“Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?”
Ortega grimaced. “Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.” She shrugged. “Price of progress.”
“About the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a stellar range ’cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it.”
The mohican slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.
“It’s easier here,” she said shortly.
“Yeah? How’s it work?”
“It—” She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. “Why do you want to know?”
I grinned at her. “Just naturally nosy, I guess.”
“OK, Kovacs.” She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. “Works like this. One day Mr Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyd’s or Cartwright Solar, maybe.”
“Is that here?” I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of my room. “In Bay City?”
The mohican had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded rapido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers leave.
“Bay City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.” Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing at the overload of whisky she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr Kadmin wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con, with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than money.”
I leaned back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean metre of space between us.
“OK, so that’s one copy. Then what?”
Ortega shrugged. “Fatal accident.”
“In Ulan Bator?”
“Right. Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyd’s with their retrieval writ, freight Dimi (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you.”
“Meanwhile…”
“Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who’s not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Bay City.”
“You don’t catch these guys too often.”
“Almost never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like this or held on a UN indictable offence. Without the UN rap, you’ve got no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.”
“That’s pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?”
“Erasure.”
“Erasure? You do that here?”
Ortega nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never quite on it. “Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?”
I thought about it. Some crimes in the Corps carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen it applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.
“It’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”
“You feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?”
I ran the tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. “No. But does it stop with people like him?”
“There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage.” The look on Ortega’s face said she didn’t think that was such a great idea.
I put my coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own cigarette to the packet’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.
“How old are you, Ortega?”
She looked back at me narrowly. “Thirty-four. Why?”
“Never been d.h.’d, hmm?”
“Yeah, I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.”
I let out the first breath of smoke. “Kind of touchy about it, aren’t you?”
“Like I said, I’m not a criminal.”
“No.” I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. “If you were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy rap.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” I didn’t know what had led me to forget that Ortega was the law, but something had. Something had been building in the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room. I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.
“Kadmin’s expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to cost.”
“About twenty grand a hit.”
“Then Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.”
Ortega raised an eyebrow. “That’s fast work, for someone who just got here.”
“Oh, come on.” I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. “If it was suicide, who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?”
“You’re well liked, are you?”
I leaned forward. “No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m working for Bancroft.”
Ortega grinned. “Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?”
Tired, Takeshi. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura wagging her finger at me. The Envoy Corps don’t get taken apart by local law.
I stumbled on as best I could.
“They knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip off the tourists. Ortega, come on.”