'Hello, Carnage.'
The crude features sketched a smile. 'Welcome back to the Panama Rose, Mr Kovacs.'
I sat up shakily on a narrow metal bunk. Carnage stepped back to give me space, or just to stay out of grabbing range. Smeared vision gave me a cramped cabin in grey steel behind him. I swung my feet to the floor and stopped abruptly. The nerves in my arms and legs were still jangling from the stunbolt and there was a sick, trembling feeling in the pit of my stomach. All things considered, it felt like the results of a very dilute beam. Or maybe a series. I glanced down at myself and saw that I was dressed in a heavy canvas gi the colour of quarried granite. On the floor beside the bunk were a pair of matching spacedeck slippers and a belt. I began to get an unpleasant inkling of what Kadmin had planned.
Behind Carnage, the door of the cabin opened. A tall, blonde woman, apparently in her early forties, stepped in, followed by another synthetic, this one smoothly modern-looking apart from a gleaming steel direct interface tool in place of a left: hand.
Carnage busied himself with introductions.
'Mr Kovacs, may I present Pernilla Grip of Combat Broadcast Distributors, and her technical assistant Miles Mech. Pernilla, Miles, I'd like to present Takeshi Kovacs, our surrogate Ryker for tonight. Congratulations, by the way, Kovacs. At the time I was utterly convinced, despite the unlikelihood of Ryker making it off stack for the next two hundred years. All part of the Envoy technique, I understand.'
'Not really. Ortega was the convincing factor. All I did was let you talk. You're good at that.' I nodded at Carnage's companions. 'Did I hear the word broadcasting? I thought that went against the creed. Didn't you perform radical surgery on a journalist for that particular crime?'
'Different products, Mr Kovacs. Different products. To broadcast a scheduled fight would indeed be a breach of our creed. But this is not a scheduled fight, this is a humiliation bout.' Carnage's surface charm froze over on the phrase. 'With a different and necessarily very limited live audience, we are forced to make up for the loss in revenue somehow. There are a great many networks who are anxious to get their hands on anything that comes out of the Panama Rose. This is the effect our reputation has, but unfortunately it is that same reputation that precludes us doing any such business directly. Ms Grip handles this market dilemma for us.'
'Nice of her.' My own voice grew cold. 'Where's Kadmin?'
'In due time, Mr Kovacs. In due time. You know, when I was told you would react this way and give yourself up for the lieutenant, I confess I doubted it at the time. But you fulfil expectations like a machine. Was it that that the Envoy Corps took away from you in return for all your other powers? Your unpredictability? Your soul?'
'Don't get poetic on me, Carnage. Where is he?'
'Oh, very well. This way.'
There was a brace of large sentries outside the cabin door that might have been the two from the cruiser. I was too jangled to remember clearly. They bracketed me as we followed Carnage along claustrophobic corridors and down listing companionways, all rust-spotted and polymer-varnished metal. I tried vaguely to memorise the path but most of me was thinking about what Carnage had said. Who had predicted my actions to him? Kadmin? Unlikely. The Patchwork Man, for all his fury and death threats, knew next to nothing about me. The only real candidate for that kind of prediction was Reileen Kawahara. Which also helped to explain why Carnage wasn't quaking in his synthetic flesh at the thought of what Kawahara might do to him for co-operating with Kadmin. Kawahara had sold me out. Bancroft was convinced, the crisis — whatever it had been — was over, and the same day Ortega was snatched as bait. The scenario I had sold to Bancroft left Kadmin out there as a private contractor with a grudge, so there was no reason why he couldn't be seen to take me down. And under the circumstances, I was safer disposed of than left alive.
For that matter, so was Kadmin so maybe it hadn't been that blatant. Maybe the word had gone out to bring Kadmin down, but only for as long as I was needed. With Bancroft convinced, I was once more expendable and the word had gone out again, to let Kadmin be. He could kill me, or I could kill him, whichever way the luck turned. Leaving Kawahara to clean up whoever was left.
I had no doubt that Kawahara would keep her word as far as releasing Sarah was concerned. The old-style yakuza were funny about that sort of thing. But she had made no such binding promises about me.
We clambered down a final staircase, a little wider than the rest, and came out onto a glassed-in gantry over a converted cargo cell. Looking down, I saw one of the arenas Ortega and I had passed in the electromag train last week, but now the plastic coverings were off the killing ring, and a modest crowd had assembled in the forward rows of each bank of plastic seating. Through the glass I could hear the sustained buzz of excitement and anticipation that had always preceded the freak fights I'd attended in my youth.
'Ah, your public awaits you.' Carnage was standing at my shoulder. 'Well, more correctly, Ryker's public. Though I have no doubt you'll be able to dissemble for them with the same skill that convinced me.'
'And if I choose not to?'
Carnage's crude features formed a simulacrum of distaste. He gestured out at the crowd. 'Well, I suppose you could try explaining it to them in mid bout. But to be honest, the acoustics aren't of the best and anyway . . . ' He smiled unpleasantly. 'I doubt you'll have the time.'
'Foregone conclusion, huh?'
Carnage maintained his smile. Behind him, Pernilla Grip and the other synthetic were watching me with the predatory interest of cats in front of a birdcage. Below, the crowd were becoming noisy with expectation.
'It has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more than Kadmin's assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his transgressions and it would be quite hazardous not to fulfil their expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came here expecting to survive, did you Mr Kovacs?'
I remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.
'No, I suppose I didn't.'
Quiet footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance towards the sound and found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.
'How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.'
I smiled grimly. 'If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.'
'But she was younger in those days.' Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth against the tanned skin. 'Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to my copy of Furies got it right.'
'Harlan's World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we get on with this, please?'
Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Out on the killing floor, the noise was less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still couldn't pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down at me:
'Remember my brother, you motherfucker!!!'
I glanced up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was buildi
ng like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had screamed like this at the Newpest freak fights, and guessed that we probably had. And we hadn't even known the combatants that flailed and clawed at each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.
On the other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn't render the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn't really worried about the knuckles, it was Kadmin's Will of God enhanced response wiring that concerned me most. A little over a century ago, I'd been up against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on Sharya, and they'd been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was heavy-duty military biomech, and against that Ryker's neurachem, recently fried by stun-bolt, was going to look pretty sick.
I took my place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the crowd quietened down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip's cameras, he looked like a malignant doll out of a child's nightmare. A fitting consort to the Patchwork Man. He raised his hands and directional speakers in the walls of the converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.
'Welcome to the Panama Rose!'
There was a vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting. Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.
'To a very special, and very exclusive, Panama Rose event, welcome. Welcome, I bid you welcome, to the most final and bloody humiliation of Elias Ryker.'
They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilisation stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.
Carnage's amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quietening gestures with both arms.
'Most of you will remember detective Ryker from some encounter or other. For some of you it will be a name that you associate with blood spilled, maybe even bones broken.
'Those memories. Those memories are painful; and some of you might think you can never lose them.'
He had them damped down now, and his voice dropped accordingly.
'My friends, I cannot hope to erase those memories for you, for that is not what we offer aboard the Panama Rose. Here we deal not in soft forgetfulness, but in remembrance, no matter how bitter that remembrance might be. Not in dreams, my friends, but in reality.' He threw out a hand to indicate me. 'My friends, this is reality.'
Another round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn't expected to be bored to death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage's theatricals were just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.
'This is reality,' Emcee Carnage repeated. 'Tonight is reality. Tonight you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.'
The crowd erupted.
I wondered briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry's Closed Quarters, the way Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker's face. Jerry himself telling me about the Mongol's run-in with the cop whose body I was wearing: Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back. And then there was Bautista on Ryker's interrogation techniques: He's right on the line most of the time. How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?
What would Ortega have said?
I thought about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I'd left her at the Hendrix, she'd take Kawahara down for rue.
Knowing it was enough.
Carnage drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A relative quiet descended on the chamber.
'The coup de grâce,' he proclaimed. 'When our matador has put Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is no more.'
He released the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theatre. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.
'Let us begin,' said Carnage, withdrawing.
There was a magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass round a whisky flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden script we were being forced to play out.
We began to circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin's body language for clues.
The Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on that account, they had told us prior to the Sharya landings. The imperatives for the builders were strength and speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness it is that their combat patterning has no random select sub-routine. Right Hand of God martyrs will therefore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very narrow band of techniques.
On Sharya, our own enhanced combat systems had been state of the art, with both random response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker's neurachem had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long enough for my conditioning to analyse the Will of God's fighting pattern and —
Kadmin struck.
The distance was nearly ten metres of clear ground; he covered it in the time it took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.
The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counter-attack was out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to block low and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head and I reeled backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand sidestrike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost casually. A low level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.
It was like someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was left far behind on the surface of my skin and a sickening numbness raged through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it was crippling. I staggered back three steps arid crashed onto the mat, twisting like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.
Turning my head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.
I understood.
Round One.
Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he's on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn't a real fight, it's a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down, but this wasn't a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where the suffering was to be maximised for the benefit of the audience.
The crowd.
I got up and looked around the dimly-seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my guts, spat on the killing floor and summoned a guard stance. Kadmin inclined his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks and instead of giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin's path. It took him the shreds of a second to realise what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every member of the chanting crowd.
The hawk nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed round, looking for neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head against the mat. I tasted blood.
I rolled upright and saw Kadmin backed off and wiping some blood of his own from his broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenalin surge that seeing his blood spilt had given me, and raised both my own hands in an expectant gesture.
'Come on, you asshole.' It croaked out of my damaged mouth. 'Put me away.'
He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin's fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.
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