He nodded at me.
“You Anderson?”
“Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.
That, and my memories.
I wondered if she was feeling the same.
“Cop, huh?” The ex–Freak Fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile, either.
“Not at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”
“Yeah.” He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ’fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.”
As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose gray was startlingly offset by a violently colored rainbow headband.
“Your visitors,” the horned man said. “You okay with this?”
Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.
“You’d better come inside,” she said.
Inside the bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her movements were smoothly unself-conscious. I’d noticed the improvement on board the Panama Rose in the early hours of the morning, but here it was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked speculatively up at me.
“That’s you inside there, Anderson, I presume?”
I inclined my head.
“You going to tell me why?”
I seated myself opposite her. “That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or out?”
“You guarantee I get my own body back.” She was trying hard to sound casual, but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. “That’s the deal?”
I glanced up at Ortega, who nodded. “That’s correct. If this comes off successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate. But it has to be successful. If we fuck up, we’ll probably all go down the double-barrel.”
“You are operating under a federal brief, Lieutenant?”
Ortega smiled tightly. “Not exactly. But under the U.N. charter, we’ll be able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are successful.”
“A retrospective federal brief.” Elliott looked back to me, brows raised. “That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something gigantic.”
“It is,” I said.
Elliott’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not with JacSol anymore, are you? Who the fuck are you, Anderson?”
“I’m your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?”
Irene Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her.
It took about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong, offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offenses for all concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.
Or maybe I just tell myself that.
Irene Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time. Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.
“You’re insane,” Elliott said finally.
“Can you do it?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was reviewing a previous dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even downloading into that A.I. core. This makes what we did to the A.I. look like a systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a virtual forum.”
“That’s not a problem. Anything else?”
“That depends on what counterintrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.” Disgust, and an edge of tears, colored her tone for a couple of instants. “You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”
“Very,” Ortega said.
Elliott’s feelings went back underground. “Then I’ll have to run some checks. That’ll take time.”
“How much time?” Ortega wanted to know.
“Well, I can do it two ways.” Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring over the emotion that had been there before. “I can do a fast scan and maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right, which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your clock.”
“Take your time,” I suggested, with a warning glance at Ortega. “Now, what about wiring me for sight and sound? You know anyone who can do that discreetly?”
“Yeah, we got people here can do that. But you can forget a telemetry system. You try to transmit out of there, you will bring the house down. No pun intended.” She moved to the arm-mounted terminal and punched up a general access screen. “I’ll see if Reese can dig you up a grab-and-stash mike. Shielded microstack, you’ll be able to record a couple of hundred hours high rez and we can retrieve it here later.”
“Good enough. This going to be expensive?”
Elliott turned back to us, eyebrows hoisted. “Talk to Reese. She’ll probably have to buy the parts in, but maybe you can get her to do the surgery on a retrospective federal basis. She could use the juice at U.N. level.”
I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged exasperatedly.
“I guess,” she said ungraciously, as Elliott busied herself with the screen. I stood up and turned to the policewoman.
“Ortega,” I muttered into her ear, abruptly aware that in the new sleeve I was completely unmoved by her scent. “It isn’t my fault we’re short of funds. The JacSol account’s gone, evaporated, and if I start drawing on Bancroft’s credit for stuff like this, it’s going to look fucking odd. Now get a grip.”
“It isn’t that,” she hissed back.
“Then what is it?”
She looked at me, at our brutally casual proximity. “You know goddamn well what it is.”
I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes to avoid having to meet her gaze. “Did you sort out that hardware for me?”
“Yeah.” She stepped back, voice returning to normal volume and empty of tone. “The stungun from the Fell Street tackle room; no one’ll miss it. The rest is coming out of NYPD confiscated weapons stocks. I’m flying out to pick it up tomorrow personally. Material transaction, no records. I called in a couple of favors.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Her tone was savagely ironic. “Oh, by the way, they had a hell of a time getting hold of the spider venom load. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that’s all about, would you?”
“It’s a personal thing.”
“Hey, Reese,” she said cheerfully. “Got a customer for you.”
Despite the pessimistic estimate, Irene Elliott finished her preliminary scan a day later. I was down by the lake, recovering from Reese’s simple microsurgery and skimming stones with a girl of about six who seemed to have adopted me. Ortega was still in New York, the chill between us not really resolved.
Elliott emerged from the encampment and yelled out the news of her successful covert scan without bothering to come down to the water’s edge. I winced as the echoes floated out across the water. The open atmosphere of the little settlement took some getting used to, and how it fitted in with successful data piracy I still couldn’t see. I handed my stone to the girl and rubbed reflexively at the tiny soreness under one eye where Reese had gone in and implanted the recording system.
“Here. See if you can do it with this one.”
“Your stones are heavy,” she said plaintively.
“Well, try anyway. I got nine skips out of the last one.”
She squinted up at me. “You’re wired for it. I’m only six.”
“True. On both counts.” I placed a hand on her head. “But you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.”
“When I’m big I’m going to be wired like Auntie Reese.”
I felt a small sadness well up on the cleanly swept floor of my Khumalo neurachem brain. “Good for you. Look, I’ve got to go. Don’t go too close to the water, right?”
She looked at me exasperatedly. “I can swim.”
“So can I, but it looks cold, don’t you think?”
“Ye-e-es . . .”
“There you are, then.” I ruffled her hair and set off up the beach. At the first bubblefab I looked back. She was hefting the big flat stone at the lake as if the water were an enemy.
Elliott was in the expansive, postmission mood that most datarats seem to hit after a long spell cruising the stacks.
“I’ve been doing a little historical digging,” she said, swinging the terminal arm outward from its resting place. Her hands danced across the terminal deck, and the screen flared into life, shedding colors on her face. “How’s the implant?”
I touched my lower eyelid again. “Fine. Tapped straight into the same system that runs the time chip. Reese could have made a living doing this.”
“She used to,” Elliott said shortly. “Till they busted her for anti-Protectorate literature. When this is all over, you make sure that someone puts in a word for her at federal level, because she sure as shit needs it.”
“Yeah, she said.” I peered over her shoulder at the screen. “What have you got there?”
“Head in the Clouds. Tampa airyard blueprints. Hull specs, the works. This stuff is centuries old. I’m amazed they still keep it on stack at all. Anyway, seems she was originally commissioned as part of the Caribbean storm-management flotilla, back before SkySystems orbital weather net put them all out of business. A lot of the long-range scanning equipment got ripped out when they refitted, but they left the local sensors in and that’s what provides basic skin security. Temperature pickups, infrared, that sort of thing. Anything with body heat lands anywhere on the hull, they’ll know it’s there.”
I nodded, unsurprised. “Ways in?”
She shrugged. “Hundreds. Ventilation ducts, maintenance crawlways. Take your pick.”
“I’ll need to have another look at what Miller told my construct. But assume I’m going in from the top. Body heat’s the only real problem?”
“Yeah, but those sensors are looking for anything over a square millimeter of temperature differential. A stealth suit won’t cover you. Christ, even the breath coming out of your lungs will probably trip them. And it doesn’t stop there.” Elliott nodded somberly at the screen. “They must have liked the system a lot, because when they refitted they ran it through the whole ship. Room temperature monitors on every corridor and walkway.”
“Yeah, Miller said something about a heat-signature tag.”
“That’s it. Incoming guests get it on boarding, and their codes are incorporated into the system. Anyone else walks down a corridor uninvited, or goes somewhere their tag says they can’t, they set off every alarm in the hull. Simple, and very effective. And I don’t think I can cut in there and write you a welcome code. Too much security.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”
“You what?” Ortega looked at me with fury and disbelief spreading across her face like a storm front. She stood away from me as if I might be contagious.
“It was just a suggestion. If you don’t—”
“No.” She said the word as if it was new to her and she liked the taste. “No. No fucking way. I’ve connived at viral crime for you, I’ve hidden evidence for you, I’ve assisted you in multiple sleeving—”
“Hardly multiple.”
“It’s a fucking crime,” she said through her teeth. “I am not going to steal confiscated drugs out of police holding for you.”
“Okay, forget it.” I hesitated, put my tongue in my cheek for a moment. “Want to help me confiscate some more, then?”
Something inside me cheered as the unwilling smile broke cover on her face.
The dealer was in the same place he had been when I walked into his ’cast radius two weeks ago. This time I saw him twenty meters away, skulking in an alcove with the bat-eyed broadcast unit on his shoulder like a familiar. There were very few people on the street in any direction. I nodded to Ortega, who was stationed across the street, and walked on. The sales ’cast had not changed, the street of ridiculously ferocious women and the sudden cool of the betathanatine hit, but this time I was expecting it and in any case the Khumalo neurachem had a definite damping effect on the intrusion. I stepped up to the dealer with an eager smile.
“Got Stiff, man.”
“Good, that’s what I’m looking for. How much have you got?”
He started a little, expression coiling between greed and suspicion. His hand slipped down toward the horror box at his belt just in case.
“How much you want, man?”
“All of it,” I said cheerfully. “Everything you’ve got.”
He read me, but by then it was too late. I had the lock on two of his fingers as they stabbed at the horror box controls.
“Ah-ah.”
He took a swipe at me with the other arm. I broke the fingers. He howled and collapsed around the pain. I kicked him in the stomach and took the horror box away from him. Behind me, Ortega arrived and flashed her badge in his sweat-beaded face.
“Bay City police,” she said laconically. “You’re busted. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we.”
The betathanatine was in a series of dermal pads with tiny glass decanters folded in cotton. I held one of the vials up to the light and shook it. The liquid within was a pale red.
“What do you reckon?” I asked Ortega. “About eight percent?”
“Looks like. Maybe less.” Ortega put a knee into the dealer’s neck, grinding his face into the pavement. “Where do you cut this stuff, pal?”
“This is good merchandise,” the dealer squealed. “I buy direct. This is—”
Ortega rapped hard on his skull with her knuckles, and he shut up.
“This is shit,” she said patiently. “This has been stepped on so hard it wouldn’t give you a cold. We don’t want it. So you can have your whole stash back and walk, if you like. All we want to know is where you cut it. An address.”
“I don’t know any—”
“Do you want to be shot while escaping?” Ortega asked him pleasantly, and he grew suddenly very quiet.
“Place in Oakland,” he said sullenly.
Ortega gave him a pencil and paper. “Write it down. No names, just the address. And so help me, if you’re tinseling me, I’ll come back here with fifty ccs of real Stiff and feed you the lo
t, unstepped.”
She took back the scrawled paper and glanced at it, removed her knee from the dealer’s neck, and patted him on the shoulder.
“Good. Now get up and get the fuck off the street. You can go back to work tomorrow, if this is the right place. And if it’s not, remember, I know your patch.”
We watched him lurch off, and Ortega tapped the paper.
“I know this place. Controlled Substances busted them a couple of times last year, but some slick lawyer gets the important guys off every time. We’ll make a lot of noise, let them think they’re buying us off with a bag of uncut.”
“Fair enough.” I looked after the retreating figure of the dealer. “Would you have really shot him?”
“Nah.” Ortega grinned. “But he doesn’t know that. ConSub does it sometimes, just to get major dealers off the street when there’s something big going down. Official reprimand for the officer involved, and compensation pays out for a new sleeve, but it takes time, and the scumbag does that time in the store. Plus it hurts to get shot. I was convincing, huh?”
“Convinced the fuck out of me.”
“Maybe I should have been an Envoy.”
I shook my head. “Maybe you should spend less time around me.”
I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the hypnophone sonocodes to lull me away from reality. On either side of me, Davidson, the Organic Damage datarat, and Ortega had settled into their racks, and even through the hypnophones I could hear their breathing, slow and regular, at the limits of my neurachem perception. I tried to relax more, to let the hypnosystem press me down through levels of softly decreasing consciousness, but instead my mind was whirring through the details of the setup like a program check scanning for error. It was like the insomnia I’d suffered after Innenin, an infuriating synaptic itch that refused to go away. When my peripheral-vision time display told me that at least a full minute had gone by, I propped myself up on one elbow and looked around at the figures dreaming in the other racks.
“Is there a problem?” I asked loudly.
“The tracking of Sheryl Bostock is complete,” the hotel said. “I assumed you would prefer to be alone when I informed you.”
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