, the Organic Damage datarat, and Ortega had settled into their racks and even through the hypnophones I could hear their breathing, slow and regular, at the limits of my neurachem perception. I tried to relax more, to let the hypnosystem press me down through levels of softly decreasing consciousness, but instead my mind was whirring through the details of the set-up like a program check scanning for error. It was like the insomnia I’d suffered after Innenin, an infuriating synaptic itch that refused to go away. When my peripheral vision time display told me that at least a full minute had gone by, I propped myself up on one elbow and looked around at the figures dreaming in the other racks.

“Is there a problem?” I asked loudly.

“The tracking of Sheryl Bostock is complete,” said the hotel. “I assumed you would prefer to be alone when I informed you.”

I sat upright and started picking the trodes off my body. “You assumed right. You sure everyone else is under?”

“Lieutenant Ortega and her colleagues were installed in the virtuality approximately two minutes ago. Irene Elliott has been established there since earlier this afternoon. She asked not to be disturbed.”

“What ratio are you running at the moment?”

“Eleven point fifteen. Irene Elliott requested it.”

I nodded to myself as I climbed out of the rack. Eleven point one five was a standard working ratio for datarats. It was also the title of a particularly bloody but otherwise unmemorable Micky Nozawa experia flic. The only clear detail I could recall was that, unexpectedly, Micky’s character got killed at the end. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Between the dimly seen heave and swell of the sea and the lights of the cabin, there was a lemon grove. I went along a dirt track between the trees and the citrus fragrance felt like cleansing. From the long grass on either side, cicadas whirred reassuringly. In a velvet sky above were stars like fixed gems and behind the cabin the land rose into gentle hills and rocky outcroppings. The vague white forms of sheep moved in the darkness on the slopes, and from somewhere I heard a dog bark. The lights of a fishing village glimmered off to one side, less bright than the stars.

There were hurricane lamps slung from the upper rail of the cabin’s front porch, but no one was seated at the wooden tables there. The front wall bore a riotous abstract mural curling around and out from the luminous lettering of a sign that read Pension Flower of ’68. Windchimes dangled along the railing, winking and turning in the faint breeze that blew in from the sea. They made a variety of gentle sounds from glassy belling to hollow wooden percussion.

On the unkempt sloping lawn in front of the porch someone had set out an incongruous collection of sofas and armchairs in a rough circle, so it looked as if the cabin had been lifted bodily off its furnished interior and set down again further up the slope. From the gathered seats came the soft sound of voices and the red embers of lit cigarettes. I reached for my own supply, realised I had neither the packet nor the need any more and grimaced wryly to myself in the dark.

Bautista’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation.

“Kovacs? That you?”

“Who else is it going to be?” I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. “This is a goddamn virtuality.”

“Yeah, but…” Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats. “Welcome to the party.”

There were five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair. On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along the full length of a second sofa.

The fifth figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a multicoloured bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in front of him.

“The Hendrix, right?”

“That’s correct.” There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto the darkened lawn. “Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original designers. If you strip down the client-mirroring systems, this is what you get.”

“Good.” I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. “You happy with the working environment?”

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

“How long’ve you been here?”

“Me?” She shrugged. “A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours ago.”

“Two and a half,” said Ortega sourly. “What kept you?”

“Neurachem glitch.” I nodded at the Hendrix figure. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“That’s exactly what he told us.” Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop. “I’d just like to know what it means.”

I made a helpless gesture. “So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail the manufacturers.” I turned back to Irene Elliott. “I take it you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the Dip.”

“You take it right.” Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure. “Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to need every scrap of that to pull it off.”

“You cased the run yet?”

Elliott nodded glumly. “It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska was freighted off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing line.”

“I’m impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?”

“A while.” Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction. “I had some help.”

“And the second interesting thing?”

“Yeah. Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t tell you much more than that without Dipping it, and I figured you wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re after.”

I remembered the spider-like automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb sacs, the sombre stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those contemptuous hooded smiles.

“Well, then.” I looked around at the assembled team. “Let’s get this gig off the ground.”

Chapter Forty

It was Sharya, all over again.

We dusted off from the tower of the Hendrix an hour after dark and swung away into the traffic-speckled night. Ortega had pulled the same Lock-Mit transport I’d ridden out to Suntouch House, but when I looked around the dimly lit interior of the ship’s belly, it was the Envoy Command attack on Zihicce that I remembered. The scene was the same; Davidson playing the role of datacom officer, face washed pale blue by the light from his screen; Ortega as medic, unpacking the dermals and charging kit from a sealwrap bag. Up ahead in the hatchway to the cockpit, Bautista stood and looked worried, while another mohican I didn’t know did the flying. Something must have shown on my face, because Ortega leaned in abruptly to study my face.

“Problem?”

I shook my head. “Just a little nostalgia.”

“Well, I just hope you got these measures right.” She braced herself against the hull. In her hand, the first dermal looked like a petal torn from some iridescent green plant. I grinned up at her and rolled my head to one side to expose my jugular.

“This is the fourteen per cent,” she said and applied the cool green petal to my neck. I felt the fractional grip, like gentle sandpaper, as it took, and then a long cold finger leapt down past my collar bone and deep into my chest.

“Smooth.”

“Fucking ought to be. You know how much that stuff would go for on the street?”

“The perks of law enforcement, huh?”

Bautista turned round. “That ain’t funny, Kovacs.”

“Leave him alone, Rod,” said Ortega lazily. “Man’s entitled to a bad joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.”

I raised one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the dermal gingerly and stood back.

“Three minutes till the next,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.

At first it was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there, so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with effort.

Then the control stimulants kicked in and in seconds my head cleared from foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just …

I felt an inane grin eating its way across my features.

“Whoooh, Kristin, this is … good stuff. This is better than Sharya.”

“Glad you like it.” Ortega glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes. You up to it?”

“I’m up to.” I pursed my lips and blew through them. “Anything. Anything at all.”

Ortega tipped her head back towards Bautista, who could presumably see the instrumentation in the cockpit. “Rod. How long have we got?”

“Be there in less than forty minutes.”

“Better get him the suit.”

While Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.

“I want you to wear this,” she said. “Little bit of Organic Damage insurance for you.”

“A needle?” I shook my head with what felt like machined precision. “Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.”

“It’s a tracer filament,” she said patiently. “And you’re not leaving this ship without it.”

I looked at the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues, usually in under forty-eight hours.

I glanced across at Davidson.

“What’s the range?”

“Hundred klicks.” The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow from his screen. “Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate unless we call you. Quite safe.”

I shrugged. “OK. Where do you want to put it?”

Ortega stood up, needle in hand. “Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack, case they chop your head off.”

“Charming.” I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.

“You’re done. Is he on screen?”

Davidson punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me, Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch and reached for the second dermal.

“Thirty-seven per cent,” she said. “Ready for the Big Chill?”

It was like being submerged in diamonds.

By the time we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armour and when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stunner. I dialled the muzzle aperture to wide. At five metres, it would take down a roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in complete silence. Sarah Sachilowska says Hi.

The dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia Deme.

The Tebbit knife on my forearm in its neural spring sheath beneath the stealth suit like a final word.

I reached for the cold feeling that had filled me up outside Jerry’s Closed Quarters and, in the crystalline depths of the Reaper, did not need it.

Mission time.

“Target visual,” called the pilot. “You want to come up and have a look at this baby?”

I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged, and the two of us went forward. Ortega seated herself beside the mohican and slipped on the co-pilot’s headset. I contented myself with standing next to Bautista in the access hatch. The view was just as good from there.

Most of the Lock-Mit’s cockpit was transparent alloy with instrumentation projected up onto it, permitting the pilot an uninterrupted view of the surrounding airspace; I remembered the feeling from Sharya, like riding a slightly concave tray, a tongue of steel or maybe a magic carpet, across the cloudscape below. A feeling that had been at once dizzying and godlike. I glanced at the mohican’s profile and wondered if he was as detached from that feeling as I was under the influence of the Reaper.

There were no clouds tonight. Head in the Clouds hung off to the left like a mountain village seen from afar. A cluster of tiny blue lights singing gently of homecoming and warmth in the icy black immensity. Kawahara seemed to have chosen the edge of the world for the whorehouse.

As we banked towards the lights, a squiggle of electronic sound filled the cockpit and the projected instrumentation dimmed briefly.

“That’s it, we’re acquired,” said Ortega sharply. “Here we go. I want a flyby under the belly. Let them get a good look.”

The mohican said nothing, but the nose of the transport dipped. Ortega reached up to an instrument panel projected onto the transparency above her head and touched a button. A hard, male voice crashed into the cabin.

“…that you are in restricted airspace. We are under licence to destroy intruding aircraft. Identify yourself immediately.”

“This is the Bay City police department,” said Ortega laconically. “Look out your window and you’ll see the stripes. We’re up here on official police business, pal, so if you so much as twitch a launcher in this direction I’ll have you blown out of the sky.”

There was a hissing silence. Ortega turned to look at me and grinned. Ahead of us, Head in the Clouds swelled like the target in a missile scope and then lifted abruptly over our heads as the pilot dipped us below the bulk of its hull and banked about. I saw lights gathered like icy fruit on gantries and the undersides of landing pads, the distended belly of the vessel curving up on either side and then we were past.

“State the nature of your business,” snapped the voice nastily.

Ortega peered out of the side of the cockpit as if looking for the speaker in amongst the airship’s superstructure. Her voice grew chilly. “Sonny, I’ve already told you the nature of our business. Now get me a landing pad.”

More silence. We circled the airship five kilometres out. I started to pull on the gloves of the stealth suit.

“Lieutenant Ortega.” It was Kawahara’s voice this time, but in the depths of the betathanatine, even hatred seemed detached and I had to remind myself to feel it. Most of me was assessing the rapidity with which they had voice-printed Ortega. “This is a little unexpected. Do you have some kind of warrant? I believe our licences are in order.”

Ortega raised an eyebrow at me. The voiceprinting had impressed her too. She cleared her throat. “This is not a licensing matter. We are looking for a fugitive. If you’re going to start insisting on warrants, I might have to assume you’ve got a guilty conscience.”

“Don’t threaten me, lieutenant,” said Kawahara coldly. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

“Reileen Kawahara, I imagine.” In the deathly silence that followed, Ortega made a jubilant punching gesture at the ceiling and turned to grin at me. The barb had gone home. I felt the faintest ripple of amusement catch at the corners of my mouth.

“Perhaps you’d better tell me the name of this fugitive, lieutenant.” Kawahara’s voice had gone as smooth as the expression on an untenanted synthetic sleeve.

“His name is Takeshi Kovacs,” said Ortega, with another grin at me. “But he’s currently sleeved in the body of an ex-police officer. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning your relationship with this man.”

There was another long pause, and I knew the lure was going to work. I’d crafted its multiple layers with all the care of the finest Envoy deceit. Kawahara almost certainly knew of the relationship between Ortega and Ryker, could probably guess Ortega’s entanglement with the new tenant of her lover’s sleeve. She would buy Ortega’s anxiety at my disappearance. She would buy Ortega’s unsanctioned approach to Head in the Clouds. Given an assumed communication between Kawahara and Miriam Bancroft, she would believe she knew where I was and she would be confident that she had the upper hand over Ortega.

But more important than all of this, she would want to know how the Bay City police knew she was aboard Head in the Clouds. And since it was likely that they had, either directly or indirectly, gleaned the fact from Takeshi Kovacs, she would want to know how he knew. She would want to know how much he knew, and how much he had told the police.

She would want to talk to Ortega.

I fastened the wrist seals of the stealth suit and waited. We completed our third circuit of Head in the Clouds.

“You’d better come aboard,” said Kawahara finally. “Starboard landing beacon. Follow it in, they’ll give you a code.”

The Lock-Mit was equipped with a rear dispatch tube, a smaller, civilian variant of the drop launcher that on military models was intended for smart bombs or surveillance drones. The tube was accessed through the floor of the main cabin and with a certain amount of contortion I fitted inside, complete with stealth suit, grav harness and assorted weaponry. We’d practised this three or four times on the ground, but now with the transport swinging in towards Head in the Clouds, it suddenly seemed a long and complicated process. Finally, I got the last of the grav harness inside and Ortega rapped once on the suit’s helmet before she slammed the hatch down and buried me in darkness.

Three seconds later the tube blew open and spat me backwards into the night sky.

The sensation was a dimly remembered joy, something this sleeve did not recall at a cellular level. From the cramped confines of the tube and the noisy vibration of the transport’s engines I was suddenly blasted into absolute space and silence. Not even the rush of air made it through the foam padding on the suit’s helmet as I fell. The grav harness kicked in as soon as I was clear of the tube and braked my fall before it got properly started. I felt myself borne up on its field, not quite motionless, like a ball bobbing on top of the column of water from a fountain. Pivoting about, I watched the navigation lights of the transport shrink inward against the bulk of Head in the Clouds.

The airship hung above and before me like a threatening storm cloud. Lights glimmered out at me from the curving hull and the gantried superstructure beneath. Ordinarily it would have given me the cringing sensation of being a sitting target, but the betathanatine soothed the emotions away in a clean rush of data detail. In the stealth suit I was as black as the surrounding sky and all but radar invisible. The grav field I was generating might theoretically show up on a scanner somewhere, but within the huge distortions produced by the airship’s stabilisers they’d need to be looking for me, and looking quite hard. All these things I knew with an absolute confidence that had no room for doubts, fears or other emotional tangling. I was riding the Reaper.

I set the impellers in cautious forward drive and drifted towards the massive, curving wall of the hull. Inside the helmet, simulation graphics awoke on the surface of the visor and I saw the entry points Irene Elliott had found for me delineated in red. One in particular, the unsealed mouth of a disused sampling turret, was pulsing on and off next to fine green lettering that spelled Prospect One. I rose steadily upward to meet it.

The turret mouth was about a metre wide and scarred around the edges where the atmosphere sampling system had been amputated. I got my legs up in front of me — no mean achievement in a grav field — and hooked myself over the lip of the hatch, then concentrated on worming myself inside up to the waist. From there I twisted onto my front to clear the grav harness and was able to slide myself through the gap and onto the floor of the turret. I switched the grav harness off.

Inside, there was barely enough crawlspace for a technician lying on his back to check the nest of equipment. At the back of the turret was an antique airlock, complete with pressure wheel, just as Irene Elliott’s Dipped blueprints had promised. I wriggled around until I could grasp the wheel with both hands, conscious that both suit and harness were catching on the narrow hatchway, and that my exertions so far had almost totally depleted my immediate body strength. I drew a deep breath to fuel my comatose muscles, waited for my slowed heartbeat to pump the oxygen round my body and heaved at the wheel. Against my expectations it turned quite easily and the airlock hatch fell outward. Beyond the hatch was an airy darkness.

I lay still for a while, mustering more muscular strength. The two-shot Reaper cocktail was taking some getting used to. On Sharya we hadn’t needed to go above twenty per cent. Ambient temperatures in Zihicce were quite high and the spider tanks’ infrared sensors were crude. Up here, a body at Sharyan room temperature would set off every alarm in hull. Without careful oxygen fuelling, my body would rapidly exhaust its cellular level energy reserves and leave me gasping on the floor like a gaffed bottleback. I lay still, breathing deep and slow.

After a couple of minutes, I twisted around again and unfastened the grav harness, then slid carefully through the hatch and hit a steel grid walkway with the heels of my hands. I curled the rest of my body slowly out of the hatch, feeling like a moth emerging from a chrysalis. Checking the darkened walkway in either direction I rose to my feet and removed the stealth suit helmet and gloves. If the keel plans Irene Elliott had Dipped from the Tampa aeroyard stack were still accurate, the walkway led down among the huge helium silos to the vessel’s aft buoyancy control room and from there I’d be able to climb a maintenance ladder directly onto the main operating deck. According to what we’d patched together out of Miller’s interrogation, Kawahara’s quarters were two levels below on the port side. She had two huge windows that looked downward out of the hull.

Summoning the blueprints from memory, I drew the shard pistol and set off towards the stern.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to reach the buoyancy control room, and I saw no one on the way. The control room itself appeared to be automated and I began to suspect that these days hardly anyone bothered to visit the swooping canopies of the airship’s upper hull. I found the maintenance ladder and climbed painstakingly down it until a warm upward-spilling glow on my face told me I was almost on the operating deck. I stopped and listened for voices, hearing and proximity sense both strained to their limits for a full minute before I lowered myself the final four metres and dropped to the floor of a well lit, carpeted passageway. It was deserted in both directions.

I checked my internal time display and stowed the shard gun. Mission time was accumulating. By now Ortega and Kawahara would be talking. I glanced around at the décor and guessed that whatever function the operating deck had once been intended to serve, it wasn’t serving it now. The passageway was decked out in opulent red and gold with stands of exotic plant life and lamps in the form of coupling bodies every few metres. The carpet beneath my feet was deep, and woven with highly detailed images of sexual abandon. Male, female and variants between twined around each other along the length of the corridor in an unbroken progression of plugged orifices and splayed limbs. The walls were hung with similarly explicit holoframes that gasped and moaned into life as I passed them. In one of them I thought I recognised the dark-haired, crimson-lipped woman of the street ’cast advertisement, the woman who might have pressed her thigh against mine in a bar on the other side of the globe.

In the cold detachment of the betathanatine, none of it had any more impact than a wall full of Martian techno-glyphs.

There were plushly appointed double doors set into each side of the corridor at about ten-metre intervals. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was behind the doors. Jerry’s biocabins, by any other name, and each door was just as likely as not to disgorge a client at any moment. I quickened my pace, searching for a connecting corridor that I knew led to stairs and elevators onto the other levels.

I was almost there when a door five metres ahead of me swung open. I froze, hand on the grip of the shard gun, shoulders to the wall, gaze gripped to the leading edge of the door. The neurachem thrummed.

In front of me, a grey furred animal that was either half-grown wolf cub or dog emerged from the open door with arthritic slowness. I kept my hand on the shard gun and eased away from the wall, watching. The animal was not much over knee height and it moved on all fours, but there was something badly wrong with the structure of the rear legs. Something wrenched. Its ears were laid back and a minute keening came from its throat. It turned its head towards me and for a moment my hand tightened on the shard gun, but the animal only looked at me for a moment and the mute suffering in its eyes was enough to tell me I was in no danger. Then it limped painfully along the corridor to a room farther down on the opposite wall and paused there, the long head down close to the door as if listening.

With a dreamlike sense of lost control, I followed and leaned my own head against the surface of the door. The soundproofing was good, but no match for the Khumalo neurachem at full stretch. Somewhere down near the limits of hearing, noises trickled into my ear like stinging insects. A dull, rhythmic thudding sound and something else that might have been the pleading screams of someone whose strength was almost gone. It stopped almost as soon as I had tuned it in.

Below me, the dog stopped keening at the same moment and lay down on the ground beside the door. When I stepped away, it looked up at me once with a gaze of pure distilled pain and reproach. In those eyes I could see reflected every victim that had ever looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal turned its head away and licked apathetically at its injured rear legs.

For a split second, something geysered through the cold crust of the betathanatine.

I went back to the door the animal had emerged from, drawing the shard gun on my way and swung through, holding the weapon in both hands before me. The room beyond was spacious and pastel-coloured with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the walls. A massive four poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the centre. Seated on the edge of the bed was a distinguished-looking man in his forties, naked from the waist down. Above the waist, he appeared to be wearing formal evening dress which clashed badly with the heavy-duty canvas work gloves he had pulled up to both elbows. He was bent over, cleaning himself between the legs with a damp white cloth.

As I advanced into the room, he glanced up.

“Jack? You finished al—” He stared at the gun in my hands without comprehension, then as the muzzle came to within half a metre of his face a note of asperity crept into his voice. “Listen, I didn’t dial for this routine.”

“On the house,” I said dispassionately, and watched as the clutch of monomolecular shards tore his face apart. His hands flew up from between his legs to cover the wounds and he flopped over sideways on the bed, gut-deep noises grinding out of him as he died.

With the mission time display flaring red in the corner of my vision, I backed out of the room. The injured animal outside the door opposite did not look up as I approached. I knelt and laid one hand gently on the matted fur. The head lifted and the keening rose in the throat again. I set down the shard gun and tensed my empty hand. The neural sheath delivered the Tebbit knife, glinting.

After, I cleaned the blade on the fur, resheathed the knife and picked up the shard gun, all with the unhurried calm of the Reaper. Then I moved silently to the connecting corridor. Deep in the diamond serenity of the drug something was nagging at me, but the Reaper would not let me worry about it.

As indicated on Elliott’s stolen blueprints the cross corridor led to a set of stairs, carpeted in the same orgiastic pattern as the main thoroughfare. I moved warily down the steps, gun tracking the open space ahead, proximity sense spread like a radar net before me. Nothing stirred. Kawahara must have battened down all the hatches just in case Ortega and her crew saw something inconvenient while they were on the premises.

Two levels down, I stepped off the stairs and followed my memory of the blueprints through a mesh of corridors until I was reasonably sure that the door to Kawahara’s quarters was around the next corner. With my back to the wall, I slid up to the corner and waited, breathing shallowly. The proximity sense said there was someone at the door around the corner, possibly more than one person, and I picked up the faint tang of cigarette smoke. I dropped to my knees, checked my surroundings and then lowered my face to the ground. With one cheek brushing the pile of the carpet, I eased my head around the corner.

A man and a woman stood by the door, similarly dressed in green coveralls. The woman was smoking. Although each of them had stunguns holstered importantly at their belts, they looked more like technical staff than security attendants. I relaxed fractionally and settled down to wait some more. In the corner of my eye, the minutes of mission time pulsed like an overstressed vein.

It was another quarter of an hour before I heard the door. At full amp, the neurachem caught the rustle of clothing as the attendants moved to allow whoever was leaving to exit. I heard voices, Ortega’s flat with pretended official disinterest, then Kawahara’s, as modulated as the mandroid in Larkin & Green. With the betathanatine to protect me from the hatred, my reaction to that voice was a muted horizon event, like the flare and crash of gunfire at a great distance.

“…that I cannot be of more assistance, lieutenant. If what you say about the Wei Clinic is true, his mental balance has certainly deteriorated since he worked for me. I feel a certain responsibility. I mean, I would never have recommended him to Laurens Bancroft, had I suspected this would happen.”

“As I said, this is supposition.” Ortega’s tone sharpened slightly. “And I’d appreciate it if these details didn’t go any further. Until we know where Kovacs has gone, and why—”

“Quite. I quite understand the sensitivity of the matter. You are aboard Head in the Clouds, lieutenant. We have a reputation for confidentiality.”

“Yeah.” Ortega allowed a stain of distaste into her voice. “I’ve heard that.”

“Well, then, you can rest assured that this will not be spoken of. Now if you’ll excuse me, lieutenant. Detective sergeant. I have some administrative matters to attend to. Tia and Max will see you back to the flight deck.”

The door closed and soft footfalls advanced in my direction. I tensed abruptly. Ortega and her escort were coming in my direction. This was something no one had bargained for. On the blueprints the main landing pads were forward of Kawahara’s cabin, and I’d come up on the aft side with that in mind. There seemed no reason to march Ortega and Bautista towards the stern.

There was no panic. Instead, a cool analogue of the adrenalin reaction rinsed through my mind, offering a chilly array of hard facts. Ortega and Bautista were in no danger. They must have arrived the same way they were leaving or something would have been said. As for me, if they passed the corridor I was in, their escort would only have to glance sideways to see me. The area was well lit and there were no hiding places within reach. On the other hand, with my body down below room temperature, my pulse slowed to a crawl and my breathing at the same low, most of the subliminal factors that will trigger a normal human being’s proximity sense were gone. Always assuming the escorts were wearing normal sleeves.

And if they turned into this corridor to use the stairs I had come down by …

I shrank back against the wall, dialled the shard gun down to minimum dispersal and stopped breathing.

Ortega. Bautista. The two attendants brought up the rear. They were so close I could have reached out and touched Ortega’s hair.

No one looked round.

I gave them a full minute before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went rapidly round the corner and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.

Chapter Forty-One

The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The décor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.

Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.

“Forget something?” she asked distantly.

“No, not a thing.”

I saw how her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned it was with unhurried smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she turned.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“Think about it.” I gestured at the loungers. “Sit down over there, take the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.”

“Kadmin?”

“Now you’re insulting me. Sit down!”

I saw the realisation explode behind her eyes.

“Kovacs?” An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. “Kovacs, you stupid, stupid bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?”

“I said sit down.”

“She has gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’m not going to tell you again,” I said mildly. “Either you sit down now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.”

The thin smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimetre at a time onto the nearest lounger. “Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill me?”

“If necessary.”

“For what? Is this some kind of moral stand?” The emphasis Kawahara laid on the last two words made it sound like the name of a product. “Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and then re-sleeve me from my last update ’cast. And it won’t take the new me very long to work out what happened up here.”

I seated myself on the edge of the lounger. “Oh, I don’t know. Look how long it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does he?”

“Is this about Bancroft?”

“No Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should have left me alone while you could.”

“Ohhh,” she cooed, mock maternal. “Did you get manipulated. I’m sorry.” She dropped the tone just as abruptly. “You’re an Envoy, Kovacs. You live by manipulation. We all do. We all live in the great manipulation matrix and it’s just one big struggle to stay on top.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t ask to be dealt in.”

“Kovacs, Kovacs.” Kawahara’s expression was suddenly almost tender. “None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and a psychotic whore for a mother. You think I asked for that? We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.”

“Or pouring water down other people’s throats,” I agreed amiably. “I guess you took after your mother, right?”

For a second it was as if Kawahara’s face was a mask cut from tin behind which a furnace was raging. I saw the fury ignite in her eyes and if I had not had the Reaper inside to keep me cold, I would have been afraid.

“Kill me,” she said, tight-lipped. “And make the most of it, because you are going to suffer, Kovacs. You think those sad-case revolutionaries on New Beijing suffered when they died? I’m going to invent new limits for you and your fish-smelling bitch.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Reileen. You see, your update needlecast went through about ten minutes ago. And on the way I had it Dipped. Didn’t lift anything, we just spliced the Rawling virus onto the ’cast. It’s in the core by now, Reileen. Your remote storage has been spiked.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re lying.”

“Not today. You liked the work Irene Elliott did at Jack It Up? Well you should see her in a virtual forum. I bet she had time to take a half dozen mindbites while she was inside that needlecast. Souvenirs. Collector’s items in fact, because if I know anything about stack engineers, they’ll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.” I nodded over at the winding data display. “I should think you’ll get the alarm in another couple of hours. It took longer at Innenin but that was a long time ago. The technology’s moved on since then.”

Then she believed, and it was as if the fury I’d seen in her eyes had banked down to a concentrated white heat.

“Irene Elliott,” she said intently. “When I find her—”

“I think we’ve had enough empty threats for one day,” I interrupted without force. “Listen to me. Currently the stack you’re wearing is the only life you have, and the mood I’m in now it wouldn’t take much to make me cut it out of your spine and stamp on it. Before or after I shoot you, so shut up.”

Kawahara sat still, glaring at me out of slitted eyes. Her top lip drew fractionally back off her teeth for a moment, before control asserted itself.

“What do you want?”

“Better. What I want, right now, is a full confession of how you set Bancroft up. Resolution 653, Mary Lou Hinchley, the whole thing. You can throw in how you framed Ryker as well.”

“Are you wired for this?”

I tapped my left eyelid where the recording system had gone in and smiled.

“You really think I’m going to do this?” Kawahara’s rage glinted at me from behind her eyes. She was waiting, coiled, for an opening. I had seen her like this before, but then I hadn’t been on the receiving end of that look. I was in as much danger under those eyes as I had ever been under fire in the streets of Sharya. “You really think you’re going to get this from me?”

“Look on the bright side, Reileen. You can probably buy and influence your way out of the erasure penalty, and for the rest you might only get a couple of hundred years in the store.” My voice hardened. “Whereas, if you don’t talk, you’ll die right here and now.”

“Confession under duress is inadmissible under law.”

“Don’t make me laugh. This isn’t going to the UN. You think I’ve never been in a court before? You think I’d trust lawyers to deal with this? Everything you say here tonight is going express needlecast to WorldWeb One as soon as I’m back on the ground. That, and footage of whoever it was I wasted in the doggie room upstairs.” Kawahara’s eyes widened and I nodded. “Yeah, I should have said earlier. You’re a client down. Not really dead, but he’ll need re-sleeving. Now with all that, I reckon about three minutes after Sandy Kim goes live, the UN tacs are going to be blowing down your door with a fistful of warrants. They’ll have no choice. Bancroft alone will force their hand. You think the same people who authorised Sharya and Innenin are going to stick at a little constitutional rule-bending to protect their power base? Now start talking.”

Kawahara raised her eyebrows, as if this was nothing more than a slightly distasteful joke she’d just been told. “Where would you like me to start, Takeshi-san?”

“Mary Lou Hinchley. She fell from here, right?”

“Of course.”

“You had her slated for the snuff deck? Some sick fuck wanted to pull on the tiger sleeve and play kitty?”

“Well, well.” Kawahara tipped her head on one side as she made connections. “Who have you been talking to? Someone from the Wei Clinic, is it? Let me think. Miller was here for that little object lesson, but you torched him, so … Oh. You haven’t been headhunting again, Takeshi? You didn’t take Felipe Miller home in a hatbox, did you?”

I said nothing, just looked at her over the barrel of the shard gun, hearing again the weakened screaming through the door I’d listened at. Kawahara shrugged.

“It wasn’t the tiger, as it happens. But something of that sort, yes.”

“And she found out?”

“Somehow, yes.” Kawahara seemed to be relaxing, which under normal circumstances would have made me nervous. Under the betathanatine, it just made me more watchful. “A word in the wrong place, maybe something a technician said. You know, we usually put our snuff clients through a virtual version before we let them loose on the real thing. It helps to know how they’re going to react, and in some cases we even persuade them not to go through with it.”

“Very thoughtful of you.”

Kawahara sighed. “How do I get through to you, Takeshi? We provide a service here. If it can be made legal, then so much the better.”

“That’s bullshit, Reileen. You sell them the virtual, and in a couple of months they come sniffing after the real thing. There’s a causal link, and you know it. Selling them something illegal gives you leverage, probably over some very influential people. Get many UN governors up here, do you? Protectorate generals, that kind of scum?”

“Head in the Clouds caters to an elite.”

“Like that white-haired fuck I greased upstairs? He was someone important, was he?”

“Carlton McCabe?” From somewhere, Kawahara produced an alarming smile. “You could say that, I suppose, yes. A person of influence.”

“Would you care to tell me which particular person of influence you’d promised they could rip the innards out of Mary Lou Hinchley?”

Kawahara tautened slightly. “No, I would not.”

“Suppose not. You’ll want that for a bargaining line later, won’t you? OK, skip it. So what happened? Hinchley was brought up here, accidentally found out what she was being fattened up for and tried to escape? Stole a grav harness, perhaps?”

“I doubt that. The equipment is kept under tight security. Perhaps she thought she could cling to the outside of one of the shuttles. She was not a very bright girl, apparently. The details are still unclear, but she must have fallen somehow.”

“Or jumped.”

Kawahara shook her head. “I don’t think she had the stomach for that. Mary Lou Hinchley was not a samurai spirit. Like most of common humanity, she would have clung to life until the last undignified moment. Hoping for some miracle. Begging for mercy.”

“How inelegant. Was she missed immediately?”

“Of course she was missed! She had a client waiting for her. We scoured the ship.”

“Embarrassing.”

“Yes.”

“But not as embarrassing as having her wash up on the shore a couple of days later, huh? The luck fairies were out of town that week.”

“It was unfortunate,” Kawahara conceded, as if we were discussing a bad hand of poker. “But not entirely unexpected. We were not anticipating a real problem.”

“You knew she was Catholic?”

“Of course. It was part of the requirements.”

“So when Ryker dug up that iffy conversion, you must have shat yourself. Hinchley’s testimony would have dragged you right into the open, along with fuck knows how many of your influential friends. Head in the Clouds, one of the Houses, indicted for snuff and you with it. What was the word you used on New Beijing that time? Intolerable risk. Something had to be done, Ryker had to be shut down. Stop me if I’m losing the thread here.”

“No, you’re quite correct.”

“So you framed him?”

Kawahara shrugged again. “An attempt was made to buy him off. He proved … unreceptive.”

“Unfortunate. So what did you do then?”

“You don’t know?”

“I want to hear you say it. I want details. I’m doing too much of the talking here. Try to keep your end of the conversation up, or I might think you’re being uncooperative.”

Kawahara raised her eyes theatrically to the ceiling. “I framed Elias Ryker. I set him up with a false tip about a clinic in Seattle. We built a phone construct of Ryker and used it to pay Ignacio Garcia to fake the Reasons of Conscience decals on two of Ryker’s kills. We knew the Seattle PD wouldn’t buy it and that Garcia’s faking wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. There, is that better?”

“Where’d you get Garcia from?”

“Research on Ryker, back when we were trying to buy him off.” Kawahara shifted impatiently on the lounger. “The connection came up.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

“How perceptive of you.”

“So everything was nicely nailed down. Until Resolution 653 came along, and stirred it all up again. And Hinchley was still a live case.”

Kawahara inclined her head. “Just so.”

“Why didn’t you just stall it? Buy some decision-makers on the UN Council?”

“Who? This isn’t New Beijing. You met Phiri and Ertekin. Do they look as if they’re for sale?

I nodded. “So it was you in Marco’s sleeve. Did Miriam Bancroft know?”

“Miriam?” Kawahara looked perplexed. “Of course not. No one knew, that was the point. Marco plays Miriam on a regular basis. It was a perfect cover.”

“Not perfect. You play shit tennis, apparently.”

“I didn’t have time for a competence disc.”

“Why Marco? Why not just go as yourself?”

Kawahara waved a hand. “I’d been hammering at Bancroft since the resolution was tabled. Ertekin too, whenever she let me near her. I was making myself conspicuous. Marco putting in a word on my behalf makes me look more detached.”

“You took that call from Rutherford,” I said, mostly to myself. “The one to Suntouch House after we dropped in on him. I figured it was Miriam, but you were there as a guest, playing Marco on the sidelines of the great Catholic debate.”

“Yes.” A faint smile. “You seem to have greatly overestimated Miriam Bancroft’s role in all this. Oh, by the way, who is that you’ve got wearing Ryker’s sleeve at the moment? Just to satisfy my curiosity. They’re very convincing, whoever they are.”

I said nothing, but a smile leaked from one corner of my mouth. Kawahara caught it.

“Really? Double sleeving. You really must have Lieutenant Ortega wrapped around your little finger. Or wrapped around something, anyway. Congratulations. Manipulation worthy of a Meth.” She barked a short laugh. “That was meant as a compliment, Takeshi-san.”

I ignored the jibe. “You talked to Bancroft in Osaka? Thursday 16th August. You knew he was going?”

“Yes. He has regular business there. It was made to look like a chance encounter. I invited him to Head in the Clouds on his return. It’s a pattern for him. Buying sex after business deals. You probably found that out.”

“Yeah. So when you got him up here, what did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth.”

“The truth?” I stared at her. “You told him about Hinchley, and expected him to back you?”

“Why not?” There was a chilling simplicity in the look she gave me back. “We have a friendship that goes back centuries. Common business strategies that have sometimes taken longer than a normal human lifetime to bring to fruition. I hardly expected him to side with the little people.”

“So he disappointed you. He wouldn’t keep the Meth faith.”

Kawahara sighed again, and this time there was a genuine weariness in it that gusted out of somewhere centuries deep in dust.

“Laurens maintains a cheap romantic streak that I continually underestimate. He is not unlike you in many ways. But, unlike you, he has no excuse for it. The man is over three centuries old. I assumed — wanted to assume, perhaps — that his values would reflect that. That the rest was just posturing, speechmaking for the herd.” Kawahara made a negligent what-can-you-do gesture with one slim arm. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.”

“What did he do? Take some kind of moral stand?”

Kawahara’s mouth twisted without humour. “You mock me? You, with the blood of dozens from the Wei Clinic fresh on your hands. A butcher for the Protectorate, an extinguisher of human life on every world where it has managed to find a foothold. You are, if I may say so, Takeshi, a little inconsistent.”

Secure in the cool wrap of the betathanatine, I could feel nothing beyond a mild irritation at Kawahara’s obtuseness. A need to clarify.

“The Wei Clinic was personal.”

“The Wei Clinic was business, Takeshi. They had no personal interest in you at all. Most of the people you wiped were merely doing their jobs.”

“Then they should have chosen another job.”

“And the people of Sharya. What choice should they have made? Not to be born on that particular world, at that particular time? Not to allow themselves to be conscripted, perhaps?”

“I was young and stupid,” I said simply. “I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learnt better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.”

“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”

“Bancroft didn’t think so.”

“Bancroft?” Kawahara made a disgusted noise deep in her throat. “Bancroft is a cripple, limping along on his archaic notions. It’s a mystery to me how he’s survived this long.”

“So you programmed him to suicide? Gave him a little chemical push?”

“Programmed him to…” Kawahara’s eyes widened and a delighted chuckle that was just the right blend of husk and chime issued from her sculpted lips. “Kovacs, you can’t be that stupid. I told you he killed himself. It was his idea, not mine. There was a time when you trusted my word, even if you couldn’t stomach my company. Think about it. Why would I want him dead?”

“To erase what you told him about Hinchley. When he was re-sleeved, his last update would be minus that little indiscretion.”

Kawahara nodded sagely. “Yes, I can see how that would fit for you. A defensive move. You have, after all, existed on the defensive since you left the Envoys. And a creature that lives on the defensive sooner or later comes to think on the defensive. You are forgetting one thing, Takeshi.”

She paused dramatically, and even through the betathanatine, a vague ripple of mistrust tugged at me. Kawahara was overplaying it.

“And what’s that?”

“That I, Takeshi Kovacs, am not you. I do not play on the defensive.”

“Not even at tennis?”

She offered me a calibrated little smile. “Very witty. I did not need to erase Laurens Bancroft’s memory of our conversation, because by then he had slaughtered his own Catholic whore, and had as much to lose as I from Resolution 653.”

I blinked. I’d had a variety of theories circling around the central conviction that Kawahara was responsible for Bancroft’s death, but none quite this garish. But as Kawahara’s words sank in, so did a number of pieces from that jagged mirror I’d thought was already complete enough to see the truth in. I looked into a newly revealed corner and wished I had not seen the things that moved there.

Opposite me, Kawahara grinned at my silence. She knew she’d dented me, and it pleased her. Vanity, vanity. Kawahara’s only but enduring flaw. Like all Meths, she had grown very impressed with herself. The admission, the final piece to my jigsaw, had slipped out easily. She wanted me to have it, she wanted me to see how far ahead of me she was, how far behind her I was limping along.

That crack about the tennis must have touched a nerve.

“Another subtle echo of his wife’s face,” she said, “carefully selected and then amped up with a little cosmetic surgery. He choked the life out of her. As he was coming for the second time, I think. Married life, eh Kovacs? What it must do to you males.”

“You got it on tape?” My voice sounded stupid in my own ears.

Kawahara’s smile came back. “Come on, Kovacs. Ask me something that needs an answer.”

“Bancroft was chemically assisted?”

“Oh, but of course. You were right about that. Quite a nasty drug, but then I expect you know—”

It was the betathanatine. The heart-dragging slow chill of the drug, because without it I would have been moving with the breath of air as the door opened on my flank. The thought crossed my mind as rapidly as it was able, and even as it did I knew by its very presence that I was going to be too slow. This was no time for thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and massage. It fogged the whiplash clarity of the Khumalo’s neurachem response system and I spun, just a couple of centuries too late, shard gun lifting.

Splat!

The stun bolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armour beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.

“What kept you?” asked Kawahara’s voice from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.

“Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.” Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. “Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?”

“It’s Kovacs,” said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.

I wasn’t going under.

“Kovacs?” Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. “I thought—”

“Yes, so did I.” The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colours swirling over her features. “He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.”

My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side-effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.

“Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,” said Trepp and put out a hand to touch my face.

“Yeah?” Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. “Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to — Fuck!”

She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.

“He was telling the truth.”

“About what?”

Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. “Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?”

“He’s cold.”

“Of course he’s fucking cold.” The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. “How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s Stiffed to the eyes.”

Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. “What are you going to do with him?”

“He’s going into virtual,” said Kawahara grimly. “Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.”

I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.

“You sure he isn’t transmitting?”

“Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?”

A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.

“I don’t have a knife.” I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.

“No problem.” Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. “I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.”

Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move towards the desk.

The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.

Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. “They coming?”

Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. “Yeah,” she said loudly. “Be here in a couple of minutes.”

I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with them a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were moulded in lead and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.

My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.

“Right then.” I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimetre apart.

I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.

I slashed sideways.

I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C-381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.

Kawahara was getting up.

“What the fuck are you waiting for?” she enquired acidly of Trepp. “Shoot this piece of shit, will you?”

Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap and levelled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.

“You traitorous fucking cunt,” Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. “You knew he was coming round, didn’t you? You’re fucking dead, bitch.”

I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time my shoulder smashed into Kawahara and we stumbled back towards the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm and we both went down on the angled glass.

The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung round at me and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.

“That ought to hold you, sport,” she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull grey flask of the water carrier. “You just lie there for a moment.”

My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stun bolt. I tried to lift one arm and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.

“Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” she said and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. “You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”

She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?”

Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.

“Security?”

“Ms Kawahara.” It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”

“I know what there’s been,” said Kawahara tiredly. “I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?”

“Ms Kawahara?”

“I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?”

There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.

“Ms Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.”

“Oh.” Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “OK, well get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?

Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you grinning at, Kovacs?”

I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.

“You,” she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.”

She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.

“Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material — that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.”

“I don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”

Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”

“When they ask how I died,” I said, “tell them: still angry.”

“Quell.” Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.”

She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.

“Have an aperitif.”

The jaws of the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.

She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how many others.

“That’s fucking enough,” I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment, driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.

The muffled crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.

Dialled to the short end of its fuse option, the termite microgrenade was designed to detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver ninety per cent of its charge to the contact face. The remaining ten per cent still wrecked my hand, tearing the flesh from the Khumalo marrow alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons, ripping the polybond ligamenting apart and punching a coin-sized hole in my palm.

On the downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me and then I was sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she realised what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away, almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken through what was left of the betathanatine.

Tell them: still angry.

Then the portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind and sky.

And we fell …

My left arm was paralysed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull. I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing upwards away from us and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face that had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiralling away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall was as seductive as sleep.

With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.

My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watching his screen.

Chapter Forty-Two

The address was, ironically enough, down in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.

The apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and weed-grown concrete landing area in the centre. Amongst the array of sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the microcopter immediately. Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.

The door to number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with blank hostility.

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.”

“Yeah, well she ain’t here.”

I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. “I think that’s probably not true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.”

“You the Sia?”

“No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.”

The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.

Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.

“You want to see me?” the synth voice asked unevenly. “What for?”

“I’m a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,” I said as gently as I could. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?”

She made a small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in men’s faces before without success.

“It won’t take long.”

She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine-god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it looked new.

Daryl had disappeared from view.

“Nice deck,” I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display front. “When did you get it?”

“A while ago.” Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. “What do you want to ask me?”

“May I sit down?”

She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.

“Well?” She jerked her hand at me nervously. “What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason for this.”

“On Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.”

The result was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I’d threatened her with a riot prod.

“That’s a part of my usual duties,” she cried shrilly. “I’m authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.”

It didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had told her to memorise.

“Was it synamorphesterone?” I asked quietly.

Cheap synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.

“How do you know that? Who told you that?” Her voice scaled to a high sobbing. “You can’t know that. She said no one would know.”

She collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently deciding that he couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything, stayed there, watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously to the sofa and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder, making her start as if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me and I could feel my own expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but it was farcical.

I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to do anything to you,” I said. “I just want to know.”

It took a minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink into Sheryl Bostock’s consciousness. It took even longer for her to get her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

“It was her,” she said, finally.

Curtis intercepted me as I came round the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was darkened with anger and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he snarled at me.

“Get out of my way, Curtis,” I said evenly. “Or you’re going to get hurt.”

His arms snapped up into a karate guard. “I said, she does—”

At that point I kicked him in the knee and he collapsed at my feet. A second kick rolled him a couple of metres down the slope towards the tennis courts. By the time he came out of the roll, I was on him. I jammed a knee into the small of his back and pulled his head up by the hair.

“I’m not having a great day,” I told him patiently. “And you’re making it worse. Now, I’m going up there to talk to your boss. It’ll take about ten minutes, and then I’ll be gone. If you’re wise, you’ll stay out of the way.”

“You fuck—”

I pulled his hair harder and he yelped. “If you come in there after me, Curtis, I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand? I’m not in the mood for swampsuck grifters like you today.”

“Leave him alone, Mr Kovacs. Weren’t you ever nineteen?”

I glanced over my shoulder to where Miriam Bancroft stood with her hands in the pockets of a loose, desert-coloured ensemble apparently modelled on Sharyan harem-wear. Her long hair was caught up under a swathe of the ochre cloth and her eyes glinted in the sun. I remembered suddenly what Ortega had said about Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff. Now I could see it, the casual poise of a fashion-house sleeve demonstrator.

I let go of Curtis’s hair and stood back while he climbed to his feet. “I wasn’t this stupid at any age,” I said untruthfully. “Do you want to tell him to back off, instead? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

“Curtis, go and wait for me in the limousine. I won’t be long.”

“Are you going to let him—”

“Curtis!” There was a cordial astonishment in her tone, as if there must be some mistake, as if answering back just wasn’t on the menu. Curtis’s face flushed when he heard it, and he stalked away from us with tears of consternation standing in his eyes. I watched him out of sight, still not convinced I shouldn’t have hit him again. Miriam Bancroft must have read the thought on my face.

“I would have thought even your appetite for violence had been sated by now,” she said quietly. “Are you still looking for targets?”

“Who says I’m looking for targets?”

“You did.”

I looked quickly at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“How convenient.”

“No, you don’t understand.” I lifted my open hands towards her. “I don’t remember it. Everything we did together is gone. I don’t have those memories. It’s been wiped.”

She flinched as if I’d struck her.

“But you,” she said in pieces. “I thought. You look—”

“The same.” I looked down at myself, at Ryker’s sleeve. “Well, there wasn’t much left of the other sleeve when they fished me out of the sea. This was the only option. And the UN investigators point-blank refused to allow another double sleeving. Don’t blame them, really. It’s going to be hard enough to justify the one we did as it is.”

“But how did you—”

“Decide?” I smiled without much enthusiasm. “Shall we go inside and talk about this?”

I let her lead me back up to the conservatory, where someone had set out a jug and tall-stemmed glasses on the ornamental table beneath the martyrweed stands. The jug was filled with a liquid the colour of sunsets. We took seats opposite each other without exchanging words or glances. She poured herself a glass without offering me one, a tiny casualness that spoke volumes about what had happened between Miriam Bancroft and my other self.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much time,” she said absently. “As I told you on the phone, Laurens has asked me to come to New York immediately. I was actually on my way out when you called.”

I said nothing, waiting, and when she had finished pouring I got my own glass. The move felt bone-deep wrong, and my awkwardness must have shown. She started with realisation.

“Oh, I—”

“Forget it.” I settled back into my seat and sipped at the drink. It had a faint bite beneath the mellowness. “You wanted to know how we decided? We gambled. Paper, scissors, stone. Of course, we talked around it for hours first. They had us in a virtual forum over in New York, very high ratio, discretion-shielded while we made up our minds. No expense spared for the heroes of the hour.”

I found an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice, and I had to stop to dump it. I took a longer pull at my drink.

“Like I said, we talked. A lot. We thought of a lot of different ways to decide, some of them were maybe even viable, but in the end we kept coming back to it. Scissors, paper, stone. Best of five. Why not?”

I shrugged, but it was not the casual gesture I hoped it would appear. I was still trying to shake off the cold that crept through me whenever I thought about that game, trying to second-guess myself with my own existence at stake. The best of five, and it had gone to two all. My heart was beating like the junk rhythm in Jerry’s Closed Quarters, and I was dizzy with adrenalin. Even facing Kawahara hadn’t been this hard.

When he lost the last round — stone to my paper — we both stared at our two extended hands for what seemed like a long time. Then, he’d got up with a faint smile and cocked his thumb and forefinger at his own head, somewhere midway between a salute and a burlesque of suicide.

“Anything I should tell Jimmy when I see him?”

I shook my head wordlessly.

“Well, have a nice life,” he said, and left the sunlit room, closing the door gently behind him. Part of me was still screaming inside that he had somehow thrown the last game.

They re-sleeved me the next day.

I looked up again. “Now I guess you’re wondering why I bothered coming here.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It concerns Sheryl Bostock,” I said.

“Who?”

I sighed. “Miriam, please. Don’t make this any tougher than it already is. Sheryl Bostock is shit-scared you’re going to have her torched because of what she knows. I’ve come here to have you convince me she’s wrong, because that’s what I promised her.”

Miriam Bancroft looked at me for a moment, eyes widening, and then, convulsively, she threw her drink in my face.

“You arrogant little man,” she hissed. “How dare you? How dare you?”

I wiped drink out of my eyes and stared at her. I’d expected a reaction but it wasn’t this. I raked surplus cocktail from my hair.

“Excuse me?”

“How dare you walk in here, telling me this is difficult for you? Do you have any idea what my husband is going through at this moment?”

“Well, let’s see.” I wiped my hands clean on my shirt, frowning. “Right now he’s the five-star guest of a UN Special Inquiry in New York. What do you reckon, the marital separation’s getting to him? Can’t be that hard to find a whorehouse in New York.”

Miriam Bancroft’s jaw clenched.

“You are cruel,” she whispered.

“And you’re dangerous.” I felt a little steam wisping off the surface of my own control. “I’m not the one who kicked an unborn child to death in San Diego. I’m not the one who dosed her own husband’s clone with synamorphesterone while he was away in Osaka, knowing full well what he’d do to the first woman he fucked in that state. Knowing that woman wouldn’t be you, of course. It’s no wonder Sheryl Bostock’s terrified. Just looking at you, I’m wondering whether I’ll live past the front gates.”

“Stop it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Stop it. Please.”

I stopped. We both sat in silence, she with her head bowed.

“Tell me what happened,” I said finally. “I got most of it from Kawahara. I know why Laurens torched himself—”

“Do you?” Her voice was quiet now, but there were still traces of her previous venom in the question. “Tell me, what do you know? That he killed himself to escape blackmail. That’s what they’re saying in New York, isn’t it?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption, Miriam,” I said quietly. “Kawahara had him in a lock. Vote down Resolution 653 or face exposure as a murderer. Killing himself before the needlecast went through to PsychaSec was the only way out of it. If he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about the suicide verdict, he might have got away with it.”

“Yes. If you hadn’t come.”

I made a gesture that felt unfairly defensive. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“And what about guilt?” she said into the quiet. “Did you stop to consider that? Did you stop to think how Laurens must have felt when he realised what he’d done, when they told him that girl Rentang was a Catholic, a girl who could never have her life back, even if Resolution 653 did force her back into temporary existence to testify against him? Don’t you think when he put the gun against his own throat and pulled the trigger, that he was punishing himself for what he’d done? Did you ever consider that maybe he was not trying to get away with it, as you put it?”

I thought about Bancroft, turning the idea over in my mind, and it wasn’t entirely difficult to say what Miriam Bancroft wanted to hear.

“It’s a possibility,” I said.

She choked a laugh. “It’s more than a possibility, Mr Kovacs. You forget, I was here that night. I watched him from the stairs when he came in. I saw his face. I saw the pain on his face. He paid for what he’d done. He judged and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who did not commit that crime, is living with the guilt again. Are you satisfied, Mr Kovacs?”

The bitter echoes of her voice were leached out of the room by the martyrweed. The silence thickened.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, when she showed no sign of speaking again. “Why did Marla Rentang have to pay for your husband’s infidelities?”

She looked at me as if I had asked her for some major spiritual truth and shook her head helplessly.

“It was the only way I could think of to hurt him,” she murmured.

No different to Kawahara in the end, I thought with carefully manufactured savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a puzzle.

“Did you know Curtis was working for Kawahara?” I asked tonelessly.

“I guessed. Afterwards.” She lifted a hand. “But I had no way of proving it. How did you work it out?”

“Retrospectively. He took me to the Hendrix, recommended it to me. Kadmin turned up five minutes after I went in, on Kawahara’s orders. That’s too close for a coincidence.”

“Yes,” she said distantly. “It fits.”

“Curtis got the synamorphesterone for you?”

She nodded.

“Through Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply as well. He was dosed to the eyes the night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka trip?”

“No. That was Kawahara.” Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. “We had an unusually candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.”

“Yeah, Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?”

“I am a woman of my word.”

“Yeah? Well, as a favour to me, do it soon.”

“And the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in this?”

I reached into my pocket and produced a matt black disc. “Footage of the injection,” I said, holding it up. “Composite footage of Sheryl Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your husband didn’t kill Marla Rentang chemically unassisted, but they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.”

“How did you know?” She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice small and distant. “How did you get to Bostock?”

“Intuition, mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?”

She nodded and cleared her throat. “I thought you were playing with me. I thought you’d told him.”

“No.” I felt a faint stab of anger. “Kawahara was still holding my friend in virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.”

She looked sideways at me, then looked away. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically, or through some kind of virtual programme. I’ve seen it done before.”

“Yes. I’m sure you have.” She sounded tired now, drifting away. “So why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?”

“I’m not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl Bostock.”

“How very astute.” She turned to look at me. “And what now, Mr Kovacs? More justice? More crucifixion of the Meths?”

I tossed the disc onto the table.

“I had the Hendrix go in and erase the injection footage from PsychaSec’s files. Like I said, they’ll probably assume your husband was dosed aboard Head in the Clouds. The expedient solution. Oh, and we erased the Hendrix’s memory of your visit to my room too, just in case someone wanted to make something of what you said about buying me off. One way and another, I’d say you owe the Hendrix a couple of big favours. It said a few guests every now and then would do. Shouldn’t cost much, relatively speaking. I sort of promised on your behalf.”

I didn’t tell her about Ortega’s sight of the bedroom scene, or how long it had taken to talk the policewoman round. I still wasn’t sure why she’d agreed myself. Instead I watched the wonder on Miriam Bancroft’s face for the full half minute it took her to reach out and close her hand around the disc. She looked up at me over her clenched fingers as she took it.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said morosely. “Who knows, maybe you and Laurens deserve each other. Maybe you deserve to go on loving a faithless sexual maladjust who can’t deal with respect and appetite in the same relationship. Maybe he deserves to go on not knowing whether he murdered Rentang unprovoked or not. Maybe you’re just like Reileen, both of you. Maybe all you Meths deserve is each other. All I know is, the rest of us don’t deserve you.”

I got up to go.

“Thanks for the drink.”

I got as far as the door—

“Takeshi.”

—and turned back, unwillingly, to face her.

“That isn’t it,” she said with certainty. “Maybe you believe all those things, but that isn’t it. Is it?”

I shook my head. “No, that isn’t it,” I agreed.

“Then why?”

“Like I said, I don’t know why.” I stared at her, wondering if I was glad I couldn’t remember or not. My voice softened. “But he asked me to do it, if I won. It was part of the deal. He didn’t tell me why.”

I left her sitting alone amidst the martyrweed.