Altered Carbon (34 page)

“You
come here often?”

“Not
often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.”

“Good
guess.”

A waiter
arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced
briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something
vegetarian.

“Good
choice,” said Ortega. She nodded at the waiter. “I’ll have
the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?”

“Water.”

Our selections
flared briefly in pink and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the
holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked
around her, seeking neutral conversation.

“So,
uh—you got places like this in Millsport?”

“On
the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.”

“No?”
She raised her customary eyebrow. “Millsport’s an archipelago,
isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—”

“An
obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I
think you’re forgetting something.” I flicked my eyes skywards.
“We Are Not Alone.”

It clicked.
“The orbitals? They’re hostile?”

“Mmm.
Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that
masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get
close enough to decommission one of them, or even get aboard, come to that, we
have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just
play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.”

“Must
make IP traffic tough.”

I nodded.
“Well, yeah. ‘Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No
other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy
exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and
maintenance shuttles to the Platforms. Bit of exotic element mining,
that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the
equator towards evening and one crack of dawn slot up on the pole. It looks
like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left
holes in the net.” I paused. “Or maybe someone shot them
down.”

“Someone?
You mean someone, not the Martians?”

I spread my
hands. “Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or
buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we
even realised it was there. It’s the same on most of the Settled worlds.
All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.”

“But
the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.”

“Yeah,
right.” I folded my arms and sat back. “The archaeologues say what
the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to
deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via
barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel
against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilisation.”

Ortega
looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had
skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.

“Do you
mind if we talk about something else?” Ortega asked uncomfortably.

“Sure.
Tell me about Ryker.”

The
discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the
table in front of her and looked at them.

“No,
I don’t think so,” she said eventually.

“Fair
enough.” I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power
screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. “But I
think you want to, really.”

“How
very male of you.”

The food
arrived and we ate in silence broken only by the traditional slurping. Despite
the Hendrix’s perfectly balanced autochef breakfast, I discovered I was
ravenous. The food had triggered a hunger in me deeper than the needs of my
stomach. I was draining the dregs of my bowl before Ortega had got halfway
through hers.

“Food
OK?” she asked ironically as I sat back.

I nodded,
trying to wipe away the skeins of memory associated with the ramen, but
unwilling to bring the Envoy conditioning online and spoil the sated feeling in
my belly. Looking around at the clean metal lines of the dining gantry and the
sky beyond, I was as close to totally contented as I had been since Miriam
Bancroft left me drained in the Hendrix.

Ortega’s
phone shrilled. She unpocketed it and answered, still chewing her last mouthful.

“Yeah?
Uhuh. Uhuh, good. No, we’ll go.” Her eyes nickered briefly to mine.
“That so? No, leave that one too. It’ll keep. Yeah, thanks Zak. Owe
you one.”

She stowed
the phone again and resumed eating.

“Good
news?”

“Depends
on your point of view. They traced the two local calls. One to a fightdrome
over in Richmond, place I know. We’ll go down and take a look.”

“And
the other call?”

Ortega looked up at me from
her bowl, chewed and swallowed. “The other number was a residential
discreet. Bancroft residence. Suntouch House. Now what, exactly, do you make of
that?”

Ortega’s fightdrome was an ancient
bulk carrier, moored up in the north end of the Bay, alongside acres of
abandoned warehouses. The vessel must have been over half a kilometre long with
six clearly discernible cargo cells between stem and stern. The one at the rear
appeared to be open. From the air, the body of the carrier was a uniform orange
that I assumed was rust.

“Don’t
let it fool you,” Ortega grunted as we circled. “They’ve
polymered the hull a quarter-metre thick all over. Take a shaped charge to sink
it now.”

“Expensive.”

She
shrugged. “They’ve got the backing.”

We landed
on the quay. Ortega killed the motors and leaned across me to peer up at the
ship’s superstructure, which at a glance appeared to be deserted. I
pushed myself back into the seat a little, discomfited in equal parts by the
pressure of the lithe torso in my lap and my slightly overfull stomach. She
felt the movement, seemed suddenly to realise what she was doing and pulled
herself abruptly upright again.

“No
one home,” she said awkwardly.

“So
it seems. Shall we go and have a look?”

We got out
into the customary blanket-snap of wind off the Bay and made for a tubular
aluminium gangway that led onto the vessel near the stern. It was uncomfortably
open ground, and I crossed it with an eye constantly sweeping the railed and
craned lines of the ship’s deck and bridge tower. Nothing stirred. I
squeezed my left arm lightly against my side to check the Fibregrip holster
hadn’t slipped down, as the cheaper varieties often did after a couple of
days’ wear. With the Nemex I was tolerably sure I could air out anyone
shooting at us from the rail.

In the
event it wasn’t necessary. We reached the end of the gangway without
incident. A slim chain was fixed across the open entrance with a hand-lettered
sign hung on it.

PANAMA
ROSE

FIGHT
TONITE—22.00

GATE
PRICE DOUBLE

I lifted
the rectangle of thin metal and looked at the crude lettering dubiously.

“Are
you
sure
Rutherford called here?”

“Like
I said before, don’t let it fool you.” Ortega was unhooking the
chain. “Fighter chic. Crude’s the in thing. Last season it was neon
signs, but even that’s not cool enough now. Place is fucking globally
hyped. Only about three or four like it on the planet. There’s no
coverage allowed in the arenas. No holos, not even televisuals. You coming, or
what?”

“Weird.”
I followed her down the tubular corridor, thinking of the freak fights
I’d gone to when I was younger. On Harlan’s World, all fights were
broadcast. They got the highest viewing figures of any transmitted
entertainment online. “Don’t people like watching this sort of
stuff?”

“Yeah,
of course they do.” Even with the distortion of the echoing corridor, I
could hear Ortega’s lip curling in the tone of her voice. “Never
get enough of it. That’s how this scam works. See, first they set up the
Creed—”

“Creed?”

“Yeah,
Creed of Purity or some such shit. Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s
rude to interrupt? Creed goes, you want to see the fight, you go see it in the
flesh. That’s
better
than watching it on the web. More classy.
So, limited audience seating, sky-high demand. That makes the tickets very
sexy, which makes them very expensive, which makes them even more sexy and
whoever thought of it just rides that spiral up through the roof.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah,
smart.”

We came to
the end of the gangway, and stepped out again onto a wind-whipped deck. On
either side of us the roofing of two of the cargo cells swelled smoothly to
waist height like two enormous steel blisters on the ship’s skin. Beyond
the rear swelling, the bridge towered blankly into the sky, seeming entirely
unconnected with the hull we were standing on. The only motion came from the
chains of a loading crane ahead of us that the wind had set swinging
fractionally.

“The
last time I was out here,” said Ortega, raising her voice to compete with
the wind, “was because some dipshit newsprick from WorldWeb One got
caught trying to walk recording implants into a title fight. They threw him
into the Bay. After they’d removed the implants with a pair of
pliers.”

“Nice.”

“Like
I said, it’s a classy place.”

“Such
flattery, lieutenant. I hardly know how to respond.”

The voice
coughed from rusty-looking tannoy horns set on two-metre-high stalks along the
rail. My hand flew to the Nemex butt, and my vision cycled out to peripheral
scan with a rapidity that hurt. Ortega gave me an almost imperceptible shake of
the head and looked up at the bridge. The two of us swept the superstructure
for movement in opposite directions, coordinating unconsciously. Under the
immediacy of the tension, I felt a warm shiver of pleasure at that unlooked-for
symmetry.

“No,
no. Over here,” said the metallic voice, this time relegated to the horns
at the stern. As I watched, the chains on one of the rear loading cranes grated
into motion and began to run, presumably hauling something up from the open
cell in front of the bridge. I left my hand on the Nemex. Overhead, the sun was
breaking through the cloud cover.

The chain
ended in a massive iron hook, in the crook of which stood the speaker, one hand
still holding a prehistoric tannoy microphone, the other gripped lightly around
the rising chain. He was dressed in an inappropriate-looking grey suit that
flapped in the wind, leaning out from the chain at a fastidious angle, hair
glinting in a wandering shaft of sunlight. I narrowed my eyes to confirm.
Synthetic. Cheap synthetic.

The crane
swung out over the curved cover of the cargo cell and the synth alighted
elegantly on the top, looking down on us.

“Elias
Ryker,” he said, and his voice was not much smoother than the tannoy had
been. Someone had done a real cut-rate job on the vocal cords. He shook his
head. “We thought we’d seen the last of you. How short the
legislature’s memory.”

“Carnage?”
Ortega lifted a hand to shade against the sudden sunlight. “That
you?”

The
synthetic bowed faintly and stowed the tannoy mike inside his jacket. He began
to pick his way down the sloping cell cover.

“Emcee
Carnage, at your service, officers. And pray what have we done to offend
today?”

I said
nothing. From the sound of it, I was supposed to know this Carnage, and I
didn’t have enough to work with at the moment. Remembering what Ortega
had told me, I fixed the approaching synth with a blank stare, and hoped I was
being sufficiently Ryker-like.

The
synthetic reached the edge of the cell cover and jumped down. Up close, I saw
that it wasn’t only the vocal cords that were crude. This body was so far
from the one Trepp had been using when I torched her, it was barely deserving
of the same name. I wondered briefly if it was some kind of antique. The black
hair was coarse and enamelled-looking, the face slack silicoflesh, the pale
blue eyes clearly logo’d across the white. The body looked solid, but a
little too solid, and the arms were slightly wrong, reminiscent of snakes
rather than limbs. The hands at the ends of the cuffs were smooth and lineless.
The synth offered one featureless palm, as if for inspection.

“Well?”
he asked gently.

“Routine
check, Carnage,” said Ortega, helping me out. “Been some bomb
threats on tonight’s fight. We’re here to have a look.”

Carnage laughed,
jarringly. “As if you cared.”

“Well,
like I said,” Ortega answered evenly, “it’s routine.”

“Oh
well, you’d better come along then.” The synthetic sighed and
nodded at me. “What’s the matter with him? Did they lose his speech
functions in the stack?”