Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene – translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.
A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood-warm. The music got even louder.
We forged through the tightly packed dancespace without incident. A couple of times, I had to shove hard to make progress but never got anything back beyond smiles, apologetic or just blissedout vacant. The take scene is pretty laid back wherever you go on Harlan’s World – careful breeding has placed the most popular strains firmly in the euphoric part of the psychotropic spectrum and the worst you can expect from those under the influence is to be hugged and slobbered on amidst incoherent professions of undying love. There are nastier hallucinogenic varieties to be had, but generally nobody wants them outside of the military.
A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirrorwood panelling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.
I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automould bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful, wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had got them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dancespace image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognisable enough to dance to. Or whatever.
‘Hey Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.’ Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. ‘That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom grown?’
I nodded at his playmates. ‘Get rid of them.’
‘Uh, sure.’ He turned back to the automould and clapped his hands. ‘Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.’
They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.
‘Yeah, him too.’
The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at Plex, who was moving towards a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the side wall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous, take and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.
‘Uh, you want a pipe, man?’
‘Plex.’ I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. ‘Just what the fuck is going on?’
He flinched. Stuttered.
‘I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—’
‘Fuck that, Plex. Talk to me.’
‘Look, man, it’s not my fault.’ His tone worked towards aggrieved. ‘Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that kaikyo shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I know biotech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was fucked up.’
So.
My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio. Kaikyo – a strait, a stolen goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.
‘Where’d they take her?’ I asked quietly.
It wasn’t Yukio’s tone any more but I wasn’t going to get much further as Yukio anyway. I didn’t know enough to sustain the lie in the face of Plex’s lifelong acquaintance.
‘Took her to Millsport, I guess.’ He was building himself a pipe, maybe to balance out the take blur. ‘I mean, Yukio, has Tanaseda really not—’
‘Where in Millsport?’
Then he got it. I saw the knowledge soak through him, and he reached suddenly under the module’s upper shelf. Maybe he had some neurachem wiring somewhere in that pale, aristocratic body he wore, but for him it would have been little more than an accessory. And the chemicals slowed him down so much it was laughable.
I let him get a hand on the gun, let him get it halfway clear of the shelf it was webbed under. Then I kicked his hand away, knocked him back onto the automould with a backfist and stamped down on the shelf. Ornate glassware splintered, the paper parcels flew and the shelf cracked across. The gun fell out on the floor. Looked like a compact shard blaster, big brother to the GS Rapsodia under my coat. I scooped it up and turned in time to catch Plex scrambling for some kind of wall alarm.
‘Don’t.’
He froze, staring hypnotised at the gun.
‘Sit down. Over there.’
He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.
Fucking set fire to it or something.
‘Who.’ His mouth worked. ‘Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.’
I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.
‘Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.’
His face creased. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.
‘Fuck. Kovacs?’
‘Good guess.’ I put the stack away again. ‘The original. Accept no imitations. Now, unless you want to be sharing a pocket with your boyhood pal here, I suggest you go on answering my questions the way you were when you thought I was him.’
‘But, you’re.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re never going to get away with this, Kovacs. They’ve got. They’ve got you looking for you, man.’