Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'It'll do,' I said, noticing that the black glass rings, like the earring, were a body joke. Each ring showed, X-ray like, a ghostly blue section of the bones in the fingers beneath. Trepp's style, at least, I could get to like.

  'I didn't tell him anything,' Sullivan blurted.

  'You didn't know anything worth a jack,' said Trepp disinterestedly. She hadn't even turned to look at him. 'Lucky for you I turned up, I'd say. Mr Kovacs doesn't look like someone ready to take "don't know" for an answer. Am I right?'

  'What do you want, Trepp?'

  'Come to help out.' Trepp glanced up as something rattled in the restaurant. The waiter had arrived bearing a tray with a large teapot and two handleless cups. 'You order this?'

  'Yeah. Help yourself.'

  'Thanks, I love this stuff.' Trepp waited while the waiter deposited everything, then busied herself with the teapot. 'Sullivan, you want a cup too? Hey, bring him another cup, would you. Thanks. Now, where was I?'

  'You'd come to help out,' I said pointedly.

  'Yeah.' Trepp sipped at the green tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. 'That's right. I'm here to clarify things. See, you're trying to hammer the information out of Sullivan here. And he doesn't know fuck all. His contact was me, so here I am. Talk to me.'

  I looked at her levelly. 'I killed you last week, Trepp.'

  'Yeah, so they tell me.' Trepp set down the tea cup and looked critically at her own fingerbones. 'Course, I don't remember that. In fact, I don't even know you, Kovacs. Last thing I remember was putting myself into the tank about a month back. Everything after that's gone. The me you torched in that cruiser, she's dead. That wasn't me. So, no hard feelings, huh?'

  'No remote storage, Trepp?'

  She snorted. 'Are you kidding? I make a living doing this, same as you, but not that much. Anyway, who needs that remote shit? The way I figure it, you fuck up, you've got to pay some kind of tab for it. I fucked up with you, right?'

  I sipped my own tea and played back the fight in the aircar, considering the angles. 'You were a little slow,' I conceded. 'A little careless.'

  'Yeah, careless. I got to watch that. Wearing artificials makes you that way. Very anti-Zen. I got a sensei in New York, it drives him up the fucking wall.'

  'That's too bad,' I said patiently. 'You want to tell me who sent you now?'

  'Hey, better than that. You're invited to meet the Man.' She nodded at my expression. 'Yeah, Ray wants to talk to you. Same as last time, except this is a voluntary ride. Seems coercion doesn't work too well with you.'

  'And Kadmin? He in on this as well?'

  Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. 'Kadmin's, well, Kadmin's a bit of a side issue right now. Bit of an embarrassment really. But I think we can deal on that as well. I really can't tell you too much more now.' She shuttled her glance sideways at Sullivan, who was begin­ning to sit up and pay attention. 'It's better if we go some­place else.'

  'All right.' I nodded. 'I'll follow you out. But let's have a couple of ground rules before we go. One, no virtuals.'

  'Way ahead of you there.' Trepp finished her tea and started to get up from the table. 'My instructions are to convey you directly to Ray. In the flesh.'

  I put a hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.

  'Two. No surprises. You tell me exactly what's going to happen well before it does. Anything unexpected, and you're likely to be disappointing your sensei all over again.'

  'Fine. No surprises.' Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she wasn't accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. 'We're going to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?'

  'Just so long as it's empty.' I released her arm and she resumed motion, coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. 'You stay here. If I see your face come through the door before we're gone, I'll put a hole in it. Tea's on me.'

  As I followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan's tea cup and a big white handkerchief, presum­ably for the warden's smashed lip. Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.

  The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.

  Outside, it was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. 'Be a minute,' she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. 'You know who that place belongs to?'

  'I guessed.'

  She shook her head. 'Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living danger­ously?'

  I shrugged. 'Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people's fights. They're a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.'

  'Not around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get involved in a brawl on some stranger's behalf. The way they figure it, that's what the police are for. You're from Harlan's World, right?'

  'That's right.'

  'Maybe it's that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?'

  'Maybe.'

  An autocab came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty compart­ment within. I smiled thinly.

  'After you.'

  'Suit yourself.' She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was looking, she grinned and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the seat. The hatch hinged down, shedding rain in sliding sheets.

  'Welcome to Urbline services,' said the cab smoothly. 'Please state your destination.'

  'Airport,' said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction. 'Private carriers' terminal.'

  The cab lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. 'Not a local trip, then,' I said tonelessly.

  She brought her arms in again, hands held palm upward. 'Well, we figured you wouldn't go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital. Take about three hours.'

  'Sub-orbital?' I drew a deep breath and touched the bolstered Philips gun lightly. 'You know, I'm going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this hardware before we fly.'

  'Yeah, we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you like. OK?'

  'Where are we going, Trepp?'

  She smiled.

  'Europe,' she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Wherever it was in Europe that we landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot's time-check, it was still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.

  'Should be a limo waiting for us,' Trepp said over her shoulder.

  We passed, without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle gen­erations were gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than I'd seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and schedule that govern most terminal buildings.

  I adjusted the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and followed Tre
pp into the trees. It wasn't quick enough to beat the gaze of two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn't so easily bought — she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol out of my fingers arid shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me in the back all the way along the aisle.

  Outside again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale grey automould seating.

  'Ten minutes,' she promised, as we rose into the air. 'What did you think of the micro-climate?'

  'Very nice.'

  'Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?'

  I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.

  Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone's using one of those things.

  Alone was fine with me.

  The truth was that I'd been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I'd been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp's obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Marian's World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn't an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet's media stack. Despite Trepp's apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.

  Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn't bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first — strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.

  It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I'd seen before and weather stained with age. As the cruiser spiral­led down towards its base and then beyond, I realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artefact.

  Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.

  The limo settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.

  'This belong to the Catholics?' I hazarded.

  'Used to.' Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. 'Back when it was new. It's private property now.'

  'How come?'

  'Ask Ray.' Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.

  As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two metres between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.

  Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man's body emerged from the gloom as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the calibre as about the same as the Hendrix's lobby defence system, and relinquished my weapons. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the auto­mated killing units drew back and spidered up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.

  'Come on.' Trepp's voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. 'You think if we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?'

  I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted over the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.

  I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high yield explosives.

  At the end of the basilica, grey things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the grey things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.

  'Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?'

  The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was ad­dressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn towards the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.

  'Ray,' I said, in Amanglic. 'I should have fucking seen this one on the launch pad.'

  Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flaw­lessly.

  'Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,' she mused. 'But if there's a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war veteran posturing, you remain at core an inno­cent. And in these times that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?'

  'Trade secret. You'd have to be a human being to under­stand it.'

  The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.

  'Yes, well, I believe we've been over this ground before.'

  My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara's interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.

  I stepped closer to one of the grey envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.

  'Bullet-proof, right?'

  'Mmm.' Kawahara tipped her head to one side. 'Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, cer­tainly.'

  I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. 'Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.'

  She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer,
a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petalled skirts cupping her lower body to mid-calf and a soft silk blouse settling over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modelled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.

  'Power is habitually buried,' she said. 'Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan's World. Or the caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?'

  'Judging by the way I've been led around the last week, I'd say yes. Now do you want to get on with this pitch?'

  'Very well.' Kawahara glanced aside at Trepp, who wandered away into the gloom, neck craned up at the ceiling like a tourist. I looked around for a seat and found none. 'You are aware, no doubt, that I recommended you to Laurens Bancroft.'

  'He mentioned it.'

  'Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. We could have had this conversation a week ago, and saved everyone a lot of unnecessary pain. It was not my intention for Kadmin to harm you. His instructions were to bring you here alive.'

  'There's been a change of programme,' I said, walking along the curve of the end chamber. 'Kadmin's not following his instructions. He tried to kill me this morn­ing.'

  Kawahara made a gesture of irritation. 'I know that. That's why you've been brought here.'

  'Did you spring him?'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'He was going to roll over on you?'

  'He told Keith Rutherford that he felt he was not deployed to his best advantage in holding. That it would be hard to honour his contract with me in such a position.'