Altered Carbon (60 page)

Feeling nothing, I pulled
the trigger.

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 airlock made a smooth thump and then a sustained humming sound as
it opened, but I didn’t react. Even when I recognised her footfalls and a
short curse as she picked her way between the coiled cabling on the floor, I
didn’t look round. 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 grey 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-centimetre 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 Anenome, cut up on a
surgical platter; about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be
re-sleeved; 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 realisation came from but it came with the solid, settling sensation
in the bedrock of my mind that I had long ago learnt to trust more than
rational thought. We left the re-sleeving 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, not clearly.
Whole thing was over in a couple of seconds. The only thing we’ve got to
decide is when to call the meatwagons.”

“Some
time soon,” said Ortega. “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 re-sleeved, he’s going to be screaming for an
investigation.”

“Maybe
not,” said Bautista. “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 enquiries 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, and left to call the ambulances. As he disappeared, Ortega
touched me lightly on the arm.

“Hey,
Kovacs. You OK?”

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 even shocked 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
won’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.”

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 ringers. 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 blurring, held the fort while
Elliott went to work faking in the monitor footage they needed. They were
indeed, as Trepp had recognised, the biggest gang on the block.