Altered Carbon (64 page)

“What
ratio are you running at the moment?”

“Eleven
point fifteen. Irene Elliott requested it.” I nodded to myself as I
climbed out of the rack. Eleven point one five was a standard working ratio for
datarats. It was also the title of a particularly bloody but otherwise
unmemorable Micky Nozawa experia flic. The only clear detail I could recall was
that, unexpectedly, Micky’s character got killed at the end. I hoped it
wasn’t an omen.

“All
right,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Between the
dimly seen heave and swell of the sea and the lights of the cabin, there was a
lemon grove. I went along a dirt track between the trees and the citrus
fragrance felt like cleansing. From the long grass on either side, cicadas
whirred reassuringly. In a velvet sky above were stars like fixed gems and
behind the cabin the land rose into gentle hills and rocky outcroppings. The
vague white forms of sheep moved in the darkness on the slopes, and from
somewhere I heard a dog bark. The lights of a fishing village glimmered off to
one side, less bright than the stars.

There were
hurricane lamps slung from the upper rail of the cabin’s front porch, but
no one was seated at the wooden tables there. The front wall bore a riotous
abstract mural curling around and out from the luminous lettering of a sign
that read
Pension Flower of
‘
68
. Windchimes dangled
along the railing, winking and turning in the faint breeze that blew in from the
sea. They made a variety of gentle sounds from glassy belling to hollow wooden
percussion.

On the
unkempt sloping lawn in front of the porch someone had set out an incongruous
collection of sofas and armchairs in a rough circle, so it looked as if the cabin
had been lifted bodily off its furnished interior and set down again further up
the slope. From the gathered seats came the soft sound of voices and the red
embers of lit cigarettes. I reached for my own supply, realised I had neither
the packet nor the need any more and grimaced wryly to myself in the dark.

Bautista’s
voice rose above the murmur of conversation.

“Kovacs?
That you?”

“Who
else is it going to be?” I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. “This
is a goddamn virtuality.”

“Yeah,
but…” Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats.
“Welcome to the party.”

There were
five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and
Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair.
On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along
the full length of a second sofa.

The fifth
figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of
him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a
multicoloured bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in
front of him.

“The
Hendrix, right?”

“That’s
correct.” There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent
before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto
the darkened lawn. “Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original
designers. If you strip down the client-mirroring systems, this is what you
get.”

“Good.”
I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. “You happy with the working
environment?”

She nodded.
“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“How
long’ve you been here?”

“Me?”
She shrugged. “A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours
ago.”

“Two
and a half,” said Ortega sourly. “What kept you?”

“Neurachem
glitch.” I nodded at the Hendrix figure. “Didn’t he tell
you?”

“That’s
exactly what he told us.” Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop.
“I’d just like to know what it means.”

I made a
helpless gesture. “So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of
the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail
the manufacturers.” I turned back to Irene Elliott. “I take it
you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the Dip.”

“You
take it right.” Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure.
“Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to
need every scrap of that to pull it off.”

“You
cased the run yet?”

Elliott
nodded glumly. “It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I
can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska
was freighted off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway
comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing
line.”

“I’m
impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?”

“A
while.” Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction.
“I had some help.”

“And
the second interesting thing?”

“Yeah.
Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t
tell you much more than that without Dipping it, and I figured you
wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re
after.”

I
remembered the spider-like automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb
sacs, the sombre stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s
basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those
contemptuous hooded smiles.

“Well, then.” I
looked around at the assembled team. “Let’s get this gig off the
ground.”

It was Sharya, all over again.

We dusted
off from the tower of the Hendrix an hour after dark and swung away into the
traffic-speckled night. Ortega had pulled the same Lock-Mit transport I’d
ridden out to Suntouch House, but when I looked around the dimly lit interior
of the ship’s belly, it was the Envoy Command attack on Zihicce that I
remembered. The scene was the same; Davidson playing the role of datacom
officer, face washed pale blue by the light from his screen; Ortega as medic,
unpacking the dermals and charging kit from a sealwrap bag. Up ahead in the
hatchway to the cockpit, Bautista stood and looked worried, while another
mohican I didn’t know did the flying. Something must have shown on my
face, because Ortega leaned in abruptly to study my face.

“Problem?”

I shook my
head. “Just a little nostalgia.”

“Well,
I just hope you got these measures right.” She braced herself against the
hull. In her hand, the first dermal looked like a petal torn from some
iridescent green plant. I grinned up at her and rolled my head to one side to expose
my jugular.

“This
is the fourteen per cent,” she said and applied the cool green petal to
my neck. I felt the fractional grip, like gentle sandpaper, as it took, and
then a long cold finger leapt down past my collar bone and deep into my chest.

“Smooth.”

“Fucking
ought to be. You know how much that stuff would go for on the street?”

“The
perks of law enforcement, huh?”

Bautista
turned round. “That ain’t funny, Kovacs.”

“Leave
him alone, Rod,” said Ortega lazily. “Man’s entitled to a bad
joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.”

I raised
one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the
dermal gingerly and stood back.

“Three
minutes till the next,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded
complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.

At first it
was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the
transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there,
so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned
uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however
small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with
effort.

Then the
control stimulants kicked in and in seconds my head cleared from foggy to the
unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air
receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature
shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold
night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a
coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just …

I felt an
inane grin eating its way across my features.

“Whoooh,
Kristin, this is … good stuff. This is better than Sharya.”

“Glad
you like it.” Ortega glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes. You
up to it?”

“I’m
up to.” I pursed my lips and blew through them. “Anything. Anything
at all.”

Ortega
tipped her head back towards Bautista, who could presumably see the
instrumentation in the cockpit. “Rod. How long have we got?”

“Be
there in less than forty minutes.”

“Better
get him the suit.”

While
Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket
and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.

“I
want you to wear this,” she said. “Little bit of Organic Damage
insurance for you.”

“A
needle?” I shook my head with what felt like machined precision.
“Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.”

“It’s
a tracer filament,” she said patiently. “And you’re not
leaving this ship without it.”

I looked at
the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of
ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep
track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went
wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing
went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues,
usually in under forty-eight hours.

I glanced
across at Davidson.

“What’s
the range?”

“Hundred
klicks.” The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow
from his screen. “Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate
unless we call you. Quite safe.”

I shrugged.
“OK. Where do you want to put it?”

Ortega
stood up, needle in hand. “Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack,
case they chop your head off.”

“Charming.”
I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There
was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and
then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.

“You’re
done. Is he on screen?”

Davidson
punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me,
Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch
and reached for the second dermal.

“Thirty-seven
per cent,” she said. “Ready for the Big Chill?”

It was like
being submerged in diamonds.

By the time
we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional
responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity
became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard
around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armour and
when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the
charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.

It was the
single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The
rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

The shard
pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stunner.
I dialled the muzzle aperture to wide. At five metres, it would take down a
roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in complete
silence. Sarah Sachilowska says Hi.

The
dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker
than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia
Deme.

The Tebbit
knife on my forearm in its neural spring sheath beneath the stealth suit like a
final word.

I reached
for the cold feeling that had filled me up outside Jerry’s Closed
Quarters and, in the crystalline depths of the Reaper, did not need it.

Mission
time.

“Target
visual,” called the pilot. “You want to come up and have a look at
this baby?”

I glanced
at Ortega, who shrugged, and the two of us went forward. Ortega seated herself
beside the mohican and slipped on the co-pilot’s headset. I contented
myself with standing next to Bautista in the access hatch. The view was just as
good from there.

Most of the
Lock-Mit’s cockpit was transparent alloy with instrumentation projected
up onto it, permitting the pilot an uninterrupted view of the surrounding
airspace; I remembered the feeling from Sharya, like riding a slightly concave
tray, a tongue of steel or maybe a magic carpet, across the cloudscape below. A
feeling that had been at once dizzying and godlike. I glanced at the
mohican’s profile and wondered if he was as detached from that feeling as
I was under the influence of the Reaper.