CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The police are more impressive by night.

First of all you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic colour into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. Then there’s the sound of the sirens on the night, like an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of dimly lit bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely nothing to see beyond this and people will still watch for hours.

Nine o’clock on a workday morning it’s a different matter. A couple of cruisers turned up in response to Ortega’s call in but their lights and sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The uniformed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and shepherded customers out of the neighbouring businesses, while Ortega persuaded the bank’s private security not to arrest me as a possible accessory to the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.

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.”