On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin's grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bniising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.
I came down on the injured ribs and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a foetal ball and saw Kadmin's borrowed features a thousand metres above me.
'Get up,' he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance. 'We're not finished yet.'
I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicoloured lights and then everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought: to keep me conscious. The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the damage that: had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied. Consciouness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with Jimmy de Soto.
'Earth?' His grinning blackout striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside the tank. 'It's a shithole, man. Fucking frozen society, like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there, historical events aren't allowed.'
'Bullshit.' My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion track. In a rare moment -when the Sharyan jamming -went down, we've heard that Admiral Cursitor's IP fleet is still light seconds out, fighting the Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn't over, the locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not looking good.
At least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my temperature beginning to climb back towards normal. The surrounding air no longer feels like hot soup and breathing is ceasing to be the major effort it was when our heart rates were down near flatline.
The robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters.
'Bullshit, is it?' Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider tank's hull. 'Hey, you 're not from there. I am, and I'm telling you if they gave me the choice of life on earth or fucking storage, I'd have to give it some thought. You get the chance to visit, don't.'
I blinked the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the roof.
'Told you not to go there, didn't I pal. Now look at you. Earth.' He spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. 'It's a shithole. Got to get to the next screen.'
The crowd noise had settled down to a steady chanting.
The anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled with laughter.
Get to the next screen.
I lurched to my feet.
You don't do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night.
The voice jumped into my head, a voice I hadn't heard in nearly a century and a half of objective time. A man I hadn't soiled my memory with for most of my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn up now, when I really needed the shit:.
The Patchwork Man will come for you.
Well, you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man's standing right over there, waiting. He's not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything.
I summoned what was left from cellular levels in Ryker's body and stalked forward.
Glass shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space between Kadmin and myself.
'Kadmin!'
I saw his eyes raised to the gantry above and then his entire chest seemed to explode. His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly off balance and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was torn off and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted and fell in ropes.
I whipped round, staring upwards, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted except for the remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit. Trepp was firing into the audience.
Down on the floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming. I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, towards the sound. Carnage was on fire.
Braced in the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a long-barrelled blaster. Carnage was in flames from the waist up, beating at himself with arms that had themselves grown wings of fire. The shrieking he made was more the sound of fury than of pain. Pernilla Grip lay dead at his feet, chest scorched through. As I watched, Carnage pitched forward over her like a figure made of melting wax and his shrieks modulated down through groans to a weird electronic bubbling and then to nothing.
'Kovacs?'
Trepp's frag gun had fallen silent, and against the ensuing background of groaning and cries from the injured, Bautista's raised voice was unnaturally loud. He detoured around the burning synthetic and climbed up into the ring. His face was streaked with blood.
'You OK, Kovacs?'
I chuckled weakly, then clutched abruptly at the stabbing pain in my side.
'Great, just great. How's Ortega?'
'She's OK. Got her dosed up on lethinol for the shock. Sorry we got here so late.' He gestured up at Trepp. 'Took your friend there a while to get through to me at Fell Street. She refused to go through official channels. Said it wouldn't scan right. The mess we made coming in here, she ain't far wrong.'
I glanced around at the manifest organic damage.
'Yeah. That going to be a problem?'
Bautista barked a laugh. 'Are you ragging me? Entry without a warrant. Organic damage to unarmed suspects. What the fuck do you think?'
'Sorry about that.' I started to move off the killing floor. 'Maybe we can work something out.'
'Hey.' Bautista caught my arm. 'They took off a Bay City cop. No one does that around here. Someone should have told Kadmin before he made the fucking mistake.'
I wasn't sure if he was talking about Ortega or me in my Ryker sleeve, so I said nothing. Instead, I tipped my head back gingerly, testing for damage, and looked up at Trepp. She was reloading the frag gun.
'Hey, are you going to stay up there all night?'
'Be right down.'
She jacked the last shell into the frag gun, then executed a neat somersault over the gantry rail and fell outwards. About a metre into the fall, the grav harness on her back spread its wings and she fetched up hanging over us at head height with the gun slung across her shoulder. In her long black coat, she looked
like an off-duty dark angel.
Adjusting a dial on the harness, she drifted closer to the floor arid finally touched down next to Kadmin. I limped up to join her. We both looked at the ripped-open corpse in silence for a moment.
'Thanks,' I said softly.
'Forget it. All part of the service. Sorry I had to bring in these guys, but I needed the backup, and fast. You know what they say about the Sia around here. Biggest fucking gang on the block, right?' She nodded at Kadmin. 'You going to leave him like that?'
I stared at the Right Hand of God martyr with his face shocked into abrupt death, and tried to see the Patchwork Man inside him.
'No,' I said, and turned the corpse over with my foot so that the nape of the neck was exposed. 'Bautista, you want to lend me that firecracker?'
Wordlessly, the cop handed me his blaster. I set the muzzle against the base of the Patchwork Man's skull, rested it there and waited to feel something.
'Anyone want to say anything?' cracked Trepp, deadpan. Bautista turned away. 'Just do it.'
If my father had any comments, he kept them to himself.
The only voices were the cries of the injured spectators, and those I ignored.
Feeling nothing, I pulled the trigger.
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 fucking 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 fucking 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 motherfucker'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 fucking 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 fuck 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.'
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