Authors: Richard Morgan
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.