Altered Carbon

  The dome above our heads smashed inward. Ortega yelled something and I rolled sideways. A body tumbled bonelessly head over feet onto the ground next to me.

  The machine pistol cut loose, aimless. Ortega yelled again and flattened herself on the floor. I rolled upright on the lap of the dead woman and shot the synthetic again, three times in rapid succession. The gunfire choked off.

  Silence.

  I swung the Nemex left and right, covering the corners of the room and the front door. The jagged edges of the smashed dome above. Nothing.

  “Ortega?”

  “Yeah, fine.” She was sprawled on the other side of the room, propping herself up on one elbow. There was a tightness in her voice that belied her words. I swayed to my feet and made my way across to her, footsteps crunching on broken glass.

  “Where’s it hurt?” I demanded, crouching to help her sit up.

  “Shoulder. Fucking bitch got me with the Sunjet.”

  I stowed the Nemex and looked at the wound. The beam had carved a long diagonal furrow across the back of Ortega’s jacket and clipped through the left shoulder pad at the top. The meat beneath the pad was cooked, seared down to the bone in a narrow line at the center.

  “Lucky,” I said with forced lightness. “You hadn’t ducked, it would have been your head.”

  “I wasn’t ducking, I was fucking falling over.”

  “Good enough. You want to stand up?”

  “What do you think?” Ortega levered herself to her knees on her uninjured arm and then stood. She grimaced at the movement of her jacket against the wound. “Fuck, that stings.”

  “I think that’s what the guy in the doorway said.”

  Leaning on me, she turned to stare, eyes centimeters away. I deadpanned it, and the laughter broke across her face like a sunrise. She shook her head.

  “Jesus, Kovacs, you are one sick motherfucker. They teach you to tell postfirefight jokes in the corps or is it just you?”

  I guided her toward the exit. “Just me. Come on, let’s get you some fresh air.”

  Behind us, there was a sudden flailing sound. I jerked around and saw the synthetic sleeve staggering upright. Its head was smashed and disfigured where my last shot had torn the side of the skull off, and the gun hand was spasmed open at the end of a stiff, bloodstreaked right arm, but the other arm was flexing, hand curling into a fist. The synth stumbled against the chair, righted itself, and came toward us, dragging its right leg.

  I drew the Nemex and pointed it.

  “Fight’s over,” I advised.

  The slack face grinned at me. Another halting step. I frowned.

  “For Christ’s sake, Kovacs.” Ortega was fumbling for her own weapon. “Get it over with.”

  I snapped off a shot, and the shell punched the synth backwards onto the glass-strewn floor. It twisted a couple of times, then lay still but breathing sluggishly. As I watched it, fascinated, a gurgling laugh arose from its mouth.

  “That’s fucking enough,” it coughed, and laughed again. “Eh, Kovacs? That’s fucking enough.”

  The words held me in shock for the space of a heartbeat, then I wheeled and made for the door, dragging Ortega with me.

  “Wha—”

  “Out. Get the fuck out.” I thrust her through the door ahead of me and grabbed the railing outside. The dead pistoleer lay twisted on the walkway ahead. I shoved Ortega again, and she vaulted the body awkwardly. Slamming the door after me, I followed her at a run.

  We were almost to the end of the gantry when the dome behind us detonated in a geyser of glass and steel. I distinctly heard the door come off its hinges behind us, and then the blast picked us both up like discarded coats and threw us down the stairs into the street.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–TWO

  The police are more impressive by night.

  First of all, you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. Then there’s the sound of the sirens on the night, like an elevator ratcheting down the levels of the city, the crackling voices of the comsets, somehow brisk and mysterious at the same time, the coming and going of dimly lit, bulky figures and snatches of cryptic conversation, the deployed technology of law enforcement for wakened bystanders to gape at, the lack of anything else going on to provide a vacuum backdrop. There can be absolutely nothing to see beyond this, and people will still watch for hours.

  Nine o’clock on a workday morning, it’s a different matter. A couple of cruisers turned up in response to Ortega’s call, but their lights and sirens were barely noticeable above the general racket of the city. The uniformed crews strung incident barriers at either end of the street and shepherded customers out of the neighboring businesses, while Ortega persuaded the bank’s private security not to arrest me as a possible accessory to the bombing. There was a bounty on terrorists, apparently. A crowd of sorts developed, beyond the almost invisible hazing of the barriers, but it seemed mostly composed of irate pedestrians trying to get past.

  I sat the whole thing out on the curb opposite, checking over the superficial injuries I’d acquired on my short flight down from the gantry to the street. Mostly, it was bruising and abrasions. The shape of the forum provider’s reception area had channeled most of the blast directly upward through the roof, and that was the route the bulk of the shrapnel had taken, as well. We’d been very lucky.

  Ortega left the clutch of uniformed officers gathered outside the bank and strode across the street toward me. She had removed her jacket, and there was a long white smear of tissue weld congealing over her shoulder wound. She held her discarded shoulder holster dangling in one hand, and her breasts moved beneath the thin cotton of a white T-shirt that bore the legend YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT—WHY DON’T YOU TRY IT FOR A WHILE? She seated herself next to me on the curb.

  “Forensic wagon’s on the way,” she said inconsequentially. “You reckon we’ll get anything useful out of the wreckage?”

  I looked at the smoldering ruin of the dome and shook my head.

  “There’ll be bodies, maybe even stacks intact, but those guys were just local street muscle. All they’ll tell you is that the synth hired them, probably for half a dozen ampules of tetrameth each.”

  “Yeah, they were kind of sloppy, weren’t they?”

  I felt a smile ghost across my lips. “Kind of. But then I don’t think they were even supposed to get us.”

  “Just keep us busy till your pal blew up, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The way I figure it, the detonator was wired into his vital signs, right? You snuff him and, boom, he takes you with him. Me, too. And the cheap hired help.”

  “And wipes out his own stack and sleeve.” I nodded. “Tidy, isn’t it.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  I rubbed absently at the scar under my eye. “He overestimated me. I was supposed to kill him outright, but I missed. Probably would have killed himself at that stage, but I messed up his arm trying to stop the machine pistol.” In my mind’s eye the gun drops from splayed fingers and skitters across the floor. “Blew it way out of his reach, as well. He must have been lying there, willing himself to die when he heard us leaving. Wonder what make of synth he was using.”

  “Whoever it was, they can have an endorsement from me any day of the week,” Ortega said cheerfully. “Maybe there’ll be something left for forensics after all.”

  “You know who it was, don’t you?”

  “He called you Kov—”

  “It was Kadmin.”

  There was a short silence. I watched the smoke curling up from the ruined dome. Ortega breathed in, out.

  “Kadmin’s in the store.”

  “Not anymore he isn’t.” I glanced sideways at her. “You got a cigarette?”

  She passed me the pack wordlessly. I shook one out, fitted it into the corner of my mouth, touched the ignition patch to the end, and drew deeply. The movements happen
ed as one, reflex conditioned over years like a macro of need. I didn’t have to consciously do anything. The smoke curling into my lungs was like a breath of the perfume you remember an old lover wearing.

  “He knew me.” I exhaled. “And he knew his Quellist history, too. That’s fucking enough is what a Quellist guerrilla called Iffy Deme said when she died under interrogation during the Unsettlement on Harlan’s World. She was wired with internal explosives, and she brought the house down. Sound familiar? Now who do we know who can swap Quell quotes like a Millsport native?”

  “He’s in the fucking store, Kovacs. You can’t get someone out of the store without—”

  “Without an A.I. With an A.I., you can do it. I’ve seen it done. Core command on Adoracion did it with our prisoners of war, like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Like hooking elephant rays off a spawning reef.”

  “As easy as that?” Ortega said ironically.

  I sucked down some more smoke and ignored her. “You remember when we were in virtual with Kadmin, we got that lightning effect across the sky?”

  “Didn’t see it. No, wait, yeah. I thought it was a glitch.”

  “It wasn’t. It touched him. Reflected in the table. That’s when he promised to kill me.” I turned toward her and grinned queasily. The memory of Kadmin’s virtual entity was clear and monstrous. “You want to hear a genuine first-generation Harlan’s World myth? An offworld fairy story?”

  “Kovacs, even with an A.I., they’d need—”

  “Want to hear the story?”

  Ortega shrugged, winced, and nodded. “Sure. Can I have my cigarettes back?”

  I tossed her the pack and waited while she kindled the cigarette. She plumed smoke out across the street. “Go on, then.”

  “Right. Where I come from originally, Newpest, used to be a textile town. There’s a plant on Harlan’s World called belaweed, grows in the sea and on most shorelines, too. Dry it out, treat it with chemicals, and you can make something like cotton from it. During the Settlement Newpest was the belacotton capital of the World. Conditions in the mills were pretty bad even back then, and when the Quellists turned everything upside down it got worse. The belacotton industry went into decline, and there was massive unemployment, unrelieved poverty, and fuck-all the Unsettlers could do about it. They were revolutionaries, not economists.”

  “Same old song, huh?”

  “Well, familiar tune anyway. Some pretty horrible stories came out of the textile slums around that time. Stuff like the Threshing Sprites, the Cannibal of Kitano Street.”

  Ortega drew on her cigarette and widened her eyes. “Charming.”

  “Yeah, well, bad times. So you get the story of Mad Ludmila the seamstress. This is one they used to tell to kids to make them do their chores and come home before dark. Mad Ludmila had a failing belacotton mill and three children who never helped her out. They used to stay out late playing the arcades across town and sleep all day. So one day, the story goes, Ludmila flips out.”

  “She wasn’t already mad, then?”

  “No, just a bit stressed.”

  “You called her Mad Ludmila.”

  “That’s what the story’s called.”

  “But if she wasn’t mad at the beginning—”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

  Ortega’s mouth quirked at the corner. She waved me on with her cigarette.

  “The story goes, one evening as her children were getting ready to go out, she spiked their coffee with something, and when they were semiconscious, but still aware, mind you, she drove them out to Mitcham’s Point and threw them into the threshing tanks one by one. They say you could hear the screams right across the swamp.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Of course, the police were suspicious—”

  “Really?”

  “—but they couldn’t prove anything. Couple of the kids had been into some nasty chemicals, they were jerking around with the local yakuza, no one was really surprised when they disappeared.”

  “Is there a point to this story?”

  “Yeah. See, Ludmila got rid of her fucking useless children, but it didn’t really help. She still needed someone to man the curing vats, to haul the belaweed up and down the mill stairs, and she was still broke. So what did she do?”

  “Something gory, I imagine.”

  I nodded. “What she did, she picked the bits of her mangled kids out of the thresher and stitched them into a huge three-meter-tall carcass. And then, on a night sacred to the dark powers, she invoked a Tengu to—”

  “A what?”

  “A Tengu. It’s a sort of mischief maker—a demon, I guess you’d call it. She invoked the Tengu to animate the carcass, and then she stitched it in.”

  “What, when it wasn’t looking?”

  “Ortega, it’s a fairy story. She stitched the soul of the Tengu inside, but she promised to release it if it served her will nine years. Nine’s a sacred number in the Harlanite pantheons, so she was as bound to the agreement as the Tengu. Unfortunately—”

  “Ah.”

  “—Tengu are not known for their patience, and I don’t suppose old Ludmila was the easiest person to work for, either. One night, not a third of the way through the contract, the Tengu turned on her and tore her apart. Some say it was Kishimo-jin’s doing, that she whispered terrible incitements into the Tengu’s ear at—”

  “Kishimo Gin?”

  “Kishimo-jin, the divine protectress of children. It was her revenge on Ludmila for the death of the children. That’s one version. There’s another that—” I picked up Ortega’s mutinous expression out of the corner of my eye and hurried on. “Well, anyway. The Tengu tore her apart, but in so doing, it locked itself into the spell and was condemned to remain imprisoned in the carcass. And now, with the original invoker of the spell dead, and worse still, betrayed, the carcass began to rot. A piece here, a piece there, but irreversibly. And so the Tengu was driven to prowling the streets and mills of the textile quarter, looking for fresh meat to replace the rotting portions of its body. It always killed children, because the parts it needed to replace were child sized, but however many times it sewed new flesh to the carcass—”

  “It’d learned to sew, then?”

  “Tengu are multitalented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the Quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.”

  I fell silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.

  “Your mother tell you that story?”

  “Father. When I was five.”

  She looked at the end of her cigarette. “Nice.”

  “No. He wasn’t. But that’s another story.” I stood up and looked down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers. “Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was working for, he’s working for himself now.”

  “How?” Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. “Okay, an A.I. could tunnel into the Bay City P.D. stack. I’ll buy that. But we’re talking about microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to Sacramento.”

  “Microsecond’s all it needed.”

  “But Kadmin isn’t on stack. They’d need to know when he was being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need—”

  She stopped as she saw it coming.

  “Me,” I finished for her. “They’d need me.”

  “But you—”

  “I’m going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.” I spun my cigarette into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth. “Today, maybe tomorrow, too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.”

  Ortega pulled a sour face. “You telling me to go undercover in my own city?”

  “Not telling you to do anything.” I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the half-spent magazine w
ith actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been. The clip went into my jacket pocket. “I’m giving you the state of play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you can be traced to, either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.” I nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. “Anybody down there with decent implants could have this conversation focused and amped.”

  “Jesus.” She blew out her cheeks. “That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.”

  “Don’t tell me that. I used to do this for a living.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the cigarette pack. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into the Nemex, eyes still scanning the crowd.

  “There you go.” Ortega tossed me the pack. “That’s a discreet destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay Area and it’ll take you there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back to business as usual.”

  I caught the pack left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers, and put it away in my jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and stuffed the pistol back into its holster.

  “Tell me that when you’ve checked the stack,” I said, and started walking.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–THrEE

  I walked south.

  Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyperefficiency and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The weather above the traffic flow was on the change, gray cloud cover racing in from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I left the cabs alone. Go primitive, Virginia Vidaura would have said. With an A.I. gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic plane. Of course, on a battlefield that’s a lot more easily done. Plenty of mud and chaos to hide in. A modern city—unbombed—is a logistical nightmare for this kind of evasion. Every building, every vehicle, every street is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the data hounds.

  I found a battered-looking currency dispenser and replenished my thinning sheaf of plasticized notes from it. Then I backed up two blocks and went east until I found a public phone booth. I searched through my pockets, came up with a card, settled the call ’trodes on my head, and dialed.