“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.