Altered Carbon (24 page)

He
shrugs
. “
So spill about
Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something
?”

“
I
think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want
to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers
.”

“
You
keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later
.”

“
That
isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t
matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell
the body off for spare parts
.”

“
Yeah
.”
Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at
the clotted gore within
. “
See your point. Well, in a construct
situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right
?”

During the
period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the
Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically
implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on
demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It
was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was
fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy.
There were a number of involuntary detonations. Still, no one ever volunteered
to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway.
Her name—

You thought
they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting
it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is
babbled—

As
I was saying …

Her name
was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been
slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the
interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are
reputed to have been:
That’s fucking enough
!

The
explosion brought the entire building down.

That’s
fucking enough
!

I
jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands
scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh
beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves
lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole
through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the
sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred,
the nipples intact.

Back to
start.

Beside the
bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded
neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held
nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose
covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message
was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a
small fishing boat.

“Aha,
the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her
hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I
was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my
trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses
over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a
cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her
movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.

I looked
over the side at the blue water.

“What
is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the
sharks?”

She
laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at
this stage. All I want to do is talk.”

I stood
loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”

“Very
well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the
stern. “You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your
affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical
to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”

“My
interest is in seeing you die.”

A small
smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be
very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for
this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.”

She
extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.

“Moreover,
we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out
over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on
the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the
minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The
sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.

“I
don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.

“Good.
Then tell us who you are.”

I tried not
to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning
lies. “I thought I had.”

“What
you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by
stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You
do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial
retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an
offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”

“I
bet it isn’t,” I muttered.

“We
do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.”

“You
already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any
idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and
feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business
associates, then
their
families and then anyone else who gets in the
way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You
don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll
eradicate
you.”

It was a
colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a
decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective
time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be
dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with
the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the
Patchwork Man.

“It
was my understanding,” said the woman quietly, “that the Envoy
Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have
as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”

Mr.Bancroft
has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common
knowledge
. Oumou Prescott’s
words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.

“Perhaps
you
would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN
Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.

The woman
looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint
rumble of the city. Finally, she said, “You are aware we could erase your
stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace.
There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”

“They’d
find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie
provides. ”You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you
whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a
deal.”

“What
deal?” she asked woodenly.

In the
fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring
the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was
the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.

“There’s
a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West
Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places
like Jerry’s.”

“And
they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For
biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”

“I’m
not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look,
you’re right. Nine times out often, this stuff doesn’t touch us.
The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these
people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response
diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s
pissed off about it—and I mean at UN Praesidium level—so they call
us in.”

The woman
frowned. “And the deal?”

“Well,
first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody.
Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some
channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information
circulates. That might be worth something to me.”

“As I
said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”

I came off
the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t fuck with
me, pal. You
are
involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of
something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either
chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”

Silence.
Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.

“We
will consider this,” said the woman.

Something
happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the
woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the
waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a
nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman
opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

I raised a
hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm
seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under
the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the
minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white
crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat.
I was.

Not.

I woke once more, this time to a rough
numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after
you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread
throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my
mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on
exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar
under my eye.

They’d
put me back.

Above me
the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on
my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted
through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from
where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for
the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above.
None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word
STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the
display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been
programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.

I was
swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the
synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was
stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.

“Clothes.”
She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”

One of the
medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”

“Yeah,”
the woman sneered. “Maybe he’ll sue us. You don’t think this
place is up to a simple De- and Re-, maybe I’ll talk to Ray about moving
our business through someone else.”

“He’s
not talking about the re-sleeve,” I observed, pulling on my trousers.
“He wants to check for interrogation trauma.”

“Who
asked you?”

I shrugged.
“Suit yourself. Where are we going?”

“To
talk to someone,” she said shortly and turned back to the medics.
“If he is who he says he is, trauma isn’t going to be an issue. And
if he isn’t, he’s coming right back here anyway.”

I continued
dressing as smoothly as I could. Not out of the fire yet, then. My crossover
tunic and jacket were intact but the bandanna was gone, which annoyed me out of
all proportion. I’d only bought it a few hours ago. No watch, either.
Deciding not to make an issue of it, I press-sealed my boots and stood up.

“So
who are we going to see?”

The woman
gave me a sour look. “Someone who knows enough to check out your shit.
And then, personally, I think we’ll be bringing you back here for orderly
dispersal.”

“When
this is over,” I said evenly, “maybe I can persuade one of our
squads to pay you a visit. In your real sleeve, that is. They’ll want to
thank you for your support.”