Splat!
The stun bolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armour beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.
“What kept you?” asked Kawahara’s voice from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.
“Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.” Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. “Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?”
“It’s Kovacs,” said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.
I wasn’t going under.
“Kovacs?” Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. “I thought—”
“Yes, so did I.” The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colours swirling over her features. “He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.”
My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side-effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.
“Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,” said Trepp and put out a hand to touch my face.
“Yeah?” Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. “Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to—Fuck!”
She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.
“He was telling the truth.”
“About what?”
Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. “Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?”
“He’s cold.”
“Of course he’s fucking cold.” The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. “How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s Stiffed to the eyes.”
Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. “What are you going to do with him?”
“He’s going into virtual,” said Kawahara grimly. “Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.”
I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.
“You sure he isn’t transmitting?”
“Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?”
A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.
“I don’t have a knife.” I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.
“No problem.” Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. “I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.”
Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move towards the desk.
The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.