Altered Carbon

  Splat!

  The stunbolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armor beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open, and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.

  “What kept you?” Kawahara’s voice asked from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.

  “Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.” Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. “Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Kovacs,” Kawahara said dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralyzed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of meters with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.

  I wasn’t going under.

  “Kovacs?” Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. “I thought—”

  “Yes, so did I.” The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colors swirling over her features. “He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.”

  My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.

  “Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,” Trepp said, and put out a hand to touch my face.

  “Yeah?” Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. “Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to— Fuck!”

  She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.

  “He was telling the truth.”

  “About what?”

  Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. “Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?”

  “He’s cold.”

  “Of course he’s fucking cold.” The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. “How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s stiffed to the eyes.”

  Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “He’s going into virtual,” Kawahara said grimly. “Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.”

  I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.

  “You sure he isn’t transmitting?”

  “Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?”

  A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.

  “I don’t have a knife.” I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.

  “No problem.” Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. “I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.”

  Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move toward the desk.

  The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.

  Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. “They coming?”

  Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. “Yeah,” she said loudly. “Be here in a couple of minutes.”

  I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with it a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were molded in lead, and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.

  My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.

  “Right, then.” I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration, and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimeter apart.

  I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neuralspring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.

  I slashed sideways.

  I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off, and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone, and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone, and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again, and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm, and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C -381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.

  Kawahara was getting up.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for?” she inquired acidly of Trepp. “Shoot this piece of shit, will you?”

  Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap, and leveled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.

  “You traitorous fucking cunt,” Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. “You knew he was coming around, didn’t you. You’re fucking dead, bitch.”

  I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid
to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time, my shoulder smashed into Kawahara, and we stumbled back toward the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me, but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm, and we both went down on the angled glass.

  The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung around at me, and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed, and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery, and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.

  “That ought to hold you, sport,” she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull gray flask of the water carrier. “You just lie there for a moment.”

  My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stunbolt. I tried to lift one arm, and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.

  “Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” she said, and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. “You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”

  She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?”

  Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move my hand almost its own width across the floor toward my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.

  “Security?”

  “Ms. Kawahara.” It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”

  “I know what there’s been,” Kawahara said tiredly. “I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?”

  “Ms. Kawahara?”

  “I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?”

  There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body, and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.

  “Ms. Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.”

  “Oh.” Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “Okay, well, get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?

  Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you grinning at, Kovacs?”

  I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage, and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.

  “You,” she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.”

  She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass, and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.

  “Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material—that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little-people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.”

  “I don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”

  Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”

  “When they ask how I died,” I said. “Tell them: Still Angry.”

  “Quell.” Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.”

  She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.

  “Have an aperitif.”

  The jaws of the tool plunged into the underside of my eye, and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.

  She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista, and who knew how many others.

  “That’s fucking enough,” I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment, driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.

  The muffled crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.

  Dialed to the short end of its fuse option, the termite microgrenade was designed to detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver 90 percent of its charge to the contact face. The remaining 10 percent still wrecked my hand, tearing the flesh from the Khumalo marrow-alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons, ripping the polybond ligamenting apart, and punching a coin-sized hole in my palm.

  On the downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me, and then I was sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she realized what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away, almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken through what was left of the betathanatine.

  Tell them: Still Angry.

  Then the portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind and sky.

  And we fell . . .

  My left arm was paralyzed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull. I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing upward away from us, and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face t
hat had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiraling away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall was as seductive as sleep.

  With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.

  My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watching his screen.

  CHAPTEr FOrTY–TWO

  The address was, ironically enough, down in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.

  The apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and weed-grown concrete landing area in the center. Amongst the array of sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the microcopter immediately. Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.

  The door to number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with blank hostility.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.”

  “Yeah, well, she ain’t here.”

  I sighed and rubbed at the scar under my eye. “I think that’s probably not true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone to see her about the Bancroft sleeve?”

  “You the Sia?”

  “No, I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for her.”

  The boy stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word. From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to smoke.