Authors: Richard Morgan
I sat the
whole thing out on the kerb opposite, checking over the superficial injuries
I’d acquired on my short flight down from the gantry to the street.
Mostly, it was bruising and abrasions. The shape of the forum provider’s
reception area had channelled most of the blast directly upwards through the
roof and that was the route the bulk of the shrapnel had taken as well. We’d
been very lucky.
Ortega left
the clutch of uniformed officers gathered outside the bank and strode across to
the street towards me. She had removed her jacket and there was a long white
smear of tissue weld congealing over her shoulder wound. She held her discarded
shoulder holster dangling in one hand and her breasts moved beneath the thin
cotton of a white T-shirt that bore the legend
You Have The Right To Remain
Silent—Why Don’t You Try It For A While
? She seated herself
next to me on the kerb.
“Forensic
wagon’s on the way,” she said inconsequentially. “You reckon
we’ll get anything useful out of the wreckage?”
I looked at
the smouldering ruin of the dome and shook my head.
“There’ll
be bodies, maybe even stacks intact, but those guys were just local street muscle.
All they’ll tell you is that the synth hired them, probably for half a
dozen ampoules of tetrameth each.”
“Yeah,
they were kind of sloppy, weren’t they?”
I felt a
smile ghost across my lips. “Kind of. But then I don’t think they
were even supposed to get us.”
“Just
keep us busy till your pal blew up, huh?”
“Something
like that.”
“The
way I figure it, the detonator was wired into his vital signs, right? You snuff
him and boom, he takes you with him. Me too. And the cheap hired help.”
“And
wipes out his own stack and sleeve.” I nodded. “Tidy, isn’t
it?”
“So
what went wrong?”
I rubbed
absently at the scar under my eye. “He overestimated me. I was supposed
to kill him outright, but I missed. Probably would have killed himself at that
stage, but I messed up his arm trying to stop the machine pistol.”
In
my mind’s eye the gun drops from splayed fingers and skitters across the
floor
. “Blew it way out of his reach as well. He must have been
lying there, willing himself to die when he heard us leaving. Wonder what make
of synth he was using.”
“Whoever
it was, they can have an endorsement from me any day of the week,” said
Ortega cheerfully. “Maybe there’ll be something left for forensics
after all.”
“You
know who it was, don’t you?”
“He
called you Kov—”
“It
was Kadmin.”
There was a
short silence. I watched the smoke curling up from the ruined dome. Ortega
breathed in, out.
“Kadmin’s
in the store.”
“Not
any more he isn’t.” I glanced sideways at her. “You got a
cigarette?”
She passed
me the packet wordlessly. I shook one out, fitted it into the corner of my
mouth, touched the ignition patch to the end and drew deeply. The movements
happened as one, reflex conditioned over years like a macro of need. I
didn’t have to consciously do anything. The smoke curling into my lungs
was like a breath of the perfume you remember an old lover wearing.
“He
knew me.” I exhaled. “And he knew his Quellist history too.
‘That’s fucking enough’ is what a Quellist guerrilla called
Iffy Deme said when she died under interrogation during the Unsettlement on
Harlan’s World. She was wired with internal explosives and she brought
the house down. Sound familiar? Now who do we know who can swap Quell quotes
like a Millsport native?”
“He’s
in the fucking store, Kovacs. You can’t get someone out of the store
without—”
“Without
an AI. With an AI, you can do it. I’ve seen it done. Core command on
Adoracion did it with our prisoners of war, like that.” I snapped my
fingers. “Like hooking elephant rays off a spawning reef.”
“As
easy as that?” Ortega said ironically.
I sucked
down some more smoke and ignored her. “You remember when we were in
virtual with Kadmin, we got that lightning effect across the sky?”
“Didn’t
see it. No, wait, yeah. I thought it was a glitch.”
“It
wasn’t. It touched him. Reflected in the table. That’s when he
promised to kill me.” I turned towards her and grinned queasily. The
memory of Kadmin’s virtual entity was clear and monstrous. “You
want to hear a genuine first generation Harlan’s World myth? An offworld
fairy story?”
“Kovacs,
even with an AI, they’d need—”
“Want
to hear the story?”
Ortega
shrugged, winced and nodded. “Sure. Can I have my cigarettes back?”
I tossed
her the pack and waited while she kindled the cigarette. She plumed smoke out
across the street. “Go on, then.”
“Right.
Where I come from originally, Newpest, used to be a textile town. There’s
a plant on Harlan’s World called belaweed, grows in the sea and on most
shorelines too. Dry it out, treat it with chemicals and you can make something
like cotton from it. During the Settlement Newpest was the belacotton capital
of the World. Conditions in the mills were pretty bad even back then, and when
the Quellists turned everything upside down it got worse. The belacotton
industry went into decline and there was massive unemployment, unrelieved
poverty and fuck all the Unsettlers could do about it. They were
revolutionaries, not economists.”
“Same
old song, huh?”
“Well,
familiar tune anyway. Some pretty horrible stories came out of the textile
slums around that time. Stuff like the Threshing Sprites, the Cannibal of
Kitano Street.”
Ortega drew
on her cigarette and widened her eyes. “Charming.”
“Yeah,
well, bad times. So you get the story of Mad Ludmila the seamstress. This is
one they used to tell to kids to make them do their chores and come home before
dark. Mad Ludmila had a failing belacotton mill and three children who never
helped her out. They used to stay out late, playing the arcades across town and
sleep all day. So one day, the story goes, Ludmila flips out.”
“She
wasn’t already mad, then?”
“No,
just a bit stressed.”
“You
called her Mad Ludmila.”
“That’s
what the story’s called.”
“But
if she wasn’t mad at the beginning—”
“Do
you want to hear this story or not?”
Ortega’s
mouth quirked at the corner. She waved me on with her cigarette.
“
The
story goes
, one evening as her children were getting ready to go out, she
spiked their coffee with something and when they were semi-conscious, but still
aware, mind you, she drove them out to Mitcham’s Point and threw them
into the threshing tanks one by one. They say you could hear the screams right
across the swamp.”
“Mh-mmmm.”
“Of
course, the police were suspicious—”
“Really?”
“—but
they couldn’t prove anything. Couple of the kids had been into some nasty
chemicals, they were jerking around with the local yakuza, no one was really
surprised when they disappeared.”
“Is
there a point to this story?”
“Yeah.
See, Ludmila got rid of her fucking useless children, but it didn’t
really help. She still needed someone to man the curing vats, to haul the
belaweed up and down the mill stairs, and she was still broke. So what did she
do?”
“Something
gory, I imagine.”
I nodded.
“What she did, she picked the bits of her mangled kids out of the
thresher and stitched them into a huge three-metre-tall carcass. And then, on a
night sacred to the dark powers, she invoked a Tengu to—”
“A
what?”
“A
Tengu. It’s a sort of mischief-maker, a demon I guess you’d call
it. She invoked the Tengu to animate the carcass, and then she stitched it
in.”
“What,
when it wasn’t looking?”
“Ortega,
it’s a fairy story. She stitched the soul of the Tengu inside, but she
promised to release it if it served her will nine years. Nine’s a sacred
number in the Harlanite pantheons, so she was as bound to the agreement as the
Tengu. Unfortunately—”
“Ah.”
“—Tengu
are not known for their patience, and I don’t suppose old Ludmila was the
easiest person to work for either. One night, not a third of the way through
the contract, the Tengu turned on her and tore her apart. Some say it was
Kishimo-jin’s doing, that she whispered terrible incitements into the Tengu’s
ear at—”
“Kishimo
Gin?”
“Kishimo-jin,
the divine protectress of children. It was her revenge on Ludmila for the death
of the children. That’s one version, there’s another
that—” I picked up Ortega’s mutinous expression out of the
corner of my eye and hurried on.“Well, anyway, the Tengu tore her apart,
but in so doing it locked itself into the spell and was condemned to remain
imprisoned in the carcass. And now, with the original invoker of the spell
dead, and worse still, betrayed, the carcass began to rot. A piece here, a
piece there, but irreversibly. And so the Tengu was driven to prowling the
streets and mills of the textile quarter, looking for fresh meat to replace the
rotting portions of its body. It always killed children, because the parts it needed
to replace were child-sized, but however many times it sewed new flesh to the
carcass—”
“It’d
learnt to sew, then?”
“Tengu
are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the
new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the
quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.”
I fell
silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She
watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.
“Your
mother tell you that story?”
“Father.
When I was five.”
She looked
at the end of her cigarette. “Nice.”
“No.
He wasn’t. But that’s another story.” I stood up and looked
down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers.
“Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was
working for, he’s working for himself now.”
“How?”
Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. “OK, an AI could tunnel into the
Bay City PD stack. I’ll buy that. But we’re talking about
microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to
Sacramento.”
“Microsecond’s
all it needed.”
“But
Kadmin isn’t
on
stack. They’d need to know when he was
being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need…”
She stopped
as she saw it coming.
“Me.”
I finished for her. “They’d need me.”
“But
you—”
“I’m
going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.” I spun my cigarette
into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth.
“Today, maybe tomorrow too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I
were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.”
Ortega
pulled a sour face. “You telling me to go undercover in my own
city?”
“Not
telling you to do anything.” I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the
half-spent magazine with actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been.
The clip went into my jacket pocket. “I’m giving you the state of
play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you
can be traced to either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.” I
nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. “Anybody down there with decent
implants could have this conversation focused and amped.”
“Jesus.”
She blew out her cheeks. “That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.”
“Don’t
tell me that. I used to do this for a living.”
She thought
about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the
cigarette packet. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into
the Nemex, eyes still scanning the crowd.
“There
you go.” Ortega tossed me the packet. “That’s a discreet
destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay area and it’ll take you
there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back
to business as usual.”
I caught
the packet left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers and put it away in my
jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and
stuffed the pistol back into its holster.
“Tell me that when
you’ve checked the stack,” I said, and started walking.
I walked south.
Over my
head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency
and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The
weather above the traffic flow was on the change, grey cloud cover racing in
from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I
left the cabs alone.
Go primitive
, Virginia Vidaura would have said.
With an AI gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic
plane. Of course, on a battlefield that’s a lot more easily done. Plenty
of mud and chaos to hide in. A modern city—unbombed—is a logistical
nightmare for this kind of evasion. Every building, every vehicle, every street
is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the
datahounds.