Altered Carbon

  I shifted behind his eyes.

  Reluctantly, he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.

  The weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.

  A weapon—any weapon—is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.

  In the ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for most of us. Ninety percent of Envoy intake came up through the Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. U.N. marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough.

  Virginia Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.

  “Mr. de Soto. You do not agree.”

  Jimmy shifted, a little abashed at how easily he had been picked out. “Well, ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.”

  There was a faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it subsided.

  “Indeed,” she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. “This . . . device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.”

  Jimmy hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon. Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was center stage before the assembled trainees, and stripped off her corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.

  “You will see,” she said loudly, “that the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first-degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five meters. I am unarmed. Mr. de Soto, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.”

  Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.

  “On your call,” she repeated.

  “Now,” he snapped.

  It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the vertical. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-meter gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realized what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him, and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.

  The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.

  “A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”

  Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin and Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden, cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.

  Got the frags, Virginia.

  Breathe, she said. Move. Control.

  And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a teahouse and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The halfhearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signaled an autocab down from the prowl lane above, and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.

  He was beginning to annoy me.

  The cab curved away southward. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitor’s blurb panel.

  “Welcome to Urbline Services,” a smooth female voice said. “You are linked to the Urbline central data stack. Please state the information you require.”

  “Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”

  “The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,” the data stack said blandly. “However, Urbline Services guarantees carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—”

  “Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?”

  There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

  “Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—”

  “That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?”

  “Straight-line distance is approximately one kilometer.”

  “Got a map?”

  The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location crosshairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.

  “All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”

  “As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.”

  I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.

  “Thanks.”

  The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.

  Where the streets I’d chased the Mongol through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swiveled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green, canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.

  The second cab was spiraling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen meters away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.

  “You looking for something, tourist?”

  There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-meter giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle-graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire, and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the Freak Fights he had lost, and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens scre
wed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.

  “Come slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face, and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.

  The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.

  Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.

  “I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”

  There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step, and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.

  “Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”

  The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training, and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp, and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him around on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him, and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimeter from his eyes.

  “Don’t,” I said quietly.

  The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.

  I backed away down the alley about a dozen meters, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.

  The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.

  Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight, and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongol had been replaced several times over.

  I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it patted me down, and the synth voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”

  “What’s the deal in the bar?”

  “Ha ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers, too.”

  “Cabins.”

  “Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

  Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.

  “Louise?”

  The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.

  “Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”

  A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door hinged open and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.

  “Right there, fucker,” a tight voice said. “This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.”

  I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.

  “That’s it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.”

  I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin-padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall, blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His mouth was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.

  “Now who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me.

  I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. “Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.”

  The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.

  “You’re lying to me,” he said softly. “I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City Justice Facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.”

  He kicked at the inert body on the floor, and I peered down out of the corner of my nearest eye. In the harsh white light the marks of torture were livid on the girl’s flesh.

  “Now I want you to think real carefully about your next answer, whoever you are. Why are you asking after Lizzie Elliott?”

  I slid my eyes back over the barrel of the blaster to the clenched face beyond. It wasn’t the expression of someone who’d been dealt in. Too scared.

  “Lizzie Elliott’s my daughter, you piece of shit, and if your friend up at the city store had any real access, you’d know why the record still says I’m on stack.”

  The gun in my back shoved forward more sharply, but unexpectedly the blond seemed to relax. His mouth flexed in a rictus of resignation. He lowered the blaster.

  “All right,” he said. “Deek, go and get Oktai.”

  Someone at my back slipped out of the cabin. The blond waved his gun at me. “You. Sit down in the corner.” His tone was distracted, almost casual.

  I felt the gun taken out of my back and moved to obey. As I settled onto the satin floor, I weighed the odds. With Deek gone, there were still three of them. The blond; a woman in what looked to me like a synthetic Asian-skinned sleeve, toting the second particle blaster whose imprint I could still feel in my spine; and a large black man whose only weapon appeared to be an iron pipe. Not a chance. These were not the street sharks I’d faced down on Nineteenth Street. There was a cold, embodied purpose about them, a kind of cheap version of what Kadmin had had back at the Hendrix.

  For a moment I looked at the synthetic woman and wondered, but it couldn’t be. Even if he’d somehow managed to slip the charges Kristin Ortega had talked about and got himself resleeved, Kadmin was on the inside. He knew who had hired him, and who I was. The faces peering at me from around the biocabin, on their own admission, knew nothing.

  Let’s keep it that way.

  My gaze crept across to Louise’s battered sleeve. It looked as if they had cut slits in the skin of her thighs and then forced the wounds apart until they tore. Simple, crude, and very effective. They would have made her watch while they did it, compounding the pain with terror. It’s a gut-swooping experience seeing that happen to your body. On Sharya, the religious police used it a lot. She’d probably need psychosurgery to get over the traum
a.

  The blond saw where my eyes had gone and offered me a grim nod, as if I’d been an accomplice to the act.

  “Want to know why her head’s still on, huh?”

  I looked bleakly across the room at him. “No. You look like a busy man, but I guess you’ll get around to it.”

  “No need,” he said casually, enjoying his moment. “Old Anemone’s Catholic. Third or fourth generation, the girls tell me. Sworn affidavit on disk, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican. We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.”

  “You talk too much, Jerry,” the woman said.

  The blond’s eyes flared whitely at her, but whatever retort he was mustering behind the curl of his lip quieted as two men, presumably Deek and Oktai, pushed into the tiny room on another wave of junk rhythm from the corridor. My eyes measured Deek and placed him in the same category—muscle—as the pipe wielder, then switched to his companion, who was staring steadily at me. My heart twitched. Oktai was the Mongol.

  Jerry jerked his head in my direction.

  “This him?” he asked.

  Oktai nodded slowly, a savage grin of triumph etched across his broad face. His massive hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was working through an extreme of hate so deep it was choking him. I could see the bump where someone had inexpertly repaired his broken nose with tissue weld, but that didn’t seem like enough to warrant the fury I was watching.

  “All right, Ryker.” The blond leaned forward a little. “You want to change your story? You want to tell me why you’re breaking my balls down here?”