I didn’t know if they had VS supplements on earth. Kristin Ortega’s angry monologue two nights ago seemed to suggest not, but at least there was the potential to bring this girl back to life. Somewhere on this fucked-up planet, some guru had ordained otherwise, and Louise, alias Anenome, had queued up with how many others to ratify the insanity.
Human beings. Never figure them out.
The car tilted and the corpse rolled unpleasantly against me as we spiralled down. Something wet seeped through the leg of my trousers. I could feel myself starting to sweat with the fear. They were going to decant me into some flesh with none of the resistance to pain that my current sleeve had. And while I was imprisoned there, they could do whatever they liked to that sleeve, up to and including physically killing it.
And then they would start again, in a fresh body.
Or, if they were really sophisticated, they could jack my consciousness into a virtual matrix similar to the ones used in psychosurgery, and do the whole thing electronically. Subjectively, there’d be no difference, but there what might take days in the real world could be done in as many minutes.
I swallowed hard, using the neurachem while I still had it to stifle the fear. As gently as I could, I pushed Louise’s cold embrace away from my face and tried not to think about the reason she had died.
The car touched down and rolled along the ground for a few moments before it stopped. When the boot cracked open again, all I could see was the roof of another covered car park strung with illuminum bars.
They took me out with professional caution, the woman standing well back, Deek and Milo to the sides giving her a clear field of fire. I clambered awkwardly over Louise and out onto a floor of black concrete. Scanning the gloom covertly, I saw about a dozen other vehicles, nondescript, registration bar codes illegible at this distance. A short ramp at the far end led up to what must be the landing pad. Indistinguishable from a million other similar installations. I sighed and as I straightened up I felt the damp on my leg again. I glanced down at my clothes. There was a dark stain of something on my thigh.
“So where are we?” I asked.
“End of the line’s where you are,” grunted Milo, lifting Louise out. He looked at the woman. “This going to the usual place?”
She nodded, and he set off across the car park towards a set of double doors. I was moving to follow when a jerk of the woman’s blaster brought me up short.
“Not you. That’s the chute — the easy way out. We got people want to talk to you before you get to go down the chute. You go this way.”
Deek grinned and produced a small weapon from his back pocket. “That’s right, Mr Badass Cop. You go this way.”
They marched me through another set of doors into a commercial capacity elevator which, according to the flashing LED display on the wall, sank two dozen levels before we stopped. Throughout the ride, Deek and the woman stood in opposite corners of the car, guns levelled. I ignored them and watched the digit counter.
When the doors opened there was a medical team waiting for us with a strap-equipped gurney. My instincts screamed at me to try and jump them, but I held myself immobile while the two pale-blue-clad men came forward to hold my arms and the female medic shot me in the neck with a hypodermic spray. There was an icy sting, a brief rush of cold and then the corners of my vision disappeared in webbings of grey. The last thing I saw clearly was the incurious face of the medic as she watched me lose consciousness.
Chapter Thirteen
I awoke to the sound of the ezan being called somewhere nearby, poetry turned querulous and metallic in the multiple throats of a mosque’s loudspeakers. It was a sound I’d last heard in the skies over Zihicce on Sharya, and it had been shortly followed by the shrill aerial scream of marauder bombs. Above my head, light streamed down through the latticed bars of an ornate window. There was a dull, bloated feeling in my guts that told me my period was due.
I sat up on the wooden floor and looked down at myself. They’d sleeved me in a woman’s body, young, no more than twenty years old with copper-sheened skin and a heavy bell of black hair that, when I put my hands to it, felt lank and dirty with the onset of the period. My skin was faintly greasy and from somewhere I got the idea that I had not bathed in a while. I was clothed in a rough khaki shirt several sizes too big for my sleeve and nothing else. Beneath it, my breasts felt swollen and tender. I was barefoot.
I got up and went to the window. There was no glass but it was well above my new head height, so I hauled myself up on the bars and peered out. A sun-drenched landscape of poorly tiled roofs stretched away as far as I could see, forested with listing receptor aerials and ancient satellite dishes. A cluster of minarets speared the horizon off to the left and an ascending aircraft trailed a line of white vapour somewhere beyond. The air that blew through was hot and humid.
My arms were beginning to ache, so I lowered myself back down to the floor and padded across the room to the door. Predictably, it was locked.
The ezan stopped.
Virtuality. They’d tapped into my memories and come up with this. I’d seen some of the most unpleasant things in a long career of human pain on Sharya. And the Sharyan religious police were as popular in interrogation software as Angin Chandra had been in pilot porn. And now, on this harsh virtual Sharya, they’d sleeved me in a woman.
Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race, Tak. No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines. My own cross-sleevings had borne that theory out. To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed to seal out instinctively. To a man, skin was a barrier, a protection. To a woman it was an organ of contact.
That had its disadvantages.
In general, and maybe because of this, female pain thresholds ran higher than male, but the menstrual cycle dragged them down to an all-time low once a month.
No neurachem. I checked.
No combat conditioning, no reflex of aggression.
Nothing.
Not even calluses on the young flesh.
The door banged open, and I jumped. Fresh sweat sprang out on my skin. Two bearded men with eyes of hot jet came into the room. They were both dressed in loose linen for the heat. One held a role of adhesive tape in his hands, the other a small blowtorch. I flung myself at them, just to unlock the freezing panic reflex and gain some measure of control over the built-in helplessness.
The one with the tape fended off my slim arms and backhanded me across the face. It floored me. I lay there, face numb, tasting blood. One of them yanked me back to my feet by an arm. Distantly, I saw the face of the other, the one who had hit me, and tried to focus on him.
“So,” he said. “We begin.”
I lunged for his eyes with the nails of my free arm. The Envoy training gave me the speed to get there but I had no control and I missed. Two of my nails drew blood on his cheek. He flinched and jumped back.
“Bitch cunt,” he said, lifting a hand to the claw mark and examining the blood on his fingers.
“Oh, please,” I managed, out of the unnumbed side of my mouth. “Do we have to have the script too? Just because I’m wearing this—”
I jammed to a halt. He looked pleased. “Not Irene Elliott, then,” he said. “We progress.”
This time he hit me just under the ribcage, driving all the breath out of my body and paralysing my lungs. I folded over his arm like a coat and slid off onto the floor, trying to draw breath. All that came out was a faint creaking sound. I twisted on the floorboards while, somewhere high above me, he retrieved the adhesive tape from the other man and unsnapped a quarter-metre length. It made an obscene tearing sound, like skin coming off. Shredding it free with his teeth, he squatted beside me and taped my right wrist to the floor above my head. I thrashed as if galvanised and it took him a moment to immobilise my other arm long enough to repeat the process. An urge to scream that wasn’t mine surfaced and I fought it down. Pointless. Conserve your strength.