Altered Carbon

  I was watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried again.

  “Trepp’s dead,” I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. “Trepp, and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?”

  His mouth tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel of the Nemex up against his left eye.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I nodded and settled back onto my seat. “Hard man, huh? So I’ll tell you. I need some answers, Jerry. You can start by telling me what happened to Elizabeth Elliott. That should be easy; I figure you carved her up yourself. Then I want to know who Elias Ryker is, who Trepp works for, and where the clinic is that you sent me to.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You don’t think I’m serious? Or are you just hoping the cops are going to show up and save your stack?” I fished the commandeered blaster out of my pocket left-handed and drew a careful bead on the dead security guard on the runway. The range was short and the beam torched his head off in a single explosion. The stench of charred flesh rolled across the room to us. Keeping one eye on Jerry, I played the beam around a little until I was sure I’d destroyed everything from the shoulders up, then snapped the weapon off and lowered it. Jerry stared at me over the table.

  “You piece of shit, he only worked security for me!”

  “That’s just become a proscribed profession, as far as I’m concerned. Deek and the rest are going the same way. And so are you, unless you tell me what I want to know.” I lifted the beam weapon. “One chance.”

  “All right.” The crack was audible in his voice. “All right, all right. Elliott tried to put a lock on a customer; she got some big-name Meth come slumming down here, reckoned she’d got enough shit to twist him. Stupid cunt tried to make me a partnership deal; she figured I could lean on this Meth guy. No fucking clue what she was dealing with.”

  “No.” I looked stonily at him across the table. “I guess not.”

  He caught the look. “Hey, man, I know what you’re thinking, but it ain’t like that. I tried to warn her off, so she went direct. Direct to a fucking Meth. You think I wanted this place ripped down and me buried under it? I had to deal with her, man. Had to.”

  “You iced her?”

  He shook his head. “I made a call,” he said in a subdued voice. “That’s how it works around here.”

  “Who’s Ryker?”

  “Ryker’s a—” He swallowed. “A cop. Used to work Sleeve Theft, then they upped him to the Organic Damage Division. He was fucking that Sia cunt, the one came out here the night you crocked Oktai.”

  “Ortega?”

  “Yeah, Ortega. Everybody knew it; they say that’s how he got the transfer. That’s why we figured you were, he was, back on the street. When Deek saw you talking to Ortega we figured she’d accessed someone, done a deal.”

  “Back on the street? Back from where?”

  “Ryker was dirty, man.” Now the flow had started, it was coming in full flood. “He RD’d a couple of sleevedealers, up in Seattle—”

  “RD?”

  “Yeah, RD’d.” Jerry looked momentarily nonplussed, as if I’d just queried the color of the sky.

  “I’m not from here,” I said patiently.

  “RD. Real death. He pulped them, man. Couple of other guys went down, stack intact, so Ryker paid off some dipper to register the lot of them Catholic. Either the input didn’t take, or someone at OrgDam found out. He got the double-barrel. Two hundred years, no remission. Word is, Ortega headed up the squad that took him down.”

  Well, well. I waved the Nemex encouragingly.

  “That’s it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I never even met the guy.”

  “And Oktai?”

  Jerry nodded vigorously. “That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare-part deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back.”

  “So Oktai comes running to you—”

  “That’s it. He’s, like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here. So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—”

  Jerry dried up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.

  “That’s fucking it.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice.

  “All right.” I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes, remembered I had none. “You smoke?”

  “Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot?”

  I sighed. “Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your cred. Who’d you borrow her from?”

  “Trepp’s an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favors sometimes.”

  “Not anymore. You ever see her real sleeve?”

  “No. Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.”

  “That far from here?”

  “ ’Bout an hour, suborbital.”

  By my reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe interplanetary, too. The Senior Fleet.

  “So who’s the wire say she’s working for now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I studied the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. “Yeah, you do.” I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. “Trepp’s gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her out. You need to worry about me.”

  He stared defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.

  “I heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.”

  “Good. Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.”

  The Envoy training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty, because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.

  “Listen, those are dangerous people. You got away; you’d better just leave it at that. You got no idea what they—”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.” I pointed the blaster into his face. “The clinic.”

  “Christ, they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use the spare parts, sometimes, and I—” He changed tack abruptly as he saw my face. “They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.”

  I thought of Louise, alias Anemone, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a machine than the door robot had.

  “We’re going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates. And don’t fuck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over the other side of the bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?”

  From his face I judged that he did.

  But just to make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of rage.

  There’s a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about half a kilometer from shore, spit into the ocean beyond, and return. Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It always sounded like macho bullshit to me.

  Now, marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water. I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the elevator for the second time, Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less forgotten what it
was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could happen.

  Again and again.

  They were rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.

  “We thought—”

  “Never mind that,” Jerry snapped. “Open the fucking door. We’ve got to get this piece of shit off the street.”

  The clinic was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in neoindustrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons, facades draped in scaffolding, and balconies hung with fake cabling and hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry thrust me inside.

  The entrance hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls, and patches of exposed brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.

  “I don’t need any fucking help. You’re the wipeouts who let this motherfucker go in the first place.”

  The two guards exchanged a glance, and the extended grasp turned into a placatory gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the parking lot on the roof last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team was waiting, sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again. He had it down to perfection.

  “Never fucking mind that.” He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck. “He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.”

  “He’s in surgery.”

  “Surgery?” Jerry barked a laugh. “You mean he’s watching the machine make pick-and-mix. All right, Chung, then.”

  The team hesitated.

  “What? Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this morning.”

  “No, it’s . . .” The man nearest me gestured. “It’s not procedure, taking him in awake.”

  “Don’t fucking tell me about procedure.” Jerry did a good impression of a man about to explode with fury. “Was it procedure to let this piece of shit get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that fucking procedure? Was it?”

  There was silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with a kind of gritted calm.

  “He ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are going to see Chung. Now, move.”

  They bought it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the operating theater I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the corridor behind us.

  “Just a moment.” The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask, which he now unpinned with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly handsome, blue eyes in a tan-complexioned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.

  “Miller,” Jerry said.

  “What exactly is going on here? Courault—” The tall man turned to the female medic. “—You know better than to bring subjects through here unsedated.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Sedaka insisted that there was no risk involved. He said he was in a hurry to see Director Chung.”

  “I don’t care how much of a hurry he’s in.” Miller swung on Jerry, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you insane, Sedaka? What do you think this is, the visitors’ gallery? I’ve got clients in there. Recognizable faces. Courault, sedate this man immediately.”

  Oh, well. No one’s lucky forever.

  I was already moving. Before Courault could lift the hypospray from her hip sack, I yanked both the Nemex and the blaster from Jerry’s waistband and spun, firing. Courault and her two colleagues went down, multiply injured. Blood splattered on antiseptic white behind them. Miller had time for one outraged yell, and then I shot him in the mouth with the Nemex. Jerry was just backing away from me, the unloaded Philips gun still dangling from his hand. I threw up the blaster.

  “Look, I did my fucking best. I—”

  The beam cut loose and his head exploded.

  In the sudden quiet that followed, I retraced my steps to the doors of the surgery and pushed through them. The little knot of figures, immaculately suited to a man and woman, had left the table on which a young female sleeve was laid out, and were gaping at me behind forgotten surgical masks. Only the autosurgeon continued working unperturbed, making smooth incisions and cauterizing wounds with abrupt little sizzlings. Indistinct lumps of raw red poked out of an array of small metal dishes collected at the subject’s head. It looked unnervingly like the start of some arcane banquet.

  The woman on the table was Louise.

  There were five men and women in the theater, and I killed them all while they stared at me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster and raked the beam over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went around and inflicted real death on everyone there.

  Outside, there were more alarms and two of the medical crew were still alive. Courault had succeeded in crawling a dozen meters down the corridor in a broad trail of her own blood, and one of her male colleagues, too weak to escape, was trying to prop himself up against the wall. The floor was slippery under him, and he kept sliding back down. I ignored him and went after the woman. She stopped when she heard my footsteps, twisted her head to look around, and then began to crawl again, frantically. I stamped a foot down between her shoulders to make her stop and then kicked her onto her back.

  We looked at each other for a long moment while I remembered her impassive face as she had put me under the night before. I lifted the blaster for her to see.

  “Real death,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

  I walked back to the remaining medic, who had seen and was now scrabbling desperately backwards away from me. I crouched down in front of him. The screaming of the alarms rose and fell over our heads like lost souls.

  “Jesus Christ,” he moaned as I pointed the blaster at his face. “Jesus Christ. I only work here.”

  “Good enough,” I told him.

  The blaster was almost inaudible against the alarms.

  Working rapidly, I took care of the third medic in similar fashion, dealt with Miller a little more at length, stripped Jerry’s headless corpse of its jacket, and tucked the garment under my arm. Then I scooped up the Philips gun, tucked it into my waistband, and left. On my way out along the screaming corridors of the clinic, I killed every person I met, and melted their stacks to slag.

  Personal.

  The police were landing on the roof as I let myself out of the front door and walked unhurriedly down the street. Under my arm, Miller’s severed head was beginning to seep blood through the lining of Jerry’s jacket.

  PART THREE

  ALLIANCE

  (APPLICATION UPGRADE)

  CHAPTEr SIXTEEN

  It was quiet and sunny in the gardens at Suntouch House, and the air smelled of mown grass. From the tennis courts came the faint popping of a game in progress, and once I heard Miriam Bancroft’s voice raised in excitement. Flash of tanned legs beneath
a flaring white skirt and a puff of shell-pink dust where the driven ball buried itself in the back of her opponent’s court. There was a polite ripple of applause from the seated figures watching. I made my way down toward the courts, flanked by heavily armed security men with blank faces.

  The players were taking a game break when I arrived, feet planted wide in front of their seats, heads down. As my feet crunched on the gravel surround, Miriam Bancroft looked up through tangled blonde hair and met my eye. She said nothing, but her hands worked at the handle of her racket and a smile split her lips. Her opponent, who also glanced up, was a slim young man with something about him that suggested he might genuinely be as young as his body. He looked vaguely familiar.

  Bancroft was seated at the middle of a row of deck chairs, Oumou Prescott on his right and a man and woman I’d never met on his left. He didn’t get up when I reached him; in fact, he barely looked at me. One hand gestured to the seat next to Prescott.

  “Sit down, Kovacs. It’s the last game.”

  I twitched a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded myself into the deck chair. Oumou Prescott leaned across to me and murmured behind her hand.

  “Mr. Bancroft has had some unwanted attention from the police today. You are being less . . . subtle . . . than we had hoped.”

  “Just warming up,” I muttered back.

  By some prior agreed time limit, Miriam Bancroft and her opponent shrugged off their towels and took up position. I settled back and watched the play, eyes mostly on the woman’s taut body as it surged and swung within the white cotton, remembering how it looked unclothed, how it had writhed against me. Once, just before a service, she caught me looking at her, and her mouth bent in fractional amusement. She was still waiting for an answer from me, and now she thought she had it. When the match finished, in a flurry of hard-fought but visibly inevitable points, she came off court glowing.