My heart dropped out of my chest and landed soggily in my guts. I’d hoped this was just local crime.

“I don’t know you,” I said cautiously, turning my head a couple of millimetres. The gun jabbed and I stopped.

“That’s right, you don’t. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk outside—

“Credit access will cease in thirty seconds,” said the hotel patiently. “Please key in your DNA signature now.”

“Mr. Kovacs won’t be needing his reservation,” said the man behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Kovacs, we’re going for a ride.”

“I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment,” said the woman on the screen.

Something in the tone of that phrase stopped me as I was turning, and on impulse I forced out a sudden, racking cough.

“What—”

Bending forward with the force of the cough, I raised a hand to my mouth and licked my thumb.

“The fuck are you playing at, Kovacs?”

I straightened again and snapped my hand out to the keypad beside the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the matt black receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of my skull and I collapsed to my hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into my face and I went the rest of the way down.

“Thank you sir.” I heard the voice of the hotel through a roaring in my head. “Your account is being processed.”

I tried to get up and got a second boot in the ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from my nose onto the carpet. The barrel of the gun ground into my neck.

“That wasn’t smart, Kovacs.” The voice was marginally less calm. “If you think the cops are going to trace us where you’re going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up!”

He was pulling me to my feet when the thunder cut loose.

Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix’s security systems with twenty-millimetre automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed the twin-mounted autoturret come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channelled a three-second burst of fire through my primary assailant. Enough firepower to bring down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.

The masked woman ran for the doors, and with the echoes of fire still hammering in my ears I saw the turret swivel to follow. She made about a dozen paces through the gloom before a prism of ruby laser light dappled across her back and a fresh fusillade exploded in the confines of the lobby. I clapped both hands over my ears, still on my knees, and the shells punched through her. She went over in a graceless tangle of limbs.

The firing stopped.

In the cordite reeking quiet that followed, nothing moved. The autoturret had gone dormant, barrels slanting at a downward angle, smoke coiling from the breeches. I unclasped my hands from my ears and climbed to my feet, pressing gingerly on my nose and face to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down and though there were cuts in my mouth I couldn’t find any loosened teeth. My ribs hurt where the second kick had hit me, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. I glanced over at the nearest corpse, and wished I hadn’t. Someone was going to have to get a mop.

To my left an elevator door opened with a faint chime.

“Your room is ready, sir,” said the hotel.

Kristin Ortega was remarkably restrained.

She came through the hotel doors with a loping stride that bounced one heavily weighted jacket pocket against her thigh, came to a halt in the centre of the lobby and surveyed the carnage with her tongue thrust into one cheek.

“You do this sort of thing a lot, Kovacs?”

“I’ve been waiting a while,” I told her mildly. “I’m not in a great mood.”

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?”