The hotel had placed a call to the Bay City police about the time the autoturret had cut loose, but it was a good half hour before the first cruisers came spiralling down out of the sky traffic. I hadn’t bothered to go to my room, since I knew they were going to drag me out of bed anyway, and once they arrived there was no question of me going anywhere until Ortega got there. A police medic gave me a cursory check, ascertained that I wasn’t suffering from concussion and left me with a retardant spray to stop the nose bleed, after which I sat in the lobby and let my new sleeve smoke some of the lieutenant’s cigarettes. I was still sitting there an hour later when she arrived.
Ortega gestured. “Yeah, well. Busy city at night.”
I offered her the packet. She looked at it as if I’d just posed a major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the packet, she searched her pockets, produced a heavy petrol lighter and snapped it open. She seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around us, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.
“So.” She plumed smoke into the air above her head. “You know these guys?”
“Oh, give me a fucking break!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I’ve been out of storage six hours, if that.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. “Meaning, I’ve talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I’ve never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions or am I going to bed?”
“All right, keep your skull on.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. She sank into the lounger opposite mine. “You told my sergeant they were professionals.”
“They were.” I’d decided it was the one piece of information I might as well share with the police, since they’d probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the two corpses through their files.
“Did they call you by name?”
I furrowed my brow with great care. “By name?”
“Yeah.” She made an impatient gesture. “Did they call you Kovacs?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Any other names?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”
The weariness that had clouded her face retreated abruptly, and she gave me a hard look. “Forget it. We’ll run the hotel’s memory, and see.”
Oops.
“On Harlan’s World you’d have to get a warrant for that.” I made it come out lazily.
“We do here.” Ortega knocked ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. “But it won’t be a problem. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Hendrix has been up on an organic damage charge. While ago, but the archives go back.”
“So how come it wasn’t decommissioned?”
“I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self defence. Course,” she nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep, “we’re talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this.”
“Yeah, I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?”
“What do you think I am, a search construct?” Ortega had started watching me with a speculative hostility I didn’t much like. Then, abruptly, she shrugged. “Archive précis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple of centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under shortly afterwards with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Hendrix graded to artificial intelligence status instead and bought itself out.”
“Smart.”
“Yeah, from what I hear the AIs were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are AI.” She grinned at me through the smoke. “That’s why no one stays in them. Shame, really. I read somewhere they’re hard-wired to want customers the way people want sex. That’s got to be frustrating, right?”
“Right.”
One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.
“We got a make on the DNA samples,” the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.