Altered Carbon

  Braced in the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a long-barreled blaster. Carnage was in flames from the waist up, beating at himself with arms that had themselves grown wings of fire. The shrieking he made was more the sound of fury than of pain. Pernilla Grip lay dead at his feet, chest scorched through. As I watched, Carnage pitched forward over her like a figure made of melting wax, and his shrieks modulated down through groans to a weird electronic bubbling and then to nothing.

  “Kovacs?”

  Trepp’s frag gun had fallen silent, and against the ensuing background of groaning and cries from the injured, Bautista’s raised voice was unnaturally loud. He detoured around the burning synthetic and climbed up into the ring. His face was streaked with blood.

  “You okay, Kovacs?”

  I chuckled weakly, then clutched abruptly at the stabbing pain in my side.

  “Great, just great. How’s Ortega?”

  “She’s okay. Got her dosed up on Lethinol for the shock. Sorry we got here so late.” He gestured up at Trepp. “Took your friend there a while to get through to me at Fell Street. She refused to go through official channels. Said it wouldn’t scan right. The mess we made coming in here, she ain’t far wrong.”

  I glanced around at the manifest organic damage.

  “Yeah. That going to be a problem?”

  Bautista barked a laugh. “Are you ragging me? Entry without a warrant. Organic damage to unarmed suspects. What the fuck do you think?”

  “Sorry about that.” I started to move off the killing floor. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  “Hey.” Bautista caught my arm. “They took off a Bay City cop. No one does that around here. Someone should have told Kadmin before he made the fucking mistake.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Ortega or me in my Ryker sleeve, so I said nothing. Instead, I tipped my head back gingerly, testing for damage, and looked up at Trepp. She was reloading the frag gun.

  “Hoy, are you going to stay up there all night?”

  “Be right down.”

  She jacked the last shell into the frag gun, then executed a neat somersault over the gantry rail and fell outward. About a meter into the fall, the grav harness on her back spread its wings and she fetched up hanging over us at head height with the gun slung across her shoulder. In her long black coat, she looked like an off-duty dark angel.

  Adjusting a dial on the harness, she drifted closer to the floor and finally touched down next to Kadmin. I limped up to join her. We both looked at the ripped-open corpse in silence for a moment.

  “Thanks,” I said softly.

  “Forget it. All part of the service. Sorry I had to bring in these guys, but I needed the backup, and fast. You know what they say about the Sia around here. Biggest fucking gang on the block, right?” She nodded at Kadmin. “You going to leave him like that?”

  I stared at the Right Hand of God Martyr with his face shocked into abrupt death, and tried to see the Patchwork Man inside him.

  “No,” I said, and turned the corpse over with my foot so that the nape of the neck was exposed. “Bautista, you want to lend me that firecracker?”

  Wordlessly, the cop handed me his blaster. I set the muzzle against the base of the Patchwork Man’s skull, rested it there, and waited to feel something.

  “Anyone want to say anything?” Trepp cracked, deadpan.

  Bautista turned away. “Just do it.”

  If my father had any comments, he kept them to himself. The only voices were the cries of the injured spectators, and those I ignored.

  Feeling nothing, I pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTEr THIrTY–SEVEN

  I was still feeling nothing an hour later when Ortega came and found me in the sleeving hall, seated on one of the automated forklifts and staring up into the green glow from the empty decanting chambers. The air lock made a smooth thump and then a sustained humming sound as it opened, but I didn’t react. Even when I recognized her footfalls and a short curse as she picked her way between the coiled cabling on the floor, I didn’t look around. Like the machine I was seated on, I was powered down.

  “How you feeling?”

  I looked down to where she stood beside the forklift. “Like I look, probably.”

  “Well, you look like shit.” She reached up to where I was seated and grasped a convenient grill cover. “You mind if I join you?”

  “Go ahead. Want a hand up?”

  “Nope.” Ortega strained to lift herself by her arms, turned gray with the effort, and hung there with a lopsided grin. “Possibly.”

  I lent her the least bruised of my arms, and she came aboard the forklift with a grunt. She squatted awkwardly for a moment, then seated herself next to me and rubbed at her shoulders.

  “Christ, it’s cold in here. How long have you been sitting on this thing?”

  “ ’Bout an hour.”

  She looked up at the empty tanks. “Seen anything interesting?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Oh.” She paused again. “You know, this fucking Lethinol is worse than a stungun. At least when you’ve been stunned, you know you’re damaged. Lethinol tells you that, whatever you’ve been through, everything’s just fine and just go ahead and relax. And then you fall ass over tit on the first five-centimeter cable you try to step over.”

  “I think you’re supposed to be lying down,” I said mildly.

  “Yeah, well, probably so are you. You’re going to have some nice facial bruises by tomorrow. Mercer give you a shot for the pain?”

  “Didn’t need it.”

  “Oh, hard man. I thought we agreed you were going to look after that sleeve.”

  I smiled reflexively. “You should see the other guy.”

  “I did see the other guy. Ripped him apart with your bare hands, huh?”

  I kept the smile. “Where’s Trepp?”

  “Your wirehead friend? She’s gone. Said something to Bautista about a conflict of interest, and disappeared into the night. Bautista’s tearing his hair out, trying to think of a way to cover this mess. Want to come and talk to him?”

  “All right.” I shifted unwillingly. There was something hypnotic about the green light from the decanting tanks, and beneath my numbness, ideas were beginning to circle restlessly, snapping at each other like bottlebacks in a feeding spiral. The death of Kadmin, far from relieving me, had only touched off a slow-burning fuse of destructive urges in the pit of my stomach. Someone was going to pay for all this.

  Personal.

  But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anemone, cut up on a surgical platter, about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be resleeved, Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months, Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged white body; it was about Virginia Vidaura walking disdainfully into storage with her head held high and a last cigarette polluting lungs she was about to lose, no doubt to some other corporate vampire. It was about Jimmy de Soto, clawing his own eye out in the mud and fire at Innenin, and the millions like him throughout the Protectorate, painfully gathered assemblages of individual human potential, pissed away into the dung heap of history. For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.

  A little dizzily, I climbed down from the forklift and helped Ortega down after me. It hurt my arms to take her weight, but nowhere near as much as the sudden, freezing knowledge that these were our last hours together. I didn’t know where the realization came from, but it came with the solid settling sensation in the bedrock of my mind that I had long ago learned to trust more than rational thought. We left the resleeving chamber hand in hand, neither of us really noticing the fact until we came face-to-face with Bautista in the corridor outside and pulled instinctively apart again.

  “Been looking for you, Kovacs.” If Bautista had any
feelings about the hand-holding, nothing showed on his face. “Your mercenary friend skipped and left us to do the cleaning up.”

  “Yeah, Kristi—” I stopped and nodded sideways at Ortega. “I’ve been told. Did she take the frag gun?”

  Bautista nodded.

  “So you’ve got a perfect story. Someone called in gunfire from the Panama Rose, you came out to look and found the audience massacred, Kadmin and Carnage dead, me and Ortega halfway there. Must have been someone Carnage upset, working off a grudge.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ortega shake her head.

  “Ain’t going to scan,” Bautista said. “All calls into Fell Street get recorded. Same goes for the phones in the cruisers.”

  I shrugged, feeling the Envoy waking within me. “So what? You, or Ortega, you’ve got snitches out here in Richmond. People whose names you can’t disclose. Call came in on a personal phone, which just happened to get smashed when you had to shoot your way past the remains of Carnage’s security guards. No trace. And nothing on the monitors because the mysterious someone, whoever did all the shooting, wiped the whole automated security system clean. That can be arranged, I take it.”

  Bautista looked dubious. “I suppose. We’d need a datarat to do it. Davidson’s good with a deck, but he ain’t that good.”

  “I can get you a datarat. Anything else?”

  “Some of the audience are still alive. Not in any fit state to do anything, but they’re still breathing.”

  “Forget them. If they saw anything, it was Trepp. Probably not even that, clearly. Whole thing was over in a couple of seconds. The only thing we’ve got to decide is when to call the meatwagons.”

  “Sometime soon,” Ortega said. “Or it’s going to look suspicious.”

  Bautista snorted. “This whole fucking thing looks suspicious. Anyone at Fell Street’s going to know what went down here tonight.”

  “Do this sort of thing a lot, do you?”

  “That ain’t funny, Kovacs. Carnage went over the line; he knew what he was calling down.”

  “Carnage,” Ortega muttered. “That motherfucker’s got himself stored somewhere. As soon as he gets resleeved, he’s going to be screaming for an investigation.”

  “Maybe not,” Bautista said. “How long ago you reckon he was copied into that synth?”

  Ortega shrugged. “Who knows? He was wearing it last week. At least that long, unless he had the store copy updated. And that’s fucking expensive.”

  “If I were someone like Carnage,” I said thoughtfully, “I’d get myself updated whenever something major went down. No matter what it cost. I wouldn’t want to wake up not knowing what the fuck I’d been doing the week before I got torched.”

  “That depends on what you were doing,” Bautista pointed out. “If it was some seriously illegal shit, you might prefer to wake up not knowing about it. That way, you polygraph your way right out of police interrogation with a smile.”

  “Better than that. You wouldn’t even . . .”

  I trailed off, thinking about it. Bautista made an impatient gesture.

  “Whatever. If Carnage wakes up not knowing, he might make some private inquiries, but he ain’t going to be in too much of a hurry to let the police department in on it. And if he wakes up knowing—” He spread his hands. “—he’ll make less noise than a Catholic orgasm. I think we’re in the clear here.”

  “Get the ambulances, then. And maybe call Murawa in to . . .” But Ortega’s voice was fading out, as the last part of the puzzle sank snugly into its resting place. The conversation between the two cops grew as remote as star static over a suit comlink. I gazed at a tiny dent on the metal wall beside me, hammering at the idea with every logic test I could muster.

  Bautista gave me a curious glance, then left to call the ambulances. As he disappeared, Ortega touched me lightly on the arm.

  “Hey, Kovacs. You okay?”

  I blinked.

  “Kovacs?”

  I put out a hand and touched the wall, as if to assure myself of its solidity. Compared to the certainty of concept I was experiencing, my surroundings seemed suddenly intangible.

  “Kristin,” I said slowly. “I have to get aboard Head in the Clouds. I know what they did to Bancroft. I can bring Kawahara down, and get Resolution 653 pushed through. And I can spring Ryker.”

  Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, we’ve been through—”

  “No.” The savagery in my voice was so abrupt it shocked even me. I could feel the bruising in Ryker’s face hurt as his features tensed. “This isn’t speculation. This isn’t a cast in the dark. This is fact. And I am going aboard Head in the Clouds. With or without your help, but I’m going.”

  “Kovacs.” Ortega shook her head. “Look at yourself. You’re a mess. Right now you couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp, and you’re talking about covert assault on one of the West Coast Houses. You think you’re going to crash Kawahara’s security with broken ribs and that face? Forget it.”

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

  “Kovacs, it isn’t going to be. I sat on the Hendrix tapes long enough for you to pull that shit with Bancroft, but that’s as far as it goes. The game’s over; your friend Sarah gets to go home, and so do you. But that’s it. I’m not interested in grudge matches.”

  “Do you really want Ryker back?” I asked softly.

  For a moment I thought she was going to hit me. Her nostrils flared white and her right shoulder actually dropped for the punch. I never knew whether it was the stungun hangover or just self-control that stopped her.

  “I ought to deck you for that, Kovacs,” she said evenly.

  I raised my hands. “Go ahead, right now I couldn’t take on an Oakland pimp. Remember?”

  Ortega made a disgusted sound in her throat and started to turn away. I put out my hand and touched her.

  “Kristin—” I hesitated. “I’m sorry. That was a bitchy crack, about Ryker. Will you at least hear me through, once?”

  She came back to me, mouth clamped tight over whatever she was feeling, head down. She swallowed.

  “I don’t. There’s been too much.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t want you hurt any more, Kovacs. I don’t want any more damage, that’s all.”

  “Damage to Ryker’s sleeve, you mean?”

  She looked at me.

  “No,” she said quietly. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean what I say.”

  Then she was pressed up against me, there in that grim metal corridor, arms wrapped hard around me and face buried in my chest, all without apparent transition. I did some swallowing of my own and held her tightly while the last of what time we had trickled away like grains of sand through my fingers. And at that moment I would have given almost anything not to have had a plan for her to hear, not to have had any way to dissolve what was growing between us, and not to have hated Reileen Kawahara quite so much.

  I would have given almost anything.

  Two A.M.

  I called Irene Elliott at the JacSol apartment and got her out of bed. I told her we had a problem we’d pay heavily to unkink. She nodded sleepily. Bautista went to get her in an unmarked cruiser.

  By the time she arrived, the Panama Rose was lit as if for a deck party. Vertical searchlights along her sides made it look as if she was being lowered from the night sky on ropes of luminescence. Illuminum-cable incident barriers crisscrossed the superstructure and the dock moorings. The roof of the cargo cell where the humiliation bout had gone down was cranked back to allow the ambulances direct access, and the blast of crime-scene lighting from within rose into the night like the glow from a foundry. Police cruisers held the sky and parked across the dock flashing red and blue.

  I met her at the gangway.

  “I want my body back,” she shouted over the whine and roar of airborne engines. The searchlights frosted her sleeve’s black hair almost back to blonde.

  “I can’t swing that for you right now,” I yelled back. “But it’s in the pipeline.
First, you’ve got to do this. Earn some credit. Now let’s get you out of sight before fucking Sandy Kim spots you.”

  Local law were keeping the press copters at bay. Ortega, still sick and shaking, wrapped herself in a police greatcoat and kept the local law out with the same glitter-eyed intensity that kept her upright and conscious. Organic Damage Division, shouting, pulling rank, bullying, and bluffing, held the fort while Elliott went to work faking in the monitor footage they needed. They were indeed, as Trepp had recognized, the biggest gang on the block.

  “I’m checking out of the apartment tomorrow,” Elliott told me as she worked. “You won’t be able to reach me there.”

  She was silent for a couple of moments, whistling through her teeth at odd moments as she keyed in the images she had constructed. Then she cast a glance at me over her shoulder.

  “You say I’m earning juice from these guys, doing this. They’re going to owe me?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.”

  “Then I’ll contact them. Get me the officer in charge, I’ll talk to whoever that is. And don’t try to call me at Ember. I won’t be there, either.”

  I said nothing, just looked at her. She turned back to her work.

  “I need some time alone,” she muttered.

  Just the words sounded like a luxury to me.

  CHAPTEr THIrTY–EIGHT

  I watched him pour a drink from the bottle of fifteen-year-old malt, take it to the phone, and seat himself carefully. The broken ribs had been welded back together in one of the ambulances, but the whole of that side was still one huge ache with occasional, flinty stabs of agony. He sipped at the whiskey, gathered himself visibly, and punched out the call.

  “Bancroft residence. With whom do you wish to speak?” It was the severely suited woman who had answered last time I called Suntouch House. The same suit, the same hair, even the same makeup. Maybe she was a phone construct.

  “Miriam Bancroft,” he said.

  Once again, it was the sensation of being a passive observer, the same sensation of disconnection that I had felt that night in front of the mirror while Ryker’s sleeve put on its weapons. The frags. Only this time it was much worse.