Altered Carbon (68 page)

“To
erase what you told him about Hinchley. When he was re-sleeved, his last update
would be minus that little indiscretion.”

Kawahara
nodded sagely. “Yes, I can see how that would fit for you. A defensive
move. You have, after all, existed on the defensive since you left the Envoys.
And a creature that lives on the defensive sooner or later comes to think on
the defensive. You are forgetting one thing, Takeshi.”

She paused
dramatically, and even through the betathanatine, a vague ripple of mistrust
tugged at me. Kawahara was overplaying it.

“And
what’s that?”

“That
I
, Takeshi Kovacs, am not you. I do not play on the defensive.”

“Not
even at tennis?”

She offered
me a calibrated little smile. “Very witty. I did not need to erase
Laurens Bancroft’s memory of our conversation, because by then he had
slaughtered his own Catholic whore, and had as much to lose as I from
Resolution 653.”

I blinked. I’d
had a variety of theories circling around the central conviction that Kawahara
was responsible for Bancroft’s death, but none quite this garish. But as
Kawahara’s words sank in, so did a number of pieces from that jagged
mirror I’d thought was already complete enough to see the truth in. I
looked into a newly revealed corner and wished I had not seen the things that
moved there.

Opposite
me, Kawahara grinned at my silence. She knew she’d dented me, and it
pleased her. Vanity, vanity. Kawahara’s only but enduring flaw. Like all
Meths, she had grown very impressed with herself. The admission, the final
piece to my jigsaw, had slipped out easily. She wanted me to have it, she
wanted me to see how far ahead of me she was, how far behind her I was limping
along.

That crack
about the tennis must have touched a nerve.

“Another
subtle echo of his wife’s face,” she said, “carefully
selected and then amped up with a little cosmetic surgery. He choked the life
out of her. As he was coming for the second time, I think. Married life, eh
Kovacs? What it must do to you males.”

“You
got it on tape?” My voice sounded stupid in my own ears.

Kawahara’s
smile came back. “Come on, Kovacs. Ask me something that needs an
answer.”

“Bancroft
was chemically assisted?”

“Oh,
but of course. You were right about that. Quite a nasty drug, but then I expect
you know—”

It was the
betathanatine. The heart-dragging slow chill of the drug, because without it I
would have been moving with the breath of air as the door opened on my flank.
The thought crossed my mind as rapidly as it was able, and even as it did I
knew by its very presence that I was going to be too slow. This was no time for
thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and
massage. It fogged the whiplash clarity of the Khumalo’s neurachem
response system and I spun, just a couple of centuries too late, shard gun
lifting.

Splat
!

The stun
bolt 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 armour 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?” asked Kawahara’s voice 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,” said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner
into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be
retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres 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, colours 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,” said Trepp
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,” said Kawahara 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 towards 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 them a soupy, suffocating quality to the
air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of
schedule. My limbs were moulded 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 centimetre
apart.

I tensed
the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring 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 enquired 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 levelled 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 round, 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 towards 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 round 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 grey 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 stun bolt. 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.