“That was what I was hoping you’d say.” I stowed the cylinder, satisfied. “How’s the new sleeve?”
“It’s OK. Any reason why I couldn’t have my own body back? I’ll be a lot faster in my own—”
“I know. Unfortunately it’s out of my hands. Did they tell you how long you’ve been in the store?”
“Four years, someone said. ”
“Four and a half,” I said, glancing at the release forms I’d signed. “I’m afraid, in the meantime, someone took a shine to your sleeve and bought it.”
“Oh.” She was silent then. The shock of waking up inside someone else’s body for the first time is nothing compared to the sense of rage and betrayal you feel knowing that someone, somewhere, is walking around inside you. It’s like the discovery of infidelity, but at the intimacy range of rape. And like both those violations, there’s nothing you can do about it. You just get used to it.
When the silence stretched, I looked across at her still profile and cleared my throat.
“You sure you want to do this right now? Go home, I mean.”
She barely bothered to look at me. “Yes, I’m sure. I have a daughter and a husband that haven’t seen me in nearly five years. You think this —” she gestured down at herself “—is going to stop me?”
“Fair enough.”
The lights of Ember appeared on the darkened mass of the coastline up ahead, and the limousine began its descent. I watched Elliott out of the corner of my eye and saw the nervousness setting in. Palms rubbing together in her lap, lower lip caught in her teeth at one corner of her new mouth. She released her breath with a small but perfectly audible noise.
“They don’t know I’m coming?” she asked.
“No.” I said shortly. I didn’t want to follow this line of conversation. “The contract is between you and JacSol West. It doesn’t concern your family.”
“But you arranged for me to see them. Why?”
“I’m a sucker for family reunions.” I fixed my gaze on the darkened bulk of the wrecked aircraft carrier below, and we landed in silence. The autolimo banked round to align itself with the local traffic systems and touched down a couple of hundred metres north of Elliott’s Data Linkage. We powered smoothly along the shore road under the successive holos of Anchana Salomao and parked immaculately opposite the narrow frontage. The dead monitor doorstop had been removed and the door was closed but there were lights burning in the glass-walled office at the back.
We climbed out and crossed the street. The closed door proved to be locked as well. Irene Elliott banged impatiently at it with the flat of one copper-skinned hand and someone sat up sluggishly in the back office. After a moment, a figure identifiable as Victor Elliott came down to the transmission floor, past the reception counter and towards us. His grey hair was untidy and his face swollen with sleep. He peered out at us with a lack of focus I’d seen before on datarats when they’d been cruising the stacks for too long. Jack-happy.
“Who the hell—” He stopped as he recognised me. “What the fuck do you want, grasshopper? And who’s this?”
“Vic?” Irene Elliott’s new throat sounded nine tenths closed. “Vic, it’s me.”
For a moment, Elliott’s eyes ran a volley between my face and the delicate Asian woman beside me, then what she had said smacked into him like a truck. He flinched visibly with the impact.
“Irene?” he whispered.
“Yes, it’s me,” she husked back. There were tears leaking down her cheeks. For moments they stared at each other through the glass, then Victor Elliott was fumbling with the locking mechanism of the door, shoving at the frame to get it out of the way, and the copper-skinned woman sagged across the threshold into his arms. They locked together in an embrace that looked set to break the new sleeve’s delicate bones. I took a mild interest in street lamps up and down the promenade.
Finally, Irene Elliott remembered me. She disengaged from her husband and twisted round, smearing the tears off her face with the heel of one hand and blinking bright-eyed at me.
“Can you—”
“Sure.” I said neutrally. “I’ll wait in the limo. See you in the morning.”
I caught one confused look from Victor Elliott as his wife bustled him inside, nodded good-naturedly at him and turned away to the parked limo and the beach. The door banged shut behind me. I felt in my pockets and came up with Ortega’s crumpled packet of cigarettes. Wandering past the limo to the iron railing, I kindled one of the bent and flattened cylinders and for once felt no sense that I was betraying something as the smoke curled into my lungs. Down on the beach, the surf was up, a chorus line of ghosts along the sand. I leaned on the railing and listened to the white noise of the waves as they broke, wondering why I could feel this much at peace with so much still unresolved. Ortega had not come back. Kadmin was still out there. Sarah was still under ransom, Kawahara still had me by the balls, and I still didn’t know why Bancroft had been killed.
And despite it all, there was space for this measure of quiet.
Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.
My gaze slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive bulk of the keeled-over Free Trade Enforcer was hard to make out. I imagined Mary Lou Hinchley hurtling down to her shattering impact with the unyielding water, then slipping broken beneath the swells to be cradled in wait for the sea’s predators. How long had she been out there before the currents contrived to carry what was left of her back to her own kind? How long had the darkness held her?
My thoughts skipped aimlessly, cushioned on the vague sense of acceptance and well-being. I saw Bancroft’s antique telescope, trained on the heavens and the tiny motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million pioneers and the deep-frozen embryo banks that might someday re-sleeve them on distant worlds, if the promise of the vaguely understood Martian astrogation charts bore fruit. If not they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.
Raising an eyebrow at my own introspection, I heaved myself off the rail and glanced up at the holographic face above my head. Anchana Salomao had the night to herself. Her ghostly countenance gazed down at repeated intervals along the promenade, compassionate but uninvolved. Looking at the composed features, it was easy to see why Elizabeth Elliott had wanted so badly to attain those heights. I would have given a lot for that same detached composure. I shifted my attention to the windows above Elliott’s. The lights were on there, and as I watched a female form moved across one of them in naked silhouette. I sighed, spun the stub of my cigarette into the gutter and took refuge in the limo. Let Anchana keep the vigil. I called up channels at random on the entertainment deck and let the mindless barrage of images and sounds numb me into a kind of half-sleep. The night passed around the vehicle like cold mist and I suffered the vague sensation that I was drifting away from the lights of the Elliotts’ home, out to sea on snapped moorings with nothing between me and the horizon where there was a storm building …
A sharp rapping on the window beside my head shook me awake. I jerked round from the position I’d slumped into and saw Trepp standing patiently outside. She gestured at me to wind down the window, then leaned in with a grin.
“Kawahara was right about you. Sleeping in the car so this Dipper can get laid. You’ve got delusions of priesthood, Kovacs.”
“Shut up, Trepp,” I said irritably. “What time is it?”
“About five.” Her eyes swivelled up and left to consult the chip. “Five-sixteen. Be getting light soon.”
I struggled into a more upright position, tasting the residue of the single cigarette on my tongue. “What are you doing here?”
“Watching your back. We don’t want Kadmin taking you out before you can sell the goods to Bancroft, do we? Hey, is that the Wreckers?”
“Not a fan, then?” Trepp nodded at the screen. “I didn’t use to be, but you live in New York long enough, you get the habit.”
“Trepp, how the fuck are you supposed to watch my back if your head is jammed in here watching screen?”
Trepp gave me a hurt look and withdrew her head. I climbed out of the limo and stretched in the chilly air. Overhead, Anchana Salomao was still resplendent, but the lights above Elliott’s were out.
“They stayed up until a couple of hours ago,” said Trepp helpfully. “I thought they might be running out on you, so I checked the back.”
I gazed up at the darkened windows. “Why are they going to run out on me? She hasn’t even heard what the terms of the deal are.”
“Well, involvement in an erasure offence tends to make most people nervous.”
“Not this woman,” I said, and wondered how much I believed myself.
Trepp shrugged. “Suit yourself. I still think you’re crazy, though. Kawahara’s got Dippers could do this stuff standing on their heads.”
Since my own reasons for not accepting Kawahara’s offer of technical support were almost entirely instinctive, I said nothing. The icy certainty of my revelations about Bancroft, Kawahara and Resolution 653 had faded with the previous day’s rush of set-up details for the run, and any sense of interlocking well-being had gone when Ortega left. All I had now was the gravity pull of mission time, the cold dawn and the sound of the waves on the shore. The taste of Ortega in my mouth and the warmth of her long-limbed body curled into mine was a tropical island in the chill, receding in my wake.
“You reckon there’s somewhere open this early that serves coffee,” I asked.
“Town this size?” Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. “Doubt it. But I saw a bank of dispensers on the way in. Got to be one that does coffee.”
“Machine coffee?” I curled my lip.
“Hey, what are you, a fucking connoisseur? You’re living in a hotel that’s just one big goddamned dispenser. Christ, Kovacs, this is the Machine Age. Didn’t anybody tell you that?”
“You got a point. How far is it?”
“Couple of klicks. We’ll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes up, she won’t look out the window and panic.”
“Sold.”
I followed Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of incense.
“This yours?”
“No, rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe. Why?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
Trepp started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Everything about the situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to Bancroft’s death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“You thought about what you’re going to do when this is over?”
“No,” I said morosely.
We found the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no better here than for Elliott’s Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups. She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.
“Want to drink it here?”
“Yeah, why not?”
We pulled the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn’t heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and watched the sea through the windscreen, immersed in a silence that was almost companionable.
“I tried for the Envoys once,” said Trepp suddenly.
I glanced sideways at her, curious. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they said. ”
I grunted. “Figures. You were never in the military, were you?”
“What do you think?” She was looking at me as if I’d just suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.
“Thought not. See, the thing is, they’re looking for borderline psychopathic tendencies. That’s why they do most of their recruiting from the military in the first place.”
Trepp looked put out. “I’ve got borderline psychopathic tendencies.”
“Yeah, I don’t doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those tendencies and a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They’re opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behaviour at the same time as it builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect Envoy material.”
“You make it sound like I had a lucky escape.”
For a few seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.
“Yeah.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “Come on, let’s get back.”
As we drove back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us. Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at once intangible and impossible to ignore.
When we pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting, leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of her husband.
“Better stay here,” I told Trepp as I climbed out. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Sure.”
“I guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.”
“I doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,” said Trepp cheerfully. “I’m better at this than you are.”
“Remains to be seen.”
“Yeah, yeah. Be seeing you.” She raised her voice as I started to walk away. “And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that happen.”
She backed up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.
“Who was that?” There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that sounded like the residue of too much crying.
“Back-up,” I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier. “Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a friend.”
“She may be your friend,” said Elliott bitterly. “She isn’t mine. None of you people are.”
I looked at her, then back out to sea. “Fair enough.”
Silence, apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the limo.
“You know what’s happened to my daughter,” she said in a dead voice. “You knew all the time.”
I nodded.
“And you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.”
“Lots of men used her,” I said brutally. “She let herself be used. And I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.”
I heard Irene Elliott’
s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom. “She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it for you, Irene.”
“You fuck.” She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.
I kept my eyes fixed on the ocean. “I don’t work for Bancroft any more,” I said carefully. “I’ve swapped sides on that piece of shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice, you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that away.”
Beside me, I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.
“You’re pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?” she said finally. “You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes at a price, right?”
“Of course it does,” I said quietly.
“I do what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack. And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you. That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.”
I watched the waves. “That’s the deal,” I agreed.
More silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at the body she was wearing, as if she’d spilled something down herself. “Do you know how I feel?” she asked.
“No.”
“I slept with my husband, and I feel like he’s been unfaithful to me.” A choked laugh. She smeared angrily at her eyes. “I feel like I’ve been unfaithful. To something. You know, when they put me away I left a body and a family behind. Now I don’t have either.”
She looked down at herself again. She lifted her hands and turned them, fingers spread.
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