Altered Carbon

  I sat upright and started picking the ’trodes off my body. “You assumed right. You sure everyone else is under?”

  “Lieutenant Ortega and her colleagues were installed in the virtuality approximately two minutes ago. Irene Elliott has been established there since earlier this afternoon. She asked not to be disturbed.”

  “What ratio are you running at the moment?”

  “Eleven point one five. Irene Elliott requested it.”

  I nodded to myself as I climbed out of the rack. Eleven point one five was a standard working ratio for datarats. It was also the title of a particularly bloody but otherwise unmemorable Micky Nozawa experia flick. The only clear detail I could recall was that, unexpectedly, Micky’s character got killed at the end. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Between the dimly seen heave and swell of the sea and the lights of the cabin, there was a lemon grove. I went along a dirt track between the trees, and the citrus fragrance felt cleansing. From the long grass on either side, cicadas whirred reassuringly. In a velvet sky above were stars like fixed gems, and behind the cabin the land rose into gentle hills and rocky outcroppings. The vague white forms of sheep moved in the darkness on the slopes, and from somewhere I heard a dog bark. The lights of a fishing village glimmered off to one side, less bright than the stars.

  There were hurricane lamps slung from the upper rail of the cabin’s front porch, but no one was seated at the wooden tables there. The front wall bore a riotous abstract mural curling around and out from the luminous lettering of a sign that read PENSION FLOWER OF ’68. Wind chimes dangled along the railing, winking and turning in the faint breeze that blew in from the sea. They made a variety of gentle sounds from glassy belling to hollow wooden percussion.

  On the unkempt sloping lawn in front of the porch someone had set out an incongruous collection of sofas and armchairs in a rough circle, so it looked as if the cabin had been lifted bodily off its furnished interior and set down again further up the slope. From the gathered seats came the soft sound of voices and the red embers of lit cigarettes. I reached for my own supply, realized I had neither the pack nor the need anymore, and grimaced wryly to myself in the dark.

  Bautista’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation.

  “Kovacs? That you?”

  “Who else is it going to be?” I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. “This is a goddamn virtuality.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats. “Welcome to the party.”

  There were five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair. On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along the full length of a second sofa.

  The fifth figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a multicolored bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in front of him.

  “The Hendrix, right?”

  “That’s correct.” There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto the darkened lawn. “Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original designers. If you strip down the client mirroring systems, this is what you get.”

  “Good.” I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. “You happy with the working environment?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  “How long’ve you been here?”

  “Me?” She shrugged. “A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours ago.”

  “Two and a half,” Ortega said sourly. “What kept you?”

  “Neurachem glitch.” I nodded at the Hendrix figure. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “That’s exactly what he told us.” Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop. “I’d just like to know what it means.”

  I made a helpless gesture. “So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail the manufacturers.” I turned back to Irene Elliott. “I take it you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the dip.”

  “You take it right.” Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure. “Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to need every scrap of that to pull it off.”

  “You cased the run yet?”

  Elliott nodded glumly. “It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska was D.H.F.’d off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing line.”

  “I’m impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?”

  “A while.” Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction. “I had some help.”

  “And the second interesting thing?”

  “Yeah. Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t tell you much more than that without dipping it, and I figured you wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re after.”

  I remembered the spiderlike automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb sacs, the somber stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those contemptuous hooded smiles.

  “Well, then.” I looked around at the assembled team. “Let’s get this gig off the ground.”

  CHAPTEr FOrTY

  It was Sharya, all over again.

  We dusted off from the tower of the Hendrix an hour after dark and swung away into the traffic-speckled night. Ortega had pulled the same Lock-Mit transport I’d ridden out to Suntouch House, but when I looked around the dimly lit interior of the ship’s belly, it was the Envoy Command attack on Zihicce that I remembered. The scene was the same, Davidson playing the role of datacom officer, face washed pale blue by the light from his screen, Ortega as medic, unpacking the dermals and charging kit from a sealwrap bag. Up ahead in the hatchway to the cockpit, Bautista stood and looked worried, while another mohican I didn’t know did the flying. Something must have shown on my face, because Ortega leaned in abruptly to study my face.

  “Problem?”

  I shook my head. “Just a little nostalgia.”

  “Well, I just hope you got these measures right.” She braced herself against the hull. In her hand, the first dermal looked like a petal torn from some iridescent green plant. I grinned up at her and rolled my head to one side to expose my jugular.

  “This is the fourteen percent,” she said, and applied the cool green petal to my neck. I felt the fractional grip, like gentle sandpaper, as it took, and then a long cold finger leapt down past my collarbone and deep into my chest.

  “Smooth.”

  “Fucking ought to be. You know how much that stuff would go for on the street?”

  “The perks of law enforcement, huh?”

  Bautista turned around. “That ain’t funny, Kovacs.”

  “Leave him alone, Rod,” Ortega said lazily. “Man’s entitled to a bad joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.”

  I raised one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the dermal gingerly and stood back.

  “Three minutes till the next,” she said. “Right?”

  I nodded complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.

  At first it was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there, so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with effort.

  Then the control stimulants kicked in, and in seconds my head cleared fr
om foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just . . .

  I felt an inane grin eating its way across my features.

  “Whoooh, Kristin, this is . . . good stuff. This is better . . . than Sharya.”

  “Glad you like it.” Ortega glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes. You up to it?”

  “I’m up to—” I pursed my lips and blew through them. “—anything. Anything at all.”

  Ortega tipped her head back toward Bautista, who could presumably see the instrumentation in the cockpit. “Rod. How long have we got?”

  “Be there in less than forty minutes.”

  “Better get him the suit.”

  While Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.

  “I want you to wear this,” she said. “Little bit of Organic Damage insurance for you.”

  “A needle?” I shook my head with what felt like machined precision. “Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.”

  “It’s a tracer filament,” she said patiently. “And you’re not leaving this ship without it.”

  I looked at the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues, usually in under forty-eight hours.

  I glanced across at Davidson.

  “What’s the range?”

  “Hundred klicks.” The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow from his screen. “Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate unless we call you. Quite safe.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Where do you want to put it?”

  Ortega stood up, needle in hand. “Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack, case they chop your head off.”

  “Charming.” I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.

  “You’re done. Is he on-screen?”

  Davidson punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me, Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch and reached for the second dermal.

  “Thirty-seven percent,” she said. “Ready for the Big Chill?”

  It was like being submerged in diamonds.

  By the time we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armor, and when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.

  It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

  The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stunner. I dialed the muzzle aperture to wide. At five meters, it would take down a roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in complete silence. Sarah Sachilowska says Hi.

  The dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia Deme.

  The Tebbit knife on my forearm in its neuralspring sheath beneath the stealth suit like a final word.

  I reached for the cold feeling that had filled me up outside Jerry’s Closed Quarters and, in the crystalline depths of the Reaper, did not need it.

  Mission time.

  “Target visual,” the pilot called. “You want to come up and have a look at this baby?”

  I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged, and the two of us went forward. Ortega seated herself beside the mohican and slipped on the copilot’s headset. I contented myself with standing next to Bautista in the access hatch. The view was just as good from there.

  Most of the Lock-Mit’s cockpit was transparent alloy with instrumentation projected up onto it, permitting the pilot an uninterrupted view of the surrounding airspace; I remembered the feeling from Sharya, like riding a slightly concave tray, a tongue of steel or maybe a magic carpet, across the cloudscape below. A feeling that had been at once dizzying and godlike. I glanced at the mohican’s profile and wondered if he was as detached from that feeling as I was under the influence of the Reaper.

  There were no clouds tonight. Head in the Clouds hung off to the left like a mountain village seen from afar. A cluster of tiny blue lights singing gently of homecoming and warmth in the icy black immensity. Kawahara seemed to have chosen the edge of the world for the whorehouse.

  As we banked toward the lights, a squiggle of electronic sound filled the cockpit and the projected instrumentation dimmed briefly.

  “That’s it, we’re acquired,” Ortega said sharply. “Here we go. I want a flyby under the belly. Let them get a good look.”

  The mohican said nothing, but the nose of the transport dipped. Ortega reached up to an instrument panel projected onto the transparency above her head and touched a button. A hard, male voice crashed into the cabin.

  “. . . that you are in restricted airspace. We are under license to destroy intruding aircraft. Identify yourself immediately.”

  “This is the Bay City police department,” Ortega said laconically. “Look out your window and you’ll see the stripes. We’re up here on official police business, pal, so if you so much as twitch a launcher in this direction, I’ll have you blown out of the sky.”

  There was a hissing silence. Ortega turned to look at me and grinned. Ahead of us, Head in the Clouds swelled like the target in a missile scope and then lifted abruptly over our heads as the pilot dipped us below the bulk of its hull and banked about. I saw lights gathered like icy fruit on gantries and the undersides of landing pads, the distended belly of the vessel curving up on either side, and then we were past.

  “State the nature of your business,” the voice snapped nastily.

  Ortega peered out of the side of the cockpit as if looking for the speaker in amongst the airship’s superstructure. Her voice grew chilly. “Sonny, I’ve already told you the nature of our business. Now get me a landing pad.”

  More silence. We circled the airship five kilometers out. I started to pull on the gloves of the stealth suit.

  “Lieutenant Ortega.” It was Kawahara’s voice this time, but in the depths of the betathanatine, even hatred seemed detached and I had to remind myself to feel it. Most of me was assessing the rapidity with which they had voiceprinted Ortega. “This is a little unexpected. Do you have some kind of warrant? I believe our licenses are in order.”

  Ortega raised an eyebrow at me. The voiceprinting had impressed her, too. She cleared her throat. “This is not a licensing matter. We are looking for a fugitive. If you’re going to start insisting on warrants, I might have to assume you’ve got a guilty conscience.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Lieutenant,” Kawahara said coldly. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

  “Reileen Kawahara, I imagine.” In the deathly silence that followed, Ortega made a jubilant punching gesture at the ceiling and turned to grin at me. The barb had gone home. I felt the faintest ripple of amusement catch at the corners of my mouth.

  “Perhaps you’d better tell me the name of this fugitive, Lieutenant.” Kawahara’s voice had gone as smooth as the expression on an untenanted synthetic sl
eeve.

  “His name is Takeshi Kovacs,” Ortega said, with another grin at me. “But he’s currently sleeved in the body of an ex–police officer. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning your relationship with this man.”

  There was another long pause, and I knew the lure was going to work. I’d crafted its multiple layers with all the care of the finest Envoy deceit. Kawahara almost certainly knew of the relationship between Ortega and Ryker, could probably guess Ortega’s entanglement with the new tenant of her lover’s sleeve. She would buy Ortega’s anxiety at my disappearance. She would buy Ortega’s unsanctioned approach to Head in the Clouds. Given an assumed communication between Kawahara and Miriam Bancroft, she would believe she knew where I was and she would be confident that she had the upper hand over Ortega.

  But more important than all of this, she would want to know how the Bay City police knew she was aboard Head in the Clouds. And since it was likely that they had, either directly or indirectly, gleaned the fact from Takeshi Kovacs, she would want to know how he knew. She would want to know how much he knew, and how much he had told the police.

  She would want to talk to Ortega.

  I fastened the wrist seals of the stealth suit and waited. We completed our third circuit of Head in the Clouds.

  “You’d better come aboard,” Kawahara said finally. “Starboard landing beacon. Follow it in; they’ll give you a code.”

  The Lock-Mit was equipped with a rear dispatch tube, a smaller, civilian variant of the drop launcher that on military models was intended for smart bombs or surveillance drones. The tube was accessed through the floor of the main cabin, and with a certain amount of contortion, I fitted inside complete with stealth suit, grav harness, and assorted weaponry. We’d practiced this three or four times on the ground, but now with the transport swinging in toward Head in the Clouds, it suddenly seemed a long and complicated process. Finally, I got the last of the grav harness inside, and Ortega rapped once on the suit’s helmet before she slammed the hatch down and buried me in darkness.