“All right.” Inwardly I was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got. Most people’s records dry up as soon as the trace goes offworld. Interstellar needlecasts are expensive. Unless the Hendrix had just broken into Warden Sullivan’s records, which was illegal. Ortega’s comment about the hotel’s previous charge sheet drifted back to me. What kind of crimes did an AI commit anyway?
“It also occurred to me that Mrs Bancroft is probably here in connection with the matter of her husband’s death, which you are investigating. I thought you would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting in the lobby.”
I sighed, and unpinned my hand from the elevator’s stop button.
“No, I bet she wasn’t.”
She was seated in the window, nursing a tall, ice-filled glass and watching the lights of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard. She didn’t turn her head when I let myself in, so I advanced across the room into her field of vision.
“The hotel told me you were here,” I said. “In case you were wondering why I didn’t unsleeve myself in shock.”
She looked up at me and shook hair back from her face
“Very dry, Mr Kovacs. Should I applaud?”
I shrugged. “You might say thank you for the drink.”
She examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes up again.
“Thank you for the drink.”
“Don’t mention it.” I went to the cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there. A bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt suggested itself. I uncorked it, sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping my eyes on my hands as they poured, I said, “Have you been waiting long?”
“About an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?”
I held onto the first mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.
“Now why would you think that, Mrs Bancroft?”
She made an elegant gesture with one hand. “No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.” I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk about?”
I waved my glass at her. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”
“I want to know what progress you’ve made.”
“You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come on, Mrs Bancroft. It’s late. You can do better than that.”
For a moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.
“I want you to stop,” she said.
I let the words sink into the darkened room.
“Why?”
I saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.
“Why not?” she said.
“Well.” I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut down my hormones. “To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I’m curious.”
“A hundred thousand isn’t so much money,” she said carefully. “And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where Laurens would never find you.”
“Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity.”
She sat forward over her drink. “Let’s not pretend, Mr Kovacs. Laurens didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.”
“I’m still curious.”
“Maybe I could satisfy that,” she said softly.
I swallowed more whisky. “Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs Bancroft?”
She made an impatient gesture. “I’m not talking about your game of detectives. You are … curious about other things, are you not?”
“I’m sorry?” I looked at her over the rim of my glass.
Miriam Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.
“Do you know what Merge Nine is?” she asked, a little unsteadily.
“Empathin?” I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.
“Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve…” She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. “This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs. I secrete Merge Nine, when … aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Mr Kovacs.”
And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.
Well, there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.
I met her halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with my mouth.
Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.
Miriam Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face. Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and sucked gently.