“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 unselfconscious. 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 UN 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 any more, 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 offences 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,” said Elliott 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 AI core. This makes what we did to the AI 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 counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.” Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants. “You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”
“Very,” said Ortega.
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 and 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 res 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 UN 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 weapon stocks. I’m flying out to pick it up tomorrow personally. Material transaction, no records. I called in a couple of favours.”
“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.”
Elliott got someone on the screen. A serious-looking woman in a late fifties African sleeve.
“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.