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 stabilizers 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 toward 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 meter 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 for a technician lying on his back to check the nest of equipment. At the back of the turret was an antique air lock, 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 around my body, and heaved at the wheel. Against my expectations it turned quite easily and the air-lock 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 20 percent. 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 the hull. Without careful oxygen fueling, 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 airyard 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 toward 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 meters 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 decor 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 meters. 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 recognized 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 technoglyphs.
There were plushly appointed double doors set into each side of the corridor at about ten-meter 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 meters 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 gray-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 toward me and for a moment my hand tightened on the shard gun, but the animal looked at me for only 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 ev
er looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal turned its head away and licked apathetically at its wounded 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 colored with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the walls. A massive four-poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the center. 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 meter 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 wounded 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, now 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 holstered 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 and 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 strain 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 toward the stern.
There was no panic. Instead, a cool analog of the adrenaline 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, dialed 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 around.
I gave them a full minute before I breathed again. Then I checked the corridor in both directions, went rapidly around the corner, and knocked on the door with the butt of the shard gun. Without waiting for a reply, I walked in.
CHAPTEr FOrTY–ONE
The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty meters wide and walled in nonreflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of meters to the sea below. The decor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke gray, the floor fused glass, and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk; the other held a group of shale-colored loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.
Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.
“Forget something?” she asked distantly.
“No, not a thing.”
I saw how her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned, it was with unhurried smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she turned.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“Think about it.” I gestured at the loungers. “Sit down over there, take the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.”
“Kadmin?”
“Now you’re insulting me. Sit down!”
I saw the realization explode behind her eyes.
“Kovacs?” An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. “Kovacs, y
ou stupid, stupid bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?”
“I said sit down.”
“She was gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” I said mildly. “Either you sit down now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.”
The thin smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimeter at a time onto the nearest lounger. “Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill me?”
“If necessary.”
“For what? Is this some kind of moral stand?” The emphasis Kawahara laid on the last two words made it sound like the name of a product. “Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and then resleeve me from my last update ’cast. And it won’t take the new me very long to work out what happened up here.”
I seated myself on the edge of the lounger. “Oh, I don’t know. Look how long it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does he?”
“Is this about Bancroft?”
“No, Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should have left me alone while you could.”
“Ohhh,” she cooed, mock maternal. “Did you get manipulated? I’m sorry.” She dropped the tone just as abruptly. “You’re an Envoy, Kovacs. You live by manipulation. We all do. We all live in the great manipulation matrix and it’s just one big struggle to stay on top.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t ask to be dealt in.”
“Kovacs, Kovacs.” Kawahara’s expression was suddenly almost tender. “None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and psychotic whore for a mother? You think I asked for that? We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.”