Altered Carbon (21 page)

The
weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy
training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.

A
weapon—any weapon—is a tool
,
she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun.
Designed for a
specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You
would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply
because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with
Envoys
.

In the
ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for
most of us. Ninety per cent of Envoy intake came up through the
Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a
status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went
everywhere armed, even on furlough.

Virginia
Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.

“Mr.de
Soto. You do not agree.”

Jimmy
shifted, a little abashed at how he easily he had been picked out. “Well,
ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better
account you give of yourself.”

There was a
faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it
subsided.

“Indeed,”
she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. “This … device
punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.”

Jimmy
hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon.
Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was centre stage before the assembled
trainees and stripped off her Corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and
spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.

“You
will see,” she said loudly, “that the charge setting is at Test. If
you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at
a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Mr.de Soto, would you
care to attempt to mark me? On your call.”

Jimmy
looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then
lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.

“On
your call,” she repeated.

“
Now
,”
he snapped.

It was
almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his
mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the
barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle
thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia
Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to
perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the
five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It
wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on
Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away
across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel
of one palm gently to rest under his nose.

The moment
stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a
long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of
the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.

“A
weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for
killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must
kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that
you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension—
you
are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”

Shrugging
his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The
face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin
& Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to
rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the
room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves.
Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.

Got the
frags, Virginia
.

Breathe
, she said.
Move. Control
.

And we went
out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I
stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a
tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks,
getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The
half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or
less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d
called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south.
I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and
saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.

He was
beginning to annoy me.

The cab
curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the
visitors’ blurb panel.

“Welcome
to Urbline services,” said a smooth female voice. “You are linked
to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you
require.”

“Are
there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”

“The
zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its
entirety,” said the datastack blandly. “However, Urbline services
guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits
and—”

“Yeah.
Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent
criminality in the Licktown area?”

There was a
brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

“Nineteenth
Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences
of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited
substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic
damage, two hun—”

“That’s
fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San
Bruno?”

“Straight
line distance is approximately one kilometre.”

“Got
a map?”

The console
lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s
and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of
moments.

“All
right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”

“As
part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an
advisable destination.”

I sat back
and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.

“Thanks.”

The cab set
me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I
glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had
been a typical machine understatement.

Where the
streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted,
this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s
clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads
swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel
mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency
I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green;
canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the
whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace
of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.

The second
cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen
metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made
their play.

“You
looking for something, tourist?”

There were
three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the
waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the
year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under
the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a
glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his
waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons.
His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and
there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was
surprisingly soft and sad sounding.

“Come
slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously.
He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and
there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be
the fastest.

The third
member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a
canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long
tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath
tightly strapped leather.

Time was
shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If
he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.

“I’m
just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a
citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”

There was a
brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his
hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into
the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.

“Like
I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”

The giant
was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a
fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in
the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger
and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the
neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right
arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was
faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him
round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around
him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went
down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow.
The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right
hand a centimetre from his eyes.

“Don’t,”
I said quietly.

The kid
moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the
kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big
hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for
something in his face.

I backed
away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail
work his way through that and catch me up.

The alley
made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I
turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street
at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd
and started looking for street signs.

Outside
Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass.
The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than
the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing
arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with
the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.

I crossed
the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth
voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”

“What’s
the deal in the bar?”

“Ha
ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is
look
, but
don’t
touch
. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That
applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins.”

“Down
the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

Down the
stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the
first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the
air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console
for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.

“Louise?”

The curves
of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in
the cabin flung stripes of light across her.

“Louise,
it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”

A smear of
something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive
inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off
its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder,
pointed at my head.

“Right
there, fucker,” said a tight voice. “This is a toaster. You do one
wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to
solder.”

I froze.
There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very
dangerous.

“That’s
it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the
corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her
down, real slow, and stand back.”