Altered Carbon

There is a
vast distance between deciding to write a first novel and actually seeing it
published, and the journey across this distance can be emotionally brutal. It
comes with loneliness attached, but at the same time requires a massive faith
in what you’re doing that is hard to sustain alone. I was only able to
complete this journey thanks to a number of people along the way, who lent me
their faith when my own was running very low. Since the technology imagined in
Altered
Carbon
doesn’t exist yet, I’d better get on and thank these
travelling companions while I can, because without their support, I’m
pretty certain
Altered Carbon
itself would not exist either.

In order of
appearance, then:

Thanks to
Margaret and John Morgan for putting together the original organic material, to
Caroline (Dit-Dah) Morgan for enthusiasm from before she could speak, to Gavin
Burgess for friendship when often neither of us were in any condition to speak,
to Alan Young for depths of unconditional commitment there isn’t any
way
to speak, and to Virginia Cottinelli for giving me her twenties when I’d
almost used mine up. Then, the light at the end of a very long tunnel, thanks
to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for considering drafts of
Altered Carbon
not once, but twice, and to Simon Spanton at Gollancz for being the man to
finally make it happen.

Two hours before dawn I sat in the
peeling kitchen and smoked one of Sarah’s cigarettes, listening to the
maelstrom and waiting. Millsport had long since put itself to bed, but out in
the Reach currents were still snagging on the shoals, and the sound came ashore
to prowl the empty streets. There was a fine mist drifting in from the
whirlpool, falling on the city like sheets of muslin and fogging the kitchen
windows.

Chemically
alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden table for the fiftieth
time that night. Sarah’s Heckler & Koch shard pistol glinted dully at
me in the low light, the butt gaping open for its clip. It was an
assassin’s weapon, compact and utterly silent. The magazines lay next to
it. She had wrapped insulating tape around each one to distinguish the
ammunition; green for sleep, black for the spider venom load. Most of the clips
were black-wrapped. Sarah had used up a lot of green on the security guards at
Gemini Biosys the previous night.

My own
contributions were less subtle. The big silver Smith & Wesson, and the four
remaining hallucinogen grenades. The thin crimson line around each canister
seemed to sparkle slightly, as if it were about to detach itself from the metal
casing and float up to join the curlicues of smoke ribboning off my cigarette.
Shift and slide of altered significants, the side effect of the tetrameth
I’d scored that afternoon down at the wharf. I don’t usually smoke
when I’m straight, but for some reason the tet always triggers the urge.

Against the
distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying strop of rotorblades on
the fabric of the night.

I stubbed
out the cigarette, mildly unimpressed with myself, and went through to the
bedroom. Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency sine curves beneath
the single sheet. A raven sweep of hair covered her face and one long-fingered
hand trailed over the side of the bed. As I stood looking at her the night
outside split. One of Harlan’s World’s orbital guardians
test-firing into the Reach. Thunder from the concussed sky rolled in to rattle
the windows. The woman in the bed stirred and swept the hair out of her eyes.
The liquid crystal gaze found me and locked on.

“What’re
you looking at?” voice husky with the residue of sleep.

I smiled a
little.

“Don’t
give me that shit. Tell me what you’re looking at.”

“Just
looking. It’s time to go.”

She lifted
her head and picked up the sound of the helicopter. The sleep slid away from
her face and she sat up in bed.

“Where’s
the ‘ware?”

It was a
Corps joke. I smiled, the way you do when you see an old friend, and pointed to
the case in the corner of the room.

“Get
my gun for me.”

“Yes
ma’am
.
Black or green?”

“Black.
I trust these scumbags about as far as a clingfilm condom.”

In the
kitchen, I loaded up the shard pistol, cast a glance at my own weapon and left
it lying there. Instead, I scooped up one of the H grenades and took it back in
my other hand. I paused in the doorway to the bedroom and weighed the two
pieces of hardware in each palm as if I was trying to decide which was the
heavier.

“A
little something with your phallic substitute, ma’am?”

Sarah
looked up from beneath the hanging sickle of black hair over her forehead. She
was in the midst of pulling a pair of long woollen socks up over the sheen of
her thighs.

“Yours
is the one with the long barrel, Tak.”

“Size
isn’t—”

We both
heard it at the same time. A metallic double
clack
from the corridor
outside. Our eyes met across the room and for a quarter second I saw my own
shock mirrored there. Then I was tossing the loaded shard gun to her. She put
up one hand and took it out of the air just as the whole of the bedroom wall
caved in in thunder. The blast knocked me back into a corner and onto the
floor.

They must
have located us in the apartment with body-heat sensors, then mined the whole
wall with limpets. Taking no chances this time. The commando that came through
the ruined wall was stocky and insect-eyed in full gas attack rig, hefting a
snub-barrelled Kalashnikov in gloved hands.

Ears
ringing, still on the floor, I flung the H grenade up at him. It was unfused,
useless in any case against the gas mask, but he didn’t have time to
identify the device as it spun at him. He batted it off the breech of his
Kalashnikov and stumbled back, eyes wide behind the glass panels of the mask.

“
Fire
in the hole
.”

Sarah was
down on the floor beside the bed, arms wrapped around her head and sheltered
from the blast. She heard the shout and in the seconds the bluff had bought us
she popped up again, shard gun outflung. Beyond the wall I could see figures
huddled against the expected grenade blast. I heard the mosquito whine of
monomolecular splinters across the room as she put three shots into the lead
commando. They shredded invisibly through the attack suit and into the flesh
beneath. He made a noise like someone straining to lift something heavy as the
spider venom sank its claws into his nervous system. I grinned and started to
get up.

Sarah was
turning her aim on the figures beyond the wall when the second commando of the
night appeared braced in the kitchen doorway and hosed her away with his
assault rifle.

Still on my
knees, I watched her die with chemical clarity. It all went so slowly it was
like a video playback on frame advance. The commando kept his aim low, holding
the Kalashnikov down against the hyper-rapid-fire recoil it was famous for. The
bed went first, erupting into gouts of white goosedown and ripped cloth, then
Sarah, caught in the storm as she turned. I saw one leg turned to pulp below
the knee, and then the body hits, bloody fistfuls of tissue torn out of her
pale flanks as she fell through the curtain of fire.

I reeled to
my feet as the assault rifle stammered to a halt. Sarah had rolled over on her
face, as if to hide the damage the shells had done to her, but I saw it all
through veils of red anyway. I came out of the corner without conscious
thought, and the commando was too late to bring the Kalashnikov around. I
slammed into him at waist height, blocked the gun and knocked him back into the
kitchen. The barrel of the rifle caught on the door jamb and he lost his grip.
I heard the weapon clatter to the ground behind me as we hit the kitchen floor.
With the speed and strength of the tetrameth I scrambled astride him, batted
aside one flailing arm and seized his head in both hands. Then I smashed it
against the tiles like a coconut.

Under the
mask, his eyes went suddenly unfocused. I lifted the head again and smashed it
down again, feeling the skull give soggily with the impact. I ground down
against the crunch, lifted and smashed again. There was a roaring in my ears
like the maelstrom and somewhere I could hear my own voice screaming
obscenities. I was going for a fourth or fifth blow when something kicked me
between the shoulder blades and splinters jumped magically out of the table leg
in front of me. I felt the sting as two of them found homes in my face.

For some
reason the rage puddled abruptly out of me. I let go of the commando’s
head almost gently and was lifting one puzzled hand to the pain of the
splinters in my cheek when I realised I had been shot, and that the bullet must
have torn all the way through my chest and into the table leg. I looked down,
dumbfounded, and saw the dark red stain inking its way out over my shirt. No
doubt about it. A exit hole big enough to take a golf ball.

With the
realisation came the pain. It felt as if someone had run a steel-wool pipe-cleaner
briskly through my chest cavity. Almost thoughtfully, I reached up, found the
hole and plugged it with my two middle fingers. The finger tips scraped over
the roughness of torn bone in the wound, and I felt something membranous throb
against one of them. The bullet had missed my heart. I granted and attempted to
rise, but the grunt turned into a cough and I tasted blood on my tongue.

“
Don’t
you move, motherfucker
.”

The yell
came out of a young throat, badly distorted with shock. I hunched forward over
my wound and looked back over my shoulder. Behind me in the doorway, a young
man in a police uniform had both hands clasped around the pistol he had just
shot me with. He was trembling visibly. I coughed again and turned back to the
table.

The Smith
& Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where I had left it less
than two minutes before. Perhaps it was that, the scant shavings of time that
had been planed off since Sarah was alive and all was well, that drove me. Less
than two minutes ago I could have picked up the gun, I’d even thought
about it, so why not now. I gritted my teeth, pressed my fingers harder into
the hole in my chest and staggered upright. Blood spattered warmly against the
back of my throat. I braced myself on the edge of the table with my free hand
and looked back at the cop. I could feel my lips peeling back from the clenched
teeth in something that was more a grin than a grimace.

“
Don’t
make me do it, Kovacs
.”

I got
myself a step closer to the table and leaned against it with my thighs, breath
whistling through my teeth and bubbling in my throat. The Smith & Wesson
gleamed like fool’s gold on the scarred wood. Out in the Reach power
lashed down from an orbital and lit the kitchen in tones of blue. I could hear
the maelstrom calling.

“
I
said don’t—
”

I closed my eyes and clawed
the gun off the table.

(NEEDLECAST DOWNLOAD)

Coming back from the dead can be rough.

In the
Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it in neutral and
float. It’s the first lesson and the trainers drill it into you from day
one. Hard-eyed Virginia Vidaura, dancer’s body poised inside the
shapeless Corps coveralls as she paced in front of us in the induction room.
Don’t
worry about anything
, she said,
and you’ll be ready for it
.
A decade later, I met her again, in a holding pen at the New Kanagawa justice
facility. She was going down for eighty to a century; excessively armed robbery
and organic damage. The last thing she said to me when they walked her out of
the cell was: “
Don’t worry kid, they’ll store it
.”
Then she bent her head to light a cigarette, drew the smoke hard into lungs she
no longer gave a damn about and set off down the corridor as if to a tedious
briefing. From the narrow angle of vision afforded me by the cell gate, I
watched the pride in that walk and I whispered the words to myself like a
mantra.