Summoning the blueprints from memory, I drew the shard pistol and set off towards the stern.
It took me less than fifteen minutes to reach the buoyancy control room, and I saw no one on the way. The control room itself appeared to be automated and I began to suspect that these days hardly anyone bothered to visit the swooping canopies of the airship’s upper hull. I found the maintenance ladder and climbed painstakingly down it until a warm upward-spilling glow on my face told me I was almost on the operating deck. I stopped and listened for voices, hearing and proximity sense both strained to their limits for a full minute before I lowered myself the final four metres and dropped to the floor of a well lit, carpeted passageway. It was deserted in both directions.
I checked my internal time display and stowed the shard gun. Mission time was accumulating. By now Ortega and Kawahara would be talking. I glanced around at the décor and guessed that whatever function the operating deck had once been intended to serve, it wasn’t serving it now. The passageway was decked out in opulent red and gold with stands of exotic plant life and lamps in the form of coupling bodies every few metres. The carpet beneath my feet was deep, and woven with highly detailed images of sexual abandon. Male, female and variants between twined around each other along the length of the corridor in an unbroken progression of plugged orifices and splayed limbs. The walls were hung with similarly explicit holoframes that gasped and moaned into life as I passed them. In one of them I thought I recognised the dark-haired, crimson-lipped woman of the street ’cast advertisement, the woman who might have pressed her thigh against mine in a bar on the other side of the globe.
In the cold detachment of the betathanatine, none of it had any more impact than a wall full of Martian techno-glyphs.
There were plushly appointed double doors set into each side of the corridor at about ten-metre intervals. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was behind the doors. Jerry’s biocabins, by any other name, and each door was just as likely as not to disgorge a client at any moment. I quickened my pace, searching for a connecting corridor that I knew led to stairs and elevators onto the other levels.
I was almost there when a door five metres ahead of me swung open. I froze, hand on the grip of the shard gun, shoulders to the wall, gaze gripped to the leading edge of the door. The neurachem thrummed.
In front of me, a grey furred animal that was either half-grown wolf cub or dog emerged from the open door with arthritic slowness. I kept my hand on the shard gun and eased away from the wall, watching. The animal was not much over knee height and it moved on all fours, but there was something badly wrong with the structure of the rear legs. Something wrenched. Its ears were laid back and a minute keening came from its throat. It turned its head towards me and for a moment my hand tightened on the shard gun, but the animal only looked at me for a moment and the mute suffering in its eyes was enough to tell me I was in no danger. Then it limped painfully along the corridor to a room farther down on the opposite wall and paused there, the long head down close to the door as if listening.
With a dreamlike sense of lost control, I followed and leaned my own head against the surface of the door. The soundproofing was good, but no match for the Khumalo neurachem at full stretch. Somewhere down near the limits of hearing, noises trickled into my ear like stinging insects. A dull, rhythmic thudding sound and something else that might have been the pleading screams of someone whose strength was almost gone. It stopped almost as soon as I had tuned it in.
Below me, the dog stopped keening at the same moment and lay down on the ground beside the door. When I stepped away, it looked up at me once with a gaze of pure distilled pain and reproach. In those eyes I could see reflected every victim that had ever looked at me in the last three decades of my waking life. Then the animal turned its head away and licked apathetically at its injured rear legs.
For a split second, something geysered through the cold crust of the betathanatine.
I went back to the door the animal had emerged from, drawing the shard gun on my way and swung through, holding the weapon in both hands before me. The room beyond was spacious and pastel-coloured with quaint two-dimensional framed pictures on the walls. A massive four poster bed with translucent drapes occupied the centre. Seated on the edge of the bed was a distinguished-looking man in his forties, naked from the waist down. Above the waist, he appeared to be wearing formal evening dress which clashed badly with the heavy-duty canvas work gloves he had pulled up to both elbows. He was bent over, cleaning himself between the legs with a damp white cloth.
As I advanced into the room, he glanced up.
“Jack? You finished al—” He stared at the gun in my hands without comprehension, then as the muzzle came to within half a metre of his face a note of asperity crept into his voice. “Listen, I didn’t dial for this routine.”
“On the house,” I said dispassionately, and watched as the clutch of monomolecular shards tore his face apart. His hands flew up from between his legs to cover the wounds and he flopped over sideways on the bed, gut-deep noises grinding out of him as he died.
With the mission time display flaring red in the corner of my vision, I backed out of the room. The injured animal outside the door opposite did not look up as I approached. I knelt and laid one hand gently on the matted fur. The head lifted and the keening rose in the throat again. I set down the shard gun and tensed my empty hand. The neural sheath delivered the Tebbit knife, glinting.
After, I cleaned the blade on the fur, resheathed the knife and picked up the shard gun, all with the unhurried calm of the Reaper. Then I moved silently to the connecting corridor. Deep in the diamond serenity of the drug something was nagging at me, but the Reaper would not let me worry about it.
As indicated on Elliott’s stolen blueprints the cross corridor led to a set of stairs, carpeted in the same orgiastic pattern as the main thoroughfare. I moved warily down the steps, gun tracking the open space ahead, proximity sense spread like a radar net before me. Nothing stirred. Kawahara must have battened down all the hatches just in case Ortega and her crew saw something inconvenient while they were on the premises.
Two levels down, I stepped off the stairs and followed my memory of the blueprints through a mesh of corridors until I was reasonably sure that the door to Kawahara’s quarters was around the next corner. With my back to the wall, I slid up to the corner and waited, breathing shallowly. The proximity sense said there was someone at the door around the corner, possibly more than one person, and I picked up the faint tang of cigarette smoke. I dropped to my knees, checked my surroundings and then lowered my face to the ground. With one cheek brushing the pile of the carpet, I eased my head around the corner.
A man and a woman stood by the door, similarly dressed in green coveralls. The woman was smoking. Although each of them had stunguns holstered importantly at their belts, they looked more like technical staff than security attendants. I relaxed fractionally and settled down to wait some more. In the corner of my eye, the minutes of mission time pulsed like an overstressed vein.