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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 motherf*cker’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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 ringers. 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 f*cking 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 blurring, 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.