Authors: Richard Morgan
“Wait
a minute.” I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. “Just
like who, who am I just like?”
“What?”
“You
just said I’m just—”
“Never
fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here,
Kovacs?”
“The
only thing I under—” Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind
me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote
clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen
the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts.
Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.
“Give
me that, turn that fucking thing—”
For a moment
I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume
louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she
collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.
“—off.”
There was a
long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on
one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my
leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that,
for a moment, our breathing matched pace.
When I turned
and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on
each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.
It was like
resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing
and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains
while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We
were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made
excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms
skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts
that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off,
sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s
shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands
tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard,
long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each
finger, rubbing.
Somehow we
got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin
I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides
across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have
been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the
room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted
herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because
now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid
entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my
hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove
like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic
elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her
breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all
the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and
Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless
epic.
I felt the
first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up
through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own
control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms
were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide
out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.
Neither of
us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and
around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide,
threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be
fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on
each other.
I slid an
arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we
lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.
“Where’re
we going?” I asked her gently.
A shrug,
but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. “Programmed cycle, down the
coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.”
“And
no one knows we’re out here?”
“Only
the satellites.”
“Nice
thought. Who does it all belong to it?”
She twisted
to look at me over her shoulder. “It’s Ryker’s.”
“Ooops.”
I looked elaborately away. “Nice carpet in here.”
Against the
odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed.
Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily,
or maybe disappear.
“I
told myself,” she murmured, “it was crazy. It was just the body, you
know.”
“Most
things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff.
Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you
believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight.
Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine
tuning. Sad, but true.”
Her finger
followed a line down the side of my face. “I don’t think it’s
sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.”
“Kristin
Ortega.” I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. “You are
a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get
into this line of work?”
She
shrugged again. “Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop.
You know how it goes.”
“Not
from experience.”
“No.”
She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. “I
guess not.”
I reached
across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the
knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the
shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted
fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our
mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under
me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.
This time,
when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each
time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her
whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward,
grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly
uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally
flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering
her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d
shared since reaching the bed.
We moved
slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first
embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from
languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings,
the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that
hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I
finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness
to her own shaking finish.
In the
Envoy Corps, you take what is offered
,
said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory.
And that
must sometimes be enough
.
As we
separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came
down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness
slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear
impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts
pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable
clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing
down.
What is offered. Sometimes.
Enough.
When I awoke, she was gone.
There was
sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The
pitching of the boat had almost stopped but there was still enough roll to show
me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably
calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat.
I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and
trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them. What to tell
Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself
sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink,
absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.
The
clinking of glasses from the door brought me round. Ortega was standing in the
doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been
stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES
in the same colour. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt
as if they might conceivably go on for ever inside. Balanced in her hands was a
large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she
tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.
So I told
her everything.
“So
what are you going to do?”
I shrugged
and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean
seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan’s World. Up on
deck, the immensity of it sank in and the yacht was suddenly a child’s
toy. “I’m going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft
wants. What
you
want. What apparently everyone fucking wants.
I’m going to kill the case.”
“You
think Kawahara torched Bancroft?”
“Seems
likely. Or she’s shielding someone who did. Doesn’t matter anymore.
She’s got Sarah, that’s all that counts now.”
“We
could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of d.h. personality
carries—”
“Fifty
to a hundred, yeah.” I smiled faintly. “I was listening last night.
But she won’t be holding directly, it’ll be some subsidiary.”
“We
can get warrants that—”
“She’s
a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse.
Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her,
she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants
take to get clearance?”
“Couple
of days, if it’s UN-expedited.” The gloom crept across
Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared
downwards.
“Exactly.
That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy,
she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in
eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be
screaming insane by the time we pulled her out.
If
we pulled her out,
and anyway I’m not going to even fucking
consider
putting her
through a single second of—”
“OK.”
Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. “OK. I’m sorry.”
I shivered
slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual
dungeons I couldn’t be sure.
“Forget
it.”
“I’m
a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys.
That’s all.”
I looked up
and gave her a bleak smile. “I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature
to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There
are no ways.”
The smile
she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going
to get us sooner or later.
“Look,
Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and
shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters
gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to
know.”
She thought
about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the
answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail
to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky
overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of
a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it
was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this
world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.
If they
want you
, a youngish Quell had once
written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite,
sooner or later
they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a
Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after
you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you,
clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods,
mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant
labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the
mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed
against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously
with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the
tradesman’s entrance
.