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.”
“F*cking 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 f*cking 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 tor 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 bolstered 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.