There was a hissing silence. Ortega turned to look at me and grinned. Ahead of us, Head in the Clouds swelled like the target in a missile scope and then lifted abruptly over our heads as the pilot dipped us below the bulk of its hull and banked about. I saw lights gathered like icy fruit on gantries and the undersides of landing pads, the distended belly of the vessel curving up on either side and then we were past.
“State the nature of your business,” snapped the voice nastily.
Ortega peered out of the side of the cockpit as if looking for the speaker in amongst the airship’s superstructure. Her voice grew chilly. “Sonny, I’ve already told you the nature of our business. Now get me a landing pad.”
More silence. We circled the airship five kilometres out. I started to pull on the gloves of the stealth suit.
“Lieutenant Ortega.” It was Kawahara’s voice this time, but in the depths of the betathanatine, even hatred seemed detached and I had to remind myself to feel it. Most of me was assessing the rapidity with which they had voice-printed Ortega. “This is a little unexpected. Do you have some kind of warrant? I believe our licences are in order.”
Ortega raised an eyebrow at me. The voiceprinting had impressed her too. She cleared her throat. “This is not a licensing matter. We are looking for a fugitive. If you’re going to start insisting on warrants, I might have to assume you’ve got a guilty conscience.”
“Don’t threaten me, lieutenant,” said Kawahara coldly. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”
“Reileen Kawahara, I imagine.” In the deathly silence that followed, Ortega made a jubilant punching gesture at the ceiling and turned to grin at me. The barb had gone home. I felt the faintest ripple of amusement catch at the corners of my mouth.
“Perhaps you’d better tell me the name of this fugitive, lieutenant.” Kawahara’s voice had gone as smooth as the expression on an untenanted synthetic sleeve.
“His name is Takeshi Kovacs,” said Ortega, with another grin at me. “But he’s currently sleeved in the body of an ex-police officer. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning your relationship with this man.”
There was another long pause, and I knew the lure was going to work. I’d crafted its multiple layers with all the care of the finest Envoy deceit. Kawahara almost certainly knew of the relationship between Ortega and Ryker, could probably guess Ortega’s entanglement with the new tenant of her lover’s sleeve. She would buy Ortega’s anxiety at my disappearance. She would buy Ortega’s unsanctioned approach to Head in the Clouds. Given an assumed communication between Kawahara and Miriam Bancroft, she would believe she knew where I was and she would be confident that she had the upper hand over Ortega.
But more important than all of this, she would want to know how the Bay City police knew she was aboard Head in the Clouds. And since it was likely that they had, either directly or indirectly, gleaned the fact from Takeshi Kovacs, she would want to know how he knew. She would want to know how much he knew, and how much he had told the police.
She would want to talk to Ortega.
I fastened the wrist seals of the stealth suit and waited. We completed our third circuit of Head in the Clouds.
“You’d better come aboard,” said Kawahara finally. “Starboard landing beacon. Follow it in, they’ll give you a code.”
The Lock-Mit was equipped with a rear dispatch tube, a smaller, civilian variant of the drop launcher that on military models was intended for smart bombs or surveillance drones. The tube was accessed through the floor of the main cabin and with a certain amount of contortion I fitted inside, complete with stealth suit, grav harness and assorted weaponry. We’d practised this three or four times on the ground, but now with the transport swinging in towards Head in the Clouds, it suddenly seemed a long and complicated process. Finally, I got the last of the grav harness inside and Ortega rapped once on the suit’s helmet before she slammed the hatch down and buried me in darkness.
Three seconds later the tube blew open and spat me backwards into the night sky.
The sensation was a dimly remembered joy, something this sleeve did not recall at a cellular level. From the cramped confines of the tube and the noisy vibration of the transport’s engines I was suddenly blasted into absolute space and silence. Not even the rush of air made it through the foam padding on the suit’s helmet as I fell. The grav harness kicked in as soon as I was clear of the tube and braked my fall before it got properly started. I felt myself borne up on its field, not quite motionless, like a ball bobbing on top of the column of water from a fountain. Pivoting about, I watched the navigation lights of the transport shrink inward against the bulk of Head in the Clouds.
The airship hung above and before me like a threatening storm cloud. Lights glimmered out at me from the curving hull and the gantried superstructure beneath. Ordinarily it would have given me the cringing sensation of being a sitting target, but the betathanatine soothed the emotions away in a clean rush of data detail. In the stealth suit I was as black as the surrounding sky and all but radar invisible. The grav field I was generating might theoretically show up on a scanner somewhere, but within the huge distortions produced by the airship’s stabilisers they’d need to be looking for me, and looking quite hard. All these things I knew with an absolute confidence that had no room for doubts, fears or other emotional tangling. I was riding the Reaper.
I set the impellers in cautious forward drive and drifted towards the massive, curving wall of the hull. Inside the helmet, simulation graphics awoke on the surface of the visor and I saw the entry points Irene Elliott had found for me delineated in red. One in particular, the unsealed mouth of a disused sampling turret, was pulsing on and off next to fine green lettering that spelled Prospect One. I rose steadily upward to meet it.
The turret mouth was about a metre wide and scarred around the edges where the atmosphere sampling system had been amputated. I got my legs up in front of me — no mean achievement in a grav field — and hooked myself over the lip of the hatch, then concentrated on worming myself inside up to the waist. From there I twisted onto my front to clear the grav harness and was able to slide myself through the gap and onto the floor of the turret. I switched the grav harness off.
Inside, there was barely enough crawlspace for a technician lying on his back to check the nest of equipment. At the back of the turret was an antique airlock, complete with pressure wheel, just as Irene Elliott’s Dipped blueprints had promised. I wriggled around until I could grasp the wheel with both hands, conscious that both suit and harness were catching on the narrow hatchway, and that my exertions so far had almost totally depleted my immediate body strength. I drew a deep breath to fuel my comatose muscles, waited for my slowed heartbeat to pump the oxygen round my body and heaved at the wheel. Against my expectations it turned quite easily and the airlock hatch fell outward. Beyond the hatch was an airy darkness.
I lay still for a while, mustering more muscular strength. The two-shot Reaper cocktail was taking some getting used to. On Sharya we hadn’t needed to go above twenty per cent. Ambient temperatures in Zihicce were quite high and the spider tanks’ infrared sensors were crude. Up here, a body at Sharyan room temperature would set off every alarm in hull. Without careful oxygen fuelling, my body would rapidly exhaust its cellular level energy reserves and leave me gasping on the floor like a gaffed bottleback. I lay still, breathing deep and slow.
After a couple of minutes, I twisted around again and unfastened the grav harness, then slid carefully through the hatch and hit a steel grid walkway with the heels of my hands. I curled the rest of my body slowly out of the hatch, feeling like a moth emerging from a chrysalis. Checking the darkened walkway in either direction I rose to my feet and removed the stealth suit helmet and gloves. If the keel plans Irene Elliott had Dipped from the Tampa aeroyard stack were still accurate, the walkway led down among the huge helium silos to the vessel’s aft buoyancy control room and from there I’d be able to climb a maintenance ladder directly onto the main operating deck. According to what we’d patched together out of Miller’s interrogation, Kawahara’s quarters were two levels below on the port side. She had two huge windows that looked downward out of the hull.