Altered Carbon

  Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first—strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.

  It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather stained with age. As the cruiser spiraled down toward its base and then beyond, I realized that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artifact.

  Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.

  The limo settled on one of the stone expanses, and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.

  “This belong to the Catholics?” I hazarded.

  “Used to.” Trepp started toward a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. “Back when it was new. It’s private property now.”

  “How come?”

  “Ask Ray.” Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.

  As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two meters between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.

  Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man’s body emerged from the gloom, as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the caliber about the same as the Hendrix’s lobby defense system, and relinquished the Nemex. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the automated killing units drew back and spidered back up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.

  “Come on.” Trepp’s voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. “You think we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?”

  I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted with the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.

  I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high-yield explosives.

  At the end of the basilica, gray things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the gray things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.

  “Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?”

  The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was addressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions, and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn toward the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.

  “Ray,” I said, in Amanglic. “I should have fucking seen this one on the launch pad.”

  Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended, and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flawlessly.

  “Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,” she mused. “But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war-veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times, that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?”

  “Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.”

  The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.

  “Yes, well, I believe we’ve been over this ground before.”

  My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara’s interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.

  I stepped closer to one of the gray envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand, and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.

  “Bullet-proof, right?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Kawahara tipped her head to one side. “Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.”

  I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. “Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.”

  She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer, a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petaled skirts cupping her lower body to midcalf and a soft silk blouse settled over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modeled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.

  “Power is habitually buried,” she said. “Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan’s World. Or the caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”

  “Judging by the way I’ve been led around the last week, I’d say yes. Now do you want to get on with this pitch?”

  “Very well.” Kawahara glanced aside at Trepp, who wandered away into the gloom, neck craned up at the ceiling like a tourist. I looked around for a seat and found none. “You are aware, no doubt, that I recommended you to Laurens Bancroft.”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. We could have had this conversation a week ago and saved everyone a lot of unnecessary pain. It was not my intention for Kadmin to harm you. His instructions were to bring you here alive.”

  “There’s been a change of program,” I said, walking along the curve of the end chamber. “Kadmin’s not following his instructions. He tried to kill me this morning.”

  Kawahara made a gesture of irritation. “I know that. That’s why you’ve been brought here.”

  “Did you spring him?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He was going to roll over on you?”

  “He told Keith Rutherford that he felt he was not deployed to his best advantage in holding. That it would be hard to honor his contract with me in such a position.”

  “Subtle.”

  “Wasn’
t it. I never can resist sophisticated negotiation. I feel he earned the reinvestment.”

  “So you beaconed in on me, hooked him out, and beamed him over to Carnage for resleeving, right?” I felt in my pockets and found Ortega’s cigarettes. In the grim twilight of the basilica, the familiar pack was like a postcard from another place. “No wonder the Panama Rose didn’t have his second fighter decanted when we got there. He’d probably only just finished sleeving Kadmin. That motherfucker walked out of there in a Right Hand of God Martyr.”

  “About the same time you were coming aboard,” Kawahara agreed. “In fact, I understand he was posing as a menial and you walked right past him. I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.”

  “Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal hemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.” I touched my cigarette to the ignition patch and drew it to life, remembering. The man knelt in the ring. I played it back slowly. On the deck of the fightdrome ship, peering down at the design being painted onto the killing floor. The upturned face as we passed. Yes, he’d even smiled. I grimaced at the memory.

  “You’re being a lot less courteous than befits a man in your situation.” I thought that underneath the cool I could detect a ragged edge in her voice. Despite her much vaunted self-control, Reileen Kawahara wasn’t much better at coping with disrespect than Bancroft, General MacIntyre, or any other creature of power I’d had dealings with. “Your life is in danger, and I am in a position to safeguard it.”

  “My life’s been in danger before,” I told her. “Usually as a result of some piece of shit like you making large-scale decisions about how reality ought to be run. You’ve already let Kadmin get too close for my comfort. In fact, he probably used your fucking virtual locater to do it.”

  “I sent him,” Kawahara gritted, “to collect you. Again, he disobeyed me.”

  “Didn’t he just.” I rubbed reflexively at the bruise on my shoulder. “So why should I believe you can do any better next time?”

  “Because you know I can.” Kawahara came across the center of the chamber, ducking her head to avoid the leathery gray clone sacs, and intercepting my path around the perimeter. Her face was taut with anger. “I am one of the seven most powerful human beings in this solar system. I have access to powers that the U.N. field commander general would kill for.”

  “This architecture’s going to your head, Reileen. You wouldn’t even have found me if you hadn’t been keeping tabs on Sullivan. How the fuck are you going to find Kadmin?”

  “Kovacs, Kovacs.” There was a definite trembling in her laugh, as if she was fighting off an urge to put her thumbs through my eye sockets. “Do you have any idea what happens on the streets of any given city on Earth if I put out a search on someone? Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snuff you out here and now?”

  I drew deliberately on the cigarette and plumed the smoke out at her. “As your faithful retainer Trepp said, not ten minutes ago, why bring me here just to snuff me out? You want something from me. Now what is it?”

  She breathed in through her nose, hard. A measure of calm seeped onto her face, and she stepped back a couple of paces, turned away from the confrontation.

  “You’re right, Kovacs. I want you alive. If you disappear now, Bancroft’s going to get the wrong message.”

  “Or the right message.” I scuffed absently at engraved lettering on the stone beneath my feet. “Did you torch him?”

  “No.” Kawahara looked almost amused. “He killed himself.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to me, Kovacs. What I want from you is an end to the investigation. A tidy end.”

  “And how do you suggest I achieve that?”

  “I don’t care. Make something up. You’re an Envoy, after all. Convince him. Tell him you think the police verdict was correct. Produce a culprit, if you must.” A thin smile. “I do not include myself in that category.”

  “If you didn’t kill him, if he torched his own head off, why should you care what happens? What’s your interest in this?”

  “That isn’t under discussion here.”

  I nodded slowly. “And what do I get in return for this tidy ending?”

  “Apart from the hundred thousand dollars?” Kawahara tilted her head quizzically. “Well, I understand you’ve been made a very generous recreational offer by other parties. And for my part, I will keep Kadmin off your back by whatever means necessary.”

  I looked down at the lettering beneath my feet and thought it through, link by link.

  “Francisco Franco,” Kawahara said, mistaking the direction of my gaze for focused interest. “Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.”

  “Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.”

  Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”

  I glanced around, ostensibly casual, scanning for robot security systems. “Yeah, looks like it. So let me get this straight. You want me to sell Bancroft a parabolic full of shit, in return for which you’ll call off Kadmin, who you set on me in the first place. That’s the deal?”

  “That, as you put it, is the deal.”

  I took one last lungful of smoke, savored it, and exhaled.

  “You can go fuck yourself, Kawahara.” I dropped my cigarette on the engraved stonework and ground it out with my heel. “I’ll take my chances with Kadmin, and let Bancroft know you probably had him killed. So. Change your mind about letting me live now?”

  My hands hung open at my sides, twitching to be filled with the rough woven bulk of handgun butts. I was going to put three Nemex shells through Kawahara’s throat, at stack height, then put the gun in my mouth and blow my own stack apart. Kawahara almost certainly had remote storage anyway, but fuck it, you’ve got to make a stand somewhere. And a man can stave off his own death wish for only so long.

  It could have been worse. It could have been Innenin.

  Kawahara shook her head regretfully. She was smiling. “Always the same, Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learned anything since New Beijing?”

  “There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

  “Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?” She was still smiling, poised like a total body theater gymnast about to launch into her aria. For a moment I suffered the almost hallucinatory conviction that she was going to break into a little dance, choreographed to a junk rhythm beat from speakers hidden in the dome above us.

  “Takeshi, where did you get this belief that everything can be resolved with such brute simplicity? Surely not from the Envoys? Was it the Newpest gangs? The thrashings your father gave you as a child? Did you really think I would allow you to force my hand? Did you really think I would have come to the table this empty-handed? Think about it. You know me. Did you really believe it would be this easy?”

  The neurachem settled within me. I bit it back, hung from the moment like a parachutist braced in the jump hatch.

  “All right,” I said evenly. “Impress me.”

  “Gladly.” Kawahara reached into the breast pocket of her liquid black blouse. She produced a tiny holofile and flicked it into active with a thumbnail. As the images evolved in the air above the unit, she passed it to me. “A lot of the detail is legalistic, but you will, of course, recognize the salient points.”

  I took the little sphere of light as if it were a poisonous flower. The name hit me at once, leaping out of the print—

  . . . SARAH SACHILOWSKA . . .

  —and then the contract terminology, like a building coming down on me in slow motion.

  . . . RELEASED INTO PRIVATE STORAGE . . .

  . . . PROVISION FOR VIRTUAL CUSTODY . . .

  . . . UNLIMITED PERIOD . . .

  . . . SUBJECT TO REVIEW AT U.N. DIS
CRETION . . .

  . . . UNDER VESTED AUTHORITY OF THE BAY CITY JUSTICE FACILITY . . .

  The knowledge coursed sickly through me. I should have killed Sullivan when I had the chance.

  “Ten days.” Kawahara was watching my reactions closely. “That’s how long you have to convince Bancroft the investigation is over, and to walk away. After that, Sachilowska goes into virtual at one of my clinics. There’s a whole new generation of virtual interrogation software out there, and I will personally see to it that she pioneers the lot.”

  The holofile hit the marble floor with a brittle crack. I lurched at Kawahara, lips peeling back from my teeth. There was a low growling coming up through my throat that had nothing to do with any combat training I had ever undergone, and the Nemex was forgotten as my hands crooked into talons. I knew what her blood was going to taste like.

  The cold barrel of a gun touched down on my neck before I got halfway.

  “I’d advise against that,” Trepp said in my ear.

  Kawahara came and stood closer to me. “Bancroft isn’t the only one who can buy troublesome criminals off colonial stacks. The Kanagawa Justice Facility was overjoyed when I came to them two days later with a bid for Sachilowska. The way they see it, if you’re D.H.F.’d offworld, the chances of you ever having enough money to buy a needlecast back again are pretty slim. And of course, they get paid for the privilege of waving you good-bye. It must seem too good to be true. I imagine they’re hoping it’s the start of a trend.” She fingered the lapel of my jacket thoughtfully. “And in fact, the way the virtuals market is at the moment, it might be a trend worth starting.”