Altered Carbon

  I hauled Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet, clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.

  “You want to tip your head back to stop that,” I told him. “Go ahead, I’m not going to hurt you again.”

  “Botherfucker!”

  I held up the crystals and the little gun. “Where did you get these?”

  “Suck by prick, Kovacs.” Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself, trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse’s. “I’b dot tellig you a fuckig thig.”

  “Fair enough.” I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for a couple of seconds. “Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking-order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.”

  He stared back at me in silence.

  “Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.”

  The silence stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of power come true.

  I shrugged. “In case you hadn’t guessed already, the answer to the lady’s question is no. I’m not interested. There, that should make you happy, and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn’t dosed yourself to the eyes, it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you very much, the offer is appreciated, but there’s too much going on here to walk away from. Tell her I’m starting to enjoy it.”

  There was a slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited, crimson-haired figure on the stairs.

  “Am I interrupting something?” the mohican inquired. The voice was slow and relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.

  I picked up my drink from the bar. “Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the party. What’ll you have?”

  “Overproof rum,” the cop said, drifting over to us. “If they’ve got it. Small glass.”

  I raised a finger at the clock face. The bartender produced a square-cut glass from somewhere and filled it with a deep-red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis, sparing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long arm.

  “Appreciated.” He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. “Not bad. I’d like a word with you, Kovacs. In private.”

  We both glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.

  “You do that?” he asked casually.

  I nodded. “Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting someone.”

  “Well, I’m glad he ain’t protecting me.”

  “Like I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.”

  “Hell, you don’t need to explain yourself to me.” The cop leaned on the bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay City Storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. “He feels aggrieved enough, he can press charges, and we’ll play back some more of this place’s memory.”

  “Got your warrant, then?” I put the question with a lightness I didn’t feel.

  “Almost. Always takes a while with the legal department. Fucking A.I.s. Look, I wanted to apologize for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they’re fundamentally okay.”

  I waved my glass laterally. “Forget it.”

  “Good. I’m Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Ortega’s partner most of the time.” He drained his glass and grinned at me. “Loosely attached, I should point out.”

  “Noted.” I signaled the bartender for refills. “Tell me something. You guys all go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?”

  “Same hairdresser.” Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. “Old guy up on Fulton. Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store. It’s the only goddamn style he knows, but he’s a nice old guy and he’s cheap. One of us started going there few years back; he gave us discounts. You know how it is.”

  “But not Ortega?”

  “Ortega cuts her own hair.” Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. “Got a little holocast scanner, says it improves her spatial coordination or some such shit.”

  “Different.”

  “Yeah, she is.” Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. “It’s her I’m here about.”

  “Uh-oh. Is this going to be a friendly warning?”

  Bautista pulled a face. “Well, it’s going to be friendly, whatever you call it. I ain’t looking for a broken nose.”

  I laughed despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.

  “Thing is, it’s tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and Ryker were real close. She’s been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now, and on a lieutenant’s pay that ain’t an easy thing to do. Never figured on an overbid like that fucker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker ain’t exactly young, and he never was a beauty.”

  “Got neurachem,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, sure. Got neurachem.” Bautista waved an arm with largesse. “You tried it yet?”

  “Couple of times.”

  “Like dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?”

  “It’s a little rough,” I admitted.

  This time we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His face grew serious.

  “I ain’t trying to lean on you. All I’m saying is, go easy. This ain’t exactly what she needs right now.”

  “Me either,” I said feelingly. “This isn’t even my fucking planet.”

  Bautista looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. “Harlan’s World’s a lot different from this, I guess.”

  “You guess right. Look, I don’t mean to be unsubtle, but hasn’t anyone pointed out to Ortega that Ryker’s as gone for good as it gets without real death? She’s not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is she?”

  The cop looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You heard about Ryker, huh?”

  “I know he’s down for the double-barrel. I know what he went down for.”

  Bautista got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It can’t be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I regretted what I’d said.

  Local color. Soak it up.

  “You want to sit down?” the cop said unhappily, casting around for bar stools that had evidently been removed at some stage. “Over in the booths, maybe? This’ll take a while to tell.”

  We settled at one of the clock-face tables, and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like Ortega, he looked surprised.

  “I quit.”

  “In that sleeve?” Bautista’s eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil of fragrant blue smoke. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. You were going to tell me about Ryker.”

  “Ryker.” The cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back. “Was working with the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They’re quite a sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain’t so easy to steal a whole sleeve intact, and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There’s some crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.”
r />   “Oh?” I said neutrally.

  Bautista nodded. “Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare-parts sale. But I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Must have happened as I was walking out the door.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway. Back in the winter of ’09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where resleeve policy clones turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High-level corruption. It bounced all the way up to U.N. presidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.”

  “Nice.”

  “In the short term, yeah. The way it works around here, heroes get a very high profile, and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicized fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before—like I said, we overlap here and there—so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.”

  “And did he? Make a difference, I mean?”

  Bautista puffed out his cheeks. “He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in, you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgment went all to pieces.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Hey, what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.”

  “Did she?” I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. “I thought she brought him in.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?”

  “Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Yeah, ain’t that a laser up the ass.” Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. “She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the I.A.D. charges.”

  “From what I heard, they had him cold.”

  “Yeah, your source got that bit right.” The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. “Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up by some high-ranking asshole who took a fall back in ’09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.”

  “But you don’t buy it?”

  “I’d like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.” Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. “I think Ryker got carried away.”

  “Blam, blam, blam?”

  “Something like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before; he’s right on the line most of the time. One slip.” There was an old terror in Bautista’s eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. “With some of these turds, it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what happened.”

  “My source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty fucking careless.”

  Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. “What Ortega says. But it won’t wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser, and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred meters of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.

  “Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle P.D. wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.”

  “Or in a real hurry.”

  Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was definitely a little drunk now. “There you go. The way I.A.D. read it, Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a do-not-disturb sign on their stacks. Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with a plasma gun.”

  “Was it true?”

  “About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?”

  “What did Ryker say?”

  “He said he didn’t do it.”

  “Just that?”

  “Nah, it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it, and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any dipping that went on.” Bautista shrugged blearily. “They found the dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn’t do it face-to-face. Virtual link.”

  “Which can be faked. Easily.”

  “Yeah.” Bautista looked pleased. “But then, this guy says he’s done work for Ryker before, this time face-to-face, and he polygraphed out on that, too. Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, I.A.D. wanted to know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle P.D. didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said.”

  “A hundred and twenty-four holes,” I muttered.

  “Yep. That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.”

  “It could have been a setup.”

  “Yeah, it could have been.” Bautista sobered up a little, and his voice got angry. “Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you—shit, sorry—the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke, there was no one there to catch him.”

  “So Ortega buys the setup story, stands by Ryker, and fights I.A.D. all the way down, and when they lose . . .” I nodded to myself. “When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?”

  “Got it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disk spinning.” Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. “Like I said, it’s tearing her up.”

  We sat quietly for a while.

  “You know,” Bautista said finally. “I think I’m going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.”

  “Just part of living in the modern age,” I told him, knocking back my drink.

  “Yeah, I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention the scumbags.”

  “So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?”

  Bautista frowned. “That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop w
ho made a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim, either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.”

  “Sure. Sorry.” I rubbed at the side of my face. Envoy conversations weren’t supposed to slip like that. “I’m a little tired. That block you live on sounds familiar. I think I’m going to go to bed. You want another drink before you go, help yourself. It’s on my tab.”

  “No thanks.” Bautista drained what was left in his glass. “Old cop’s rule. Never drink alone.”

  “Sounds like I should have been an old cop.” I stood up, swaying a little. Ryker may have been a death-wish smoker, but he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol. “You can see yourself out okay, I guess.”

  “Sure.” Bautista got up to go and made about a half-dozen paces before he turned back. He frowned with concentration. “Oh, yeah. Goes without saying, I was never here, right.”

  I gestured him away. “You were never here,” I assured him.

  He grinned bemusedly, and his face looked suddenly very young. “Right. Good. See you around, probably.”

  “See you.”

  I watched him out of sight, then, regretfully, let the ice-cold processes of Envoy control trickle down through my befuddled senses. When I was unpleasantly sober again, I picked up Curtis’s drug crystals from the bar and went to talk to the Hendrix.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–ONE

  “You know anything about synamorphesterone?”