Altered Carbon

  I settled cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the cushions to the sea a kilometer below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never been my strong point.

  “Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff,” Ortega said, gesturing sideways at the hull. “Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”

  She paused. “I was born on Understanding Day,” she added inconsequentially.

  “Really?”

  “Yep. January ninth. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.”

  “Nice.”

  Who she was really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive. “When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be called Maria.”

  “You come here often?”

  “Not often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.”

  “Good guess.”

  A waiter arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something vegetarian.

  “Good choice,” Ortega said. She nodded at the waiter. “I’ll have the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?”

  “Water.”

  Our selections flared briefly in pink, and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked around her, seeking neutral conversation.

  “So, uh—you got places like this in Millsport?”

  “On the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.”

  “No?” She raised her customary eyebrow. “Millsport’s an archipelago, isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—”

  “An obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I think you’re forgetting something.” I flicked my eyes skywards. “We Are Not Alone.”

  It clicked. “The orbitals? They’re hostile?”

  “Mmm. Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get close enough to decommission one of them—or even get aboard, come to that—we have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.”

  “Must make IP traffic tough.”

  I nodded. “Well, yeah. Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and maintenance shuttles to the platforms. Bit of exotic-element mining, that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the equator toward evening and one crack-of-dawn slot up on the pole. It looks like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left holes in the net.” I paused. “Or maybe someone shot them down.”

  “Someone? You mean, someone, not the Martians?”

  I spread my hands. “Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we even realized it was there. It’s the same on most of the settled worlds. All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.”

  “But the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.”

  “Yeah, right.” I folded my arms and sat back. “The archaeologues say what the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilization.”

  Ortega looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.

  “Do you mind if we talk about something else?” Ortega asked uncomfortably.

  “Sure. Tell me about Ryker.”

  The discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said eventually.

  “Fair enough.” I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. “But I think you want to really.”

  “How very male of you.”

  The food arrived, and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced autochef breakfast, I discovered I was ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway through hers.

  “Food okay?” she asked ironically as I sat back.

  I nodded, trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning on-line and spoil the sated feeling in my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.

  Ortega’s phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.

  “Yeah? Uh-huh. Uh-huh, good. No, we’ll go.” Her eyes flickered briefly to mine. “That so? No, leave that one, too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks, Zak. Owe you one.”

  She stowed the phone again and resumed eating.

  “Good news?”

  “Depends on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.”

  “And the other call?”

  Ortega looked up at me from her bowl, chewed, and swallowed. “The other number was a residential discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of that?”

  CHAPTEr NINETEEN

  Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the bay, alongside acres of abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometer long with six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange that I assumed was rust.

  “Don’t let it fool you,” Ortega grunted as we circled. “They’ve polymered the hull a quarter meter thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink it now.”

  “Expensive.”

  She shrugged. “They’ve got the backing.”

  We landed on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomforted in equal parts by the pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realize what she was doing, and pulled herself abruptly upright again.

  “No one home,” she said awkwardly.

  “So it seems. Shall we go and have a look?”

  We got out into the customary blanket-snap of wind off the bay and made for a tubular aluminum gangway that led onto the vessel near the stern. It was uncomfortably open ground, and I crossed it with an eye constantly sweeping the railed and craned lines of the ship’s deck and bridge tower. Nothing stirred. I squeezed my left arm lightly against my side to check that the fibergrip holster hadn’t slipped down, as the cheaper varieties often did after a couple of days’ wear. With the Nemex I was tolerably sure I could air out anyone shooting at us from the rail.

 
In any event it wasn’t necessary. We reached the end of the gangway without incident. A slim chain was fixed across the open entrance with a hand-lettered sign hung on it.

  PANAMA ROSE

  FIGHT TONIGHT—22.00

  GATE PRICE DOUBLE

  I lifted the rectangle of thin metal and looked at the crude lettering dubiously.

  “Are you sure Rutherford called here?”

  “Like I said before, don’t let it fool you.” Ortega was unhooking the chain. “Fighter chic. Crude’s the in-thing. Last season it was neon signs, but even that’s not cool enough now. Place is fucking globally hyped. Only about three or four like it on the planet. There’s no coverage allowed in the arenas. No holos, not even televisuals. You coming, or what?”

  “Weird.” I followed her down the tubular corridor, thinking of the Freak Fights I’d gone to when I was younger. On Harlan’s World, all fights were broadcast. They got the highest-viewing figures of any transmitted entertainment on-line. “Don’t people like watching this sort of stuff?”

  “Yeah, of course they do.” Even with the distortion of the echoing corridor, I could hear Ortega’s lip curling in the tone of her voice. “Never get enough of it. That’s how this scam works. See, first they set up the Creed—”

  “Creed?”

  “Yeah, Creed of Purity or some such shit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to interrupt? Creed goes, you want to see the fight, you go see it in the flesh. That’s better than watching it on the Web. More classy. So, limited audience seating, sky-high demand. That makes the tickets very sexy, which makes them very expensive, which makes them even more sexy, and whoever thought of it just rides that spiral up through the roof.”

  “Smart.”

  “Yeah, smart.”

  We came to the end of the gangway and stepped out again onto a wind-whipped deck. On either side of us the roofing of two of the cargo cells swelled smoothly to waist height like two enormous steel blisters on the ship’s skin. Beyond the rear swelling, the bridge towered blankly into the sky, seeming entirely unconnected with the hull we were standing on. The only motion came from the chains of a loading crane ahead of us that the wind had set swinging fractionally.

  “The last time I was out here,” Ortega said, raising her voice to compete with the wind, “was because some dipshit newsprick from WorldWeb One got caught trying to walk recording implants into a title fight. They threw him into the bay. After they’d removed the implants with a pair of pliers.”

  “Nice.”

  “Like I said, it’s a classy place.”

  “Such flattery, Lieutenant. I hardly know how to respond.”

  The voice coughed from rusty-looking loudspeaker horns set on two-meter-high stalks along the rail. My hand flew to the Nemex butt, and my vision cycled out to peripheral scan with a rapidity that hurt. Ortega gave me an almost imperceptible shake of the head and looked up at the bridge. The two of us swept the superstructure for movement in opposite directions, coordinating unconsciously. Under the immediacy of the tension, I felt a warm shiver of pleasure at that unlooked-for symmetry.

  “No, no. Over here,” the metallic voice said, this time relegated to the horns to the stern. As I watched, the chains on one of the rear loading cranes grated into motion and began to run, presumably hauling something up from the open cell in front of the bridge. I left my hand on the Nemex. Overhead, the sun was breaking through the cloud cover.

  The chain ended in a massive iron hook, in the crook of which stood the speaker, one hand still holding a prehistoric microphone, the other gripped lightly around the rising chain. He was dressed in an inappropriate-looking gray suit that flapped in the wind, leaning out from the chain at a fastidious angle, hair glinting in a wandering shaft of sunlight. I narrowed my eyes to confirm. Synthetic. Cheap synthetic.

  The crane swung out over the curved cover of the cargo cell, and the synth alighted elegantly on the top, looking down on us.

  “Elias Ryker,” he said, and his voice was not much smoother than the tannoy had been. Someone had done a real cut-rate job on the vocal chords. He shook his head. “We thought we’d seen the last of you. How short the legislature’s memory.”

  “Carnage?” Ortega lifted a hand to shade against the sudden sunlight. “That you?”

  The synthetic bowed faintly and stowed the mike inside his jacket. He began to pick his way down the sloping cell cover.

  “Emcee Carnage, at your service, officers. And pray what have we done to offend today?”

  I said nothing. From the sound of it, I was supposed to know this Carnage, and I didn’t have enough to work with at the moment. Remembering what Ortega had told me, I fixed the approaching synth with a blank stare, and hoped I was being sufficiently Ryker-like.

  The synthetic reached the edge of the cell cover and jumped down. Up close, I saw that it wasn’t only the vocal chords that were crude. This body was so far from the one Trepp had been using when I torched her, it was barely deserving of the same name. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of antique. The black hair was coarse and enameled looking, the face slack silicoflesh, the pale blue eyes clearly logo’d across the white. The body looked solid, but a little too solid, and the arms were slightly wrong, reminiscent of snakes rather than limbs. The hands at the ends of the cuffs were smooth and lineless. The synth offered one featureless palm, as if for inspection.

  “Well?” he asked gently.

  “Routine check, Carnage,” Ortega said, helping me out. “Been some bomb threats on tonight’s fight. We’re here to have a look.”

  Carnage laughed, jarringly. “As if you cared.”

  “Well, like I said,” Ortega answered evenly. “It’s routine.”

  “Oh well, you’d better come along then.” The synthetic sighed and nodded at me. “What’s the matter with him? Did they lose his speech functions in the stack?”

  We followed him toward the back of the ship and found ourselves skirting the pit formed by the rolled-back cover of the rearmost cargo cell. I glanced down inside and saw a circular white fighting ring, walled on four sides by slopes of steel and plastic seating. Banks of lighting equipment were strung above, but there were none of the spiky spherical units I associated with telemetry. In the center of the ring, someone was kneeling, painting a design on the mat by hand, and looked up as we passed.

  “Thematic,” Carnage said, seeing where I was looking. “Means something in Arabic. This season’s fights are all themed around Protectorate police actions. Tonight it’s Sharya. Right Hand of God Martyrs versus Protec Marines. Hand-to-hand, no blades over ten centimeters.”

  “Bloodbath, in other words,” Ortega said.

  The synth shrugged. “What the public wants, the public pays for. I understand it is possible to inflict an outright mortal wound with a ten-centimeter blade. Just very difficult. A real test of skill, they say. This way.”

  We went down a narrow companionway into the body of the ship, our own footsteps clanging around us in the tight confines.

  “Arenas first, I presume,” Carnage shouted above the echoes.

  “No, let’s see the tanks first,” Ortega suggested.

  “Really?” It was hard to tell with the low-grade synthetic voice, but Carnage seemed to be amused. “Are you quite sure it’s a bomb you’re looking for, Lieutenant? It seems to me the arena would be the obvious place to—”

  “Got something to hide, Carnage?”

  The synthetic turned back to look at me for a moment, quizzically. “No, not at all, Detective Ryker. The tanks it is, then. Welcome to the conversation, by the way. Was it cold on stack? Of course, you probably never expected to be there yourself.”

  “That’s enough,” Ortega interposed herself. “Just take us to the tanks and save the small talk for tonight.”

  “But of course. We aim to cooperate with law enforcement. As a legally incorporated—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Ortega waved the verbiage away with weary patience. “Just take us to the fucking tanks
.”

  I reverted to my dangerous stare.

  We rode to the tank area in a dinky little electromag train that ran along one side of the hull, through two more converted cargo cells equipped with the same fighting rings and banks of seats but this time covered over with plastic sheeting. At the far end, we disembarked and stepped through the customary sonic cleansing lock. A great deal dirtier than PsychaSec’s facilities, ostensibly made of black iron, the heavy door swung outward to reveal a spotlessly white interior.

  “At this point we dispense with image,” Carnage said carelessly. “Bare-bones low-tech is all very well for the audience, but behind the scenes, well.” He gestured around at the gleaming facilities. “You can’t make an omelette without a little oil in the pan.”

  The forward cargo section was huge and chilly, the lighting gloomy, the technology aggressively massive. Where Bancroft’s low-lit womb mausoleum at Psycha-Sec had spoken in soft, cultured tones of the trappings of wealth, where the resleeving room at Bay City Storage Facility had groaned minimal funding for minimal deservers, the Panama Rose’s body bank was a brutal growl of power. The storage tubes were racked on heavy chains like torpedoes on either side of us, jacked into a central monitor system at one end of the hold via thick black cables that twisted across the floor like pythons. The monitor unit itself squatted heavily ahead of us like an altar to some unpleasant spider god. We approached it on a metal jetty raised a quarter meter above the frozen writhings of the data cables. Behind it to left and right, set into the far wall, were the square glass sides of two spacious decanting tanks. The right-hand tank already held a sleeve, floating backlit and tethered cruciform by monitor lines.

  It was like walking into the Andric cathedral in Newpest.

  Carnage walked to the central monitor, turned, and spread his arms rather like the sleeve above and behind him.