“Ten minutes,” she promised, as we rose into the air. “What did you think of the micro-climate?”
“Very nice.”
“Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?”
I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.
Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of those things.
Alone was fine with me.
The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.
Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first—strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.
It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather-stained with age. As the cruiser spiralled down towards its base and then beyond, I realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artefact.
Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.
The limo settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.
“This belong to the Catholics?” I hazarded.
“Used to.” Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. “Back when it was new. It’s private property now.”
“How come?”
“Ask Ray.” Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.
As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two metres between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.
Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man’s body emerged from the gloom as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the calibre as about the same as the Hendrix’s lobby defence system, and relinquished my weapons. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the automated killing units drew back and spidered up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.
“Come on.” Trepp’s voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. “You think if we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?”
I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted over the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.
I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high yield explosives.
At the end of the basilica, grey things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the grey things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.
“Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?”
The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was addressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn towards the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.
“Ray,” I said, in Amanglic. “I should have fucking seen this one on the launch pad.”
Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flawlessly.
“Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,” she mused. ”But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?”
“Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.”
The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.
“Yes, well, I believe we’ve been over this ground before.”
My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara’s interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.
I stepped closer to one of the grey envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.
“Bullet-proof, right?”
“Mmm.” Kawahara tipped her head to one side. “Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.”
I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. “Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.”
She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer, a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petalled skirts cupping her lower body to mid-calf and a soft silk blouse settling over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modelled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.