Chapter FOURTEEN
I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.
They’d put me back.
Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.
I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.
“Clothes.” She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”
One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”
“Yeah,” the woman sneered. “Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving our business through someone else.”
“He’s not talking about the re-sleeve,” I observed, pulling on my trousers. “He wants to check for interrogation trauma.”
“Who asked you?”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Where are we going?”
“To talk to someone,” she said shortly and turned back to the medics. “If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.”
I continued dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover tunic and jacket were intact but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either. Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.
“So who are we going to see?”
The woman gave me a sour look. “Someone who knows enough to check out your shit. And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly dispersal.”
“When this is over,” I said evenly, “maybe I can persuade one of our squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to thank you for your support.”
The blaster came out of its sheath with a soft strop, and was under my chin. I barely saw it happen. My recently re-sleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, aeons too late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.
“Don’t you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,” she said softly. “You got these clowns scared, they’re anchored in place and they think you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me. Got it?”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up by the gun.
“Got it,” I said.
“Good,” she breathed, and removed the blaster. “You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologise with everybody else. But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.”
At a rapid pace, we went down corridors that I tried to memorise and into a lift identical to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again, and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during the torture were hazy—the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining off the experience to avert the trauma—but even if it had gone on a couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.
“Get in the car,” said the woman laconically.
This time my ride was a larger, more elegant machine, reminiscent of Bancroft’s limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and shaven-headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear. I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the military would be seen dead with authorisation stripes. It was too close to the serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.
A second man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling negligently from his hand. He too had the shaven skull and the bar code. I looked hard at it as I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur and I cranked up the neurachem to eavesdrop.
“…head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.”
“No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—”
One of the medics slammed the door shut on me and the solid clunk at max amplification nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the machine pistoleer opened the doors on the other side and climbed in next to me.
“Close your eyes,” the woman said, producing my bandanna. “I’m going blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t going to want you knowing where to find them.”
I looked around at the windows. “These look polarised to me anyway.”
“Yeah, but no telling how good that neurachem is, huh? Now hold still.”
She knotted the red cloth with practised efficiency and spread it a little to cover my whole field of vision. I settled back in the seat.
“Couple of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when.”
The car boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat the odour of faeces on the inbound journey, and the seat I was in moulded itself supportively to my form. I seemed to have moved up in the order of things.
Strictly temporary, man. I smiled faintly as Jimmy’s voice echoed in the back of my skull. He was right. A couple of things were clear about whoever we were going to see. This was someone who didn’t want to come to the clinic, who didn’t even want to be seen near it. That bespoke respectability, and with it power, the power to access off-world data. Pretty soon they were going to know that the Envoy Corps was an empty threat, and very shortly after that I was going to be dead. Really dead.
That kind of dictates the action, pal.
Thanks, Jimmy.
After a few minutes the woman told me to take off the blindfold. I pushed it up onto my forehead and retied it there in its customary position. At my side, the muscle with the machine pistol smirked. I gave him a curious look.
“Something funny?”
“Yeah.” The woman spoke without turning her gaze from the city lights beyond the window. “You look like a f*cking idiot.”
“Not where I come from.”
She turned to look at me pityingly. “You aren’t where you come from. You’re on Earth. Try behaving like it.”
I looked from one to the other of them, the pistoleer still smirking, the synthetic with the expression of polite contempt, then shrugged and reached up with both hands to untie the bandanna. The woman went back to watching the lights of the city sink below us. The rain seemed to have stopped.
I chopped down savagely from head height, left and right. My left fist jarred into the pistoleer’s temple with enough force to break the bone and he slumped sideways with a single grunt. He never even saw the blow coming. My right arm was still in motion.
The synthetic whipped around, probably faster than I could have struck, but she misread me. Her arm was raised to block and cover her head, and I was under the guard, reaching. My hand closed on the blaster at her belt, knocked out the safety and triggered it. The beam seethed into life, cutting downwards, and a large quantity of the woman’s right leg burst open in wet ropes of flesh before the blowback circuits cut the blast. She howled, a cry more of rage than of pain, and then I dragged the muzzle of the weapon up, triggering another blast diagonally across her body. The blaster carved a channel a handsbreadth wide right through her and into the seat behind. Blood exploded across the cabin.
The blaster cut out again and the cabin went suddenly dim as the flaring of the beam weapon stopped. Beside me, the synthetic woman bubbled and sighed, and then the section of her torso that the head was attached to sagged away from the left side of the body. Her forehead came to rest against the window she had been looking out of. It looked oddly as if she was cooling her brow on the rain streaked glass. The rest of the body sat stiffly upright, the massive sloping wound cauterised clean by the beam. The mingled stink of cooked meat and fried synthetic components was everywhere.
“Trepp? Trepp?” It was the chauffeur’s intercom squawking. I wiped blood out of my eyes and looked at the screen set in the forward bulkhead.
“She’s dead,” I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster. “They’re both dead. And you’re next, if you don’t get us on the ground right now.”
The chauffeur rallied. “We’re five hundred metres above the Bay, friend, and I’m flying this car. What do you propose doing about that?”
I selected a mid-point on the wall between the two cabins, knocked out the blowback cutout on the blaster and shielded my face with one hand.
“Hey, what are you—”
I fired through into the driver’s compartment on tight focus. The beam punched a molten hole about a centimetre wide and for a moment it rained sparks backwards into the cabin as the armouring beneath the plastic resisted. Then the sparks died as the beam broke through and I heard something electrical short out in the forward compartment. I stopped firing.
“The next one goes right through your seat,” I promised. “I’ve got friends who’ll re-sleeve me when they fish us out of the Bay. You’ll carve into steaks right through this f*cking wall, and even if I miss your stack, they’ll have a hard time finding which part of you it’s inside, now f*cking get me on the ground.”
The limousine banked abruptly to one side, losing altitude. I sat back a little amidst the carnage and cleaned more blood off my face with one sleeve.
“That’s good,” I said more calmly. “Now set me down near Mission Street. And if you’re thinking about signalling for help, think about this. If there’s a firefight, you die first. Got it? You die first. I’m talking about real death. I’ll make sure I burn out your stack if it’s the last thing I do before they take me down.”
His face looked back at me on the screen, pale. Scared, but not scared enough. Or maybe scared of someone else. Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of longheld obedience through hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.
I used to be like that myself.
“How about this?” I offered rapidly. “You violate traffic protocol putting us down. The Sia turn up, bust you and hold you. You say nothing. I’m gone and they’ve got nothing on you outside of a traffic misdemeanour. Your story is you’re just the driver, your passengers had a little disagreement in the back seat and then I hijacked you to the ground. Meanwhile, whoever you work for bails you out rapido and you pick up a bonus for not cracking in virtual holding.”
I watched the screen. His expression wavered, and he swallowed hard. Enough carrot, time for the stick. I locked the blowback circuit on again, lifted the blaster so he could see it and fitted it to the nape of Trepp’s neck.
“I’d say you’re getting a bargain.”
At point-blank range, the blaster beam vaporised spine, stack and everything around it. I turned back to the screen.
“Your call.”
The driver’s face convulsed, and the limo started to lose height raggedly. I watched the flow of traffic through the window, then leaned forward and tapped on the screen.
“Don’t forget that violation, will you?”
He gulped and nodded. The limo dropped vertically through stacked lanes of traffic and bumped hard along the ground, to a chorus of furious collision alert screeches from the vehicles around us. Through the window I recognised the street I’d cruised with Curtis the night before. Our pace slowed somewhat.
“Crack the nearside door,” I said, tucking the blaster under my jacket. Another jerky nod and the door in question clunked open, then hung ajar. I swivelled, kicked it wide and heard police sirens wailing somewhere above us. My eyes met the driver’s on the screen for a moment and I grinned.
“Wise man,” I said, and threw myself out of the coasting vehicle.
The pavement hit me in the shoulder and back as I rolled amidst startled cries from passing pedestrians. I rolled twice, hit hard against a stone frontage and climbed cautiously to my feet. A passing couple stared at me and I skinned my teeth in a smile that made them hurry on, finding interest in other shop fronts.
A stale blast of displaced air washed over me as a traffic cop’s cruiser dropped in the wake of the offending limo. I stayed where I was, giving back the diminishing handful of curious looks from passers-by who had seen my unorthodox arrival. Interest in me was waning, in any case. One by one the stares slipped away, drawn by the flashing lights of the police cruiser, now hovering menacingly above and behind the stationary limo.
“Turn off your engines and remain where you are,” crackled the airborne speaker system.
A crowd started to knot up as people hurried past me, jostling and trying to see what was going on. I leaned back on the frontage, checking myself for damage from the jump. By the feel of the fading numbness in my shoulder and across my back, I’d done it right this time.
“Raise your hands above your head and step away from your vehicle,” came the metallic voice of the traffic cop.
Over the bobbing heads of the spectators, I made out the driver, easing himself out of the limo in the recommended posture. He looked relieved to be alive. For a moment I caught myself wondering why that kind of stand-off wasn’t more popular in the circles I moved in.
Just too many death wishes all round, I guess.
I backstepped a few metres in the mix of the crowd, then turned and slipped away into the brightly lit anonymity of the Bay City night.