“I’m not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out of ten, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it — and I mean at UN Praesidium level — so they call us in.”
The woman frowned. “And the deal?”
“Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.”
“As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”
I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t fuck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”
Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.
“We will consider this,” said the woman.
Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.
I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat. I was.
Not.
Chapter Fourteen
I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.
They’d put me back.
Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.
I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.
“Clothes.” She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”
One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”
“Yeah,” the woman sneered. “Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving our business through someone else.”
“He’s not talking about the re-sleeve,” I observed, pulling on my trousers. “He wants to check for interrogation trauma.”
“Who asked you?”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself. Where are we going?”
“To talk to someone,” she said shortly and turned back to the medics. “If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.”
I continued dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover tunic and jacket were intact but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either. Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.
“So who are we going to see?”
The woman gave me a sour look. “Someone who knows enough to check out your shit. And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly dispersal.”
“When this is over,” I said evenly, “maybe I can persuade one of our squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to thank you for your support.”
The blaster came out of its sheath with a soft strop, and was under my chin. I barely saw it happen. My recently re-sleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, aeons too late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.
“Don’t you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,” she said softly. “You got these clowns scared, they’re anchored in place and they think you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me. Got it?”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up by the gun.
“Got it,” I said.
“Good,” she breathed, and removed the blaster. “You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologise with everybody else. But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.”
At a rapid pace, we went down corridors that I tried to memorise and into a lift identical to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again, and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during the torture were hazy — the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining off the experience to avert the trauma — but even if it had gone on a couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.
“Get in the car,” said the woman laconically.
This time my ride was a larger, more elegant machine, reminiscent of Bancroft’s limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and shaven-headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear. I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the military would be seen dead with authorisation stripes. It was too close to the serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.
A second man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling negligently from his hand. He too had the shaven skull and the bar code. I looked hard at it as I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur and I cranked up the neurachem to eavesdrop.
“…head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.”
“No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—”
One of the medics slammed the door shut on me and the solid clunk at max amplification nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the machine pistoleer opened the doors on the other side and climbed in next to me.
“Close your eyes,” the woman said, producing my bandanna. “I’m going blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t going to want you knowing where to find them.”
I looked around at the windows. “These look polarised to me anyway.”