‘Ortega, this is nothing to do—’
‘I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.’ She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. ‘I don’t know, that doesn’t look like fear on your face, exactly.’
‘Ortega—’
‘ ‘‘I want you to stop,’’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don’t rememb—’
I pulled the remote out of her reach. ‘I remember what she said.’ ‘Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple—’
‘Ortega, you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—’
‘Shut up.’ Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. ‘You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—’
‘If you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.’ I tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have. ‘I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.’
‘Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.’
‘She’ll beat the rap. You know she will.’
‘If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot’s on the other foot this time around.’
The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.
I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.
‘And while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.’
‘I was going to tell you about that.’
‘No, you fucking weren’t,’ Ortega snarled. ‘You weren’t going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.’
‘Look, the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much to—’
‘You arrogant motherfucker.’ The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. ‘You’re just like him, you’re just fucking like him. You think we need the fucking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation—’
‘Wait a minute.’ I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. ‘Just like who, who am I just like?’
‘What?’
‘You just said I’m just—’
‘Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?’
‘The only thing I under—’ Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.
‘Give me that, turn that fucking thing —’
For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.
‘— off.’
There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.
When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.
It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.
Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.
I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.
I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.
‘Where’re we going?’ I asked her gently.
A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. ‘Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.’
‘And no one knows we’re out here?’
‘Only the satellites.’
‘Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?’
She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. ‘It’s Ryker’s.’
‘Ooops.’ I looked elaborately away. ‘Nice carpet in here.’
Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.
‘I told myself,’ she murmured, ‘it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.’