Altered Carbon (59 page)

It was like
someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was
left far behind on the surface of my skin and a sickening numbness raged
through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it
was crippling. I staggered back three steps and crashed onto the mat, twisting
like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.

Turning my
head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and
both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the
steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.

I
understood.

Round One.

Empty-handed
combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you
can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him.
If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight,
it’s a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down,
but this wasn’t a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where
the suffering was to be maximised for the benefit of the audience.

The crowd.

I got up
and looked around the dimly-seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on
saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my
guts, spat on the killing floor and summoned a guard stance. Kadmin inclined
his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry
of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for
them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks and instead of
giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin’s path. It took him the shreds
of a second to realise what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were
almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every
member of the chanting crowd.

The hawk
nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an
instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed round, looking for
neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my
feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and
rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head
against the mat. I tasted blood.

I rolled
upright and saw Kadmin backed off and wiping some blood of his own from his
broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at
me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenalin
surge that seeing his blood spilt had given me, and raised both my own hands in
an expectant gesture.

“Come
on, you asshole.” It croaked out of my damaged mouth. “Put me
away.”

He was on
me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him.
Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering
valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the
space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct
told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows
like the attentions of an irritating insect.

On the last
of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist,
yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs
and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured
arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm
strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make
when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the
neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in
Kadmin’s grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled
free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and
by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.

I came down
on the injured ribs and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to
fight the urge to roll into a foetal ball and saw Kadmin’s borrowed
features a thousand metres above me.

“Get
up,” he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance.
“We’re not finished yet.”

I snapped
up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in
the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm and the power knuckles
hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicoloured lights and then
everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind
it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of
focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought to keep me conscious.
The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the
damage that had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied.
Consciousness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I
was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with
Jimmy de Soto.

“
Earth
?”
His grinning blackout striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside
the tank
. “
It’s a shithole, man. Fucking frozen society,
like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there, historical
events aren’t allowed
.”

“
Bullshit
.”
My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder
bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has
been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion
track. In a rare moment when the Sharyan jamming went down, we’ve heard
that Admiral Cursitor’s IP fleet is still light seconds out, fighting the
Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn’t over, the
locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not
looking good
.

At
least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my
temperature beginning to climb back towards normal. The surrounding air no longer
feels like hot soup and breathing is ceasing to be the major effort it was when
our heart rates were down near flatline
.

The
robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the
near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters
.

“
Bullshit,
is it
?”
Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider
tank’s hull
. “
Hey, you’re not from there. I am, and
I’m telling you if they gave me the choice of life on earth or fucking
storage,
I’d have to give it some thought. You get the chance to
visit
, don’t.”

I blinked
the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like
sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the
roof.

“
Told
you not to go there, didn’t I pal. Now look at you. Earth
.” He
spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. “
It’s a
shithole. Got to get to the next screen
.”

The crowd
noise had settled down to a steady chanting.

The anger
ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow
and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and
raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled
with laughter.

Get to
the next screen
.

I lurched
to my feet.

You
don’t do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night
.

The voice
jumped into my head, a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly a century and a
half of objective time. A man I hadn’t soiled my memory with for most of
my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn
up now, when I really needed the shit:.

The
Patchwork Man will come for you
.

Well,
you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man’s standing right over there,
waiting. He’s not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But
thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything
.

I summoned
what was left from cellular levels in Ryker’s body and stalked forward.

Glass
shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space
between Kadmin and myself.

“Kadmin!”

I saw his
eyes raised to the gantry above and then his entire chest seemed to explode.
His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly
off balance and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was
torn off and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted
and fell in ropes.

I whipped
round, staring upwards, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just
destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her
arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung
about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted except for the
remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the
noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in
panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit.
Trepp was firing into the audience.

Down on the
floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming.
I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, towards the sound. Carnage was on fire.

Braced in
the chamber door beyond, Rodrigo Bautista stood hosing wide-beam fire from a
long-barrelled 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
OK, Kovacs?”

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

“Great,
just great. How’s Ortega?”

“She’s
OK. 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.

“Hey,
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 outwards. About a metre 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?” cracked Trepp, 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.