Altered Carbon (17 page)

A wayward
speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.

I spotted
the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the
kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of
armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s
legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to
find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could
panic him into tripping.

That
wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left
gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back
again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which
promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and
followed. Finally, I had the advantage.

Perhaps he
was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle
over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into
instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the
uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a
rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath
Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to
overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.

In the
event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the
original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He
scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was
still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top
of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because
he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing
in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.

I hit hard,
skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been.
The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my
ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my
shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover
that wasn’t there.

“LAY
DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”

A cluster
of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down
the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street
and flooded us with white fire. From where I lay, I screwed up my eyes and
could just make out the police transport, a regulation crowd-control five
metres off the street, lights flashing. The soft storm of its turbines swept
flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings
and pinned them there like dying moths.

“STAND
WHERE YOU ARE!” the tannoy thundered again. “LAY DOWN YOUR
WEAPON!”

The Mongol
brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the transport bucked as
its pilot tried to avoid the beam. Sparks showered off one turbine where the
weapon found its mark and the transport sideslipped badly. Machine-rifle fire
answered from a mounting somewhere below the vessel’s nose, but by that
time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone
through the smoking gap.

Screams
from somewhere within.

I picked myself slowly up
off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the
ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy
and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilot’s window, a
hatch whined up and Kristin Ortega stood framed in the opening.

The transport was a stripped-down
version of the one that had given me the ride out to Suntouch House, and it was
noisy in the cabin. Ortega had to shout to make herself heard above the
engines.

“We’ll
put in a sniffer squad, but if he’s connected he can get stuff
that’ll change his body’s chemical signature before dawn. After
that, we’re down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part
of town…”

The
transport banked and she gestured down at the warren of streets below.
“Look at it. Licktown, they call it. Used to be called Potrero way back.
They say it was a nice area.”

“So
what happened?”

Ortega
shrugged in her steel lattice seat. “Economic crisis. You know how it is.
One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next
you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan.”

“That’s
tough.”

“Yeah,
isn’t it,” said the detective dismissively. “Kovacs, what the
fuck
were you doing at Jerry’s?”

“Getting
an itch scratched,” I growled. “Any laws against it?”

She looked
at me. “You weren’t getting greased in Jerry’s. You were
barely in there ten minutes.”

I lifted my
own shoulders and made an apologetic face. “You ever been downloaded into
a male body straight out of the tank, you’ll know what it’s like.
Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Jerry’s, performance isn’t
an issue.”

Ortega’s
lips curved in something approximating a smile. She leaned forward across the
space between us.

“Bullshit,
Kovacs. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they’ve got on you at Millsport.
Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so
steep you’d need pitons and rope to get up it. Everything you do,
performance is going to be an issue.”

“Well.”
I fed myself a cigarette and ignited it as I spoke. “You know
there’s a lot you can do for some women in ten minutes.”

Ortega
rolled her eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around
her face.

“Right.
And you’re telling me with the credit you have from Bancroft,
Jerry’s is the best you can afford?”

“It’s
not about cost,” I said, and wondered if that was the truth of what
brought people like Bancroft down to Licktown.

Ortega
leaned her head against the window and looked out at the rain. She didn’t
look at me. “You’re chasing leads, Kovacs. You went down to
Jerry’s to follow up something Bancroft did there. Given time I can find
out what that was, but it’d be easier if you just told me.”

“Why?
You told me the Bancroft case was closed. What’s your interest?”

That
brought her eyes back round to mine, and there was a light in them. “My
interest is keeping the peace. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but every time
we meet it’s to the sound of heavy-calibre gunfire.”

I spread my
hands. “I’m unarmed. All I’m doing is asking questions. And
speaking of questions … How come you were sitting on my shoulder when the
fun started?”

“Just
lucky, I guess.”

I let that
one go. Ortega was tailing me, that much was certain. And that in turn meant
there had to be more to the Bancroft case than she was admitting.

“What’s
going to happen to my car?” I asked.

“We’ll
have it picked up. Notify the hire company. Someone can come and get it from
the impound. Unless you want it.”

I shook my
head.

“Tell
me something, Kovacs. Why’d you hire a ground car? On what
Bancroft’s paying you, you could have had one of these.” She
slapped the bulkhead by her side.

“I
like to go places on the ground,” I said. “You get a better sense
of distance that way. And on Harlan’s World, we don’t go up in the
air much.”

“Really?”

“Really.
Listen, the guy who nearly torched you out of the sky back there—”

“Excuse
me?” She cranked up one eyebrow in what by now I was beginning to think
of as her trademark expression. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I
think we saved your sleeve back there. You were the one looking down the wrong
end of the hardware.”

I gestured.
“Whatever. He was waiting for me.”

“Waiting
for you?” Whatever she really thought, Ortega’s face was
disbelieving. “According to those Stiff dealers we loaded into the wagon,
he was buying product. An old customer, they say.”

I shook my
head. “He was waiting for me. I went to talk to him, he took off.”

“Maybe
he didn’t like your face. One of the dealers, I think it was the one
whose skull you cracked, said you were looking jacked up to kill
someone.” She shrugged again. “They say you started it, and it certainly
looks that way.”

“In
that case, why aren’t you charging me?”

“Oh,
with what?” She exhaled an imaginary plume of smoke. “Organic
damage (surgery reparable) to a pair of Stiff peddlers? Endangering police
property? Breach of the peace in Licktown. Give me a break, Kovacs. This sort
of thing goes down every night outside Jerry’s. I’m too tired for
the paperwork.”

The
transport tipped and through the window I could see the dim form of the
Hendrix’s tower. I’d accepted Ortega’s offer of a ride home
in much the same spirit as I had the police lift out to Suntouch House—to
see where it would take me. Envoy wisdom. Go with the flow, and see what it
shows you. I’d no reason to suppose Ortega was lying to me about our
destination, but still part of me was surprised to see that tower. Envoys
aren’t big on trust.

After an
initial wrangle with the Hendrix about landing permission, the pilot set us
down on a grimy-looking drop pad atop the tower. I could feel the wind tugging
at the transport’s lightweight body as we landed, and as the hatch
unfolded upwards, the cold came battering aboard. I got up to go. Ortega stayed
where she was, watching me go with a lopsided look that I still couldn’t
work out. The charge I’d felt last night was back. I could feel the need to
say something pressing on me like an impending sneeze.

“Hey,
how’d the bust go down on Kadmin?”

She shifted
in the seat and stuck out one long leg to rest her boot on the chair I had just
vacated. A thin smile.

“Grinding
through the machine,” she said. “We’ll get there.”

“Good.”
I climbed out into the wind and rain, raising my voice. “Thanks for the
lift.”

She nodded
gravely, then tipped her head back to say something to the pilot behind her.
The whine of the turbines built and I ducked hurriedly out from under the hatch
as it began to close. As I stepped back, the transport unglued itself and
lifted away, lights flashing. I caught a final glimpse of Ortega’s face
through the rain-streaked cabin window, then the wind seemed to carry the
little craft away like an autumn leaf, wheeling away and down towards the
streets below. In seconds it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other
flyers speckling the night sky. I turned and walked against the wind to the
drop pad’s access staircase. My suit was sodden from the rain. What had
possessed Bancroft to outfit me for summer with the scrambled weather systems
that Bay City had so far exhibited was beyond me. On Harlan’s World, when
it’s winter, it stays that way long enough for you to make decisions
about your wardrobe.

The upper
levels of the Hendrix were in darkness relieved only by the occasional glow of
dying illuminum tiles, but the hotel obligingly lit my way with neon tubes that
flickered on in my path and died out again behind me. It was a weird effect,
making me feel as if I was carrying a candle or torch.

“You
have a visitor,” the hotel said chattily as I got into the elevator and
the doors whirred closed.

I slammed
my hand against the emergency stop button, raw flesh stinging where I’d
skinned my palm. “What?”

“You
have a visi—”

“Yeah,
I heard.” It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if the AI could take
offence at my tone. “Who is it, and where are they?”

“She
identifies herself as Miriam Bancroft. Subsequent search of the city archives
has confirmed sleeve identity. I have allowed her to wait in your room, since
she is unarmed and you left nothing of consequence there this morning. Aside
from refreshment, she has touched nothing.”

Feeling my
temper rising, I found focus on a small dent in the metal of the elevator door
and made an attempt at calm.

“This
is interesting. Do you make arbitrary decisions like this for all your
guests?”

“Miriam
Bancroft is the wife of Laurens Bancroft,” said the hotel reproachfully.
“Who in turn is paying for your room. Under the circumstances, I thought
it wise not to create unnecessary tensions.”

I looked up
at the ceiling of the elevator.

“You
been checking up on me?”

“A
background check is part of the contract I operate under. Any information
retained is wholly confidential, unless subpoenaed under UN directive
231.4.”

“Yeah?
So what else you know?”

“Lieutenant
Takeshi Lev Kovacs,” said the hotel. “Also known as Mamba Lev, One
Hand Rending, the Icepick, born Newpest, Harlan’s World 35th May 187,
colonial reckoning. Recruited to UN Protectorate forces 11th September 204,
selected for Envoy Corps enhancement 31st June 211 during routine screening—”

“All
right.” Inwardly I was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got.
Most people’s records dry up as soon as the trace goes offworld.
Interstellar needlecasts are expensive. Unless the Hendrix had just broken into
Warden Sullivan’s records, which was illegal. Ortega’s comment
about the hotel’s previous charge sheet drifted back to me. What kind of
crimes did an AI commit anyway?