PART 5 : NEMESIS
(SYSTEMS CRASH)
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.
“How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.”
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.