Chapter TEN
The transport was a stripped-down version of the one that had given me the ride out to Suntouch House, and it was noisy in the cabin. Ortega had to shout to make herself heard above the engines.
“We’ll put in a sniffer squad, but if he’s connected he can get stuff that’ll change his body’s chemical signature before dawn. After that, we’re down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part of town…”
The transport banked and she gestured down at the warren of streets below. “Look at it. Licktown, they call it. Used to be called Potrero way back. They say it was a nice area.”
“So what happened?”
Ortega shrugged in her steel lattice seat. “Economic crisis. You know how it is. One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yeah, isn’t it,” said the detective dismissively. “Kovacs, what the f*ck were you doing at Jerry’s?”
“Getting an itch scratched,” I growled. “Any laws against it?”
She looked at me. “You weren’t getting greased in Jerry’s. You were barely in there ten minutes.”
I lifted my own shoulders and made an apologetic face. “You ever been downloaded into a male body straight out of the tank, you’ll know what it’s like. Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Jerry’s, performance isn’t an issue.”
Ortega’s lips curved in something approximating a smile. She leaned forward across the space between us.
“Bullshit, Kovacs. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they’ve got on you at Millsport. Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so steep you’d need pitons and rope to get up it. Everything you do, performance is going to be an issue.”
“Well.” I fed myself a cigarette and ignited it as I spoke. “You know there’s a lot you can do for some women in ten minutes.”
Ortega rolled her eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around her face.
“Right. And you’re telling me with the credit you have from Bancroft, Jerry’s is the best you can afford?”
“It’s not about cost,” I said, and wondered if that was the truth of what brought people like Bancroft down to Licktown.
Ortega leaned her head against the window and looked out at the rain. She didn’t look at me. “You’re chasing leads, Kovacs. You went down to Jerry’s to follow up something Bancroft did there. Given time I can find out what that was, but it’d be easier if you just told me.”
“Why? You told me the Bancroft case was closed. What’s your interest?”
That brought her eyes back round to mine, and there was a light in them. “My interest is keeping the peace. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but every time we meet it’s to the sound of heavy-calibre gunfire.”
I spread my hands. “I’m unarmed. All I’m doing is asking questions. And speaking of questions … How come you were sitting on my shoulder when the fun started?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
I let that one go. Ortega was tailing me, that much was certain. And that in turn meant there had to be more to the Bancroft case than she was admitting.
“What’s going to happen to my car?” I asked.
“We’ll have it picked up. Notify the hire company. Someone can come and get it from the impound. Unless you want it.”
I shook my head.
“Tell me something, Kovacs. Why’d you hire a ground car? On what Bancroft’s paying you, you could have had one of these.” She slapped the bulkhead by her side.
“I like to go places on the ground,” I said. “You get a better sense of distance that way. And on Harlan’s World, we don’t go up in the air much.”
“Really?”
“Really. Listen, the guy who nearly torched you out of the sky back there—”
“Excuse me?” She cranked up one eyebrow in what by now I was beginning to think of as her trademark expression. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we saved your sleeve back there. You were the one looking down the wrong end of the hardware.”
I gestured. “Whatever. He was waiting for me.”
“Waiting for you?” Whatever she really thought, Ortega’s face was disbelieving. “According to those Stiff dealers we loaded into the wagon, he was buying product. An old customer, they say.”
I shook my head. “He was waiting for me. I went to talk to him, he took off.”
“Maybe he didn’t like your face. One of the dealers, I think it was the one whose skull you cracked, said you were looking jacked up to kill someone.” She shrugged again. “They say you started it, and it certainly looks that way.”
“In that case, why aren’t you charging me?”
“Oh, with what?” She exhaled an imaginary plume of smoke. “Organic damage (surgery reparable) to a pair of Stiff peddlers? Endangering police property? Breach of the peace in Licktown. Give me a break, Kovacs. This sort of thing goes down every night outside Jerry’s. I’m too tired for the paperwork.”
The transport tipped and through the window I could see the dim form of the Hendrix’s tower. I’d accepted Ortega’s offer of a ride home in much the same spirit as I had the police lift out to Suntouch House—to see where it would take me. Envoy wisdom. Go with the flow, and see what it shows you. I’d no reason to suppose Ortega was lying to me about our destination, but still part of me was surprised to see that tower. Envoys aren’t big on trust.
After an initial wrangle with the Hendrix about landing permission, the pilot set us down on a grimy-looking drop pad atop the tower. I could feel the wind tugging at the transport’s lightweight body as we landed, and as the hatch unfolded upwards, the cold came battering aboard. I got up to go. Ortega stayed where she was, watching me go with a lopsided look that I still couldn’t work out. The charge I’d felt last night was back. I could feel the need to say something pressing on me like an impending sneeze.
“Hey, how’d the bust go down on Kadmin?”
She shifted in the seat and stuck out one long leg to rest her boot on the chair I had just vacated. A thin smile.
“Grinding through the machine,” she said. “We’ll get there.”
“Good.” I climbed out into the wind and rain, raising my voice. “Thanks for the lift.”
She nodded gravely, then tipped her head back to say something to the pilot behind her. The whine of the turbines built and I ducked hurriedly out from under the hatch as it began to close. As I stepped back, the transport unglued itself and lifted away, lights flashing. I caught a final glimpse of Ortega’s face through the rain-streaked cabin window, then the wind seemed to carry the little craft away like an autumn leaf, wheeling away and down towards the streets below. In seconds it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other flyers speckling the night sky. I turned and walked against the wind to the drop pad’s access staircase. My suit was sodden from the rain. What had possessed Bancroft to outfit me for summer with the scrambled weather systems that Bay City had so far exhibited was beyond me. On Harlan’s World, when it’s winter, it stays that way long enough for you to make decisions about your wardrobe.
The upper levels of the Hendrix were in darkness relieved only by the occasional glow of dying illuminum tiles, but the hotel obligingly lit my way with neon tubes that flickered on in my path and died out again behind me. It was a weird effect, making me feel as if I was carrying a candle or torch.
“You have a visitor,” the hotel said chattily as I got into the elevator and the doors whirred closed.
I slammed my hand against the emergency stop button, raw flesh stinging where I’d skinned my palm. “What?”
“You have a visi—”
“Yeah, I heard.” It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if the AI could take offence at my tone. “Who is it, and where are they?”
“She identifies herself as Miriam Bancroft. Subsequent search of the city archives has confirmed sleeve identity. I have allowed her to wait in your room, since she is unarmed and you left nothing of consequence there this morning. Aside from refreshment, she has touched nothing.”
Feeling my temper rising, I found focus on a small dent in the metal of the elevator door and made an attempt at calm.
“This is interesting. Do you make arbitrary decisions like this for all your guests?”
“Miriam Bancroft is the wife of Laurens Bancroft,” said the hotel reproachfully. “Who in turn is paying for your room. Under the circumstances, I thought it wise not to create unnecessary tensions.”
I looked up at the ceiling of the elevator.
“You been checking up on me?”
“A background check is part of the contract I operate under. Any information retained is wholly confidential, unless subpoenaed under UN directive 231.4.”
“Yeah? So what else you know?”
“Lieutenant Takeshi Lev Kovacs,” said the hotel. “Also known as Mamba Lev, One Hand Rending, the Icepick, born Newpest, Harlan’s World 35th May 187, colonial reckoning. Recruited to UN Protectorate forces 11th September 204, selected for Envoy Corps enhancement 31st June 211 during routine screening—”
“All right.” Inwardly I was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got. Most people’s records dry up as soon as the trace goes offworld. Interstellar needlecasts are expensive. Unless the Hendrix had just broken into Warden Sullivan’s records, which was illegal. Ortega’s comment about the hotel’s previous charge sheet drifted back to me. What kind of crimes did an AI commit anyway?
“It also occurred to me that Mrs.Bancroft is probably here in connection with the matter of her husband’s death, which you are investigating. I thought you would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting in the lobby.”
I sighed, and unpinned my hand from the elevator’s stop button.
“No, I bet she wasn’t.”
She was seated in the window, nursing a tall, ice-filled glass and watching the lights of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard. She didn’t turn her head when I let myself in, so I advanced across the room into her field of vision.
“The hotel told me you were here,” I said. “In case you were wondering why I didn’t unsleeve myself in shock.”
She looked up at me and shook hair back from her face.
“Very dry, Mr.Kovacs. Should I applaud?”
I shrugged. “You might say thank you for the drink.”
She examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes up again.
“Thank you for the drink.”
“Don’t mention it.” I went to the cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there. A bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt suggested itself. I uncorked it, sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping my eyes on my hands as they poured, I said,“Have you been waiting long?”
“About an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?”
I held onto the first of mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.
“Now why would you think that, Mrs.Bancroft?”
She made an elegant gesture with one hand. “No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.” I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk about?”
I waved my glass at her. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”
“I want to know what progress you’ve made.”
“You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs.Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.”
For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.
“I want you to stop,” she said.
I let the words sink into the darkened room.
“Why?”
I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well.” I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. “To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health, Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.”
“A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,” she said carefully. “And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.”
“Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.”
She sat forward over her drink. “Let’s not pretend, Mr.Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.”
“I’m still curious.”
“Maybe I could satisfy that,” she said softly.
I swallowed more whisky. “Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs.Bancroft?”
She made an impatient gesture. “I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are … curious about other things, are you not?”
“I’m sorry?” I looked at her over the rim of my glass.
Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.
“Do you know what Merge Nine is?” she asked, a little unsteadily.
“Empathin?” I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of f*cking psychos.
“Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve…” She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. “This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when … aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr.Kovacs.”
And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.
I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her *oris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.
Blending, our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.
For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed against the glass of the bio-cabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long, warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they were spread on either side of my body.
And then the motion.
The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.
Later, as we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”
I looked down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.
“Is that a trick question?”
She laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at Suntouch House.
“No. I want to know.”
“Do you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.
“You think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we don’t care about anything young?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your perspectives.”
“Yes, it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her. “Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?”
I leaned over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head to kiss her on one breast.
“Miriam Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you.”
She staved off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”
“What kind of a question—”
“I’m serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in some control and looked her in the eyes.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I like you.”
Her voice lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”
“Yes, I like what we did.”
“Do you want more?”
“Yes, I want more.”
She sat up to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”
“I want more. Of you.”
She pushed me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and sharp.
“Out west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser, there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful. I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”
I made a noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.
“What was that?” She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.
“How long?” I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. “Is this fun park invitation good for?”
She grinned then, a grin of pure lechery.
“Unlimited rides,” she said.
“But for a limited period only, right?”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.”
“That might take a long time.”
“No.” There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time and her gaze fell a little. “No it won’t.”
The pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak I could hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.
As the orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine and as I started to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.
Whiteout.
And when I came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was gone like a fever dream.