Altered Carbon (20 page)

I took the
weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol,
slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it
hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight.
Clive waited beside me patiently.

“All
right.” I handed it back. “And something subtle?”

“Philips
squeeze gun.” Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the
confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the
Nemex. “A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator.
Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty metres. No recoil, and
you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can
be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.”

“Batteries?”

“Specs
are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing
muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in
the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.”

“Do
you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?”

“Out
the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and
that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees
it.”

“All
right, fine.” Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow
process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through
your skull. No telling when you might get re-sleeved, if at all. But by now the
ache in my head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Maybe target
practice wasn’t the thing right at that moment. I didn’t bother
asking the price either. It wasn’t my money I was spending.
“Ammunition?”

“Comes
in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a
promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?”

“Not
really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.”

“Ten
clips, each?” There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten
clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there
were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more
than actually hitting anything. “And you wanted a blade, right?”

“That’s
right.”

“Sheila!”
Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with
crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in
her lap and the matte grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked round
when she heard her name, remembered the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Clive
waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the
shift back to reality as she got up.

“Sheila,
this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?”

“Sure.”
The woman reached out a lanky arm. “Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What
kind of steel you looking for?”

I matched
her grip. “Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but
it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.”

“All
right,” she said amiably. “Want to come with me? You finished
here?”

Clive
nodded at me. “I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll
package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?”

“Carry
out.”

“Thought
so.”

Sheila’s
end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of
silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from
stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife
with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.

“Tebbit
knife,” she said inconsequentially. “Very nasty.”

And with
every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the
left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried
itself in the silhouette’s head. “Tantalum steel alloy blade,
webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting and
of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them
with the sharp end.”

I stepped
across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a
razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre,
delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into
it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a
code I didn’t recognise. Light glinted dully off the grey metal.

“What’s
this?”

“What?”
Sheila moved to stand beside me. “Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel
is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with haemoglobin.
Well away from the edges, so if you cut yourself there’s no problem, but
if you sink it in anything with blood…”

“Charming.”

“Told
you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.

“I’ll
take it.”

Back out on
the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a
jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a
glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough
sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was
beginning to recede.

I was three
blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.

It was the
Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine,
that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the
corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of
town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the
ground to provide much camouflage.

The Tebbit
knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural
spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious
that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but
abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my
town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let
whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked
my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive
thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures
chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had
in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at
the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s
face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.

The two of
us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653
demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The
chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system
was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped
away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had
been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in
the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I
steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the
odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Hendrix.

On my way
down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller.
Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of
women whose clothing was designed to display more dian they would have shown of
themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above
the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support
lifting and pressing breasts out for view; heavy, rounded pendants nestling
glans-like in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips
painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.

A tide of
cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing
bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles
and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh
and bone as if the women were a species of plant.

Betathanatine.
The Reaper.

Final
offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research
projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close
to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same
time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning
of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced
death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that
might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth
of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the
detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form
was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male
adolescent market.

It was also
an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer
monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but
fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.

The last
time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full
dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart
to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan
spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg
and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the
crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.

“Got
Stiff, man,” said a hoarse voice redundantly. I blinked away the
broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey
cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at
me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of
direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the
same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I
shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against
a shop front.

“Hey…”

“Don’t
piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.”

I saw his
hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming.
Retargetting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers …

And was
face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres
tall. Tentacles writhed at me and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked
hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up.
Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt
the slimy flesh give.

“You
want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,” I said tightly.

The mound
of flesh vanished and I was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard
onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.

“All
right, man, all right.” He held up his hands, palms out. “You
don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a
living here.”

I stepped
back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.

“Where
I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,”
I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from
the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was
obscene.

“I
give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my
face.”

I left him
there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference
between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam
Bancroft’s sleeve.

I paused on
a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.

Mid afternoon. My first of
the day.

As I dressed in the mirror that night, I
suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and
that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car
behind the eyes.

Psychoentirety
rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get
some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve-changer, but this
was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments I was literally
terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my
presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring
sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of
each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters
that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the
mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his
jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practised
snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at
his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice discs had lived up
to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.

I shifted
behind his eyes.

Reluctantly,
he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then
he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.