Bautista’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation.

“Kovacs? That you?”

“Who else is it going to be?” I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. “This is a goddamn virtuality.”

“Yeah, but…” Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats. “Welcome to the party.”

There were five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair. On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along the full length of a second sofa.

The fifth figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a multicoloured bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in front of him.

“The Hendrix, right?”

“That’s correct.” There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto the darkened lawn. “Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original designers. If you strip down the client-mirroring systems, this is what you get.”

“Good.” I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. “You happy with the working environment?”

She nodded. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

“How long’ve you been here?”

“Me?” She shrugged. “A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours ago.”

“Two and a half,” said Ortega sourly. “What kept you?”

“Neurachem glitch.” I nodded at the Hendrix figure. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“That’s exactly what he told us.” Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop. “I’d just like to know what it means.”

I made a helpless gesture. “So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail the manufacturers.” I turned back to Irene Elliott. “I take it you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the Dip.”

“You take it right.” Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure. “Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to need every scrap of that to pull it off.”

“You cased the run yet?”

Elliott nodded glumly. “It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska was freighted off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing line.”

“I’m impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?”

“A while.” Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction. “I had some help.”

“And the second interesting thing?”

“Yeah. Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t tell you much more than that without Dipping it, and I figured you wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re after.”

I remembered the spider-like automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb sacs, the sombre stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those contemptuous hooded smiles.

“Well, then.” I looked around at the assembled team. “Let’s get this gig off the ground.”

CHAPTER FORTY

It was Sharya, all over again.

We dusted off from the tower of the Hendrix an hour after dark and swung away into the traffic-speckled night. Ortega had pulled the same Lock-Mit transport I’d ridden out to Suntouch House, but when I looked around the dimly lit interior of the ship’s belly, it was the Envoy Command attack on Zihicce that I remembered. The scene was the same; Davidson playing the role of datacom officer, face washed pale blue by the light from his screen; Ortega as medic, unpacking the dermals and charging kit from a sealwrap bag. Up ahead in the hatchway to the cockpit, Bautista stood and looked worried, while another mohican I didn’t know did the flying. Something must have shown on my face, because Ortega leaned in abruptly to study my face.

“Problem?”

I shook my head. “Just a little nostalgia.”

“Well, I just hope you got these measures right.” She braced herself against the hull. In her hand, the first dermal looked like a petal torn from some iridescent green plant. I grinned up at her and rolled my head to one side to expose my jugular.

“This is the fourteen per cent,” she said and applied the cool green petal to my neck. I felt the fractional grip, like gentle sandpaper, as it took, and then a long cold finger leapt down past my collar bone and deep into my chest.

“Smooth.”

“Fucking ought to be. You know how much that stuff would go for on the street?”

“The perks of law enforcement, huh?”

Bautista turned round. “That ain’t funny, Kovacs.”

“Leave him alone, Rod,” said Ortega lazily. “Man’s entitled to a bad joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.”

I raised one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the dermal gingerly and stood back.

“Three minutes till the next,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.

At first it was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there, so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with effort.

Then the control stimulants kicked in and in seconds my head cleared from foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just …

I felt an inane grin eating its way across my features.

“Whoooh, Kristin, this is … good stuff. This is better than Sharya.”

“Glad you like it.” Ortega glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes. You up to it?”

“I’m up to.” I pursed my lips and blew through them. “Anything. Anything at all.”

Ortega tipped her head back towards Bautista, who could presumably see the instrumentation in the cockpit. “Rod. How long have we got?”

“Be there in less than forty minutes.”

“Better get him the suit.”

While Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.

“I want you to wear this,” she said. “Little bit of Organic Damage insurance for you.”

“A needle?” I shook my head with what felt like machined precision. “Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.”

“It’s a tracer filament,” she said patiently. “And you’re not leaving this ship without it.”

I looked at the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues, usually in under forty-eight hours.

I glanced across at Davidson.

“What’s the range?”

“Hundred klicks.” The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow from his screen. “Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate unless we call you. Quite safe.”

I shrugged. “OK. Where do you want to put it?”

Ortega stood up, needle in hand. “Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack, case they chop your head off.”

“Charming.” I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.