“How very male of you.”

The food arrived and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced autochef breakfast, I discovered I was ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway through hers.

“Food OK?” she asked ironically as I sat back.

I nodded, trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning online and spoil the sated feeling in my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.

Ortega’s phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.

“Yeah? Uhuh. Uhuh, good. No, we’ll go.” Her eyes nickered briefly to mine. “That so? No, leave that one too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks Zak. Owe you one.”

She stowed the phone again and resumed eating.

“Good news?”

“Depends on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.”

“And the other call?”

Ortega looked up at me from her bowl, chewed and swallowed. “The other number was a residential discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of that?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the Bay, alongside acres of abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometre long with six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange that I assumed was rust.

“Don’t let it fool you,” Ortega grunted as we circled. “They’ve polymered the hull a quarter-metre thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink it now.”

“Expensive.”

She shrugged. “They’ve got the backing.”

We landed on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomfited in equal parts by the pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realise what she was doing and pulled herself abruptly upright again.

“No one home,” she said awkwardly.

“So it seems. Shall we go and have a look?”

We got out into the customary blanket-snap of wind off the Bay and made for a tubular aluminium gangway that led onto the vessel near the stern. It was uncomfortably open ground, and I crossed it with an eye constantly sweeping the railed and craned lines of the ship’s deck and bridge tower. Nothing stirred. I squeezed my left arm lightly against my side to check the Fibregrip holster hadn’t slipped down, as the cheaper varieties often did after a couple of days’ wear. With the Nemex I was tolerably sure I could air out anyone shooting at us from the rail.

In the event it wasn’t necessary. We reached the end of the gangway without incident. A slim chain was fixed across the open entrance with a hand-lettered sign hung on it.

PANAMA ROSE

FIGHT TONITE—22.00

GATE PRICE DOUBLE

I lifted the rectangle of thin metal and looked at the crude lettering dubiously.

“Are you sure Rutherford called here?”

“Like I said before, don’t let it fool you.” Ortega was unhooking the chain. “Fighter chic. Crude’s the in thing. Last season it was neon signs, but even that’s not cool enough now. Place is fucking globally hyped. Only about three or four like it on the planet. There’s no coverage allowed in the arenas. No holos, not even televisuals. You coming, or what?”

“Weird.” I followed her down the tubular corridor, thinking of the freak fights I’d gone to when I was younger. On Harlan’s World, all fights were broadcast. They got the highest viewing figures of any transmitted entertainment online. “Don’t people like watching this sort of stuff?”

“Yeah, of course they do.” Even with the distortion of the echoing corridor, I could hear Ortega’s lip curling in the tone of her voice. “Never get enough of it. That’s how this scam works. See, first they set up the Creed—”

“Creed?”

“Yeah, Creed of Purity or some such shit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to interrupt? Creed goes, you want to see the fight, you go see it in the flesh. That’s better than watching it on the web. More classy. So, limited audience seating, sky-high demand. That makes the tickets very sexy, which makes them very expensive, which makes them even more sexy and whoever thought of it just rides that spiral up through the roof.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah, smart.”

We came to the end of the gangway, and stepped out again onto a wind-whipped deck. On either side of us the roofing of two of the cargo cells swelled smoothly to waist height like two enormous steel blisters on the ship’s skin. Beyond the rear swelling, the bridge towered blankly into the sky, seeming entirely unconnected with the hull we were standing on. The only motion came from the chains of a loading crane ahead of us that the wind had set swinging fractionally.

“The last time I was out here,” said Ortega, raising her voice to compete with the wind, “was because some dipshit newsprick from WorldWeb One got caught trying to walk recording implants into a title fight. They threw him into the Bay. After they’d removed the implants with a pair of pliers.”

“Nice.”

“Like I said, it’s a classy place.”

“Such flattery, lieutenant. I hardly know how to respond.”

The voice coughed from rusty-looking tannoy horns set on two-metre-high stalks along the rail. My hand flew to the Nemex butt, and my vision cycled out to peripheral scan with a rapidity that hurt. Ortega gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked up at the bridge. The two of us swept the superstructure for movement in opposite directions, coordinating unconsciously. Under the immediacy of the tension, I felt a warm shiver of pleasure at that unlooked-for symmetry.

“No, no. Over here,” said the metallic voice, this time relegated to the horns at the stern. As I watched, the chains on one of the rear loading cranes grated into motion and began to run, presumably hauling something up from the open cell in front of the bridge. I left my hand on the Nemex. Overhead, the sun was breaking through the cloud cover.

The chain ended in a massive iron hook, in the crook of which stood the speaker, one hand still holding a prehistoric tannoy microphone, the other gripped lightly around the rising chain. He was dressed in an inappropriate-looking grey suit that flapped in the wind, leaning out from the chain at a fastidious angle, hair glinting in a wandering shaft of sunlight. I narrowed my eyes to confirm. Synthetic. Cheap synthetic.

The crane swung out over the curved cover of the cargo cell and the synth alighted elegantly on the top, looking down on us.

“Elias Ryker,” he said, and his voice was not much smoother than the tannoy had been. Someone had done a real cut-rate job on the vocal cords. He shook his head. “We thought we’d seen the last of you. How short the legislature’s memory.”

“Carnage?” Ortega lifted a hand to shade against the sudden sunlight. “That you?”

The synthetic bowed faintly and stowed the tannoy mike inside his jacket. He began to pick his way down the sloping cell cover.

“Emcee Carnage, at your service, officers. And pray what have we done to offend today?”

I said nothing. From the sound of it, I was supposed to know this Carnage, and I didn’t have enough to work with at the moment. Remembering what Ortega had told me, I fixed the approaching synth with a blank stare, and hoped I was being sufficiently Ryker-like.